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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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I didn't read the entire thing but the broad strokes of things seems pretty inscrutable to me. We have this empire that's doomed to fail and this prophecy of preventing a milennia of dark ages or whatever. Then we just go off to the corner of the galaxy, forget about the empire, and have a run of the mill space opera with a squabble with some other factions in that corner. Is there any payoff of the empire collapsing or any of that?

The three bound volumes that make up the "trilogy" (Foundation, Foundation & Empire, and Second Foundation) are a collection of novellas that were first published in magazines (plus an original short story about the trial of Hari Seldon on Trantor). The driving tension of the first novella is that the Foundation (at that point still an Imperial project that is supposed to be writing an encyclopedia) finds itself in hostile territory after the surrounding sectors successfully declare independence from the Empire.

I will avoid more detailed spoilers beyond the one implicit in the title Foundation and Empire, but two of the other novellas centre around (direct or proxy) conflicts between the rising Foundation and the dying Empire.

There is a story in the second book involving the surviving remains of the empire attempting to expand once again and conflicting with the foundation.

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