Comments on: Foundation

By: BuckGalaxy

BuckGalaxy — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:33:27 +0000

AppleTV is $8 a month. You can get the first month free and binge watch all seasons of Foundation in a couple weeks. Also so many other great Sci Fi shows right on or near a par with the Expanse.

Stop messing around.

By: podrock

podrock — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:14:36 +0000

Start with Snow Crash. Then Cryptonomicon. Then the “Baroque Trilogy.”

By: ER

ER — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:12:21 +0000

I haven’t seen any of the “Foundation” series, but I am pleased to see actor Jared Harris was playing the pivotal Hari Seldon role. I first saw Harris as Anderson Dawes, the ruthless OPA leader in the “Expanse”, and he really knocked that one out of the park. Harris captured perfectly the personality of the committed intellectual terrorist: capable of great brutality and vicious cruelty, but always justified by his conviction of the fundamental righteousness and inevitability of his cause. He even got the Belter accent down pat! Since then I have watched him in several other dramatic roles and he has always delivered.

I hope someday to see him in the role of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

By: RL

RL — Mon, 18 May 2026 02:17:54 +0000

Everything after the 3rd was crap- like many sci-fi writers he went bonkers, but those 3 books, and ‘The Genesis machine’ were really good

By: ER

ER — Sat, 16 May 2026 21:00:38 +0000

And for the Peloponnesian War, you can’t go wrong with Thucydides.
He actually fought in it! On both sides! Thucydides is considered the first “modern” historian, his prose (translated from ancient Greek) reads like a twentieth century writer. He is a biased observer, but he also freely admits it. The Peloponnesian War is vital to understanding Greek history. It weakened both Athens and Sparta so that they could not resist the threats coming from the North (Macedonia) and West (Rome).

For Roman history, late Republic and early Empire, read Robert Graves’ books in the list I posted above. I also highly recommend the HBO series “Rome”. These are both works of fiction and not history, but they give a good idea of what it must have been like to live in those times, something academic histories cannot do.

A work of fiction that went deep into what it was like to actually live in NAZI Germany in WWII is Len Deighton’s “Winter”. Also, I highly recommend Shirer’s “Berlin Diary” and Harry W. Flannery’s “Assignment to Berlin”, both available online at:

https://archive.org/details/AssignmentToBerlin/mode/2up

both written by US correspondents working in Berlin just prior to our entry in the war.

I also highly recommend Simon Schama’s “History of Britain” available as a book and TV series.

The new Ken Burns documentary on the American Revolution is just as good as his “Civil War”. There’s a lot more to that story than what we learned in school, and some of it is pretty ugly. For example, even though the Brits tried to accommodate many of the colonists’ demands, there were powerful forces pushing to complete independence. There were American companies who were lobbying to acquire Indian lands W of the Allegheny mountains, so it could be sold to future European immigrants to the colonies, and the Brits were for leaving that land to the Indian nations because of their help against the French during the French and Indian War. Most of our founding fathers were involved financially in those companies. They WANTED independence because they planned to make a fortune if the UK was gone. Also, the Boston Tea Party wasn’t about British taxes on tea, the Brits had eliminated the tax and cheap British tea was hurtful to John Hancock’s smuggling business. And of course, both sides lied to the Indians and the blacks in order to buy their support.

By: RobVG

RobVG — Sat, 16 May 2026 19:04:29 +0000

I read most of the book after you suggested it a few years ago. World history wasn’t taught in my high school, and I didn’t study it in college, so the details of Hitler’s rise to power was something I needed.
I recently learned about Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact which shed a different light on WWII. I also read about the war between Russia and Japan over Mongolia and parts of Siberia in ’38. If you could think of a few more books that would that would bridge the crevasses in my knowledge of history, I’d appreciate it.

By: RobVG

RobVG — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:20:27 +0000

I’ll start looking them up.

By: ER

ER — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:37:05 +0000

Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh (or the equally good 12-episode UK TV miniseries)
Letting Go – Phillip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint – Phillip Roth
Anything by Robert Silverberg (except the Majipoor stories, they suck big time)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – John Le Carre
Smiley’s People – John Le Carre
The Naked Ape* – Desmond Morris
The Sea Around Us* – Rachel Carson
I, Claudius – Robert Graves
Claudius the God – Robert Graves
The ‘Flashman’ series by George MacDonald Fraser (comic historical adventures)
The ‘Hornblower’ series by C S Forester (historically accurate naval drama)
Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – (the movie is, IMHO, far superior to Muriel Spark’s original book)
The Stars my Destination – Alfred Bester
The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester