{"id":1592,"date":"2020-06-15T22:40:41","date_gmt":"2020-06-16T03:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/?p=1592"},"modified":"2020-06-15T22:40:41","modified_gmt":"2020-06-16T03:40:41","slug":"the-ebb-and-flow-of-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/the-ebb-and-flow-of-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ebb and Flow of Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Over on Adventures Fantastic, I’ve been reviewing the nominees for the Retro Hugos. Isaac Asimov has two stories from his Foundation series on the ballot, one a novelette<\/a>, and the other a short story. I haven’t read the original Foundation series since I was in high school. These two stories are the last two in Foundation<\/em>. So I read the whole book.\u00a0 The last story in the book, “The Merchant Princes”, which was published under the title of “The Big and the Little” before the story that precedes it in the book. There’s a passage in the story where the central character travels outside the Foundation’s sphere of influence and talks to an old man. The old man tells him what’s happened in the Empire, which the Foundation has lost contact with, over the last few decades.<\/p>\n

In addition to increasing my interest in history, that made me want to read something with an epic scale.\u00a0 I immediately thought of Poul Anderson’s Technic future history, particularly the Dominic Flandry subseries. Which made me want to reread H. Beam Piper, Dune<\/em>, and\u00a0 and to read the rest of Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series.\u00a0 (If you haven’t read Ruocchio, you’re missing out. I’ve only read the first book, but I’ll be buying all the others.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Watching the news, something I’m trying to quarantine myself from but my wife keeps breaking quarantine, has only added to this urge. I have to wonder if we’re seeing the American Empire start to collapse. But that’s a topic I don’t want to get into right now.<\/p>\n

Maybe it’s my way of looking for comfort and certainty in uncertain times. Rereading favorite stories and novels and spending time with characters on worlds I haven’t visited in years may be what I need. Learning how to video myself doing labs so I can post them on YouTube is turning into a real grind.<\/p>\n

So when the Retro Hugo posts are done, I’m going to try to focus on some intergalactic shenanigans. And not just the galactic empire stuff. I really like space opera, and there’s something about late spring and early summer that makes me want to read it.\u00a0 I’m sure there’s some deep psychological reason for that, but I’m not going to bother trying to figure out what. It might spoil my enjoyment of space opera.<\/p>\n

So what are some of your favorite galactic empires or stories involving the fall of an empire (real or imaginary)?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over on Adventures Fantastic, I’ve been reviewing the nominees for the Retro Hugos. Isaac Asimov has two stories from his Foundation series on the ballot, one a novelette, and the other a short story. I haven’t read the original Foundation series since I was in high school. These two stories are the last two in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35,285],"tags":[879,863,858,762,774],"class_list":["post-1592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-isaac-asimov","category-poul-anderson","tag-christopher-ruocchio","tag-dune","tag-h-beam-piper","tag-isaac-asimov","tag-poul-anderson"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3P5pJ-pG","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1592"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1594,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1592\/revisions\/1594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}