A Review: Foundation’s Edge

Isaac Asimov
ISBN-13: 978-0007381159

Although the original Foundation trilogy (1950s) laid the groundwork for Asimov’s universe, I’ve always found it rather bland. When Asimov returned to the series in the 1980s with Foundation’s Edge, the leap in storytelling quality felt far greater than the thirty years that separated them. Growing up, I listened to Prelude to Foundation on cassette and loved it. Published just six years after Foundation’s Edge (with Foundation and Earth in between), it cemented for me how much richer and more engaging Asimov’s later entries were compared to the original trilogy.

The mystery, the twists, and the separate timelines that converge all give the story a grand space-opera feel. The characters resonated with me, and the depiction of spaceships and hyperspace travel felt believable - perhaps because Asimov wisely avoids overexplaining how hyperspace works. Some of his characteristic sexism remains, though it’s far less pronounced than in the earlier books.

Overall, it stands as a solid work of science fiction with a wide enough scope to feel expansive without losing focus.

Comments

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...

Do software engineering professionals still read? - survey results

In order to gauge the potential audience for my book, So you think you can lead a team? , I conducted a small survey of my colleagues, co-workers and anyone from Linked. I read regularly, for work and pleasure, and assumed everyone else did too but did the responses I received confirm this? I polled 173 people, all within the software engineering field (including Product, etc), with a range of ages and years of experience in their role. What surprised me the most was that the majority of people, young or old, just starting or seasoned, still prefer reading physical books to blogs or e-readers. It also seemed that the older and more experienced were the most keen in learning more, and reading to expand or update their knowledge. When it comes to reading habits between different roles the survey showed that software engineers and team leads read more regularly for their career than other roles, with 55 years old and over and 16+ years experience being the biggest readers over...

Paul Grenyer

Search This Blog