Foundation

I recently listened to Scott and Julie, from A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and it's tough for me to keep up with them all, so I am a bit behind on this one. The story they were talking about was Isaac Asimov's Foundation. This is a book near and dear to my heart, as it brings me back to high school. A lovely young lass befriended me, and convinced me to join the Science Fiction Book Club, of which she was a member. Now that I think of it, perhaps she just wanted the free book credits for getting me to join...

At any rate, I got 2 free books for joining, and they could be any books, even trilogies. So on her advice I got Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy and Frank Herbert's Dune trilogy. Wow, seeing as that's going for $195 I wish I had kept my copies. Oh well.

Science Fiction soon became my favorite thing to read. And although I loved both sets of stories, Foundation was my favorite, and Asimov soon became my favorite author. Between trips to the mailbox looking for my next month's SF book club offerings, I would go to the library and pour through their science fiction section, from Anderson to Zelazny, reading everything they had.

But back to the Foundation trilogy. If you haven't read it, there will be spoilers, so go away, read it, and come back... Good. Julie and Scott had some interesting things to say about it, but they didn't focus on what I think is very obvious (maybe they didn't because it is so glaringly obvious) - Harry Seldon is Christ. Oh not literally, but he is a Christ figure in the story. Just like Christ he gathers his disciples and says "I will be with you until the end of the age."

When there is a Seldon crisis" he even appears to the descendants of his disciples. You did read the books, right? Oh, then a "Seldon crisis" is a socio-political crisis predicted by Harry Seldon's psychohistorical mathematics. When one happens, the people can't see the way it can be resolved, but Harry knows, and it all works out in the end. Kind of like "the gates of hell shall not prevail" kind of stuff...

Which got me thinking. In the 13th century, the Church was suffering from corruption from within and the threat of Muslim invasion and secularism from without. Sound familiar? Until a young man named Francis had a dream that Jesus was telling him "rebuild my church." We think of him as a nice man in brown who holds birds in his hands, but in the day he was quite the radical. He walked hundreds of miles, barefoot, to preach to the Muslims, with the result that they did not invade.

It seems like the Church today is experiencing another "Seldon crisis." Will Jesus appear and help us through this one? Perhaps he already has...

Posted in: Books,Catholic,Islam,My life,Saints,science fiction