Asking the Wrong Questions

Kyr is humanity's vengeance. A genetically engineered super-soldier with superior strength, speed, and reflexes, raised in Spartan austerity on the isolated, militaristic Gaea station, trained in weapons and combat since childhood, Kyr and her cohort were born after the alien majoda, seeking a decisive conclusion to their war with humanity, destroyed the Earth. Established by a splinter group who would not accept humanity's surrender in the wake of this calamity, Gaea station has raised generations of young people to dream of revenge and retribution. On the verge of completing her training, Kyr, who has not only excelled in her own right but has pushed other cadets to better embody Gaea's ethos of military might and battle readiness, is certain of receiving a plum combat assignment. It will not take spotting the literary reference in the title of Emily Tesh's excellent first novel for most readers to guess that some or all of what Kyr understands about her world is wro...

Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is one of my big science fiction lacunae. I've read and enjoyed other Asimov books--his robot stories were my introduction to the genre--but for whatever reason, what's often considered his magnum opus passed me by (and it is, I suspect, a bit late to catch up; my tolerance for wooden prose and cardboard women is a lot lower than it was when I was ten). Which means my perspective on Apple TV+'s adaptation of the books is rather different from that of most of my friends. They've been furiously tracking where the show diverges and converges from the original story (more the former than the latter, by the sound of it) and gnashing their teeth over its failure to convey the books' ideas. I've been more able to take the show on its own terms, which has not always been a good thing--the first season was a tedious slog, full of its own importance but rarely managing to bring it across. The just-concluded second season of Foundation...