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“Have you seen that thing?”

“What thing?”

“That thing that does that thing it does.”

“Oh, that thing. No, sorry.”

~

thing; noun; from Old English thing, assembly; akin to Old High German ding, thing, assembly; Gothic theihs, time.

~

I’m not known for brevity. Whether speaking or writing I tend to use a lot of words. Sometimes I even use more words than necessary. Of course, I don’t think they are unnecessary words, but from time to time I feel my listeners or readers probably do. I’m a bit of a throwback. People used to speak, and write, using far more words than they do now. In our hurried times staccato bursts of vernacular whipped with slang seem the rule, and any spoken or written statement longer than five or six words feels burdensome.

The exceptions, of course, are lawyers and legal documents, and by inclusion legislators and bills. They grow wordier in inverse proportion to our terseness, and it’s possible that’s no coincidence. Lawyers know that language is a minefield of ambiguity. They add words in order to reinforce the meaning of the text and anticipate ways in which future readers will attempt to take from it meanings that are at odds with the original intent of the writers. Pursue this goal long enough and what emerges makes for less-than-entertaining reading.

It is, however, precise. I learned to read contracts and legal language long ago, and it has served me well in a number of cases worth real money. I even like writing them, much to the consternation of barristers I have worked with. There is something satisfying about the weighty, measured cadence of legal language thumping onto a page as you write. The words matter in the most practical and immediate sense. They are at the same time statements of currently agreed fact and potential weapons in future disagreements.

Terse language, on the other hand, is often imprecise language. It doesn’t have to be. “Pick up that hammer” is a pretty precise statement. “Grab that” is not, but when accompanied by a nod or hand gesture it can be enough. One sure-fire way to boil the precision out of any statement is to add the word “thing.” It may well be the most useless word in any language. At the very least it’s one of the most irritating. One definition for the word “thing” is: a separate and distinct quality, fact, idea, or usually entity. “Thing” can mean any damned thing, and as a result actually means nothing.

I guess the idea worked well for all those Carpi, Allamani, Tervingi, and Taifali running around central Europe 1500 years ago. They had probably just figured out that there were things in the world, and it is kind of heart-warming to imagine them pointing to a walnut in the Hyrcinian Forest and stating “Ding!” with a confident and knowing air. Yes, Fritigern, that’s a thing you have there. Once you get past that basic philosophical understanding of corporeal entities and their existential selfness the word “thing” is just a hair more useful than the word “noun.”

So while I hesitate to suggest that people go back to writing and speaking in complete sentences that offer fully-developed thoughts,  I do propose that we banish the word “thing” from all polite usage written and spoken. I trust you will get right on that. Meanwhile I have this ding I have to do.

Ok, I admit I have been in the middle of a really unproductive cycle for the last couple of weeks. I’m not talking about work. I’m talking about the other 50% of my life, or more specifically the 50% of that 50% that is available for liesure, and which for some strange reason I can’t explain continues to be devoted in large part to watching old episodes of Lost. I can’t stop. I need help. There is no reason for me to be watching this show. Actually, I did have a sort of rational goal in mind, which was to catch up before the start of the final season. But I’m not sure I’ll make it.

Lost has a great premise, but a tough one to get a long run out of. Gilligan’s Island only made it for three seasons, and that feels like some sort of cosmic constant because I have just started in on Lost’s fourth season on Netflix and it’s just getting ridiculous. There must have been at least some members of the cast and crew looking at those scripts each week and thinking “what the hell?” So far my favorite example of how ludicrous it gets involves the “Looking Glass” underwater station.

First, and maybe funniest, is the moment when Sayid unfurls a blueprint of the station at the Beach Camp, and the title on the document is “Looking Glass Hatch.” Why is this hilariously stupid? The blueprint was created by Dharma, and is a document that pre-dated the castaways’ arrival. The castaways referred to these installations as “hatches” because the first thing Locke found was a metal hatch. The rooms below it then became known as the hatch, and the other rooms they found were by extension hatches. There’s no reason to think any of the original builders would have thought of an underwater habitat and lab as a “hatch” or labelled it that way on a blueprint.

Then there is the whole series of events leading up to Charlie’s checking out. If the Looking Glass station were the source of the jamming signals don’t you think that, before paddling out and trying to dive on it and get inside without SCUBA equipment, you might try, oh, I don’t know, cutting that fat cable leading down to it from the beach? Yes, there could be backup power. It might not work. But I would try it before I got wet, and so would any other rational person. As an aside, what builder sophisticated enough to create an underwater habitat and lab would just leave that cable lying on the damn beach?

Then we get to Charlie in the communications room, where he has just turned off the jamming signal. He knew he was supposed to drown there, and it looks like he has cheated fate. But wait! The Russian guy who got shot in the chest with a speargun is swimming outside the porthole, and he has a grenade! The grenade goes off, the porthole shatters, water is pouring in. What does Charlie do? Does he step through the door he is standing right next to and pull it shut after him? No, he closes it and locks himself in the room. Yea, I get to die!

This is just bad writing. It’s lazy writing. You could rewrite that entire sequence of events, preserve every ounce of drama and mystery, and have it all make sense from start to finish. But to do that you have to think about it, and maybe that’s a luxury television writers don’t have anymore. Or maybe the absurdity itself has some larger meta-purpose that I don’t get yet. I have no idea. But it’s hard to imagine people watching this stuff without laughing.

Given the title and what I often write about here, you might think this post is about either losing one’s way, or becoming hopelessly mired in the documentation for some arcane class library. It’s about neither of those things, nor is it concerned with any other variation on the theme of not knowing where you are. Rather, it’s about writing, and the title reflects that I got to thinking about writing while watching a billion episodes of ABC’s drama “Lost.” Well, perhaps not a billion. Anyway, let me explain.

I hardly watch television. I have an HDHomerun on our network and can get 120+ channels at my desktop, but frankly it’s 99% crap. Pick a channel at random and you have a 75% chance of hitting a commercial. Wait the commercial through and you have an 85% chance of finding yourself watching Cops. The remaining 15% of the time is split between informercials and a show on the “History Channel” entitled “Mega-awesome Disasters III: The Earth is Overwhelmed by Ice and then Explodes!” Most of the time I turn it on after work and fall asleep waiting for dinner to be ready.

So I missed the whole “Lost” phenomenon. I was aware of it like a distant cultural carrier-wave, but up until two weeks ago I hadn’t watched a single episode. Then my wife got a Netflix account and I discovered their on-demand streaming library and Windows 7 Media Center integration. If you have a job and responsibility do not sign up for this service. It should be a schedule II controlled substance. Once you start watching there is no reason to stop. An intervention will require physically removing you from your couch with a large putty knife. The service is fast, the quality of the video and audio excellent, and if the library isn’t massive yet, there is still enough to keep you supine for a year. It should be illegal.

One of the titles in the Netflix streaming library is all of “Lost.” I always wondered what the buzz was all about, so I decided to watch a few episodes. I’ve now watched about 35 of them, and will probably watch the remainder of Season 2, at least. But as I have watched it an interesting thing has happened: I’ve transitioned from watching to see where the story goes, to waiting for the next completely absurd plot twist to unfold so I can laugh and launch derisive comments at the monitor. What prompted me to write this post is not that I have been watching “Lost” devolve into a comedy of writing horror, but rather that it seems to me like so much writing these days has succumbed to the same fate.

Making a good story is very hard. I know because I keep trying and failing. Aside from all the other well-cataloged elements a good story requires, its events must be constructed on a foundation of plausibility. You have to get the little things right in order to make the world feel believable and real. Not to say that a good story cannot contain the incredible. The incredible and otherworldly make great story elements. But the incredible has to spring from the credible. When the big incredible thing happens, it has to happen in the context of a world that is wholly credible in all the small details. That’s what allows the reader to disregard reason and leap that small gap from the mundane to the wonderful.

The problem with “Lost” is that virtually nothing about it is plausible. It could have been. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t have been. The big incredible things that happen work very well. It’s just that they happen in a world that is itself absurd. It falls apart the minute you start to think about it. Yet the show is hugely popular and won an Emmy. It makes me wonder if most of the audience ever does think about it. Clearly some get it, and the evident absurdities and incongruities have even led fans to speculate that all the characters actually died on the plane and that they are in purgatory. I don’t think they are, but the viewers might be.

Start with the basic premise of the show. The writers needed to get a group of people into an exotic, isolated location without hope of rescue or recourse to any of the normal amenties of civilization. How did they choose to do that? They had an airliner break up at altitude and dump its three sections onto a mountainous island in the South Pacific, relatively intact and with a substantial number of living humans aboard. Every single aspect of this series of events is implausible in the extreme.

The pilots were on their way to Los Angeles from Sydney when they “lost all communication” and “turned back toward Fiji.” First, airliners don’t lose all communication unless they lose all power. The average airliner has something like four independent radios, as well as satellite communication with the fleet home office. Second, when an airliner breaks up at altitude at full cruise speed (the airliner in Lost was actually in a dive and would have been exceeding cruise speed) it doesn’t come down gently, or in very large pieces. People don’t live through that, or at least not often. There is one case I am aware of where a stewardess was tossed into the tail section of an aircraft after it was split by a bomb. The tail impacted on a forested slope and bounced to a stop and she lived, although very seriously injured. Everyone else on the aircraft was killed. In “Lost” some of the passengers are tossed into the water, some into the jungle, but at least 60-80 of them get up and walk away.

Yeah, right. Was that really the best the writers could come up with? There was no other way to get this group of people into the situation they wanted? I can think of at least three. “Lost” doesn’t really get any better after the passengers are deposited at the edge of the jungle and struggling to survive. One of my favorite chuckle-inducing scenes was when Sayid turns on a handheld VHF radio and exclaims breathlessly “We have a bar!” It’s as if all the writers are 20 year-olds who think every communications device works like an IPhone. Later he takes that same, single transceiver and by setting up some aluminum antennas in various places he uses that same, single transceiver to attempt to triangulate the position of a radio signal they intercepted. The producers should have hired some of the team that created MacGiver. At least some of the science would be sound.

The silliness just continues to multiply the longer you keep punching up that next episode, from hunting wild boar with a knife, to making use of dynamite that has been sitting in a humid jungle for 90 years. We don’t even have to get into the illogical, irrational way most of the characters behave. And yet I keep watching those episodes on Netflix, and from this and the series persistent popularity the writers might conclude that they have done a bang-up job. And so, from a business perspective, I guess they have. But in terms of quality there is quite a large difference between watching something out of appreciation for its merits, and watching something else out of the morbid fascination of witnessing a trainwreck.

It was with some degree of sadness that I closed the cover of Patrick O’Brian’s “Blue at the Mizzen” last evening. The act marked the end of my second trip through the twenty-volume series since I first had “Master and Commander” recommended to me by my brother ten years ago or more. I enjoyed this journey every bit as much as, and perhaps more than, the first. But even as I savored those final pages melancholy crept in, hard on the heels of the almost certain knowledge that it would be my last visit to O’Brian’s world. I was saying good bye to Captain (nay, Admiral!) Aubrey and the Doctor, for good. I will reread a book more than once, even many times. I have read the four books in the main trunk of Tolkien’s work something like eight or nine times, at least. But I have to read them all, and in order, and well, there are twenty of them in O’Brian’s tale.

It takes a significant portion of a person’s life to read twenty novels once. It must be a truly rare writer who could motivate a second helping, and perhaps no writer living or dead could prompt a third. O’Brian was every bit that writer: fit to inhabit the same exalted perch and breathe the same rarified air as Conrad, London, Wells, Verne, and Forester. To be sure, O’Brian cannot claim their variety of subject matter and point of view, and there are some who might smirk at the literary pretensions of what we must all admit was a six-thousand page serial adventure novel, but I don’t believe many who have read the books would share that view. O’Brian was in many ways a one-hit wonder, but what a prodigious great hit it was. Page after lyrical, poetical page, the tales of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are an antiquarian feast for the literary senses.

And if it requires a rare writer to prepare such a feast, maybe it needs a rare reader to take a seat at the table once it is served. Great length is not the only characteristic of this tale that might deter the faint-hearted amateur. One of the great distinguishing features of O’Brian’s work is the language. Among the things novelists strive for are style, voice, and a sense of place. In the Aubrey-Maturin novels O’Brian emerged in the eye of the reading world as a master craftsman, whose every sentence, every perfectly placed paragraph, was so thoroughly steeped in the time, or his sense of it, that while reading them you found yourself immersed without ever feeling the water around your ankles. But this language can be daunting to those accustomed to the modern novel, that often flies by with the breathless pace of a movie. I have relatives who have tried to read O’Brian, but simply have not been able to make headway, even though they love a good sea story.

And it is as a sea story, one immensely long glorious sea story, that O’Brian’s work truly shines. He is neither as dark as Conrad, as gritty as London, nor as fanciful as Verne, and his vision of life at sea is somewhat too idealized to be read as history, but for an authentic image of an eighteenth-century full-rigged ship and its working he is not to be matched. For this he drew on comprehensive research, and personal experience. I am probably in a minority of O’Brian readers who have spent a significant amount of time in square-rigged wooden ships. I spent a large part of 1984 and 1985 sailing as crew aboard first a barkentine (square-rigged foremast, fore-and-aft-rigged main and mizzen) of 180′, and then a brigantine (same rig, one less mast) of 140′. Like the characters in “Master and Commander” and its sequels, I have been aloft in a blow, and know what it is like to lay out on a yard a hundred feet above deck, with one hand for the ship, and one hand for yourself. There is not one detail of O’Brian’s descriptions, from chainplates to futtock shrouds, from wearing to clubhauling, that did not ring true for me.

As authentic as they are, the novels are not one unbroken success from front to back. Some are better than others, and I think that on my second time through I read them with a somewhat more critical eye. Beginning with “The Yellow Admiral” I began to get a sense that perhaps O’Brian knew that things were getting a little repetitive, and even more to the point, he himself acknowledged, in one of the few forewords that he wrote, that he was “running out of history.” If he had known the story would be so popular, he said, then he might have begun in the 1780’s or even earlier. There was a great deal of smacking good Royal navy history that had passed beyond the tale’s reach when he decided to bring the Doctor and the Lieutenant together in Minorca in the year 1800. I doubt, though, that the tale would have been better for an earlier start.

Nor is it improved by a later end. There is a 21st “book” in the series, but I won’t read it. Published after the author died in Dublin in 2000, it consists of a couple of typeset chapters and some handwritten treatments and notes. If they are an accurate guide to the plot, then it seems that O’Brian, at least, was not yet tired of his characters. But for me the perfect ending is “Blue at the Mizzen.” I am content to see Jack with the promise of his pennant, and Stephen with the hope of Christine to salve his wounds, and all of them frozen forever in memory, riding to anchor in the bay of Valparaiso and looking after home and hearth at Woolcombe. The twenty books O’Brian actually completed give us the grand arc of the character’s lives from start to satisfying finish, from jobless Lieutenant to respected Admiral, from penniless surgeon to wealthy naturalist, and there is really nothing more that a reader can ask from an author. By any measurement, Patrick O’Brian gave this reader more pleasure to the page than he had any right to expect.

I struck out three times at the library this week. One was a Ben Bova novel about two brothers on opposite sides of the stem cell/cloning/immortality issue. It started pretty well, but then kept switching between first person protagonists in the first three chapters. I like the first person perspective, but I guess I don’t like to get into a new head with every chapter. I might give this one another try because Bova is a fine writer whose work I have enjoyed in the past.

The other two looked like good stories too, and the one I began reading started well. However, what I had missed in both cases, and what was not advertised anywhere on the books’ jackets, was that both were buried in the middle of an -ilogy. One was a second book, and the other a third. This fact was not made clear in the frontispieces or title pages either. You really couldn’t figure it out until you read the back cover testimonials carefully. I took both back to the library and made a desultory effort to find the beginnings of each story in the catalog, but our small library either never had the earlier novels, or doesn’t have them anymore. Perhaps the buyers for the library were deceived as easily as I was.

I don’t like to jump into the middle of a multivolume story. In fact, I’m almost to the point where I just disdain -ilogies alltogether. I was introduced to them by Tolkien at the age of 10 or 11, and ruined for them by Jordan at the age of 45, when, after fifteen years of rambling through eleven increasingly incoherent and plodding volumes in the Wheel of Time series, the author departed the mortal plane without finishing it. I think WoT would have made a really great trilogy.

These days it seems more than half the new volumes at the library are part of a series. If I see “Fifth Volume in the Dreams of Balthazar Chronicles” I just put the damn thing back on the shelf, only slightly more quickly than I would if it were the first volume. My aversion is selective. I’ve been known to go out of my way to get complete sets of O’Brien, Gemmell, and Cornwell, not to mention Mary Stewart. In O’Brien’s case the Aubrey-Maturin books actually stand pretty well on their own, and as for Gemmell, Cornwell, and Stewart they are just worth it, and how. But my weariness of the -ilogy marketing approach just makes it a lot harder to win me over. I’d like to see more really good single volume stories. I’ll be fifty years old in a year and a half or so; I can’t even be sure of living through another Robert Jordan.

And while I am on the subject of books it would be remiss of me not to mention the most lamentable trend of all, which is neatly encapsulated by the title of a book I was looking at in the library last night: “Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Sanction by Eric van Lustbader.” Robert Ludlum cannot write any more Bourne novels, because he is dead, and van Lustbader shouldn’t be writing them either. “Tom Clancy” is another one. He’s still alive as far as I know, but 95% of the stuff I see with his name on it was written by someone else. Hopefully, the publishing industry has been learning along with the rest of us that pursuit of money for it’s own sake isn’t the point. I’d just like to see good books. The rest of the business will take care of itself.

If you have any interest in intelligent algorithms Ari Schulman has an article worth reading in the Winter 2009 volume of The new Atlantis. I am not particularly fascinated with what some think of as Artificial Intelligence; I can’t stand the term, to be frank, and hold the acronym in no higher esteem. But I am very fond of algorithms which occasionally seem to be intelligent, particularly as they apply to gaming and game theory. And seeming to be intelligent is, as Schulman reminds us, all the Turing Test requires. Having written a fairly popular backgammon game for Windows back in the early 90’s I have some direct experience of how much easier it is to opine on the idea of decomposing complex thought processes into rules and procedures than to actually do it. In a cogent and well-written tour of the last thirty years of thinking in the field of intelligent programs, Schulman applies his insights about the nature of mind and machine, and comes up with some convincing reasons why a layered, modular, procedural description of intelligence continues to be an ellusive goal.

When Isaac Asimov first conceived the idea for his Foundation stories it was 1941, and World War II had just erupted. The first three stories in the series appeared in John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction magazine between 1941 and 1944. The whole breadth of the tale was not finalized and collected into book form until the early 1960’s. In 1966 it won a Hugo for Best Science Fiction Series, a category created to honor it and one other seminal competitor: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

I first read the Foundation series front to back in the early 1990’s. Recently I got the bug to reread it, probably because my steady diet of nonfiction had become overwhelming. A number of things stand out to my older and more critical eye. Some of them are anachronisms that certainly would have seemed reasonable to Asimov in the 1940’s, but which, when they appear in a far-future setting of galactic empire and interstellar travel, seem highly amusing to those of us in Asimov’s future who still don’t have any of those things. Others are just quirks of the writer’s own style that caught my eye. So here are a few of the funny things about Foundation:

They Use Paper

The setting is the far, far future. The Milky Way Galaxy consists of millions of populated worlds united under the Imperial rule of Trantor. Vessels of every description use hyperspace jumps to travel effortlessly and quickly between the stars. And yet, when Mayor Indbur of The Foundation is irritated or bored in Foundation and Empire he scratches little drawings on sheets of paper from a pad and then tosses them into an atomic flash disposal unit. When a secure personal message needs to be delivered it arrives sealed in a tube, engraved on silvery film that quickly destructs as it is read. Perhaps most amusingly, when in that same volume Ducem Barr visits Trantor in the company of Lathem Devers one of the first things he does is grab the topmost of a stack of newspapers. Here in the 21st century the debate rages as to whether newspapers have any economic role in the new world of information, and paper is used less and less each day. But to the Asimov of the 1940’s these seemed like important and durable features of civilization. Asimov did not predict email, or data encryption, or the web, at least not in Foundation.

Everyone Smokes

Tobacco use was prevalent and popular in Asimov’s day, and it is sprinkled liberally, though not artlessly, throughout Foundation. Cigars are most often mentioned, followed by cigarrettes and pipes. On two of the narrated appearances of Hari Seldon his simulacrum makes the unseen audience free to smoke as part of his introduction. Atomic flash dispensers are provided on desks and in waiting areas for the disposal of ash and the cleaning of pipe bowls. In the early story of Terminus the qualities of Vegan tobacco are extolled over the home grown variety, but as the empire fails home grown is all they have. As the Foundation establishes itself cigarrettes make a reappearance. When in Second Foundation the team of Toran, Bayta, Mis, and Magnifico visit the ruined world of Trantor to search the library there, they are offered home grown cigars from a ceremonial humidor, and even the woman, Bayta, partakes. The health effects of tobacco were not unknown when these stories were written, but they were buried under a tidal wave of positive messaging. Tobacco seemed like another permanent fixture of civilized society to Asimov, and he had no reason to foresee the negative perception that would attach to the tobacco leaf over the next fifty years.

Everything is Atomic

Speaking of nuclear flash disposal units, virtually all the high tech in the stories is nuclear powered, and often in amusingly naive ways. Atomic radiation is used to execute prisoners, destroy documents, dispose of waste, and lend an aura of godhead to the boy king Lepold of Anacreon. Nuclear power is the economic leverage which Terminus uses against Anacreon, which no longer has it. It powers all devices from the largest ships and their weapons down to the seemingly magical jewelry with which the Foundation trader Les Ponyets ensnares the nobility of Askone. In the 1940’s and 50’s the U.S. Government was happily subjecting thousands of soldiers and civilians to radiation to see what would happen. The dangers of radiation were not well-understood, and Asimov was predicting that it would come to be the basic source of power for all of modern civilization and beyond. Today we in the U.S. are so intimidated by it that we haven’t begun a new nuclear power plant in fifteen years or more. To be fair to the author, virtually all SF stories of this period made liberal use of the wonders of atomic power. Modern authors are required to be more sophisticated.

Computerized Star Maps!

In 1941 the first modern computer was two to four years from being invented, depending on whose version of the history you want to believe. In Asimov’s fictional world computers play a very minor role. They are calculating and counting machines, as in the one that controls Hari Seldon’s Time Vault on Terminus. These were the things that scientists were considering using computers for at the dawn of the second World War. Asimov did not predict networked information and the revolution it would have on media (see “They Use Paper” above). Messages are still written down or sent by “Hyperwave Relay.” Video is delivered by television, and in one case he actually mentions “television sets” being sent to a backward world as an item of trade. But the best example is the navigation of starships. In Second Foundation when Han Prichard and Bail Channis travel to Tazenda to seek the location of the Second Foundation they are aided by a useful new tool that has just been developed: a screen that can display the stars as they appear from any point in the galaxy, and even zoom in on and rotate around any point. Imagine! Those of us who use Celestia, or World-wide Telescope to do the same thing today from our desks at home, but who still can’t travel anywhere beyond the confines of our own planetary system, are allowed a chuckle, but will have to forgive Asimov’s inability to foresee all this.

Gender Roles

When the Foundation stories were born World War II was just about to lay down the first real challenge to traditional gender roles, as men marched off to war and Rosie marched down to the aircraft factory to spend her days with a riveting gun. There are few strong females in Foundation. All the great events of history are manipulated, discussed, and reacted to by men. Bayta, the wife of the trader Toran in Foundation and Empire is one of the few examples, and even she is not immune from the views of women as Asimov observed them in his day. When the planet Haven is under threat from the Mule, Bayta counsels one of the girls who works in her volunteer group to “visit the washroom and get your peaches and cream on.” Asimov is trying to demonstrate the emotional condition of the population of Haven, which we later learn is due to the Mule’s specific abilities. Naturally those most affected by an emotion-based attack are the females! Off to the washroom, ladies. Still, we can hardly give or take from Asimov on this account. He was just working from what he knew, and what he thought the things he knew might lead to.

It’s All Dialog

This last one is not an anachronism, but rather an interesting note on the author’s style. Asimov mentions it himself, in his introduction to the paperback edition of the series. When preparing to write the fourth story after a long hiatus he reread his earlier work, and was uneasy because there was no action. He must have gotten over that uneasiness, because he stuck more or less to the same pattern for the rest of the series. There are little bits of action here and there: someone fires a blaster, or a ship lands. But for the most part the entire plot is advanced through dialog. Each scene begins with a minimum of descriptive set-up in which the characters are introduced, and then proceeds through the dialog resulting from the set-up. It is in the dialog that open questions are resolved and the next set of questions introduced. As a writer who has made paltry attempts at fiction here and there I find this fascinating. It tells me that plot and character are the things that count. Description and action serve only to support and advance the characters and what happens to them, and Foundation is an extreme example of this in action, from a master of the art.