Saturday!

* I knew we were in a Seldon crisis: Obama eying "New Foundation" as his answer to the New Deal.

* If you can't beat 'em: GOP moderate and feared 2012 rival Jon Huntsman joins Obama administration as ambassador to China.

* There's been a lot of talk on the blogotubes about recent polls showing a national shift towards pro-life positions. It's possible there's been some sort of catalyzing event or demographic shift I'm unaware of that accounts for this, but it seems to me most likely that this reflects an important rhetorical shift that has recently been embraced by the GOP. Consider that the nation's most prominent pro-life politician, Sarah Palin, routinely describes "life" as a morally admirable "choice" made by her and others. I suspect this new rhetoric of choice is significantly muddying the waters in these polls, encouraging people who might not choose abortion for themselves to think that's what being "pro-life" is. Of course, that any choice is or should be involved at all is incompatible with what the term "pro-life" has historically meant.

Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the Foundation series—"It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, 'See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism.'"

Krugman and I have something in common. (via io9)

Every science fiction fan has a foundation for their nerdity. It is their Urtext. For me—and I take no particular joy in admitting this—there's no question that it is Star Trek. The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and I watched more or less every episode of Star Trek produced before the day I came to understand the show's structural limitations sometime during the mid-'90s.

But if my nerdy nature can have a second foundation, it's undoubtedly Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which I remember as vividly today as the day I read them a decade and a half ago. It's only partially an exaggeration to say that for me all theories of history are but footnotes to Asimov. (If it's good enough for al Qaeda, it should be good enough for everyone.)

Asimov Wiki
Timeline of the Robots/Foundation Universe
A favorite commentary, and a followup.

Now, I wouldn't recommend that any of you necessarily read these books now; I suspect Asimov's magic only really works on thirteen-year-old boys. But I bring this up because there's word that a Foundation movie is finally going to be made, and it's clearly going to be awful. The director attached, Roland Emmerich, directed Independence Day, the Godzilla remake, The Day after Tomorrow, and 10,000 BC. On his entire IMDb page only Stargate and The Thirteenth Floor (producer's credit) fills me with anything less than total dread. B-movies are great, but Foundation shouldn't be a B-movie. If anything, it should be a HBO series...

Quick links:

* Toothpaste for Dinner beholds the Singularity. (Thanks, kate w!)

* They're (finally) turning Isaac Asimov's Foundation series into a movie.

* Once again people are discovering Orson Scott Card's reprehensible politics. It happens about once every six months.

* 29 Literary Science Fiction Novels You Should Read. More than half of these are already on my exam lists; the rest probably will be by the time I take my exams in March...