Tolkien and Asimov

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Originally Posted by HerenIstarion

I very much like idea of Fate being rendered and calculated mathematically, though . Imagine Mandos doing eqautions, typing feverishlty on his 'Fortunium IV ('Valintel Inside)' PC's keyboard? And all those elves thinking he is being prophesying...

Agreed. Always liked the idea of determining group (not individual) behavior via mathematics. In theory it would work; you would just need to be able to gather, analyze and interpret the data in an efficient and timely fashion. On the other hand, Mandos may have just taken great notes during the Music...

Read something recently regarding a god that could know what every atom (or even quantum) in the universe was doing and so would do in the future. This would mean that the god or 'Mandos' computer' would have to be larger than the universe that it was modeling. Anyway, future prediction/prophecy is something that is easier to accept than to understand.

Read Asimov as a teen and again as an adult. Though I think that he is 'one of the greats,' I now see Asimov's stories, especially the Foundation series, as simplistic. Don't see Tolkien's works like that, and am not sure if it's due to the writing, content, or that one is science fiction in the future and the other is fantasy in the past. Asimov's stories always are pasteurized, and everything just seems to work out just so in the end. Does anyone know of an example of a Boromir-like character death in the Foundation series?

Just some rambling thoughts.