A Moment of Meta

Hello friends, I’m afraid I have another wrinkle in the Seldon Crisis plan before getting to second part of The General. Sorry to keep you waiting on the edge of your seats while General Bel Riose gets ready to lay waste to the tiny world on the galactic fringe that we’ve all come to know and love. We’ll just have to hope that Ducem Barr and Lathan Devers can keep him and his Imperial ships of the line at bay a little longer.

There are a couple of reasons why I feel it is necessary to pause a little longer and I’ll explain those reasons now. First, to be honest, I can’t keep up the pace of releasing a new episode every two weeks. There are a lot of steps to creating a show like this; writing, editing, recording, editing the audio, supervising sound design, preparing the show notes and transcript, not to mention promoting the show, all while managing a full time day job to pay the bills. I’ve been finding that the part that suffers the most when I’m in a rush is the most important part at the very beginning – the writing. If I don’t give myself enough time to write thoughtfully and with sufficient time for insight, I can tend to rely too heavily on the storyline and Asimov’s awesome dialog. There’s also another pretty compelling reason for investing more time in writing the script. In order to avoid any messy legal entanglements, it’s necessary for me to do more than just retell the story. The Asimov estate would prefer people buy the books than have them read to them for free, so I have to do a lot more than that.

I’m not going to say you absolutely have to have read the books up to the part I’m covering before you listen, but that you shouldn’t expect this podcast to provide the complete experience you would get from reading the books. I’ll be shifting my focus a little more towards the insights I get from the stories and away from a super detailed summary. I’ve suggested as much in the past. Please, please read Asimov or listen to an audiobook at some time, because all along I’ve been leaving quite a lot out, and that will continue to an even greater degree going forward. This may be a biased opinion, but I believe every word Isaac Asimov writes is magical.

Of course I’ll still be including dialog and will continue to voice it performatively, because it’s a blast and I love bringing these characters to life, but there will be some significant parts of the story that will only be summarized. I’ll provide the most detail, and the most dialog, in the segments of the story that I feel are most dramatic and meaningful. I’ll still try to avoid spoilers, because the twists and turns are a lot more fun if they’re not spelled out in advance.

I hope you can all forgive me for adjusting my approach in these ways so I can stay on track in completing this amazing story. The upcoming episodes are definitely worth waiting for. Beyond the conclusion of the epic confrontation between the grandiose but rotting Empire and the precocious and vigorous Foundation, there are new threats waiting on the horizon. Threats not even foreseen by the amazing analytical powers of Hari Seldon. These are going to make for some awesome drama, and I look forward very much to enjoying it with you. In two weeks, we’ll wrap up The General, and then we’ll dive into the first section of what is possibly the most powerful and intriguing section of the entire epic, The Mule. See you next time on Seldon Crisis!

If you feel that you’ve been cheated by this very brief non-episode, may I again remind you there is a very cool totally original science fiction audio drama by the name of Planet and Sky created by the same person who brings you Seldon Crisis, but read by a superbly talented narrator, and including original music that you might find really worth your time listening to. I’ll provide a link in the show notes.