Latest / Galaxies and Goddesses: A Sci-Fi & Fantasy Bookcast / Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov: The Power of a Single Word or Character
Transcript
- Foundation and Empire Andrea: I’m Andrea. Elizabeth: And I'm Elizabeth. Andrea: Join us as we chat about sci-fi and fantasy books and beyond. Elizabeth: Looking for a little escape from reality. So are we. Andrea: Welcome to Galaxies and Goddesses. Elizabeth: In this week's episode, we're talking about Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov. Andrea: Specifically, we'll be chatting about where the story picks up after Foundation and how the second book differs from the first book in the trilogy. Elizabeth: Along with how word choice can shape the way we think and feel about a story. Andrea: The end of Foundation deals with the Foundation planet Terminus gaining power and establishing a larger trade system throughout the periphery of the galaxy. Andrea: And then Foundation and Empire picks up with Part One, The General, and Foundation has grown into a major power. Andrea: The declining Empire still exists, and there's a new general, General Bel Riose, attempting to reclaim imperial territory. So he gets to the periphery because he's been so successful as a general and a military leader, and he wants to keep conquering. Bel Riose is at the periphery, he encounters Foundation, and he says, "Hey, there's a serious threat here we need to address." Andrea: And the first half of the book is his story. Elizabeth: Part Two is called The Mule, and it does the same thing that has happened throughout the first book, Foundation, and now Foundation and Empire. From each part to the next, it jumps ahead in time. And so this time it's, like, 50 or 80 years in the future from when The General, Part One, took place. Elizabeth: Is that right? Andrea: It gets kind of hard to remember what the exact timeframes are, but book two, Foundation and Empire, starts about 300 years after the Foundation was founded. So I don't remember exactly how much time has passed between The General and The Mule, Part One and Part Two. Andrea: I, I don't remember that. But the entirety of the book is about 300 years into this 1,000-year timeframe that the Seldon, psychohistory project has projected. Elizabeth: So between part one and part two so the Empire is not totally gone, but it's much, much weaker, and now the Foundation is essentially the predominant power within the galaxy. Andrea: Or like they're edge of the galaxy. Like they have more advanced science. They're predominant in the sense of like they have the most advanced technology, but they haven't taken over the whole empire at that point, right? Elizabeth: Yeah. Andrea: Yeah. Elizabeth: And so then this character, the Mule, he starts to take over a rogue planet within the planets of the Foundation. And there's a warlord that is ruling that particular planet, and the Mule overthrows this warlord and then from there essentially starts to take over the Foundation. Andrea: So one by one, this new sort of mysterious leader, the Mule, he takes over planets and doesn't face much resistance. Andrea: Both Part One and Two of this book feel like a more cohesive story arc than the first book in the series, and I think that's something that I wanna spend some time talking about, because it felt more complete or more like what I was maybe expecting out of the series when we first chose this for the podcast. Elizabeth: I agree with you 100% that it felt a lot more like a real book as opposed to a collection of short stories. Elizabeth: The first book describes how this whole separate power comes to be and why it's happening, but it doesn't feel like one cohesive story. And so you know, like each of the sections of Foundation have characters within it, but it was really hard to get into those characters, and it didn't really matter one section to the next about the characters in the previous section, and so you just didn't care as much. But this time around, there are characters that you can sort of follow and get into. Andrea: I guess for the first book the character that really stood out was Hari Seldon, right? Because he founded it all. That name does reoccur. But you don't particularly develop an emotional attachment to him. It's just like, "Oh, yeah, I, recognize that name," because it gets mentioned over and over again. Elizabeth: As the, the, the prophet, the founder of everything. And so then his name continues to get used in reference to being the founder of everything throughout all of the books it seems like. Andrea: Yeah. Elizabeth: Hmm. Andrea: So yeah, like we were saying that this book has a more cohesive story arc, and there's characters that you care about a little bit more because they do last more than just one or two chapters. They seem to sort of stick with you throughout the entirety of each of these parts. And it feels like there's more action happening. Andrea: It feels like it's not just a bunch of backroom discussions. It's not just a meeting room. You get to see kind of different planets and explore the galaxy a little bit more in Foundation and Empire, which I enjoyed. I enjoyed that aspect of it. Elizabeth: Yeah. Especially The Mule, the second part, I think that's where it kinda really got into its stride. Andrea: Yeah, or it's like groove. I'd agree with that. Andrea: I realized in retrospect when I finished the book, that Foundation focused mainly on these large social groups and ideas and collective action, whereas Foundation and Empire asks more of the question of whether one person's actions could change the course of history. Andrea: So it's asking whether a single general could change Hari Seldon's great psychohistory prediction, or whether the Mule, being this outside unpredictable factor, can really change the course of history. So yeah, following those individuals made it a more compelling story. Elizabeth: There was one part of the book that really stuck out to me for sure the question of can an individual change history? And in my book, it's page 167 in The Mule. And it says, "We've been blinded by Seldon's psychohistory, one of the first propositions of which is that the individual does not count, does not make history, and that complex social and economic factors override him, make a puppet out of him." Elizabeth: Hari Seldon's theory or the practice of psychohistory, it's not about individual action, it's about the behavior of the masses. The question of does the individual count? I think Hari Seldon would argue that the individual does not count, but it's almost like these two parts, the general and the Mule sort of argue the other way. These are individual characters who are making a significant difference in the course of events. But then, within the book it, it also sort of it responds to that and says that maybe the Mule doesn't count as far as an individual making history. Andrea: Right, like the unpredictable nature of what we don't know we don't know, in a sense? Elizabeth: Or like the, that the mule is not a person. Andrea: I think that is something that might be cleared up later in the third book. I think there's gonna be more to that later on in the series. Elizabeth: Yeah, there probably will be. 'Cause then two paragraphs later it says "But the Mule is not a man. He is a mutant." So maybe Hari Seldon's psychohistory doesn't apply to him because he's not acting the way that humans do because he's a mutant, and it’s… Andrea: Right. Elizabeth: Hari Seldon's, like, formula only works with humans, not mutants. Andrea: And he's like Superman in a sense, or he's part something else, not totally human. Elizabeth: Yeah. And that, that does sort of plant the seed for more within the trilogy and in the bigger series. 'Cause if there's one mutant, I would imagine there must be other mutants Andrea: Yes. That's an interesting thought. We'll see! I suppose we'll see. Elizabeth: Yeah. And like what does that look like, and how does that happen? What sort of roles do they play? Andrea: Well, we mentioned that we get to follow specific characters a little bit more, and I said I would be optimistic, and I'm glad that we read this book. I think we finally got a strong female character that I was looking for. Andrea: So I was very happy to finally see a female character, Bayta. She shows up and is a pivotal character to the story. There's even a chapter that is basically all female characters, and two of the characters, Bayta and Hella, have a conversation about the status of the war and their point of view at the time, and that was actually a really big deal. Andrea: I was really happy to see that show up in this book. And I think technically this passes the Bechdel test. The Bechdel test is for film to sort of measure female representation, but the baseline being that it has two named female characters that talk about something other than a man. And so I think by having this, this one chapter in there with this one conversation between two female characters, and they start out by talking about a man. Andrea: They're complaining about how all the women are crying over their men being off at war, but then they do actually share their own point of view and their own perspective, so it got there. It got there, and it made me happy. Elizabeth: Yeah. Elizabeth: I definitely thought of you as I was reading that, 'cause it, it doesn't happen in the first part. I don't know if there are really any female characters in general in the first part. But once you get to The Mule, it's only a couple chapters in, or even the first chapter, and Bayta makes her appearance. Elizabeth: And I was like, "Oh, there you go, Andrea. Finally, there's your female character" Andrea: Yes, I felt a little bit more seen in this depiction of the future, right? Which is nice. Andrea: There's also another scene where there's a bunch of men smoking cigars, but this time there's a woman present, and she is presented with a cigar as well, and it describes how the guy presenting the cigar felt slightly uncomfortable. Andrea: Like, "Should I be doing this?" And as I'm reading this, I'm going, "Yes. Yes, you should be presenting the woman with a cigar as well." And so I... Yeah, that just made me smile reading that part. Elizabeth: Just you're a woman doesn't mean that you don't also sometimes wanna smoke a cigar. Andrea: Right. But, but that she should be entitled to have the same opportunities as the men in this future, and that her gender doesn't necessarily exclude her from, from being in the room. Elizabeth: Like celebrating themselves? Andrea: Yes, or from being in the discussion. Elizabeth: Yeah. Elizabeth: So when it comes to these books like Foundation versus Foundation and Empire if there isn't necessarily as much of an overarching story or cohesive plot including good characters, I find myself not remembering it as well. And that could also be partly Isaac Asimov's writing style as well. I only just finished the book a few days ago, but I find that I remember more of this than I remember of Foundation. And I think that does speak, once again, to more of a cohesive plot in Foundation and Empire. There are more memorable characters. So that pulls you in more. But there is still sort of something about it that just kinda makes it so I don't necessarily remember all the details. Elizabeth: Part of that might be that they're kinda short books. My copy is only 224 pages. then when there isn't as much there, it's not fleshing out the scenes, and the characters, and the personalities and those sorts of details that make a story really stick with you. But this one was definitely better because there's so much more of a story here, the, like, a cohesive plot. And maybe also kind of Isaac Asimov's style, maybe he's sort of getting more into his style as he's writing these more to be a book instead of short stories. Andrea: Yeah, I don't know if it's necessarily a writing style, but I feel like he packs a lot of meaning and ideas into small sentences or concepts. So he might just mention, "Oh, they were born on an agricultural planet," and so he's implying or he's creating this whole concept of planets as resources in a single phrase or part of a sentence. Andrea: So I think there's a lot of meaning in very short excerpts, and if you're not reading it slowly, it might just go in one ear and out the other type of thing, I think. Elizabeth: Yeah. Andrea: So I was looking back through some of the things I marked from Foundation, the first book, and one of the things I marked was that they had a Minister of Education and Propaganda. Andrea: And I was like, oh, that's interesting. It's the same person, Minister of Education and Propaganda. So when you take a second to think about that, that's actually saying a lot in very few words. Elizabeth: Like these two separate things, but since it's all under the purview of one person, then they are related. Andrea: Right, or the same thing. Elizabeth: Yeah. Andrea: Like how we educate people is a form of propaganda almost, right? Elizabeth: Yeah. Andrea: So, that's not what he said. It was just a title, but I feel like he was implying larger ideas behind that title. And so because these were originally published in a magazine and serialized for a magazine, I think if you had time to really read it more than once, maybe you finish it and you read it again, and maybe on a second read you'd pick up more of the nuance and it might stick with you a little more if you're reading it more than once, right? Elizabeth: Yeah, I can see that. It's a world that has a lot of rich detail but, but he doesn't linger on the details. Andrea: Right. So if you don't catch it when it's mentioned, then he just might not come back to it, or he might not come back to that concept for another 50 pages. Elizabeth: Yeah. Andrea: On that note another example, when they're talking about hangar space, this is a moment that stuck out to me. The ship hangar where they dock while they're on a planet, and the married couple is going on their, quote-unquote, "honeymoon," right? Andrea: They're kind of undercover spies going to Klagan, Bayta and her husband, and Asimov is describing this concept of the hangar. "As a result, the visitor combines hangar space and hotel bill into one at a saving. The owners sell temporary use of ground space at ample profits. The government collects huge taxes. Everyone has fun. Nobody loses. Simple!” Elizabeth: Yeah. Everyone has fun. I did sort of forget about that, but it's fun to think about it again that you, y- yeah, you sleep inside your ship, and then becomes your hotel when you land in the hangar. Andrea: And at the end, it's just a one-word sentence where he says, “Simple!" But I just felt like there could be a lot more to that. That's sort of a, a tongue-in-cheek bit that maybe it started as a simple idea, but now it's this massive conglomeration of visitors and it's a huge complex and it's not such a simple undertaking anymore. Andrea: That's what I got from that. It's kind of how these simple ideas evolve or snowball into bigger, not so simple things. I thought that was interesting. And it's, it's moments like that that kinda just make me, like, chuckle to myself as I'm reading this. Elizabeth: So going along with the same idea of, like, Asimov conveying a lot with not very many words and being very concise but still really packing a punch with what he's saying and, and making a really incredible comment on things like, you know, now you have this big hotel within a hangar sort of bureaucracy-type stuff. Elizabeth: So in the first part in The General, , the characters are arriving onto the planet Trantor, which is headquarters of the empire. And it says, "Already Devers had fumed his way through the manifold complications of a world conceived in paperwork and dedicated to the principle of the form in quadruplicate." Andrea: Yes. Elizabeth: So this, this the whole process for them to even just get onto the planet is just so much bureaucracy. Andrea: Like a bureaucratic nightmare, right? Elizabeth: Yeah. "A world conceived in paperwork and dedicated to the principle of the form in quadruplicate." Heh. And yeah, it gives you this great sense of frustration and bureaucracy and red tape but it's just a simple, short little sentence. Andrea: And I think there's something almost universal about this idea of having to do a form in quadruplicate, right? Elizabeth: Yeah. Andrea: Everybody hates that. That's pretty universal, I think. Elizabeth: So going off the idea that Isaac Asimov is very conscientious with his word choice what would you say are some words that stood out to you while you were reading? Andrea: So I didn't notice this at first, or I didn't quite understand it at first, but a couple of times he used the word “unprintable”, and I was like, "Okay, that's a bit odd." And then he used it a few more times and I realized it was meant to be an expletive. But because it was published in a magazine originally, they couldn't publish four letter swear words. Andrea: So this is literally an unprintable word, like it is a curse word conveying so much anger or frustration that it's unprintable, and as the reader you sort of have to fill in the blank for what you would put there. Elizabeth: I don't remember that at all. Andrea: If you're reading it really quickly, you might not pick up on that. But the, the second time it came up, I'm like, "Wait, I'm missing something." I kind of felt like I'd just skipped over something. Andrea: So one example of that in chapter 15, there's a conversation between Indbur, who is the head of Foundation, and Ebling Mis, who is one of the psychohistorians. And Ebling Mis is meeting with Indbur and he's being criticized about his clothing, and he says, "What's wrong with my clothes?" Andrea: Demanded Mis hotly. "Best cloak I had till those unprintable fiends got their claws on it. I'll leave just as soon as I deliver what I came to deliver. Ga-LAX-y.” " If it didn't involve a Seldon Crisis, I would leave right now." So there you got two, you got two of his sort of expletives. Andrea: You got, " Those unprintable fiends got their claws on it," and then he says, " "Galaxy." another uh, kind of swear word, using space or, or galaxy as swear words. I just thought that was really fun. Andrea: Online it says that unprintable was a way of getting around censorship, and that also made me think about Battlestar Galactica, the TV show, where instead of using a four-letter word, they use the word frack, F-R-A-C-K. And this way of getting around censorship but still conveying your meaning and creating your own sort of world building of expletives, that just kind of makes me smile. Andrea: I enjoy that. Elizabeth: Yeah, Ga-LAX-y, definitely stood out to me as, as well 'cause it's always spelled weird. Andrea: Yeah. Elizabeth: G-A hyphen and then all caps L-A-X hyphen Y. So does that mean it should, yeah, should be pronounced Galaxy, the emphasis on the LAX in all caps? And then don't they also sometimes say space? Andrea: Yes. Yes. Oh, space. Yeah, I just thought it was fun. I wish people could go around saying, "Oh, space!” Elizabeth: I've also noticed with fantasy books, if it's a fantasy world where there are lots of gods, instead of saying “By God” or “Dear God”, they'll say “By Gods” or “Dear Gods”. Andrea: Yeah. And just adjust it slightly. Elizabeth: I mean, it's close enough, but just a little bit different from what someone would normally exclaim. but yeah, the, the unprintable, I didn't even notice that. I just kind of kept reading. Andrea: It kind of reminded me of like “inconceivable”, “unprintable”. Elizabeth: Yeah. Like from The Princess Bride, "You keep using that word” Andrea: Yes. Elizabeth: “I don't think it means what you think it means." Yeah. Andrea: But yeah, there were, there are a few words also that I don't think would be used today. Like the words mutant and freak. Elizabeth: Yeah, I feel like the word freak has a lot of different connotations now and maybe isn't used as much. I don't have kids, so what do the kids say to each other on the playground? Elizabeth: And, do kids use the word freak to call each other freak? Elizabeth: I feel like as an adult, instead of using freak as a noun, we might use it more like an adjective, like something's kind of freaky. That could mean, you know, oh, that's really weird. It was freaky or scary or unsettling. But I don't know about using it to describe someone, if we use that as much anymore. Elizabeth: Another thing that I noticed about Isaac Asimov's writing style that made it a little bit harder once again, and maybe this is just how they wrote back in the '50s more often. But it, it always felt like something would be happening. There's a scene, and it's within the same chapter, but now there's a different scene. Elizabeth: And some amount of time has lapsed. And normally, since it really does seem like a different scene, I would expect there to be a gap within the text to sort of reset my brain as I read into the next bit that it makes sense that now it's a new scene. Andrea: Or even maybe like a gap and a little dot or something in between. Is that what you're talking about? Elizabeth: Yeah. Sometimes it's a little symbol or two or three dots or a little curlicue or something. But sometimes there isn't a symbol at all, and there's just a gap in the text. Or also, if the gap occurs from one page to the next. If there's normally not three dots, sometimes then there is the dots to signify that the gap occurred in that context. Elizabeth: But it does help sometimes a little bit when you're reading, because it sometimes felt jarring at times that you'd be going from one paragraph to the next paragraph, and it seems like it's still the same scene, but it wasn't. Elizabeth: Suddenly different stuff is happening. And I think the gap would have helped me as a reader. Elizabeth: It would have helped the flow in my brain when it's there. I don't know if I've seen that in other books before, so I don't know if it's something that happened more often in the ‘50s. Andrea: Yeah, or maybe it was like a newer development in editing or publishing to incorporate those breaks or something. Elizabeth: Yeah. And there were quite a few times, that suddenly it's a different scene, but it didn't seem like that was going to be the case, and… Andrea: Yeah, I remember realizing that at one point too, and I was like, "Oh, this is a different conversation.” Elizabeth: Yeah. Andrea: It’s no longer the same three people, and it's a different group of people talking, and there was no gap. Elizabeth: Yeah. Maybe they're in a different room now and they've gone somewhere else, and maybe a couple of days have passed , but it's still all just the same continuous text. Andrea: And towards the end I got a little bit confused where Ebling Mis was doing a lot of research at the library trying to reconstruct psychohistory basically from ancient texts. Elizabeth: Yeah, and he's trying to figure out where the Second Foundation is 'cause nothing's really been mentioned, just hinted at. Andrea: Right. Andrea: And it was really hard for me to remember how much time has passed, I was a little confused. Andrea: But it, it makes me wonder if maybe that was because it was published in a magazine, and space is at a premium, right? Elizabeth: Yeah. Andrea: I know that newspaper columns, or if you're gonna put an ad in something, you pay by the letter basically back in the day. Elizabeth: Yeah, how much total space you're taking, surface area of the magazine. Elizabeth:The magazine serialization featured two separate parts. Elizabeth: The General was originally published as The Dead Hand in the April 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, and The Mule was originally published as a two-part story in the November and December 1945 issues. So yeah, space being at a premium I guess trying to reduce the amount of space. Andrea: It seems like that could be something they could update later. I don't know. I'm not sure. Elizabeth: If you're printing it in a book form now someone could go back and put in some gaps that would help. Andrea: Right. That's what I would think too, but I don't know. I'm not gonna hold that against it necessarily. Elizabeth: Yeah, if you put it into context, just one of the things that comes with reading this book or these books is you just have to accept that how they were written. Andrea: Mm-hmm. Andrea: So also one of the things I've heard about the book or the series of Foundation, and I'm, I'm not a big history buff, but I've heard that the collapse of the Empire is loosely based on the collapse of the Roman Empire. And one of the things was that the Roman Empire dealt with a communication lag, and that contributed to its fall or decline. Andrea: Also that Bel Riose's character is based on Belisarius, one of the generals, a Byzantine general. And I, so I thought that was kind of interesting in that it makes me think that, basing it off history is a way of pointing out the cyclical nature of history, and that if we don't learn from our mistakes in the past, we will repeat them in the future. Elizabeth: Yeah. And this question of can history be predicted? Within the context of these books, the whole thing, the sort of mathematical formula that Hari Seldon comes up with is saying exactly that, that history can be predicted, and it's not based upon the action of individuals, but action of the masses. Andrea: Mm-hmm. Elizabeth: And it, it does really bring up these big questions of power and government and religion, and whether this book is based off of the fall of the Roman Empire or not, I mean, it could be arguably based off of the fall of any empire, because no empire has ever not fallen. You know? Elizabeth: No, no civilization, no government, no power, no empire has ever held power indefinitely. Andrea: Right. Andrea: We've already mentioned that Foundation and Empire deals more with individuals than it does with large social groups, but it also deals more with emotions, and that is part of how the Mule is able to come into power, is that he's able to influence people's emotions in a unique way, I'd say. Andrea: And I think there's a lot to be said for how prominent politicians are pushed into positions of power because they are able to sway people's emotions, that they incite different feelings, good or bad, and that leads to very strong opinions. Elizabeth: Yeah, there was a part that stood out to me kind of talking about that basically like the laws of physics versus the laws of history based on, Hari Seldon's formula of psychohistory, that history can be predicted. But within the laws of history, the probabilities of error are greater because history doesn't deal with as many humans as physics does atoms. It's like a matter of scale, so the individual variations between atoms the individual variations between humans is greater. And so then there's a higher probability of error, versus the laws of physics, since there's so many atoms just based upon the scale, the number of atoms, the probability of error is less. Elizabeth: Basically saying that within the context of the book, history is predictable, but there's more of a range of error because history's dealing with fewer people than physics is dealing with atoms. Andrea: Kind of on that note, I was pleasantly surprised when Hari Seldon's appearance comes, and his prediction wasn't completely correct. It, it was correct in some aspects, but he got it a little bit wrong, and it made it start to be more exciting. It kind of drew me into the book to be like, "Oh, it's not just following this predicted history.” Elizabeth: Yeah. Andrea: “What's gonna happen next?" It actually drew me in a lot more, and I think that's why the whole Mule storyline got a lot more interesting. What happens when things aren't as predictable as we think they're going to be? And I'm actually more excited to read the next book, Second Foundation, than I was going into Foundation and Empire. Andrea: What about you? Elizabeth: Yeah, definitely. I guess at this point, since having read two of these books, I’m guessing that it's going to be a similar layout in that there will be a couple of parts, two or three or something, and probably some big jumps in time. But it, it does seem to be getting juicier. Andrea: Right. Elizabeth: And it's yeah, not just as predictable from 30,000 foot view from the ivory tower, the psychohistorians just sort of looking at the model they've created, this formula, and watching it unfold exactly like they think it's going to. It's not exactly that. It's getting juicier. Andrea: I wouldn't be surprised if the next book starts out perhaps on Second Foundation and almost works its way towards the characters in the storyline. But I haven't started it yet, and I am curious what'll happen next. Foundation and Empire leaves off on a bit of a cliffhanger, and I think it definitely steps up its game just overall. Andrea: I enjoyed reading this a lot more. Andrea: So what would you rate this, Elizabeth? Elizabeth: I think I'd give it four stars. It had more of a cohesive story. It had more interesting characters. I found myself getting drawn into it more, but I wouldn't quite give it five stars because I wasn't completely enthralled or completely absorbed by it. Elizabeth: But after having read it the first time, sort of knowing what the basic story is, you sort of pick up on more of it maybe if you read a few times. So, so maybe if I read it again, I'd give it a higher rating, but I don't know that I will read it again. What about you? What would you give it? Andrea: Fair, fair. I think I'm right there with you. I'd give it four stars. I think I gave it, like, a 4.25 on one of the places I rate my books. Similarly it's not a five star read because I didn't leave it going, "Oh, I loved that." I went, "Oh, I really liked that." So it's four stars. Elizabeth: Yeah. I'm pretty excited to read the third book. Andrea: Same. Agreed Elizabeth: So it's another great example of you don't stop at The Gunslinger. And I think that's just maybe my, my general mantra…for the series. Andrea: Your, your mantra? Yeah. Elizabeth: Yeah. So I think that's maybe my general mantra: You don’t stop at The Gunslinger. You don't stop at the first book. and some authors when they start to write a series, they don't necessarily have the whole thing planned out, and so they're maybe having to sort of find their stride, get their feet under them before it starts to get good. Andrea: Yeah. Well, actually, in the back of the copy that I have, it has a little bio on Isaac Asimov, and it says that he began his Foundation series at the age of 21. 21 years old. I was impressed. Elizabeth: Yeah. I mean, presumably he hadn't written very many things or hardly anything at all when he wrote Foundation at 21. And authors, not always, some authors, you know, from their debut novel or debut book have it really figured out, dialed in. But some authors have to kind of figure it out, figure out their own writing style. Andrea: To grow as an author... Elizabeth: Yeah, I mean, going back to The Gunslinger Stephen King wrote The Gunslinger when he was 19. Andrea: Wow. Elizabeth: And then didn't write The Drawing of the Three until he was 39. So you know, 20 years later he continued the series. So yeah, don't stop at The Gunslinger, which is absolutely my mantra… Elizabeth: Unfortunately, that concludes this week's episode. We've reached the end of another cosmic journey on Galaxies and Goddesses. Andrea: Don't worry, the adventure never really ends. There are always more stories to explore, and let's be honest, more bookish tangents for us to go on. Elizabeth: But hey, that's part of the fun. If you loved today's episode, make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share the magic. Andrea: Stay tuned for our next episode where we'll be doing a mid-year check-in on our reading stats. Elizabeth: And in the meantime, keep your mind fueled by the magic of stories. Andrea: And never stop chasing. The worlds waiting for you between the pages. Thanks everyone.