alt Hacker NewsI'm going to make myself unpopular here, but I've never understood the perennial gushing about this story on hn.
The writing is okay, but the ending is kind of trite (especially given the author's humanist beliefs. And there's much too much exposition.
Convince me I'm wrong.
Replies
Nav_Panel • yesterday at 7:15 PM
Nah I agree with you, as someone who's read a lot of Asimov. As far as MULTIVAC stories go, I always preferred "All The Troubles of the World" (https://schools.ednet.ns.ca/avrsb/070/rsbennett/HORTON/short...).
Context matters. The first guy to write X is a luminary. The next 50 people to write variations of X start falling along a spectrum, from luminary to hack. After that, everyone except children have been exposed to X, and anyone writing about it seems trite.
I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov, and now the original seems trite (when you read it after all the stuff derived from it). But the work remains foundational.