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| 1616145358
| 9781616145354
| 1616145358
| 3.79
| 1,916
| Jan 01, 2012
| Jan 24, 2012
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really liked it
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) This is the third volume now of Mark Hodder's steampunk series, in which the real-life Victorian explorer Richard Francis Burton and libertine artist Algernon Swinburne fictionally team up for a series of adventures in an alt-history 19th century, and nicely illustrates the problem with missing the first title in such a series when it comes to following along with the rest; for while I didn't seem to have much problem following along with the second volume, The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, mostly I suspect because it didn't contain much background material about the first volume, this third chapter contains just a huge infodump about the book that started it all (The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, that is), a complicated backstory that involves time travel, multiple possible histories, and a sacred prehistoric meteorite that holds the key to the far-future quantum mechanics that are causing all the space-time-hopping messes in the first place (or, um, something like that), and I have to confess that I had a hard time simply trying to keep up with all the complex exposition. (Also, series fans, be aware that Hodder seems to have grown tired of the entire premise of Swinburne playing Dr. Watson to Burton's Sherlock Holmes, and that this third volume is mostly a Burton adventure with a few drunken wisecracks by Swinburne randomly thrown in here and there.) Granted, this universe is a much more original and creepy vision than most steampunk novels, the main reason to read the books in the first place -- in particular I really love the idea of genetic engineering being mastered long before electronics, so that the streets and skies are filled with giant dead bugs whose hollow exoskeletons are used as industrialized human vehicles -- but I also have to confess that by not getting hooked on this series from its start, I'm finding it increasingly difficult with each new volume to stay emotionally connected to the proceedings, the problem in a nutshell with all these endless so-so series that sci-fi publishers love putting out. It should be kept in mind when deciding for yourself whether or not to pick up a copy. Out of 10: 8.2 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 12, 2012
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Apr 12, 2012
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Paperback
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| 1616145331
| 9781616145330
| 1616145331
| 3.55
| 264
| Jan 01, 2011
| Nov 2011
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liked it
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) This is volume two of a new "steampunk meets superheroes" series from Andrew P. Mayer, a rather potboilerish adventure tale about masked vigilantes with fantastical weapons fighting crime in late-1800s New York; I reviewed the first volume last year and found it only so-so, while after finishing this latest found it…er, only so-so. And that's because Mayer never really does anything with this admittedly fascinating premise once he comes up with it; the action scenes are ho-hum, the dialogue purposely written with a kind of comic-book simplicity, and in general with plot developments that never rise above the clunky pulp serials that Mayer is obviously trying to emulate. And that's not bad if that's specifically what you're looking for, which is why it's getting at least an okay score today; but I'll warn you now that you'll be bored and disappointed if you're expecting even an ounce more than a competent genre quickie, and that this should be kept in mind if you're picking it up yourself. It comes recommended to steampunk fans who have a high degree of patience, but pretty much no one else. Out of 10: 7.6 ...more |
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1
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not set
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Feb 22, 2012
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Feb 22, 2012
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Paperback
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| 1616143673
| 9781616143671
| 1616143673
| 3.59
| 422
| Jan 01, 2011
| Jul 26, 2011
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really liked it
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Regular readers will remember last year's Ghosts of Manhattan, from genre veteran and Doctor Who scriptwriter George Mann, and how I found it only so-so when originally reviewing it myself; and now its sequel is out, Ghosts of War, which I decided to go ahead and read as well, partly because a copy was nicely sent to me by our buddies at Pyr and partly because I've always suspected that I didn't give the first volume a fair shake. And indeed, the good news is that this "Art Deco Steampunk" actioner came off this time as much better than the original, I suspect partly because both Mann and myself have grown more into these characters and setting; for those who don't know, it's set in an alt-history 1920s New York, in which a Shadow/Batman-style crimefighter is assisted by lots of fanciful tech gear, while facing complications not from German spies but ones from a still-strong and now antagonistic British Empire, who has been locked into a cold war of sorts with the US for decades on end by now. Of course, in my defense, it's also clear that this sequel is simply better than the original as well, and very specifically addresses some of the problems that I mentioned about the first book; for example, while I found what Mann actually did with this milieu in the original to be rather uninspiring, this time he comes up with a real corker of a dilemma, one I'll let remain a surprise but let's say ties in nicely with the work of HP Lovecraft, who in real life was writing his best-known stories right in these same years. Essentially more of the same but now just a little sharper, a little brighter and a little smarter, it comes recommended to both traditional steampunk fans and aficionados of Early Modernist noir serials, a rousing thriller that stands strongly against the Victorian setting where most of these types of novels are usually placed. Out of 10: 8.4 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 20, 2011
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Oct 20, 2011
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Paperback
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| 0765327449
| 9780765327444
| 0765327449
| 3.81
| 4,697
| Sep 27, 2011
| Sep 27, 2011
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liked it
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The whole reason I picked up this 2011 novel is because a sequel to it is just now being released, and I was so fascinated by the concept behind them that I thought the two books might make for a good double-review; that concept being, "What if some of the ancient clans from Scotland and Ireland who eventually emigrated in the 1700s to the American Appalachian Mountains were in fact not human at all, but actually varying families of fairies who had fled Scotland and Ireland a thousand years before that, and that some of those backwards, closed-off small towns in Kentucky and Tennessee are in fact now entirely inhabited by people who can perform magic?" (Or in other words, if you consider something like Neil Gaiman's 1990s work to be "urban fantasy," this might best be called "rural fantasy.") Unfortunately, though, author Alex Bledsoe never finds anything interesting to actually do with this fascinating concept, turning in a molasses-slow story that repeats all its relatively small amount of plot points five or six times in order to fill pages (I get it! Our Iraq-veteran hero is going to heal more quickly than humans! I GET IT, BLEDSOE!), and that paints its overly obvious villains as broadly as a cartoon might. And worst of all, although there's an NPR enthusiast's amount of obsession over the true-life folk songs of Appalachia (I suspect one of the main reasons Bledsoe even wanted to write this), barely any actual magic takes place, aside from occasional weird hand gestures and Jedi Mind Trick headaches; and without the magical element, this is simply a story about feuding hillbillies in red state hell, and Lord, I have no interest in reading that. Not actually badly written, it's still getting a low score, simply from the huge disappointment the reality of this book was compared to the expectations of its premise. Out of 10: 6.9 ...more |
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1
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not set
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May 20, 2013
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Oct 13, 2011
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Paperback
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| 1582436444
| 9781582436449
| 1582436444
| 3.50
| 403
| May 14, 2012
| Apr 01, 2011
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it was amazing
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) It may sound at first to be the height of cheesy cross-genre gimmickry -- a modern-style crime drama set within a James Howard Kunstleresque post-apocalyptic, neo-Luddite America -- but in Ashes of the Earth, mystery veteran Eliot Pattison takes what could've been an extremely eye-rolling experience and actually makes it taut and fascinating, a thriller that I admit I found more engaging than most other crime novels set within much more workaday surroundings. And that's because Pattison chooses to take a sober, toned-down approach to his world-building here, concocting a crime that fits in very naturally with the quasi-Victorian, surrounded-by-ruins milieu of these kinds of novels, making the story much less about radioactive mutants and hidden caches of Barbie dolls (although both these things are there as well), and much more about how the human capacity for both compassion and greed will long survive whatever circumstances we humans find ourselves in, not a utopia or a wasteland like so many post-apocalyptic thrillers are but simply a new way of life and new ways for people to act both honorably and horribly. The twist-filled plot is best left a surprise, which is why I won't mention anything about what actually "happens" here; but let's just say that fans of both Scott Turow and dystopian sci-fi are likely to be highly satisfied with this quickly paced, always fascinating book, a story that manages to be not only inventive in its plot but even introduces lots of original elements to its details, something becoming harder and harder to do in our post-Road times, when an ever-expanding glut of post-apocalyptic novels seems sometimes to be in danger of cannibalizing itself to death. A pleasant surprise and a much better novel than I was expecting, it comes strongly recommended. Out of 10: 9.3 ...more |
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not set
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Oct 07, 2011
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Mar 04, 2011
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Hardcover
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| 0765321505
| 9780765321503
| 0765321505
| 3.75
| 6,694
| Apr 13, 2010
| Apr 13, 2010
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really liked it
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The reason I put this older (2010) urban-fantasy alt-history novel on reserve at my local library is because its sequel The Coldest War just came out, and the premise sounded interesting enough to warrant going back to the first book and catching up; set within a Johnathan Strange like alt-reality where magic is real (via evil, ephemeral cosmic aliens who we barely understand but who some can take advantage of), it tells the story of a World War Two where the Nazis have literally invented supermen and crusty upper-class "magic scholars" in the UK are made MI6 operatives to stop them. But alas, although the idea itself is just really quite amazing, the execution of the idea is only subpar; the plot itself is quite clunky at times, the level of characterization uneven, the dialogue sometimes flat, and perhaps worst of all (or at least a big personal pet peeve of mine), a paper-thin wife is invented for one of the main characters exclusively to serve as a flimsy deux-ex-machina for the story's climax, otherwise servicing as a disposable distraction for the other couple of hundred pages we have to deal with her. I can see why the book's gotten so much attention, because it really is a captivating story idea, unique and historical and yet another great modern take on the Nazi's real-life obsession with the occult; and while it's sure to satisfy hardcore urban-fantasy fans, I doubt that I myself will be reading volume two of the series, and do not recommend it except to the most diehard Joss Whedon fans out there. Out of 10: 8.4 ...more |
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1
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not set
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Aug 07, 2012
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May 18, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 0765318415
| 9780765318411
| 0765318415
| 3.52
| 33,995
| Jun 01, 2009
| Sep 29, 2009
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it was amazing
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.) Ah, steampunk! The very definition of a literary subgenre, steampunk tales fit not only within the general category of science-fiction (in that the storylines usually hinge on technology that has not yet been invented), but then bury this uninvented technology within a past that never was, usually the Victorian Age to be specific, imagining various scientific breakthroughs that never actually happened and then imagining what life would've been like if those breakthroughs had been real (for example, the idea of computers actually being invented in the 1860s instead of 1960s, the concept behind one of the first steampunk novels to really define the genre, 1990's The Difference Engine by famed "cyberpunk" authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, resulting in a room-sized monstrosity covered in gleaming brass and powered by steam, thus explaining the origins of the term itself). And thus just like serial-killer crime thrillers or Georgian romance tales, so too does steampunk have a very specific audience in mind, and so too does its success mostly depend on its ability to offer up a series of specifically fetishized details that its small, fiercely loyal audience is specifically looking for. And thus do we come to Cherie Priest's mindblowing new Boneshaker, which as industry fans know has been causing quite a stir over the last few months, seemingly coming out of nowhere to make both Publishers Weekly and Amazon's "Best of 2009" lists, and with such genre veterans as Warren Ellis and Cory Doctorow tripping over their own feet in their attempt to gush more and more about how marvelous it is. And there's a very good reason for this; because this novel is perfect, or at least "perfect" as it's defined within the narrow confines of what makes a genre project truly great. And in fact, this book is so great that I thought I would use my write-up of it today as an excuse to rather wonkily go through step by step and explain where exactly Priest gets things so right; that's how good it is, that it's not just entertaining but can serve as a useful tutorial as well to fellow genre authors who are facing problems with their own projects. So let's start with what's the most obvious strength of Boneshaker, and what's been getting it so much attention in such a short period -- it's a book with not only a fascinating grand hook behind its plot, but filled with enough fascinating incidental details as well to easily propel a 400-page manuscript. And this of course is where so many genre authors get things wrong, as seen again just last week for example in my review of Peter Crowther's "Forever Twilight" series -- that in their zeal to come up with a great concept to propel their book in general, they forget that an entire three-act storyline needs to be constructed out of that great concept too, leading to stories that often have huge gaping holes in their middles, giant hundred-page sections where literally nothing happens, as the characters essentially sit around having frivolous conversations as they wait for the next lever in that storyline's Grand Concept to kick into gear. So in Priest's case, she starts with a doozy of a concept, which like I said is basically step one in writing a great genre novel -- she imagines an alternative-history late-1800s, in which the Russians have hired an American mad scientist named Leviticus Blue to construct a giant drilling machine he calls the "Boneshaker," so that they can go prospecting under the ice in Alaska and jump-start the Klondike Gold Rush a good half-century before it happened in real life. But something goes terribly wrong in the Seattle basement where Blue is constructing the machine (an accident? sabotage? the mystery behind the incident is yet another part of the complex storyline), creating a giant sinkhole that essentially collapses the entire downtown district; and that's where the real trouble starts, in that the subterranean rift ends up releasing a poisonous underground gas, which just happens to turn anyone who comes into contact with it into a flesh-eating zombie. And since Washington is still a territory instead of a state, the US government wants nothing to do with this accident's complicated and expensive clean-up; and so as a sloppy stop-gap measure, the residents of Seattle basically build a giant 200-foot wall around downtown, turning the entire district into a yellow-haze-filled wasteland of wrecked Victorian parlors and the rotting undead, along with a small community of gas-mask-wielding smugglers, criminals and other libertarians, who have carved out a hardscrabble existence for themselves through an ingenious series of underground tunnels and basement living spaces, filled with clean air from impossibly long tubes snaking over the walls and industrial-strength bellows run by sweaty Chinese laborers. Yeah, an astonishing concept, like I said, but then Priest backs this up with a whole series of smaller developments, all of them related to the main Grand Concept but pedestrian enough to fuel the page-to-page action that keeps the manuscript moving forward: a gang war within this underground community; a diluted version of this poisonous fog called "yellow sap" that those on the outside use as a recreational drug, basically Priest's version of opium; the owners of the weaponized zeppelins who transport this yellow sap in and out of the contaminated zone; the steel-helmeted Hessian criminal warlord who may or may not be the surviving, horribly disfigured Dr. Blue. And that leads us to the second big thing that Priest gets right in Boneshaker, which is that all the truly great genre novels in history are ones filled with startlingly unique visions; and here Priest is just overflowing with such visions, delivering mental image after mental image that most of us never even thought possible until she came up with them, deftly combining steampunk with a post-apocalyptic zombie tale, a first-person-shooter videogame, and the John Carpenter classics Escape From New York and Big Trouble in Little China (which let's not forget, was originally meant to be a steampunk tale itself, until the producers fired the first screenwriters and updated the story from the 1880s to 1980s). After all, this is the particular fetishistic detail that fuels both steampunk and science-fiction in general, the delivering of stunning visions of technology that never was; and here Priest does a superlative job, not only with the grand scheme of things but all the way down to its gritty details. And that leads us to the third big thing Priest gets right here; that like so many of the best genre projects in history, she comes up with a grand mythology that informs the entire book and more, while still not getting lost in telling this one specific story. Because for those who don't know, Boneshaker is actually only the first volume of a coming trilogy Priest calls the "Clockwork Century," a sweeping look at an entire alternative 1800s, one in which the Civil War has turned into a twenty-year Vietnam-like bloody stalemate, and where the Republic of Texas discovers oil a good 50 years before they do in real life, funding a this-time successful revolution which leads to them now being their own sovereign nation. All of these things inform this first novel of the trilogy, and especially when it comes to the dueling airships which make up an entire beguiling subplot on their own (one of the many things that has led to the Civil War lasting so long in the first place, the invention of a modern-style Air Force out of armored balloons, a technology that is perfected much more quickly by the Confederacy); yet Priest doesn't allow this mythology to spin out of control either, but rather doles it out in these delicious little scoops, making you constantly wanting a little more just like the best genre projects do. And that leads us to the fourth thing Priest does right with Boneshaker, the crucial yet subtle element that eludes so many mediocre genre projects that could've been great; she takes the time and attention to populate this fantastical environment with very real-feeling, highly complex characters, thus corralling this insane plotline and grand mythology and bringing it down to a human level that we can intimately relate to. For example, the entire story itself is told through the eyes of Dr. Blue's widow, the proud yet frazzled single mother Briar Wilkes, who only gets involved in this mess in the first place in an attempt to rescue her smart yet naive teenage son Zeke, who one day sneaks into the contaminated zone in an attempt to gather proof that the father he never knew was in fact not guilty of deliberately causing the sinkhole for material gain, as the 15-year-old popular rumor that has ruined his reputation has it. This essentially boils the entire book down into a family drama, which is nice enough on its own; but now add all the morally dubious yet sympathetic people the two meet along their separate journeys, from the massive yet kindhearted airship captain Jeremiah to the mechanical-armed tough-talking saloon owner Lucy, not to mention the dozens of fully realized incidental characters along the way. Add all of these things together, and you get what you see here in Boneshaker, a book that literally could not be written better than it currently is, which is why today it receives a perfect score of 10 among those who are already genre fans; but of course, keep in mind that this definitely is a genre project when all is said and done, which is why its general score is a bit lower, because don't forget that in order for a book to score in the high 9s here at CCLaP, it must be able to transcend its intended audience and appeal to a large general crowd as well, which this book definitely does not. It is for sure the book to try if you've always been curious about steampunk, and want to pick the absolute best of the genre so to not waste your time; but if you simply have no interest in steampunk at all, you will be unable to see this book as anything other than ridiculously silly no matter how well it's written, a fact which should be tempered against all my glowing praise of it today. That said, I'm confident in proclaiming that it will appeal to most people out there, and of course for existing genre fans it should immediately be moved to the top of your reading queue; needless to say that it'll be making CCLaP's own "Best of 2009" list coming next month, and that I'm now eagerly awaiting the release of volume two in the series (Clementine, coming from Subterranean Press next summer, which is apparently about Civil War spies and is partly set in Chicago -- hmm!). Out of 10: 9.0, or 10 for steampunk fans ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 16, 2009
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Sep 23, 2009
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Paperback
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| 0553293389
| 9780553293388
| 0553293389
| 4.18
| 95,088
| Oct 1982
| Dec 31, 2010
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it was ok
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THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Cur THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Currentlyâ€� ‌inâ€� ‌theâ€� ‌challenge:â€� ‌Isaacâ€� ‌Asimov'sâ€� ‌Robot/Empire/Foundationâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Margaretâ€� Atwoodâ€� ´¥â€� ‌JGâ€� ‌Ballardâ€� ´¥â€� Cliveâ€� ‌Barkerâ€� ´¥â€� Christopherâ€� Buckleyâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | ‌Lee Child's Jack Reacher | ‌Philipâ€� ‌Kâ€� ‌Dickâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Ian Fleming | Williamâ€� ‌Gibsonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Michelâ€� Houellebecqâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Irvingâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Kazuoâ€� ‌Ishiguroâ€� ´¥â€� Shirleyâ€� Jacksonâ€� | ‌Johnâ€� ‌Leâ€� ‌Carreâ€� ´¥â€� Bernardâ€� ‌Malamudâ€� ´¥â€� Cormac McCarthy | Chinaâ€� ‌Mievilleâ€� ´¥â€� Toni Morrison | ‌VSâ€� Naipaulâ€� ´¥â€� Chuckâ€� ‌Palahniukâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Timâ€� ‌Powersâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Terryâ€� ‌Pratchett'sâ€� ‌Discworldâ€� ´¥â€� Philipâ€� ‌Rothâ€� ´¥â€� Nealâ€� Stephensonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jimâ€� ‌Thompsonâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Updikeâ€� ´¥â€� Kurtâ€� ‌Vonnegutâ€� ´¥â€� Jeanette Winterson | PGâ€� ‌Wodehouseâ€� 2022 reads, #29 and 30. And so, three years after writing the first review of this 15-book megaseries, do we finally come to the end of my look at Isaac Asimov's so-called "Future History" volumes, in which he took three formerly unrelated trilogies he wrote in the 1950s (the "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation" books) then in the '80s and early '90s write six "bridging novels" that legitimately (if not awkwardly) turns the entire thing into one unified, persistent, arguably paradox-free 22,000-year timeline. Inspired by his buddy Robert Heinlein's ability to pull this off in his career as well, it takes us in 15 books (novels and short-story collections) from a day-after-tomorrow future of increasingly intelligent robots to a far future in which a humanity now in its trillions is scattered across 25 million planets, governed under one giant empire whose bureaucracy is the size of an entire planet (where George Lucas got his inspiration for Star Wars' "" Coruscant). As I've mentioned in previous reviews, I was 13 when I first read the original '50s Foundation trilogy, after finding it on my grandparents' guest bedroom's back bookshelves, filled with all the leftover sci-fi my father and uncle read in the 1940s through '60s when they were kids themselves; and then I was actually in high school in the early '80s just a few years later when all these bridging novels first started coming out. 1982's Foundation's Edge, one of the two books being reviewed today, was the very first one of these bridging novels, released at the beginning of my freshman year; the other, '86's Foundation and Earth, came out at the end of my senior year, right before entering college and getting introduced to the cyberpunk genre and Dark Age comic books (and the indie music and drugs that accompanied them) by all the cool hipsters there who were older and smarter than me, and actually included girls for the first freaking time in my life, which is why I quickly ditched the Silver Age of sci-fi around the mid-'80s for a diet of all cyberpunk, Vertigo, urban fantasy, and cute industrial/goth girls. Even with it being that long now since first approaching those books, though, I can still remember two very distinct things about that initial wave of public reaction to these '80s books that tie all these series together: both how much it was celebrated as the triumphant return of a grand master to a genre he hadn't regularly published in for twenty years at that point (spending most of the late-'60s to late-'70s actually writing in a wide variety of nonfiction subjects, eventually receiving the designation [I believe still not broken] of being the only person in history to publish books in nine out of the ten Dewey Decimal System categories); and how disappointing the books turned out to be as reading experiences, just this page-padding nonsense from an old man with not much left to say, not when compared to such mindfuckery in those same years as from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, which is why all us young readers were gravitating to those writers back then. That's been the same conclusion I've drawn again 35 years later, reading all 15 of these books in a row, that the '80s titles in this megaseries simply aren't very good, with Asimov having no more than about a short story's worth of actual plot to convey in any of them, but who then pads them out to sometimes 100,000 words or more so that they'll feel "weighty enough" to deserve all the Hugos and Nebulas the awards people were already lining up to award him, book unseen at that point. It was a weird time to be a young sci-fi fan, I'm now starting to realize, when the so-called "Silver Age" authors who had their heights in the '50s and '60s were now at the twilight of their careers, and us teenagers were veering towards this particularly outre, hardcore, outlandish style of the arts, lit by the harsh neons of Japanese logos and shiny rainlit back alleys full of consumer-tech trash. I was already a (young) adult in these years, so I distinctly remember with this adult eye how much authors like Asimov and books like these were being pushed towards the sci-fi community as these "objects" to be "revered" from a "master" who we all have the "privilege" of seeing "going out on a high note," not just concerning him and the Future History books but also reflected in mid-'80s projects like Arthur C. Clarke's sequel to 2001, the creatively titled 2010 which went through a similar pre-public veneration before the project itself was ever released. My friends and I were not really having any of that, and we knew what we liked and we gravitated towards it, which I suppose it why you see this strange schism between the "con-going" sci-fi fans in these years and the "cyberpunk" fans who mixed these books in with the indie comics they were also reading, the indie music they were listening to, the computer work (legal and non) they were doing, the drugs they did and the fashion they followed. People wanted these aging '60s masters to have one last hurrah to their careers, and that's admirable; but Asimov at least was largely not up to the task, and should have in fact just written six short stories in the style of the original 1951 Foundation that covers all the plot of these six '80s bridging novels, and publish just it as one book which neatly ties together all nine of the original books from the '50s and makes the entire "Future History" megaseries a tidy decology. Maybe one day in the far future when these books are in the public domain, someone will do exactly that; but until then, now that I've gone through the entire thing myself, let me recommend first reading the Robot short stories and the three Robot crime novels, then reading just the Wikipedia entries (or my reviews) of the bridging novel Robots and Empire, the entire original "Empire" trilogy from the '50s, and the two modern "Foundation" prequels, to then pick up with the full books again for the original '50s "Foundation" trilogy, and back to the recaps for these last two "Foundation" sequels being covered today. That's still a worthy achievement, and as we saw in my original looks at them, both the "Robot" books and the original "Foundation" ones are all still great reads that are worth your while; but you can skip all the empty words and "magical robot" nonsense of the modern bridging novels without missing anything important, so I suggest sticking to just the six books that most demonstrate why Asimov and his work is still worth continuing to look at, all these decades later. Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 12, 2022
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Mar 27, 2009
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0061474096
| 9780061474095
| 0061474096
| 4.17
| 74,065
| Sep 09, 2008
| Sep 09, 2008
|
it was amazing
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.) Is Neal Stephenson the most brilliant living author currently in the United States of America? Oh, wait, I can answer that for you right away: Yes. Yes he is. And that's because Stephenson can do something almost no other American writer currently putting out work can; he can take a healthy dose of the popular zeitgeist at any given moment, mine it to understand the underlying fears and hopes these trendy obsessions actually express, twist it using some of the most inventive speculative fictional tropes that have ever been created, infuse it with the kind of heady, complex "pure science" usually only understood by nuclear physicists and NOVA hosts, then spit it out in these breathtakingly dense thousand-page tomes every couple of years. Of all the thousands of published writers of our generation, I'm convinced that Stephenson will be one of the mere handful still being read and studied a century from now, and there's a very good reason that so many people call him "the heir of Thomas Pynchon," the creator of his own one-man literary genre that can't be called anything else but "Stephensonian." And thus have I eagerly followed along in real time with nearly all of Stephenson's backbreakers over the decades, all the way back from the 1992 cyberpunk classic Snow Crash (the direct inspiration for the very real Second Life); then to his stunning redefinition of steampunk, 1995's The Diamond Age; then to his masterful examination of the real history of 20th-century code-breaking, 1999's Cryptonomicon; and then to his massive three-book, three-thousand-page overview of the entire beginning of both science and finance as we know them, the career-defining "Baroque Cycle" (2003's Quicksilver, 2004's The Confusion, and 2005's The System of the World). And now, after ten days in a row of reading at least four hours each and every day, I have finally finished Stephenson's latest, the epoch-defining yet often headscratching Anathem; and in fact I found it so dense, so generation-defining, I've come to realize that I simply will not be able to make all my points in the usual thousand-word essay I normally do here regarding any given book. So instead I'm doing two essays on two days, one spoiler-free and the other spoiler-heavy (today's the spoiler-free one), the first essay devoted to nothing else but the superlatively complicated backstory, and not even touching the book's actual plot until the second essay. (GoodReads readers, this is one of the rare times when you will literally , because of there literally not being room here for both.) Because it's important right away to understand what Stephenson is trying to do with this novel, and will make your reading of it (a part-time job, I warn you now, that will take most people four to six weeks) go a lot more smoothly; he is no less than redefining the very relationship between religion and science, and methodically explaining how there's actually a lot less differences between the two than most of us think, if people would simply choose to embrace both subjects in this interrelated way. And really, this grand a goal is not actually as big a stretch as it might seem at first; after all, according to how recent history has played out, we're hovering right around a time these days where we as a society will be creating a big giant new way for us to even think about such basic subjects as faith, reason, the meaning of life, and more. There was the Enlightenment of the 1700s, for example, which pushed atheistic rationality to the forefront of society; then the Romanticism of the 1800s, in which emotions and spirituality were brought back into style; then the Modernism (and Postmodernism) of the 1900s, where science and religion were first presented as an "either/or" proposition, where rationality and faith were first cemented in the mind as eternally struggling enemies. And now here it is, the early 2000s; so what kind of "ism" will define this age? Well, if you study the subject like I do, the pretty obvious answer is that we're set to go through a century where we profoundly redefine what the relationship is in the first place between religion and science, which is why it's not really such a surprise that Stephenson would latch onto the subject himself, a good ten or fifteen years before it becomes the dominant subject of the popular culture at large, just like all his other novels have done too. And the way Stephenson does this is of course unexpected and magnificent, which is by creating an entire different planet called Arbre which is almost just like Earth, but different in several basic important ways. For example, the first three thousand years of Arbre's written history are almost exactly like the last three thousand years of our own (from ancient Greece to now); except that in the oldest surviving myth they have, their version of our "Remus and Romulus" tale, theirs supposedly involves a father who near the end of his life professes to having a vision of what he calls a "perfect other world," then dies before he can explain what exactly he meant. So one daughter, Deat, interprets this how the religious of Earth usually would, into terms of a "heaven" and a "god" and "angels" and the like; but the other daughter, Hylaea, takes it to mean that he glimpsed a realm of pure perfect science and reason, not so much a physical place like a "heaven" but more like a Taoist-style existence of pure energy, where instead of a deity running things who takes the form of a person, there is instead only the pure clocklike perfection of a completely rational universe. And so all the way back to the beginning of Arbrean society, there have actually been two major ways to think of religion, not only the "deist" way which is the only one we have on Earth (known as "deolatist" in their world, after the daughter Deat), but also this "religion of science" known as Hylaeanism, later in history generalized to the more inclusive term "Mathism." And the Mathists have their own monks and their own monasteries, essentially mirroring how the study of science got its actual start in ancient Earth as well; and anytime one of these monk scientists has a sudden breakthrough, like Newton discovering gravity or Einstein discovering relativity or Pythagorus inventing his theory about triangles, this is considered the Mathic version of a miracle, or perhaps more like speaking in tongues, a sort of short, profound connection that monk suddenly has with this so-called semi-mystical world of pure rational perfection, known in their language as the "Hylaean Theoric World" (with "theorism" being their word for our "science"). And this is just inspired of Stephenson to do, I think, because this hearkens all the way back to what real Earth's first scientists actually were trying to do too, the so-called "natural philosophers" and "alchemists" of the 1600s; to them, "science" wasn't a standalone subject unto itself but rather a simple subset of religion, a way of understanding God better by intensely studying the things that God creates, and understanding how we should live our own lives by studying how such creatures as trees and animals do it out in the "natural world," a.k.a. "the world that works the way God wants the world to work, when we humans aren't using our big giant brains to screw it all up." And again, for anyone who's ever studied Eastern religions, you can see a lot of similarities between this and some of the basic tenets behind Taoism and Buddhism -- the idea that God is too infinitely complex a creature for us to ever understand, so all we can do instead is study the things that God creates, and get our cues on how to live our own lives by metaphorically interpreting God in its most purely rational form, what we now know as "scientific concepts," things like gravity and photosynthesis and DNA. Newton and the other proto-scientists of the Baroque "Royal Society" always saw their pursuits as an offshoot of religion; it's only been in the last 150 years that science has taken on a reputation as being an abomination to God, as the insane efficiency of the scientific process (theorize, test, observe, record without bias) has meant a profoundly fast increase in scientific sophistication, to the point where scientists must now spend their entire lives studying the specific pursuit they mean to make their career just to get caught up, and now not just observe nature in action but actively manipulate it, thus "playing God" in the eyes of many instead of merely worshipping God through natural observation. All Stephenson does is merely formalize this process, on a planet much like Earth's but where he can take certain artistic liberties; on Arbre, scientists literally are monks, universities literally monasteries, where specialists literally devote their entire lives to the pursuit of specific knowledge, literally do wear robes and shave their heads and live in cloisters and everything else. Except unlike Deolatism/deism/traditional religion, commandment number one among Mathics tends to be, "It's a sin to presume that you will eventually understand everything there is to know about the world," with commandment number two being, "And it's an even bigger sin to make up stories about the things you don't understand." When all is said and done, Stephenson argues that this is really the only big difference between science and deism, with all the other conflicts playing off it in one way or another: that science is all about trying to discover what makes the world work the way it does, without tainting your observations with fictional stories regarding the way you really, really wish the world worked, while the entire point of deism is precisely to make up such comforting and easily understood fictional stories, as a way of easing the fear and threat so many feel in the face of the unknown. And like I said, thus does the first three thousand years of Arbrean written history pass remarkably like Earth's, with their version of a Roman Empire (the "Bazian Empire") which eventually adopts Catholicism ("The Ark of Baz") as its official religion, which eventually leads to a Protestant Reformation (the "Anti-Bazians") which turns into their version of the Renaissance ("The Rebirth"), which on Arbre is when the gates of the ancient Mathic monasteries were first flung open, so that most of the science-worshipping monks could disperse themselves among the public at large, ushering in their version of our "Modern Age" or "Scientific Age" or whatever you want to call it (basically, the last 500 years of history, from the Renaissance to now), which the Arbreans call "The Praxic Age" on their world, "Praxism" being their word for "technology." And in fact Stephenson does something else really smart when laying out this alternative ancient history, which is to wisely separate what we humans know as "science" into three distinct pursuits on Arbre -- not just the scientific process (logic, rationality, etc), which is technically the only pursuit the Mathics embrace, but also the study of numbers (Earth's "mathematics") and the study of just technology, which are the pursuits the "Saecular" (non-Mathic) parts of Arbrean society mostly concentrate on, and especially when it comes to the subject of "syntactic devices" (things like computers, for example, which can be taught to "read" and "write," but don't even begin to understand the context of what they're parsing, of how to enjoy a joke or be emotionally moved by a poem). Mathic monks instead concentrate on so-called "semantic thought," or the idea that understanding things in context is the most important pursuit in life; and thus is it that only a portion of Arbre's society understands the reasons why technology works, but doesn't actually use any of the technology their theories spawn, while a much larger portion of the population invents and uses all the technology of Arbrean society, but doesn't understand how any of it works. And also thus is it that what might seem to be very scientific people to us are actually considered blindly religious to the Arbreans, the so-called "number-worshippers" who idolize the specifics of math without understanding any of the underlying theories that make the equations work. (This would be roughly translated to Earth's technology worshippers; think of the socially-retarded Comic Book Guys of the world, who can program a computer application but don't know how to even start having a rational, polite discussion with another human being. And in fact Stephenson very cleverly uses as the ultimate example the so-called "Secret Brotherhood of the Ita" associated with each Mathic monastery, a bastardization of the old corporate "I.T. administrators," the number-worshippers who actually ensure that the monasteries and their giant central worship-clocks keep functioning, but who are physically separated from the monks so that their "tech worship" won't "poison" the Mathics' purely theoretic minds. Freaking brilliant, Stephenson.) But see, all this is only half the backstory of Anathem; because in their timeline, right around our early 2000s is the actual Year Zero of their current calendar, because of a series of apocalyptic occurrences on Arbre in those years known simply as "The Terrible Events" (with us knowing for certain that these events take place right around their early 2000s, despite the new calendar, because of Arbre even having their version of what they call "The Three Harbingers," roughly corresponding to our World War Two, World War One, and Europe-wide political revolutions of 1848, all of them supposedly minor omens of the apocalyptic events that were to come). And for what it's worth, Stephenson leaves the details of the Terrible Events purposely murky, but highly implies that the mess started with the exact kind of accidental molecular disaster that conspiracy theorists have been crowing about this year regarding the very real Large Hadron Collider just built at CERN, the idea that we may just accidentally create a miniature black hole with the thing because of messing around with stuff we don't nearly understand yet, with Stephenson implying that this kicked off a blind panic and a series of voluntary nuclear weapon discharges in a last-ditch attempt to destroy the rapidly expanding artificial black hole, leading to all the other nuclear-armed nations of the world discharging their own weapons in their own blind panics, resulting in all the mass death and chaos and ecological disaster such events would cause. Whatever the case, we do definitely know that what was blamed for the Events, among both the Mathics and the Saeculars, was the commingling between the two groups that defined the Praxic Age; and thus did the monk scientists retreat back into their monasteries and once again close the gates, an event known as "The Reconstitution" and that marks year one of their "modern" calendar. And thus does yet another entire three thousand years pass, three thousand years of "future history" that haven't actually happened on Earth yet, where humanity ends up progressing in two distinctly different ways; how the Saecular world essentially becomes a neverending chaos of revolutions and superstitions, a Second Dark Age ruled by an alliance of brain-dead tech worshippers and traditional Evangelicals, where skyscrapers and post-apocalyptic wars come and go faster than people can even keep track, while the Mathic monasteries become timeless closed citadels of pure theoretical thought, where monks master such impossibly dense subjects as quantum mechanics and genetic manipulation using nothing more than chalk marks on slate, stick drawings in the dirt. And thus is an uneasy truce developed between the two societies, with both pretty much agreeing to leave the other alone except when absolutely necessary; well, except for the three times in the last three thousand years when the monks got a little too full of themselves, when they started taking on scientific progressions again deemed a little too much like "playing God," at which points the now almost exclusively superstitious Saecular world rose up against what they considered the "witches" of the Mathic world and slaughtered almost all of them, known historically by the remaining Mathics as the three "Great Sacks," the last of which occurred nearly 800 years before the beginning of our current story. Okay, got all that? Good; now we're ready for page one of the actual book. And like I said, another fifteen hundred words concerning just that subject will be coming tomorrow. I hope you'll have a chance to come by again then. (UPDATE: .) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 2009
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Aug 09, 2008
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553293427
| 9780553293425
| 0553293427
| 3.90
| 26,375
| 1950
| Dec 01, 1991
|
it was amazing
|
THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Cur THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Currentlyâ€� ‌inâ€� ‌theâ€� ‌challenge:â€� ‌Isaacâ€� ‌Asimov'sâ€� ‌Robot/Empire/Foundationâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Margaretâ€� Atwoodâ€� ´¥â€� ‌JGâ€� ‌Ballardâ€� ´¥â€� Cliveâ€� ‌Barkerâ€� ´¥â€� Christopherâ€� Buckleyâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | ‌Lee Child's Jack Reacher | ‌Philipâ€� ‌Kâ€� ‌Dickâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Ian Fleming | Williamâ€� ‌Gibsonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Michelâ€� Houellebecqâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Irvingâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Kazuoâ€� ‌Ishiguroâ€� ´¥â€� Shirleyâ€� Jacksonâ€� | ‌Johnâ€� ‌Leâ€� ‌Carreâ€� ´¥â€� Bernardâ€� ‌Malamudâ€� ´¥â€� Cormac McCarthy | Chinaâ€� ‌Mievilleâ€� ´¥â€� Toni Morrison | ‌VSâ€� Naipaulâ€� ´¥â€� Chuckâ€� ‌Palahniukâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Timâ€� ‌Powersâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Terryâ€� ‌Pratchett'sâ€� ‌Discworldâ€� ´¥â€� Philipâ€� ‌Rothâ€� ´¥â€� Nealâ€� Stephensonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jimâ€� ‌Thompsonâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Updikeâ€� ´¥â€� Kurtâ€� ‌Vonnegutâ€� ´¥â€� Jeanette Winterson | PGâ€� ‌Wodehouseâ€� â€� 2021 reads, #106. I mentioned this at the very start of my Isaac Asimov "Future History" completist run, but today in particular I think it bears repeating, that instead of reading these 15 books in the order they were first written and published, I'm reading them in the chronological order of the fictional timeline involved, since the entire "megaseries" (comprising the former smaller 1950s series "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation," plus a series of bridging novels in the 1980s that thematically linked them all together) is supposed to cover roughly a 22,000-year persistent, paradox-free history, and I thought it'd be worth reading them in the order of the events covered if for nothing else than to see how the '80s titles clash or complement the '50s ones they're interspersed with under this kind of reading order. So even though the three novels known as the "Empire" series were published in the order of first Pebble in the Sky in 1950, then The Stars, Like Dust in '51 and The Currents of Space in '52, I'm reviewing them here in the order of Stars then Currents then Pebble, in that this order shows us the slow rise and eventual domination of the Galactic Empire the series is named after. As I've talked about previously, all three of these books are from the very start of Asimov's career, back in the 1940s when people like him and such other eventual Silver Age pioneers as Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury were all in their twenties, and therefore had to adhere to the genre standards of the now middle-aged editors and agents that at the time ran the sci-fi publishing industry. And those guys all grew up on proto-sci-fi from the late Victorian Age and early 20th century, back when the genre was essentially "Tarzan in space," the books that give us the now hoary term "space opera" which was ironically invented precisely by people like Asimov later in his career, to dismissively categorize the type of stuff he was forced to write back when he was young and unknown; and so that's why the other smaller series from the larger Future History megaseries, including the "Robot" books (set in a "day after tomorrow" universe, which for him was the late 20th century) and the "Foundation" books (set thousands of years after the Empire books) are so much better known, because Asimov worked very hard during his lifetime to have those two other series much better known, and to downplay these early, frustration-filled Empire novels and never revisit them again. And indeed, just like I was saying during my review of Stars, Asimov was correct to do this; these play now like the worn-out, badly outdated radio-serial-style screenplays that he himself could already see them to be back in the '40s, when he was forced to write them in order to get published at all, and which prompted him to write next the much more heady and startlingly unique "Foundation" stories, as well as going in the opposite direction and trying to bring a Michael Crichton-style, grounded-in-today's-science approach to his "Robot" stories. In contrast, these Empire novels are way more in the vein of Flash Gordon, John Carter of Mars, Tom Swift, and the "Radium Age" books of EE "Doc" Smith, in which the focus is much more on empty spectacle, melodramatic derring-do, and strict adherence to traditional gender roles, the "science" involved being just whatever random made-up nonsense needed to be invented in order to push along its childlike plot, in which we are introduced to a humanity-settled galaxy that's ruled with an iron fist by an all-powerful evil empire, and follow along with some plucky heroes as they try to rage against the machine. If this all sounds familiar, that's because the original Star Wars in 1977 was intended by George Lucas to be a loving homage to these creaky old space operas he grew up on in the '40s, books exactly like today's under question, which were unceremoniously killed off by the rise of Silver Age authors precisely like Asimov in his more well-known books, just the moment they became famous and powerful enough that they could. But the reason Star Wars was such a phenomenon was because it was so much insanely better than anyone expected a Flash Gordon homage to be, so don't expect Asimov's Flash Gordon ripoffs here to even hold a candle to them, or to be nearly as entertaining a reading experience. All three of these are instead real clunkers of melodramas, paycheck-generating pulp serial stuff (indeed, the very medium that first published these three novels, originally in 15 monthly installments throughout the late '40s); and if you think you're missing some sort of hidden gems because of Asimov himself downplaying these books for the entire rest of his career, rest assured that you're not. Thankfully, though, this finally gets us over and done with the Empire books for good; and that means we're ready to move on to the most famous books of Asimov's career, the paradigm-expanding "Foundation" series (first a trilogy in the '50s, then with two sequels in the early '80s, then with two prequels in the late '80s and early '90s). Since we're taking these in the timeline's chronological order, that means our next read will be 1988's Prelude to Foundation, another of these "bridging" novels that shows how series patriarch Hari Seldon first invented the field known as psychohistory as a young man, which in Asimov's retconned history is largely through the help of the robot hero of this megaseries' very first books, now 20,000 years old and hiding in plain sight among the far-future humans of the Empire's home planet of Trantor. As always, I hope you'll have a chance to join me again here soon for my look at that. Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 28, 2021
|
Aug 09, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0586062009
| 9780586062005
| 0586062009
| 4.23
| 35,052
| Aug 20, 1985
| 1996
|
it was ok
|
THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Cur THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Currentlyâ€� ‌inâ€� ‌theâ€� ‌challenge:â€� ‌Isaacâ€� ‌Asimov'sâ€� ‌Robot/Empire/Foundationâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Margaretâ€� Atwoodâ€� ´¥â€� ‌JGâ€� ‌Ballardâ€� ´¥â€� Cliveâ€� ‌Barkerâ€� ´¥â€� Christopherâ€� Buckleyâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | ‌Lee Child's Jack Reacher | ‌Philipâ€� ‌Kâ€� ‌Dickâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Ian Fleming | Williamâ€� ‌Gibsonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Michelâ€� Houellebecqâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Irvingâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Kazuoâ€� ‌Ishiguroâ€� ´¥â€� Shirleyâ€� Jacksonâ€� | ‌Johnâ€� ‌Leâ€� ‌Carreâ€� ´¥â€� Bernardâ€� ‌Malamudâ€� ´¥â€� Cormac McCarthy | Chinaâ€� ‌Mievilleâ€� ´¥â€� Toni Morrison | ‌VSâ€� Naipaulâ€� ´¥â€� Chuckâ€� ‌Palahniukâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Timâ€� ‌Powersâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Terryâ€� ‌Pratchett'sâ€� ‌Discworldâ€� ´¥â€� Philipâ€� ‌Rothâ€� ´¥â€� Nealâ€� Stephensonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jimâ€� ‌Thompsonâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Updikeâ€� ´¥â€� Kurtâ€� ‌Vonnegutâ€� ´¥â€� Jeanette Winterson | PGâ€� ‌Wodehouseâ€� â€� And so we finally come to the end of my reading of Isaac Asimov's "Robot" series, from 1950's I, Robot to today's 1985 Robots and Empire; and I have to confess, I'm relieved to do so, because the last two novels of this series that Asimov wrote in the '80s are pretty lousy indeed, with Robots and Empire seriously in the running for perhaps the worst novel he ever wrote. The motivation was noble, I'll give him that, which is one of the reasons I'm reading the entire run in the first place; namely, after writing three unrelated science-fiction trilogies back in the '50s concerning three different subjects (the "Robot" books, set in a day-after-tomorrow universe that looks similar to our own; the "Empire" books, set several millennia later, when humanity has expanded out into thousands of worlds across the galaxy; and the "Foundation" books, set several millennia after that, in which a shadowy group of intellectuals attempt to save humanity after the collapse of said empire), Asimov reapproached these books at the end of his life and realized that by writing a small number of "bridging" novels, he could turn the entire thing into one uninterrupted 15-book series chronicling 23,000 years of the human race's "future history," in the same vein as the similarly named series by his buddy Robert A. Heinlein, a series which took second place to Asimov's Foundation books when attendees of the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention voted for the greatest science-fiction series of all time*. [*And by the way, it's fascinating to take a look at the other nominees for that award, including E.E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensmen" series from the 1930s, and Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Barsoom" series from the 1910s, and realize what a huge indication that is of the state of science-fiction in the 1960s versus now. If in the 2020s you tried to suggest to a hardcore fan that this is the best the genre has to offer, in most cases you'd get laughed right out of the room, which says a lot about how much this genre has grown and expanded in the half-century since this symbolic award was given out.] The problem with these bridging novels, though, as I already detailed in my write-up of The Robots of Dawn last time, is that Asimov didn't have much more of an agenda with them than the need to impart about a short story's worth of information to help explain inconsistencies between the different series' settings (for example, the "Empire" books portray a galaxy where robots don't exist, and Earth is a radioactive wasteland, the exact opposite situation from the "Robot" books); but with Asimov now having achieved "grand old master" status by the last decade of his life, his publisher Doubleday wanted to milk these new novels for all they were worth, and so each of them needed to be a hefty 400 pages or so in order to justify the accolades that people were lining up ahead of time to give them. And so that led to these cartoonishly bloated, ridiculously overwritten tomes, with Robots and Empire so far being the most guilty example out of all of them, with entire ten-page dialogue scenes that exist solely and exclusively to impart exactly one sentence of information, and even the characters often acknowledging this by exasperatingly blurting at the end of the ten pages, "Look, will you just tell me in plain words what you're trying to say?" Say what you will about 1950s science-fiction (and believe me, ); but at least the lack of respect and money back then, coupled with the fact that most new full-length stories in those days were first published serially in pulp magazines, led to novels that were lean and tight by necessity. By the '80s, though, when such megasuccessful franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek had brought the genre into mainstream acceptance, and a mainstream publisher with deep pockets like Doubleday made a bit more money with each extra page one of their books contained, this allowed writers like Asimov to work without a leash; and unfortunately Asimov really needed that leash in order to produce his best work, because when left alone to the delight of the sound of his own voice, he got lost in these endlessly looping conversations that would just say the same thing over and over and over, for thousands upon thousands of words at a stretch. Plus I have to confess that I was profoundly disappointed with Asimov's decision to clean up the inconsistencies between these series by inventing a robot that happens to have telepathic abilities (revealed in the previous book in this series, which is why I don't consider it a spoiler for this book in the series), a literal definition of the "deus ex machina" copout that lazy writers have been using for thousands of years to easily get themselves out of plot jams. Asimov prided himself on his love of rationality and science, and was a champion of "hard" (i.e. actual science-based) science-fiction his entire career; so for him to clean up these series' timelines by basically saying "and then a wizard showed up and waved his magic wand and solved everything" is a huge letdown, and dishonors the science-heavy novels that first established him as a beloved master of this genre. And of course this novel also suffers from the same thing The Robots of Dawn did immediately preceding it, which is Asimov doubling-down at the end of his life on the overt sexism and subsumed racism that people were already criticizing even in the '80s (but for more, again see my review of the previous novel), with all kinds of skeevy references here to women's pendulous breasts and , and seemingly no one in the future having any problem with the habit of calling robots "boy" in order to "put them in their place." As I mentioned last time, these kinds of details were only barely justifiable in the first place way back in the '50s when he first started using them, because at least he was reflecting the actual mores and language of society at the time; but for him to be consciously aware of his fans' complaints about these details by the '80s, at a time when it was most decidedly no longer kosher to say such things, just to respond by coldly declaring, "I couldn't possibly care whether the people who support my career are offended by these things or not, and just to prove it I'm going to deliberately keep using them despite their complaints," marks the sad end of a cranky old man's legacy, a former pioneer and one-time social activist who should've known better than this, and could've reacted to these issues with a lot more grace and mindfulness than he did, lending credence to the argument that this attitude had become an impenetrable fortress in the sci-fi community by the Woke 21st century, with no other option than to violently tear it down altogether. So yes, I'm glad I took the time to read all the old "Robot" novels at least once more in my life, and read all the new ones for the first time; but whew, I'm also glad it's over, a reading experience that was checkered to say the least. Next time, the first of the "Empire" books, 1951's The Stars, Like Dust, also notable for being the very first novel Asimov ever published, so I hope you'll have a chance to join me again then. Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 02, 2020
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Aug 09, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B0DTR66512
| 4.16
| 93,107
| May 1988
| Aug 22, 1994
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it was ok
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THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Cur THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Currentlyâ€� ‌inâ€� ‌theâ€� ‌challenge:â€� ‌Isaacâ€� ‌Asimov'sâ€� ‌Robot/Empire/Foundationâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Margaretâ€� Atwoodâ€� ´¥â€� ‌JGâ€� ‌Ballardâ€� ´¥â€� Cliveâ€� ‌Barkerâ€� ´¥â€� Christopherâ€� Buckleyâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | ‌Lee Child's Jack Reacher | ‌Philipâ€� ‌Kâ€� ‌Dickâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Ian Fleming | Williamâ€� ‌Gibsonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Michelâ€� Houellebecqâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Irvingâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Kazuoâ€� ‌Ishiguroâ€� ´¥â€� Shirleyâ€� Jacksonâ€� | ‌Johnâ€� ‌Leâ€� ‌Carreâ€� ´¥â€� Bernardâ€� ‌Malamudâ€� ´¥â€� Cormac McCarthy | Chinaâ€� ‌Mievilleâ€� ´¥â€� Toni Morrison | ‌VSâ€� Naipaulâ€� ´¥â€� Chuckâ€� ‌Palahniukâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Timâ€� ‌Powersâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Terryâ€� ‌Pratchett'sâ€� ‌Discworldâ€� ´¥â€� Philipâ€� ‌Rothâ€� ´¥â€� Nealâ€� Stephensonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jimâ€� ‌Thompsonâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Updikeâ€� ´¥â€� Kurtâ€� ‌Vonnegutâ€� ´¥â€� Jeanette Winterson | PGâ€� ‌Wodehouseâ€� â€� â€� 2022 reads, #7. And so here we are, officially nine books now into my completist run of Isaac Asimov's "Future History" megaseries (comprising the three smaller 1950s trilogies known as "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation," plus six bridging novels that tie them together into one giant uberstory), which to remind you I'm reading in the storyline's chronological order, not the order the books were originally published; and so even though today we're officially entering the timeline of the "Foundation" books, the classic late-'40s stories that originally brought a young Asimov so much attention, today's prequel novel is actually one of the last books Asimov ever wrote before dying in 1992. As we've talked about in previous write-ups, Asimov had always been a fan of his buddy Robert Heinlein's "Future History" series (which in 1966 came in second place for a special Hugo Award for greatest science-fiction series of all time, beaten only by Asimov's own "Foundation"), and realized with a little fudging that he too could bring all his old '40s and '50s tales together into one giant unified consistent 22,000-year history of humanity after our own age; and so that's exactly what Asimov spent the last years of his life doing (and in fact had been in the middle of plotting out an entire new trilogy in the "Robot" universe when he died, finished with the estate's blessing by Roger MacBride Allen and now known as the "Caliban" trilogy, leading some to question whether these too belong in the official "Future History" canon or not). But as we examined in the '80s books Asimov wrote to bridge together the "Robot" and "Empire" series, there's a big, huge problem with these bridging books, which is that Asimov only needs to get a novella or less worth of actual storyline conveyed in these novels; but since this was so heavily hyped and marketed back in these '80s years as the Return of the Grand Master to the Sci-Fi Series That First Made Him a Legend (which I remember very clearly, being in high school at the time), each of these needed to be huge full-sized tomes to support the weight of all the money being spent and awards people were lining up beforehand to bestow on them. That makes these bridging novels time-wasting slogs of exposition and looping dialogue, then, a real chore to get through and highly unsatisfying as simple pleasure reads unto themselves, because Asimov really never meant for them to be in the first place, but rather exist as an awkward vehicle for bringing together three sometimes clashing storylines that had never been designed to fit together in the first place. And that gets us to the other big complaint I have about these '80s bridging novels; that after spending a career both being hailed as and defining himself as a writer of "hard science fiction," i.e. stories about real physics and actual scientific breakthroughs, in which everything is incredibly rational and believable, at the very end of his life he decided to fix these three series' sometimes conflicting details by inventing a robot with magical powers -- specifically, the ability to read minds and the ability to telekinetically influence others to do things -- to explain away all the conflicts and smooth out the passing of some incredibly unlikely events that would have to happen to lead the universe of the Earth-set "Robot" novels into the same universe of the "Empire" novels (which, um, have no robots, and also is a universe where Earth is a radioactive wasteland), and then on to the same universe again of the "Foundation" novels, set tens of thousands of years after the earlier books. That's a cop-out, plain and simple, solving awkward story conflict problems by saying, "And then a magical robot stepped in and fixed everything with a twinkle of his nose," and it makes all of these bridging novels disappointing no matter where in the chronological timeline they appear. And then there's the final problem with these specifically as "Foundation" novels, which is that they explain way too much, while one of the things about the original "Foundation" trilogy that made them so famous is the sense of unsolved mystery that hangs around the edges of its far-future universe. The mythos' patriarch, Hari Seldon, the man who sets all the gears in motion, is already an old man and just about to die when the first original "Foundation" novel opens; and then we only ever see him again as a series of tiny cameos in hologram form, his millennia-old predictions about human evolution becoming increasingly off with each new recording playback, leading to the events of the original '50s Second Foundation novel. But to see him here as a younger man, having space-opera-style "PEW! PEW!" adventures in the grimy back streets of Trantor's slums, and suffering all kinds of incredibly awkwardly crammed-in references to future events in the series ("I guess what you could say, Mr. Seldon, is that you're partly talking about psychology and partly about history, eh? I suppose you could maybe call that 'psychohistory,' EH? EEHHHH, MR. SELDON????"), is just too much, and smacks of the kind of desperate, self-congratulatory fan service that led to one of the most notoriously awful Star Wars moments of all time, when an uncomfortable-looking Liam Neeson awkwardly gestures and announces, "Obi-Wan Kenobi, meet Anakin Skywalker!" What set the original "Foundation" trilogy so apart from the usual sci-fi space opera nonsense coming out around it in the late 1940s is that it has so much intrigue built into it, such big and heady themes being played around with, the audacity to not only invent a brand-new form of science but to eventually see it become a real thing in the real world. (Psychohistory, as explained in these books, is not that far off from combining Big Data, machine learning, chaos theory and viral marketing.) This prequel novel, though (and I'm assuming the other prequel novel directly after this one), is just some padded-out shoot-em-up nonsense, fueled by the Dickensian machinations of our magical robot friend, and doesn't hold a candle to the original '50s books largely credited with kickstarting the so-called "Silver Age" of science-fiction (or if you prefer, the Mid-Century Modernist era). That makes me more eager than ever to finally get to that original trilogy, the first-ever adult science-fiction novels I myself ever read (way back in the early-'80s when the bridging novels first started coming out), to see if they're still as good as I remember or the same disappointment most of these Future History 21st-century re-reads have been. But like I said, first will be 1993's second prequel novel, Forward the Foundation, the last book Asimov ever personally worked on, published just months after his death. I'm hoping it will be a short and painless experience, but I ain't holding my breath. Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 18, 2022
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Aug 09, 2008
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Paperback
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| 0553587579
| 9780553587579
| 0553587579
| 4.07
| 77,349
| Oct 1986
| Aug 31, 2004
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it was ok
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THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Cur THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Currentlyâ€� ‌inâ€� ‌theâ€� ‌challenge:â€� ‌Isaacâ€� ‌Asimov'sâ€� ‌Robot/Empire/Foundationâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Margaretâ€� Atwoodâ€� ´¥â€� ‌JGâ€� ‌Ballardâ€� ´¥â€� Cliveâ€� ‌Barkerâ€� ´¥â€� Christopherâ€� Buckleyâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | ‌Lee Child's Jack Reacher | ‌Philipâ€� ‌Kâ€� ‌Dickâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Ian Fleming | Williamâ€� ‌Gibsonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Michelâ€� Houellebecqâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Irvingâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Kazuoâ€� ‌Ishiguroâ€� ´¥â€� Shirleyâ€� Jacksonâ€� | ‌Johnâ€� ‌Leâ€� ‌Carreâ€� ´¥â€� Bernardâ€� ‌Malamudâ€� ´¥â€� Cormac McCarthy | Chinaâ€� ‌Mievilleâ€� ´¥â€� Toni Morrison | ‌VSâ€� Naipaulâ€� ´¥â€� Chuckâ€� ‌Palahniukâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Timâ€� ‌Powersâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Terryâ€� ‌Pratchett'sâ€� ‌Discworldâ€� ´¥â€� Philipâ€� ‌Rothâ€� ´¥â€� Nealâ€� Stephensonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jimâ€� ‌Thompsonâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Updikeâ€� ´¥â€� Kurtâ€� ‌Vonnegutâ€� ´¥â€� Jeanette Winterson | PGâ€� ‌Wodehouseâ€� 2022 reads, #29 and 30. And so, three years after writing the first review of this 15-book megaseries, do we finally come to the end of my look at Isaac Asimov's so-called "Future History" volumes, in which he took three formerly unrelated trilogies he wrote in the 1950s (the "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation" books) then in the '80s and early '90s write six "bridging novels" that legitimately (if not awkwardly) turns the entire thing into one unified, persistent, arguably paradox-free 22,000-year timeline. Inspired by his buddy Robert Heinlein's ability to pull this off in his career as well, it takes us in 15 books (novels and short-story collections) from a day-after-tomorrow future of increasingly intelligent robots to a far future in which a humanity now in its trillions is scattered across 25 million planets, governed under one giant empire whose bureaucracy is the size of an entire planet (where George Lucas got his inspiration for Star Wars' "" Coruscant). As I've mentioned in previous reviews, I was 13 when I first read the original '50s Foundation trilogy, after finding it on my grandparents' guest bedroom's back bookshelves, filled with all the leftover sci-fi my father and uncle read in the 1940s through '60s when they were kids themselves; and then I was actually in high school in the early '80s just a few years later when all these bridging novels first started coming out. 1982's Foundation's Edge, one of the two books being reviewed today, was the very first one of these bridging novels, released at the beginning of my freshman year; the other, '86's Foundation and Earth, came out at the end of my senior year, right before entering college and getting introduced to the cyberpunk genre and Dark Age comic books (and the indie music and drugs that accompanied them) by all the cool hipsters there who were older and smarter than me, and actually included girls for the first freaking time in my life, which is why I quickly ditched the Silver Age of sci-fi around the mid-'80s for a diet of all cyberpunk, Vertigo, urban fantasy, and cute industrial/goth girls. Even with it being that long now since first approaching those books, though, I can still remember two very distinct things about that initial wave of public reaction to these '80s books that tie all these series together: both how much it was celebrated as the triumphant return of a grand master to a genre he hadn't regularly published in for twenty years at that point (spending most of the late-'60s to late-'70s actually writing in a wide variety of nonfiction subjects, eventually receiving the designation [I believe still not broken] of being the only person in history to publish books in nine out of the ten Dewey Decimal System categories); and how disappointing the books turned out to be as reading experiences, just this page-padding nonsense from an old man with not much left to say, not when compared to such mindfuckery in those same years as from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, which is why all us young readers were gravitating to those writers back then. That's been the same conclusion I've drawn again 35 years later, reading all 15 of these books in a row, that the '80s titles in this megaseries simply aren't very good, with Asimov having no more than about a short story's worth of actual plot to convey in any of them, but who then pads them out to sometimes 100,000 words or more so that they'll feel "weighty enough" to deserve all the Hugos and Nebulas the awards people were already lining up to award him, book unseen at that point. It was a weird time to be a young sci-fi fan, I'm now starting to realize, when the so-called "Silver Age" authors who had their heights in the '50s and '60s were now at the twilight of their careers, and us teenagers were veering towards this particularly outre, hardcore, outlandish style of the arts, lit by the harsh neons of Japanese logos and shiny rainlit back alleys full of consumer-tech trash. I was already a (young) adult in these years, so I distinctly remember with this adult eye how much authors like Asimov and books like these were being pushed towards the sci-fi community as these "objects" to be "revered" from a "master" who we all have the "privilege" of seeing "going out on a high note," not just concerning him and the Future History books but also reflected in mid-'80s projects like Arthur C. Clarke's sequel to 2001, the creatively titled 2010 which went through a similar pre-public veneration before the project itself was ever released. My friends and I were not really having any of that, and we knew what we liked and we gravitated towards it, which I suppose it why you see this strange schism between the "con-going" sci-fi fans in these years and the "cyberpunk" fans who mixed these books in with the indie comics they were also reading, the indie music they were listening to, the computer work (legal and non) they were doing, the drugs they did and the fashion they followed. (Let's never forget, after all, that after William Gibson attended his first-ever World Science Fiction Convention in the early '80s, he became so depressed by the state of the community that he quit writing altogether for over a year.) People wanted these aging '60s masters to have one last hurrah to their careers, and that's admirable; but Asimov at least was largely not up to the task, and should have in fact just written six short stories in the style of the original 1951 Foundation that covers all the plot of these six '80s bridging novels, and publish just it as one book which neatly ties together all nine of the original books from the '50s and makes the entire "Future History" megaseries a tidy decology. Maybe one day in the far future when these books are in the public domain, someone will do exactly that; but until then, now that I've gone through the entire thing myself, let me recommend first reading the Robot short stories and the three Robot crime novels, then reading just the Wikipedia entries (or my reviews) of the bridging novel Robots and Empire, the entire original "Empire" trilogy from the '50s, and the two modern "Foundation" prequels, to then pick up with the full books again for the original '50s "Foundation" trilogy, and back to the recaps for these last two "Foundation" sequels being covered today. That's still a worthy achievement, and as we saw in my original looks at them, both the "Robot" books and the original "Foundation" ones are all still great reads that are worth your while; but you can skip all the empty words and "magical robot" nonsense of the modern bridging novels without missing anything important, so I suggest sticking to just the six books that most demonstrate why Asimov and his work is still worth continuing to look at, all these decades later. Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
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Jun 12, 2022
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Aug 09, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553803735
| 9780553803730
| 0553803735
| 4.27
| 195,478
| 1953
| Jun 01, 2004
|
it was ok
|
THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Cur THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Currentlyâ€� ‌inâ€� ‌theâ€� ‌challenge:â€� ‌Isaacâ€� ‌Asimov'sâ€� ‌Robot/Empire/Foundationâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Margaretâ€� Atwoodâ€� ´¥â€� ‌JGâ€� ‌Ballardâ€� ´¥â€� Cliveâ€� ‌Barkerâ€� ´¥â€� Christopherâ€� Buckleyâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | ‌Lee Child's Jack Reacher | ‌Philipâ€� ‌Kâ€� ‌Dickâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Ian Fleming | Williamâ€� ‌Gibsonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Michelâ€� Houellebecqâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Irvingâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Kazuoâ€� ‌Ishiguroâ€� ´¥â€� Shirleyâ€� Jacksonâ€� | ‌Johnâ€� ‌Leâ€� ‌Carreâ€� ´¥â€� Bernardâ€� ‌Malamudâ€� ´¥â€� Cormac McCarthy | Chinaâ€� ‌Mievilleâ€� ´¥â€� Toni Morrison | ‌VSâ€� Naipaulâ€� ´¥â€� Chuckâ€� ‌Palahniukâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Timâ€� ‌Powersâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Terryâ€� ‌Pratchett'sâ€� ‌Discworldâ€� ´¥â€� Philipâ€� ‌Rothâ€� ´¥â€� Nealâ€� Stephensonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jimâ€� ‌Thompsonâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Updikeâ€� ´¥â€� Kurtâ€� ‌Vonnegutâ€� ´¥â€� Jeanette Winterson | PGâ€� ‌Wodehouseâ€� 2022 reads, #27. So after two amazing books in a row, 1951's Foundation and 1952's Foundation and Empire (which, as we talked about last time, should perhaps actually be better titled Foundation's Fall), we now get to the book that for decades finished up the original Foundation series that first made Asimov famous, 1953's Second Foundation; but alas, what we see here is one of the first examples in his career (but certainly not the last) of what's made the '80s bridging novels of this megaseries so disappointing to me as well, where Asimov found himself with only a short story's worth of actual information he needed to get across to readers to finish up the last events of our 500-year saga, but wrote an entire full-length novel in order to convey this information, leading to a padded-out experience of literary bloat in which not very much happens and a whole lot of pages are used to tell us that. And indeed, perhaps the differing circumstances behind these books' publishing histories show a clear reason for this: for while the first two books were actually originally written as a whole series of longish short stories for the '40s pulp magazines that gave Asimov his start, back when he was an unknown twentysomething wage slave getting paid by the word and hustling with all the other unknowns, this third book actually first appeared as only two halves at first, both now fully novella-sized in length, now presented in these pulps as a sort of "special event" to honor an author whose public profile had risen dramatically in just the few years since the first books. In a world of Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it's hard to emphasize enough just how much it blew people away in the early '50s to suddenly see science-fiction get embraced by the hipster intellectual hoi-polloi, the ones buying Eames chairs and listening to Dave Brubuck and working as an ad man on Madison Avenue; after all, as we examined when looking at this megaseries' earlier "Empire" books, at the beginning of his career Asimov was competing against the likes of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Tom Swift, goofy kiddie fare that no one took seriously at all. This is very much how Asimov developed his reputation in the first place, by writing these first two Foundation books that were just so startlingly fresh and complex and forward-thinking, and that along with his young peers like Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke started getting embraced by all kinds of people who had never embraced sci-fi before (people with money! People with degrees! People with taste!), not by coincidence commingling with the public's newfound fascination for the just-announced US space program. But as we've sort of objectively seen through this megaseries, Asimov at his shortest is always Asimov at his best (see not only the short pieces that make up these first two Foundation books, for example, but his attempt in these same years at Michael Chrichton-like day-after-tomorrow technothrillers, the "Robot" stories); and so even here, just barely after his career has started taking off, when he's instead given a chance to write something larger for more prestige and money, he does what we unfortunately see him do for the entire rest of his 40-year career as well, fail to come up with enough plot and try to make up for it with endlessly looping dialogue-heavy drudgery. After burning through almost half a millennium of history in the first two books, here we pick up a mere two generations after the events ending Foundation and Empire (warning: if you're reading book three in the series, I'm assuming you already know the spoilers of the first two books); as you remember, the now split-up galaxy of humanity had briefly been united again (or at least a large part of it) through the work of a "superhuman" named the Mule, who turned out to have telekinetic powers which let him simply take over entire worlds just by thinking about it. Since even psychohistory's founder Hari Seldon warned that the practice can only foretell the future based on the movements of trillions of people, not the actions of a single person, the Foundation's plan has been thrown all off by the appearance of this universe-changing individual that Seldon could've never foreseen; and after digging through the 500-year-old archives in a desperate attempt to save themselves, the current Foundation leaders discover that way, way back during Seldon's original court trial and expulsion from the Empire's capital, Trantor (the actual events of the first story in '51's original Foundation), he mentioned offhandedly that he was actually establishing two foundations, the very public-facing one there on Terminus out at the far edge of the galaxy that everyone's been paying attention to all these centuries, but then also an entirely secret one located only in the cryptic location "the other end of the universe," where it becomes more and more clear to everyone that Seldon actually began training an entire society of psychohistorians, and that 500 years of seclusion later, they must all be a bunch of freaking supervillain geniuses by now. Are they real? Can they save the first Foundation? Are they in fact in the process right now of saving the first Foundation? Or is there more nefarious puppetstring-pulling afoot? Do they in fact need to be eliminated instead for the good of humanity? Oh frak, what if they have telekinesis like the Mule too??!! These are all great questions, and they would've made an amazing further short story in this saga, which I'm positive was exactly Asimov's mindset when he envisioned it, because he had been cranking out these 10,000-word pieces like clockwork for an entire decade at this point; but as two 35,000-word novellas telling a 70,000-word single plot, he simply didn't come up with enough storyline, and tried to make up for it by having everyone endlessly sitting around discussing what happened and what's about to happen and what's happening now, and who's at fault and what's going on and have they really gotten to the bottom of it and what's going to be done about it, anyway. Ugh, Asimov, enough already! You already admit right in the first very chapter that the second Foundation indeed exists and is indeed doing the exact puppetstring-pulling everyone is worried they're doing; so chop-chop with the pew-pew and let's get to the point where we see what happens, already! That's been the unfortunate conclusion of my completist run experiment here of the Future History megaseries, that many of them are disappointingly slow filler that only exist to tie together the few legitimately outstanding titles in the run; and you can already see it here in 1953, a book that I think gets a much bigger free pass as part of this amazing series than it would as a standalone book by itself. Even more sadly, we're about to finally end the entire megaseries with two of the '80s books that have turned out to be such let-downs, Foundation's Edge from 1982 and Foundation and Earth from '86. I actually read both of these when the were first published while I was in high school, and so I can tell you already that they're the same let-downs all the other '80s titles have been; nonetheless, we'll finish out this completist run by actually reading and examining them, so expect a final double-review of both books at once soon. Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 2022
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Aug 09, 2008
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553803727
| 9780553803723
| 0553803727
| 4.22
| 217,637
| Apr 1952
| Jun 01, 2004
|
really liked it
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THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Cur THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Currentlyâ€� ‌inâ€� ‌theâ€� ‌challenge:â€� ‌Isaacâ€� ‌Asimov'sâ€� ‌Robot/Empire/Foundationâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Margaretâ€� Atwoodâ€� ´¥â€� ‌JGâ€� ‌Ballardâ€� ´¥â€� Cliveâ€� ‌Barkerâ€� ´¥â€� Christopherâ€� Buckleyâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | ‌Lee Child's Jack Reacher | ‌Philipâ€� ‌Kâ€� ‌Dickâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Ian Fleming | Williamâ€� ‌Gibsonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Michelâ€� Houellebecqâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Irvingâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Kazuoâ€� ‌Ishiguroâ€� ´¥â€� Shirleyâ€� Jacksonâ€� | ‌Johnâ€� ‌Leâ€� ‌Carreâ€� ´¥â€� Bernardâ€� ‌Malamudâ€� ´¥â€� Cormac McCarthy | Chinaâ€� ‌Mievilleâ€� ´¥â€� Toni Morrison | ‌VSâ€� Naipaulâ€� ´¥â€� Chuckâ€� ‌Palahniukâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Timâ€� ‌Powersâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Terryâ€� ‌Pratchett'sâ€� ‌Discworldâ€� ´¥â€� Philipâ€� ‌Rothâ€� ´¥â€� Nealâ€� Stephensonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jimâ€� ‌Thompsonâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Updikeâ€� ´¥â€� Kurtâ€� ‌Vonnegutâ€� ´¥â€� Jeanette Winterson | PGâ€� ‌Wodehouseâ€� 2022 reads, #26. So, the last time we were here, we were talking about Isaac Asimov's original and first Foundation novel in 1951, and how it serves as the intellectual crux around which the entire rest of his 15-book "Future History" megaseries revolves; for without the outsized popularity and reputation of it, neither his original '50s "Robot" or "Empire" series on their own would've been enough to convince him to flesh it out into a giant megaseries in the first place, with my recent re-read of the '51 original being a great reminder of why it's appropriate that we hold this one in higher regard than any of Asimov's other novels. And we also talked in that previous write-up about how the sections of the original '51 Foundation (either incredibly large chapters or incredibly small novellas, take your pick) actually came from standalone pieces that Asimov originally wrote for pulps in the '40s like Astounding Science Fiction, which was how a huge proportion of genre fans were mainly getting their monthly fill in those day, but thematically linked to form a larger overall novel that could then be published in book form at the end and garner the series the kind of mainstream respect that only comes from classrooms, bookstores and libraries. That's the first thing to keep in mind when you're ready to move along to the book's sequel, 1952's Foundation and Empire, because it actually makes more sense to take the truncated first part of today's book (one that only lasts 30 percent of the book's length) and instead tack it onto the end of the original Foundation, in that it too is a standalone look at one very specific moment along this thousand-year timeline that the Foundation's founder, Hari Seldon, envisioned between the fall of the Galactic Empire (which had been running the entire Milky Way galaxy for the last ten thousand years of advanced human settlement via faster-than-light spaceships), and the continued high-level functioning of technology and knowledge via this organization of super-nerds he's set up on the far edge of the galaxy to "keep the flame alive," so to speak. In fact, this first part of the book is not only set up exactly like the sections of the previous book in its framework, but serves as a great symbolic end-capper to the story that was originally being told in that volume too; set 300 years after the start of the Foundation, it envisions a day when the crumbling Empire has long forgotten about the Foundation's existence, until an overly ambitious general of the fleet is out on the galaxy's periphery taking notes about the edge of the empire's reach one day, and comes across this regional power holding sway over all the star systems within its reach, still with the ability to manufacture and use such ultra-rare advanced technology now as nucleics, miniaturized processors, and personal force fields. When looked at this way, the beginning of Foundation and Empire is actually this very lovely way to end the original Foundation, in that it's all about the moment the Foundation itself becomes more powerful than the dwindling Empire for the very first moment in history, and sort of lets the Foundation establish its own version of the Monroe Doctrine, by which I mean their declaration to the Empire that "we'll leave you alone if you leave us alone, but the time has come for you to stop screwing around in our neck of the woods." That brings the entire narrative being told in Foundation full-circle, from getting "chased" out of the Empire at its origin to eventually becoming the largest and most stable organization in the galaxy, just as Seldon predicted. That would then make the second, much larger section of Foundation and Empire (the latter 70% of its length) even more shocking, which probably should more rightly have been published as its own standalone small book entitled something like Foundation's Fall, in that it's all about the appearance of something Seldon could've never foreseen, a human miraculously born with mutant, superhuman powers, who singlehandedly starts taking over the entire galaxy Ghengis Khan-style by just swooping in and bowling over anyone who tries to get in his way. Although also officially starting the trend for the first time of Asimov overwriting certain scenes so to pad out the lengths of his manuscripts, there's something legitimately thrilling and bone-chilling about the setup he creates here, of a universe of 40 trillion inhabitants so of course holding a high potential of a mutant baby with superhuman powers to eventually be born; or at least, when I was 13 and reading this novel for the first time, I absolutely and legitimately got chills when I reached the part of the book where Seldon's familiar, comforting hologram in the glass box from centuries ago finally appears in the Vault again on Terminus, to tell the people of the Foundation of their latest "Seldon Crisis" he actually had foreseen and also had guessed the outcome, but suddenly what the hologram is talking about is nonsense, a bunch of what-ifs that had never actually occurred in the real world, and it becomes clear suddenly that this so-called superhuman "Mule" has actually broken the entire psychohistory theories that Seldon had so carefully worked out in his lifetime centuries ago, since Seldon himself had always been careful to mention that his science-based predictions of the future can only work by judging the behavior of billions of people in aggregate, while the actions of one individual person can never be worked out in such a scientific way. That's what leads us into the events of the last book of this series' original trilogy, 1953's Second Foundation which I'll be reviewing next; when it becomes clear that the Foundation's goose is cooked, the nerds on Terminus start looking back at the official record of it all over the last 500 years, and learn that Seldon actually mentioned during his original trial on Trantor that he was actually setting up two foundations, the very public-faced one at the edge of the universe that busied itself for its first century with building a galaxy-wide version of Wikipedia, but also a second one "on the opposite end of the universe" that mysteriously never gets mentioned again, with Seldon downplaying its existence the rest of his life, while also (it's always occurred strangely to some) purposely not letting any actual psychohistorians join the first public Foundation when they initially left for Terminus. That leads many to believe that there's a secret Foundation out there somewhere that exists only of psychohistorians and nothing else, and that they've long ago compensated for the actions of the Mule and have humanity back on whatever shadowy puppetstring-pulling shenanigans they have in store for them; but we'll talk about all that next time, so I hope you'll have a chance to join me here again next month for that. Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 24, 2022
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Aug 09, 2008
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Hardcover
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| 055329461X
| 9780553294613
| 055329461X
| 3.47
| 22,663
| Sep 1990
| Feb 1992
|
really liked it
|
Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ 2019 Summer Reading Challenge 8. It takes two: Read a coauthored book THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌older Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ 2019 Summer Reading Challenge 8. It takes two: Read a coauthored book THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Currentlyâ€� ‌inâ€� ‌theâ€� ‌challenge:â€� ‌Isaacâ€� ‌Asimov'sâ€� ‌Robot/Empire/Foundationâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Margaretâ€� Atwoodâ€� ´¥â€� ‌JGâ€� ‌Ballardâ€� ´¥â€� Cliveâ€� ‌Barkerâ€� ´¥â€� Christopherâ€� Buckleyâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | ‌Lee Child's Jack Reacher | ‌Philipâ€� ‌Kâ€� ‌Dickâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Ian Fleming | Williamâ€� ‌Gibsonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Michelâ€� Houellebecqâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Irvingâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Kazuoâ€� ‌Ishiguroâ€� ´¥â€� Shirleyâ€� Jacksonâ€� | ‌Johnâ€� ‌Leâ€� ‌Carreâ€� ´¥â€� Bernardâ€� ‌Malamudâ€� ´¥â€� Cormac McCarthy | Chinaâ€� ‌Mievilleâ€� ´¥â€� Toni Morrison | ‌VSâ€� Naipaulâ€� ´¥â€� Chuckâ€� ‌Palahniukâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Timâ€� ‌Powersâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Terryâ€� ‌Pratchett'sâ€� ‌Discworldâ€� ´¥â€� Philipâ€� ‌Rothâ€� ´¥â€� Nealâ€� Stephensonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jimâ€� ‌Thompsonâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Updikeâ€� ´¥â€� Kurtâ€� ‌Vonnegutâ€� ´¥â€� Jeanette Winterson | PGâ€� ‌Wodehouseâ€� This 1990 novel is demonstrably proven (and heavily documented) to be the very first book in history to inspire the term "steampunk," which 29 years later is now a mainstream genre unto itself; and that's because its co-authors, longtime buddies William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, were two of the main writers to inspire the term "cyberpunk" back in the '80s when their careers started, and fans were essentially making a warm joke when first trying to classify this book with all the hallmarks of a cyberpunk tale, but set in the Victorian Age. As its main core premise from which everything else is wrapped around, the two envision an alt-history where the real-life Charles Babbage actually managed to secure the funds for the "analytical engine" he invented on paper in the 1830s but was never able to actually carry out, essentially a computing machine but made of brass and wood and powered by steam, and which was actually built and proven to work by the London Science Museum in the same early-'90s years when this book was written. So just like how Gibson and Sterling wrote this book around thirty years after the invention of home computers, and thus in the middle of the Information Revolution that would eventually result in the web, smartphones and more, so too did they set the book around thirty years after the invention of Babbage's computing machine, picturing a world that's been utterly transformed in certain respects by these Engines now being ho-hum everyday devices, although still grounding the story in the 19th-century Victorian times in which it's set. That is very, very easily the most charming and fascinating thing about this novel, the way that Gibson and Sterling make literally hundreds of clever references and comparisons to the real cyberpunk age they were living through while writing it, just with all of it now filtered through a world that lacks electricity or LED screens: whether that's the "kinoscope" artists who obsess over the resolution and refresh rate of their building-sized graphic screens that employ painted wooden pixels; the attempt to apply algorithmic compression techniques to the paper cards that make the Engines work; the fact that it's these computer "clackers" (read "coders") that now make up England's politically connected and cash-flush upper-middle-class, mirroring the Startup Age that was just underway when Gibson and Sterling wrote this book; or even the central mystery that drives the plot, a purloined box of French clacker cards that turns out to be (view spoiler)[the world's very first computer virus, designed by a nascent Luddite terrorist group in an attempt to destroy Europe's entire economy (hide spoiler)]. Then the other major amazing thing going on here is Gibson and Sterling's deep and wide knowledge of the actual real-life history of the Victorian Age, taking a series of real figures and places and now imagining how they would've reacted to a world where computers actually existed in the 1830s. The infamous hedonist and outsider Lord Byron, for example, is now the Prime Minister, because of throwing in his lot early on with the "Radical Industrialists" who embraced computing machines when they were first invented (with the Duke of Wellington now a villain, because of siding with the Luddites and illegally declaring martial law in the 1840s in a bloody and unsuccessful attempt to wipe out the Rads); real-life Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, on the other hand, ends up staying out of politics altogether, embracing his real-life side job as an author of popular melodramas in order to become one of the age's leading artists and gossipy society wags. The world of The Difference Engine is a world where CIA-type secret British fanagling has kept America split during the Civil War era, the Confederates now a proper independent nation, Texas its own republic too, the Northern Territories still controlled by the now British-armed Native Americans, and New York City overrun by a Communist coup during the chaos of the real-life Union Draft Riots. And this is just the start of the overwhelming amount of alt-history world-building Gibson and Sterling do here, a heady and impressive fictional Wikipedia that pulls in everyone from Romantic poet John Keats (now a computer artist with a cult fanboy audience) to Civil War insurrectionist (who here becomes President in 1848, but whose alcoholism, racism and sexual perversion essentially leads to the US permanently breaking apart). All of this would've otherwise made The Difference Engine one of the top science-fiction novels ever written; but unfortunately the last 75 pages of this 400-page book go so off the rails that it permanently stains the 325 pages that came before, first with Gibson and Sterling completely losing control of their three-act plot (the story just sort of peters out into nothing by the end, with absolutely no climax and no resolution), then unwisely choosing to finish the book with an overwritten 10,000-word epistolary appendix, in which we look at things like private letters and court transcripts in order to flesh out many of the minor characters we had been following in the pages previous. It leaves the reader with a bad taste in their mouth at the end, feeling rightly that Gibson and Sterling took away their opportunity for the grandly outrageous finale this book should've had; and so for me, that knocks the novel's score down an entire 20 percent, despite most of the book being one of the most inventive and startlingly original stories one will ever see in the world of genre writing, and certainly the greatest steampunk tale ever written. It comes recommended with this in mind, that you will love the beginning but inevitably be disappointed by the ending, but with it in general being a fine addition to the hard-to-classify careers of these two hard-to-classify authors. William Gibson books being reviewed in this series: Neuromancer (1984) | Count Zero (1986) | Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) | The Difference Engine (1990) | Virtual Light (1993) | Idoru (1996) | All Tomorrow's Parties (1999) | Pattern Recognition (2003) | Spook Country (2007) | Zero History (2010) | The Peripheral (2014) | Agency (2020) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 08, 2019
|
Aug 09, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553803719
| 9780553803716
| 0553803719
| 4.17
| 573,820
| Aug 30, 1951
| Jun 01, 2004
|
it was amazing
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THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Cur THEâ€� ‌GREATâ€� ‌COMPLETISTâ€� ‌CHALLENGE:â€� ‌Inâ€� ‌whichâ€� ‌Iâ€� ‌revisitâ€� ‌olderâ€� ‌authorsâ€� ‌andâ€� ‌attemptâ€� ‌toâ€� ‌readâ€� everyâ€� ‌bookâ€� ‌theyâ€� ‌everâ€� ‌wroteâ€� Currentlyâ€� ‌inâ€� ‌theâ€� ‌challenge:â€� ‌Isaacâ€� ‌Asimov'sâ€� ‌Robot/Empire/Foundationâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Margaretâ€� Atwoodâ€� ´¥â€� ‌JGâ€� ‌Ballardâ€� ´¥â€� Cliveâ€� ‌Barkerâ€� ´¥â€� Christopherâ€� Buckleyâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | ‌Lee Child's Jack Reacher | ‌Philipâ€� ‌Kâ€� ‌Dickâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Ian Fleming | Williamâ€� ‌Gibsonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Michelâ€� Houellebecqâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Irvingâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Kazuoâ€� ‌Ishiguroâ€� ´¥â€� Shirleyâ€� Jacksonâ€� | ‌Johnâ€� ‌Leâ€� ‌Carreâ€� ´¥â€� Bernardâ€� ‌Malamudâ€� ´¥â€� Cormac McCarthy | Chinaâ€� ‌Mievilleâ€� ´¥â€� Toni Morrison | ‌VSâ€� Naipaulâ€� ´¥â€� Chuckâ€� ‌Palahniukâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Timâ€� ‌Powersâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Terryâ€� ‌Pratchett'sâ€� ‌Discworldâ€� ´¥â€� Philipâ€� ‌Rothâ€� ´¥â€� Nealâ€� Stephensonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jimâ€� ‌Thompsonâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Updikeâ€� ´¥â€� Kurtâ€� ‌Vonnegutâ€� ´¥â€� Jeanette Winterson | PGâ€� ‌Wodehouseâ€� So as mentioned in my most previous review in this megaseries, the entire reason I decided to take on a completist run of this 15-book "Future History" by Isaac Asimov is because three of the books within it -- the original '50s trilogy of Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation -- was not only the first adult science-fiction novels I ever read, but some of the first adult novels I ever read in any genre, right around 7th grade at the turn of the 1980s when junior high suddenly opened up this new world of intellectual possibilities to me. This was the same year my English teacher loaned me a beat-up copy of The Dead Zone, my first-ever Stephen King novel, and my Social Studies teacher loaned me a beat-up copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; and it was the first year I started taking the pleasantly musty-smelling old post-war hardbacks more seriously that were stacked up in the back bookcases of my grandparents' house's guest bedrooms in those years. They were filled at the time with all the old science-fiction my dad and uncle used to read as kids and then teens in the 1940s through early '60s; and while as a kid myself I took early to their large run of "Tom Swift" books, it wasn't until hitting junior-high that I started taking a serious look at the adult fiction that was still left over from their '50s and '60s teendoms, which is what led me both to the "Foundation" novels and also my first try at Frank Herbert's Dune (which was still too dense for my 12-year-old mind; I wouldn't finally get through it for the first time until my senior year). I'll be honest -- when first reading the Foundation novels as a "young adult" right around the dawn of the 1980s, they blew my mind, and thoroughly set me down the road to becoming the widely and deeply read SF fan I now am as a fiftysomething middle-ager. So this is the part of Asimov's 15-book "Future History" megaseries I've been looking forward to the most, especially since such a large proportion of the ten books that came before this one have been such disappointments, and I tried this time to reach back through my modern Kindle and see if I could touch again on what made these such special reading experiences for me as a newly awakening teen, before the internet and before even cable television, see if I could still touch those places again forty years and several thousand books later, and how this would or would not compare to my mostly disappointed experiences with the rest of the megaseries as a well-read middle-ager. And so that was one of the nice things to notice right away when I started this latest read of the first 1951 Foundation, that it hasn't been my imagination, that it really does start off with a much bigger and better bang than any of the other books so far have, and that we all as SF fans have a reason to remember these original Foundation books with higher regard than most of Asimov's other books. To be precise, he drops us straight into the middle of this giant mythos and universe that's already going on around us at full speed with no explanations when we start, in which it becomes rapidly clear through the first dozen or so chapters that this sort of dowdy, eccentric professor at the heart of our story is actually going to be much more clever and unique than anything that had been seen in sci-fi literature up to that time. Let's not forget that when we looked at Asimov's "Empire" novels, begun just a few years before the "Foundation" ones that he became much better known for, both those novels and everything else being published in the pulp world in the 1940s was essentially more like "Tarzan in spaaaaaace" than what we now think of as the sci-fi genre, swashbucklers like Flash Gordon and John Carter who used their fists as much as their rayguns, with "science" behind it all that consisted of "whatever nonsense we need to peddle to sell this story to a bunch of 12-year-old dupes." Here, though, Asimov gives us a fully thought-out conceptual new futuristic career and academic department that sounds both plausible and like magic -- the so-called "psychohistory" that can essentially use science to predict the future, through a convoluted form of mathematics that now 75 years later sounds like a combination of our modern Big Data, machine learning, social media and chaos theory. And the inventor of the practice, Hari Seldon, introduced to us as already an elderly man who is to die just a few short years later, comes off as more and more of some weird dark wizard as the story continues -- every time a new "surprise" development occurs in the plot, it's later revealed that Seldon already knew decades before that it was going to happen, and that all these "random" events are looking more and more like a grand puppeteering by Seldon and his handpicked Google-like team of super-nerds ostensibly creating their version of Wikipedia so to help the crumbling Galactic Empire from falling into a thousand years of chaos (the "foundation" of the series' title), but in reality are employing the convoluted formulas of psychohistory more and more in order to better pinpoint where the future is headed. That's some heavy stuff for an age where Asimov's direct competitors were Flash Gordon, Zorro and the Shadow, a much headier concept that sort of melds together old-fashioned fantasy storytelling with cutting-edge scientific concepts and actual intellectual heft, within a real age in history (the 1940s and '50s) when things like psychotherapy and sociology were really becoming sophisticated, mature subjects for the first time. It sort of perfectly matched the story the US wanted to tell itself about being a smart, educated, literate, creative, forward-thinking postwar society, and it's no wonder that this sort of sci-fi with a hip, intellectual, "ripped from the headlines" bent would be eaten up with a spoon by the same people reading beat poetry, buying Modernist furniture, and listening to smooth jazz. And it's told in an incredibly clever way here in the first book too, by unceremoniously killing our main hero of old age right after Part One, and having him only "appear" again in holographic form at various symbolic points in his Foundation's future, in which as a feeble old man in a wheelchair he demonstrates that he smartly guessed centuries in the past exactly what kind of crisis they would likely be going through right now, and how the crisis would most likely play out according to the formulas of psychohistory. Let's not forget, the entirety of Asimov's first nine science-fiction books -- the first three "Robot" books, the only three "Empire" books, and the first three "Foundation" books -- were all originally published serially in monthly pulps like Astounding Science Fiction, and so Asimov needed a hook here to make each enlarged chapter stand alone well as just a read unto itself, but also fit into a much larger big picture. This idea of looking at distinct future crises of this planet "Terminus" where the Foundation all live, capped at the end by a hologram by Seldon explaining to everyone what we've learned, served as this really nice framework by which he could tell both serial and standalone stories month after month for as long as he needed to gather a full novel's worth of material; this was then eventually published as a full-length book in 1951, right at the dawn of a post-war boom in cheap printing, high literacy, millions of blue-collar guys in college thanks to the GI Bill, and tons more free time for everyone in society, which meshed with a suddenly aspirational, society-approved style of science-fiction storytelling that would quickly be termed the genre's "Silver Age" (since the "Golden Age" was already reserved for Victorian fuddyduds like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne). And that's what really made writers like Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke household names, is when the stories finally progressed into the full novel stage and could appear in "respectable" places like the library, bookstore and classroom. And of course let's not forget the last incredible thing about this original Foundation novel, that we barely see in any of the other novels in this megaseries: an ultra-complex plot that jumps in all kinds of unexpected and fascinating directions, because of spanning a grand total of 150 years in history, in which this foundation Seldon establishes on Terminus (by tricking the Emperor into thinking he's "banishing" them there) first operates with no oversight at all and backed by the overwhelming military force of the Empire (a situation Asimov was clearly using to comment on the scientific community's relationship with a newly militarized US government in the years after World War Two, in which they did whatever they wanted and were backed by billions of dollars and millions of guns); then to a day when the crumbling Empire finally loses power out there in the periphery, in which the civilian government of Terminus effectively engages a peaceful coup over the Foundation's board, then turns the planet's superior intellectual knowledge over its dumb-dumb barbarian neighbors into a religion deliberately used to manipulate the people they need raw goods from; then when that stops working a century later, Terminus then pivots into out-producing and out-innovating all their neighbors, becoming a corporate-run society where it's simply more money and wildly better weapons than anyone else that keeps them on top. That's a ton of intellectual complexity within a story format that up to now had been more of the Star Wars variety -- "PEW PEW! LOOK OUT! BANG BANG! RUUUUNN!!!!" -- and it was this kind of intellectual heft, combined with the innovations we've already talked about, that turned science-fiction suddenly into a hip, officially mainstream approved endeavor, one good enough for multiple movies and TV shows (quickly replacing Westerns), and eventually leading to the Mid-Century Modernist peaks like Clarke's 2001 in the '60s. What I've unfortunately learned is that Asimov pretty much rode this reputation he built up in the '50s for the entire rest of his life to justify a career that had a slow downward trajectory for the entire forty years afterwards until his death, with especially his work in the '80s and early '90s bridging all these first trilogies together being particularly not worth any time visiting except for the most truly Asimovian hardcores; but this very first one of his career to make any kind of splash is still truly as amazing as it was when it first came out, and when I myself fondly remember it from the dawn of the '80s, and I'm looking forward to finishing these other two in the original trilogy, which I remember as being somewhat less brilliant than the original but still great on their own. â€�Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 14, 2022
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Jul 09, 2007
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.79
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really liked it
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Apr 12, 2012
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Apr 12, 2012
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|||||
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| 3.55
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liked it
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Feb 22, 2012
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Feb 22, 2012
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|||||
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| 3.59
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really liked it
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Oct 20, 2011
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Oct 20, 2011
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|||||
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| 3.81
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liked it
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May 20, 2013
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Oct 13, 2011
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|||||
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| 3.50
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it was amazing
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Oct 07, 2011
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Mar 04, 2011
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|||||
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| 3.75
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really liked it
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Aug 07, 2012
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May 18, 2010
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|||||
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| 3.52
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it was amazing
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Nov 16, 2009
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Sep 23, 2009
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|||||
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| 4.18
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it was ok
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Jun 12, 2022
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Mar 27, 2009
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|||||
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Jun 2009
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Aug 09, 2008
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|||||
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| 3.90
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it was amazing
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Nov 28, 2021
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Aug 09, 2008
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|||||
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| 4.23
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it was ok
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Mar 02, 2020
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Aug 09, 2008
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|||||
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| 4.16
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it was ok
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Feb 18, 2022
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Aug 09, 2008
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|||||
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| 4.07
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it was ok
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Jun 12, 2022
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Aug 09, 2008
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|||||
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| 4.27
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it was ok
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Jun 2022
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Aug 09, 2008
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|||||
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| 4.22
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really liked it
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May 24, 2022
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Aug 09, 2008
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|||||
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| 3.47
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really liked it
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Nov 08, 2019
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Aug 09, 2008
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|||||
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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May 14, 2022
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Jul 09, 2007
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