Now that I'm no longer professionally obligated to review 200 contemporary novels each year as part of running the CCLaP website, I've been using 2018 to indulgently make my way through the complete works of a number of authors who I've always wanted to be completists of; and one of those authors is Tim Powers, who has gotten famous over the years for blending multiple types of genres into "New Weird" tales about secret histories that are taking place around us in plain sight. I started with his 1983 Philip K. Dick Award-winning The Anubis Gates, where he combines time travel, the birth of Romanticism in the early 1800s, and the occult elements of ancient Egypt; then next I jumped back to his very first novel, 1976's The Skies Discrowned, a straightforward space opera that's disappointing precisely because of its lack of originality, okay on its own but prophetically plodding when you realize what kinds of startling work was to come from him a few decades later.
But the whole reason I decided to read Powers in the first place, and the books that garnered him such a passionate fan base to begin with, is his "Fault Lines" trilogy from the 1990s, starting with 1992's Last Call which I just finished a few days ago. And wow, it's easy to tell with this one why people started calling him a master of a new genre that he and only he is writing in; ostensibly an "urban fantasy" novel from those '90s years when that genre first became so immensely popular, he somehow managed here to weave together the history of tarot cards, the Christian myth of the Fisher King, Bugsy Siegel and the birth of modern Las Vegas, body-swapping, astral projection, and the seedy underbelly of contemporary Los Angeles, into a unified narrative that not only isn't an incoherent mess, but is actually a dazzling, mesmerizing thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat for over 500 pages.
That's really the thing that's so exciting about this book, and why people get so hooked on Powers; because he's essentially making up his own unique mythos and magical history as he goes here, in a way like you've never heard another writer ever describe a secret magical history, but that contains a kind of inherent in-universe sense to it; a world where people perform ad-hoc contemporary rituals using found pop-culture detritus that hearken back to ancient rituals using much more primal material, substituting things like kazoos and cigarette smoke in order to replicate arcane rites from thousands of years previously. It's an infinitely clever way to tell a contemporary urban fantasy story, not least of which is because you have no prior frame of reference to the universe he is unfolding in front of you, making every turn of events a new surprise that goes in directions you could've never guessed beforehand.
An unforgettable book, Last Call this week joins that small list in my head of Favorite Novels I've Ever Read In My Life, and I'm excited now about tackling the next book in this series soon, 1996's Expiration Date.
Tim Powers books covered in this review series: The Skies Discrowned (1976) | An Epitaph in Rust (1976) | The Drawing of the Dark (1979) | The Anubis Gates (1983) | Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985) | On Stranger Tides (1987) | The Stress of Her Regard (1989) | Last Call (1992) | Expiration Date (1996) | Earthquake Weather (1997) | Declare (2001) | Three Days to Never (2006) | Hide Me Among the Graves (2012) | Medusa's Web (2016) | Alternate Routes (2018) | More Walls Broken (2019) | Forced Perspectives (2020)...more
1943's The Little Prince is one of those classic children's books that for some inexplicable reason I've found myself at the age of 50 still having never read; so when I learned that one of the tasks of this year's Goodreads Summer Reading Challenge was to read a book originally published in a language other than English, I thought this would be a great excuse to finally dust off this beloved short tale by French aristocrat and aviation pioneer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which became a posthumous hit for him after disappearing during a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean during World War Two. Unfortunately, though, I found this book so tedious that I could barely finish it, despite it being short enough to be read in its entirety in a single afternoon; and that's because it's not really a book-style narrative at all, but rather a series of disconnected fairytales in which Saint-Exupéry rather heavy-handedly and self-righteously lets all of us know exactly what he thinks is wrong with the world and all the dirty humans in it besides himself, by inventing a series of quirkily precious, preciously quirky one-person mini-planets that our titular hero visits while on his way to Earth, each of which contain Gulliver-style archetypes meant to teach us lessons about avarice, sloth, greed and the other deadly sins, but are so on the nose as to quickly become intolerable.
The book is actually kind of delightful at the beginning, when we're concentrating just on the child prince himself and his descriptions of his home; and I suspect that's why it's this part that we only think of whenever we think about this book, because the rest of it is a meandering, sermonizing slog, one of those "children's" books that I suspect has been much more about well-meaning adults forcing the book on children than it has been about actual children actually liking it over the decades. I'm giving it one more extra star today than I normally would, simply to acknowledge that a whole lot of people disagree with me about this assessment; but that's still only two stars total, a book I'm glad to now have under my belt mostly so that I'll never have to pick it up again. Although still worth checking out, it comes with a strong caution, a book best approached with your expectations extremely low. ...more
(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 have to go to the CCLaP website for the second half, 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.
Hey, do you like novels that consist of 60,000 words of exposition, and don't have a single plot development whatsoever? Then buddy, do I have the book for you! I exaggerate for humorous effect, of course, but to be honest, I'm not exaggerating by much; because even author Arthur C. Clarke himself freely admitted that when he wrote 1973's Rendezvous With Rama, his main interest was in exploring the technical details behind what would theoretically make a "space ark" or "generation spaceship" actually work in the real world, and thought it would be more interesting to write out these details in the form of a narrative fictional story than as an academic paper.
That makes this a prime example of what in that genre is known as "hard" science-fiction, in which traditional literary elements like character, conflict, plot and style are sacrificed in the name of presenting the most realistically scientific look at a fantastical concept that can be possibly pulled off (no laser swords or fussy British robots here, my friend), with all the good and bad that you would expect from such an exercise. And to be clear, there's a lot of good here, provided that you can get into Clarke's expository spirit; his world-building is fantastic, giving us a palpable sense of what it might actually be like to walk around inside a spaceship consisting of a hollow 30-mile-long tube, and he gets a lot of mileage out of exploring the idea that, if we ever did meet an alien culture, maybe we arrogant humans wouldn't be able to immediately guess the purpose of every single artifact of theirs we come across, a concept that had been explored a year previous in greater detail in Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's 1961 Solaris.
This alone would've been enough for the book to earn 3 and a half stars from me, despite the fact that pretty much nothing of note happens, that the tiny amount of conflict that arises is resolved almost immediately, and that Clarke essentially paints all his characters as little more than meat sacks whose purpose in existing is to make their eyes and brains locomotive, since Clarke needs nothing else from them here other than to walk around witnessing the details around them. But since I have to either round half-stars down or up here at Goodreads, I'm rounding up today, mostly to reflect the additional good will this book has retroactively received since Clarke unwisely authorized a series of sequels in the 1990s written by Gentry Lee -- chief engineer of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lover of terribly written sex scenes, and who apparently should've never been allowed to write even a single word of science-fiction in his life, given the sheer number of reviews of his novels that start, "This is literally the worst book I've ever read in my life." (Seriously, check out his oeuvre here sometime if you want an afternoon of hilariously vicious reviews of his apparently execrable novels.) His terribly plotted Rama sequels are so atrocious that they've actually made people go back to Clarke's 1973 original and think, "Hmm, maybe he was actually onto something by not including any plot developments at all." And if you're going to have a late-career decision that turns out to be a misstep, this is about the best misstep to have, one that at least brings newfound respect to a book from earlier in your career. ...more
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote
Currently in the challenge: Martin AmisTHE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote
Currently in the challenge: Martin Amis | Isaac Asimov (Robot/Empire/Foundation) | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Philip K Dick | Daphne Du Maurier | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse
Eek, I just realized I never actually wrote my reviews of the first two books in this series! Oh well, I guess I need to do so here, then post this extra-long review to all three book pages...
For those who don't know, Isaac Asimov first got famous in the 1950s from three different novel series that at first seemed to have nothing to do with each other: the "Robot" novels, set in a moderately near future in which humans are first colonizing the galaxy, using an explosion of robots for the task and not quite sure how to think about it; the "Empire" novels, set of thousands of years later, in which a now scattered humanity has coalesced into a single galaxial empire full of intrigue (one of the first book series to inspire the term "space opera"); and the "Foundation" novels, set thousands of years after that, in which a brilliant math-based sociologist comes to realize that this galaxial empire is about to crumble, and sets secret plans in motion to ensure that humanity survives and is able to re-organize afterwards. Each of these series originally had three books in them apiece (plus a book of day-after-tomorrow "Robot" short stories), which is how it remained for decades; but then in the 1980s, as Asimov neared the end of his life, he realized that with a few well-placed bridging novels he could actually link these ten books into one coherent and pervasive 10,000-year history of the human race, which is what prompted him to crank out another five novels that decade to now expand this "mega-series" into 15 books*.
[*This is not counting the three "Inferno" robot novels from the 1990s, which Asimov had been sketching out as his next project before dying, and subsequently were written out from his notes by Roger MacBride Allen; and it's worth noting that an entire cottage industry has popped up since his death for novels by other authors set in this massive pervasive universe, endorsed and sometimes commissioned by Asimov's estate, including two more Foundation books and another 11 robot novels. Whew!]
I've read maybe two-thirds of these books already, scattered over the years in a random order, but I thought it'd be fun to finally read them all in the chronological order of the events themselves, which means hopping back and forth between the '50s books and the '80s books on a regular basis. I started with the "Robot" stories, which for many years was collected into a single book known as I, Robot, but then expanded in the '80s into the newly titled The Complete Robot. They were generally like I remembered them being, although I have to confess that early Asimov isn't holding up well at all as we get ready here to enter the 2020s, a kind of shiny optimistic Mid-Century Modernist approach to science-fiction that seemed fine if not a little dated when I was a teen in the '80s myself, but that in the 35 years since then (and the now 70 years since they were first written) often seems hopelessly outdated to the point of historical curiosity instead of contemporary pleasure read. These '40s and '50s stories seem to be most remarkable now for what Asimov missed about the future than what he got right, or for the ways that the standards and more of his own times bleed into these fantastical stories; they're set in a world where people can travel between planets but smoke unfiltered cigarettes the entire way, where women can build robots but are still non-ironically criticized for their "crazy hormonal mood swings," where computers are still the size of rooms and are still operated through thousands of mechanical switches. (In fact, one of the most telling stories here is the one where humans direct an artificially intelligent computer to build a cutting-edge spaceship on their behalf, then are convinced that the computer has malfunctioned when it builds a ship whose bridge contains only a single plasma screen to run the entire thing.)
Thankfully, though, the later Robot novels continue to hold up a lot better; and that's mainly because Asimov made the decision to write them as traditional murder mysteries, only set in a futuristic world where a hard-edged cop gets partnered with a bleeding-edge human-looking robot, giving Asimov plenty of opportunities to obliquely look at the robot-filled universe where the stories take place, as well as build up an impressive history of this universe-building that would ultimately end up informing the rest of the series after them. The first, The Caves of Steel, is set at a time when humanity has basically broken up into two subsects -- there are the "Spacers," who have embraced robots as a means of expanding into roughly 50 other planets, and then the remaining Earthlings, who treat robots with contempt and fear, but whose planet has become so overcrowded as a result that humanity now lives in giant megacities that burrow miles underneath the planet's crust, forcing most humans to have crippling agoraphobia because of never spending even a single moment anymore on the planet's surface. We follow one of these harried molemen Earthlings, police detective Elijah Baley, as he investigates the murder of a Spacer ambassador, and is unwillingly assigned as his partner a Spacer robot named R. Daneel Olivaw, the latest model in a largely unknown new series of robots that look and act almost exactly like flesh-and-blood humans. Then in the second novel, The Naked Sun, the action moves to an almost opposite situation -- the Spacer planet Solaria, which houses a population of only 20,000 people, making each citizen essentially the sole master of their own individual city-state maintained by thousands of robots, but who have a crippling fear of being in the same room as any other biological creature.
Just like the Robot short stories, the Robot novels have to be taken with a grain of salt, and forgiven for their 1950s literary crimes if they're to be enjoyed at all; and it's also important to remember that they both originally ran serially in science-fiction pulp magazines before being collected as books, which tends to make each chapter end on an overly melodramatic cliffhanger note, just to be immediately resolved in the first paragraph of the next chapter. But still, these are loads better than the short stories which started the series, still enjoyable as contemporary reads as long as you squint a little and are tolerant of their clunky bits. And most importantly, Asimov is very clever here at setting up what he wants the main message of the entire series to be, simply by making little side comments here and there throughout their page counts; that humanity is doomed by taking either the Earth attitude or the Solaria one, that we as a species need to embrace not only technology but also good old-fashioned human effort and fellowship, to use robots to ease the backbreaking menial work of terraforming but not let them usurp our ability to think and innovate. Asimov would expand on this theory in the third Robot novel, then use the concept as the basis for the background of the Empire and Foundation novels (basically, the idea that the original 50 Spacer worlds eventually died out through inertia, while the humans of Earth eventually abandoned the planet altogether in order to populate the entire rest of the galaxy). But more on this when I review The Robots of Dawn next month.
Isaac Asimov books now reviewed: I, Robot | The Caves of Steel...more
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