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| 0553293427
| 9780553293425
| 0553293427
| 3.90
| 25,303
| 1950
| Dec 01, 1991
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse 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
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Aug 09, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553293435
| 9780553293432
| 0553293435
| 3.74
| 24,199
| 1951
| Dec 01, 1991
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really liked it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse 2021 reads, #87. I recently published a book version of the very first completed chapter of this Great Completist Challenge (regarding the five-book 'George Miles Cycle' by noted Generation X "New Transgressive" '90s LGBTQ author Dennis Cooper), and have been thinking about which one I might have a decent chance of finishing next; and that got me to thinking for the first time in a while about what we now call Isaac Asimov's "Future History" megaseries, known in his lifetime as the three separate series "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation." I'm already done with all five Robot novels, after all; and with Apple+ recently producing a brand-new high-profile adaptation of the Foundation books, that gives me a reason to hurry up and get to them myself, so that I can get the book version out in time to take advantage of the renewed interest by a whole new audience. But that first is going to take me through a part of this megaseries I've never read before (versus the Robot and Foundation books, which I've been reading regularly since I was a teenager in the 1980s); and that's the Empire books that have generally been forgotten by history at large, which I don't think is exactly a coincidence since Asimov himself really de-emphasized these books once he got famous too. The second of the series, 1951's The Stars, Like Dust (which he famously declared in interviews as the worst book of his career), was in fact only the second book of Asimov's career, originally serialized in the pulpy Galaxy magazine like most of the authors of the Mid-Century Modernist era; and I gotta say, it really reflects what the mainstream genre publishers at the time wanted, which was simplistic and thrilling action-adventure stories. Before the 1950s, this is essentially what "science fiction" was, basically Tarzan in space (think Edgar Rice Burroughs' "John Carter of Mars" series, for a great example), although at least by the 1930s authors like E.E. "Doc" Smith had pulled the tropes into the radio/radium era, which is when we saw the development of other Early Modernist sci-fi action tales like Flash Gordon and Tom Swift. This is the stuff the middle-aged gatekeepers like the magazine publishers still loved in the late 1940s, when people like Asimov were first getting published; so he and the other young writers were pushed in this direction if they wanted any chance of getting book deals, into territory that they themselves would call later in their careers with derision "space opera," just for the joke to eventually be on them when a California nerd in the '70s decided to make a big-budget homage to these hokey shoot-em-up tales, and forever changed the way we permanently think about the genre. And indeed, there's nothing particularly wrong with Asimov's take at it here either, but it's just not the kind of "books about ideas" that he and his compatriots were really striving for in those years, and whose efforts to overcome these Doc Smith space opera tropes directly led to the rise of the Silver Age of science-fiction. There's a lot of spaceship chases in this book, and a lot of lasers being shot at each other, all in service of a storyline that's literally no more complicated than, "There's a giant empire, and the people being subjugated by it hate it, and they're trying to stop it but the empire won't let them;" and while that was good enough to allow Asimov to continue writing and publishing, it certainly wasn't anything like the heady, bizarre, really challenging intellectual concepts found in his "Foundation" stories he was publishing in the pulps at the same time, and which quickly became his much greater obsession as soon as the industry had expanded enough that it could be. That will eventually lead us to Asimov (and the Silver Age in general) reaching its greatest height in the late '50s and early '60s; but meanwhile, we have two more Empire books to (quickly) get through. Next up, 1950's The Currents in Space (chronologically next, although actually published one year previous), so keep your eye out for that 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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Oct 13, 2021
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Aug 09, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0586062009
| 9780586062005
| 0586062009
| 4.22
| 33,773
| Aug 20, 1985
| 1996
|
it was ok
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse 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, there's plenty to say); 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 pinchable asses, 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
| ||||||||||||||
| 4.19
| 58,384
| 1958
| 1993
|
really liked it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | 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 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 22, 2019
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Aug 09, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0553299492
| 9780553299496
| 0553299492
| 4.19
| 50,837
| 1983
| Mar 01, 1994
|
it was ok
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse After writing a series of short stories and novels in the 1950s that melded together the high technology of robotics with the social issues of literary fiction, thus ushering in the so-called "Silver Age" of science-fiction (or to use a more common term, the Mid-Century Modernist era of science-fiction), Isaac Asimov largely abandoned this entire milieu in the 1960s and '70s in order to concentrate on works that were capturing his attention more. (For those who don't know, Asimov famously published books in nine of the ten Dewey Decimal categories; he spent a large chunk of his career not writing science-fiction at all, but rather nonfiction looks at such disparate subjects as physics, chemistry, history and Bible interpretation.) In the 1980s, though, during the last decade of his life, Asimov got interested in writing a series of "bridging" novels that would tie together his three most famous series (not just the "Robot" stories, set in day-after-tomorrow times, but the "Empire" trilogy set thousands of years later, then the "Foundation" trilogy set thousands of years after that), into one unified pervasive "future history" spanning tens of thousands of years, and whose events all inform each other. Today's book, 1983's The Robots of Dawn, was the second such novel of this new later-career stage of writing, meant to finally turn the "Robot" novels into a legitimate trilogy like the "Empire" and "Foundation" books, as well as conceptually set up a universe that eventually leads us to the status quo we see in the "Empire" books -- for while the first Robot novel is set on an overcrowded Earth whose population lives in giant underground cities and are xenophobic about robots, and the second novel set on one of the 50 "Spacer" worlds the human race has now established (sparsly populated planets where the ratio of humans to robots is one to ten thousand, and the pampered citizens are slowly bringing about their own destruction through cultural inertia), the third book is set on a planet that's trying to achieve a balance between the two, leading us to an "Empire" future in which Earthlings go out and settle thousands of planets without the help of robots at all, and the 50 original robot-heavy "Spacer" worlds are eventually forgotten to myth and legend. And like the first two Robot novels, this one is also a murder mystery, featuring the previous investigating team of crusty Earth detective Elijah Baley and Spacer humaniform robot R. Daneel Olivaw. There's a big problem, though, with The Robots of Dawn, which mostly has to do with the fact that it's precisely meant as a bridging novel; for while Asimov clearly had no other goal for this than a short story's worth of expository information to help explain why no robots are featured in the "Empire" trilogy, and the "Spacer" worlds are never mentioned, despite them taking place chronologically after the "Robot" novels, he unfortunately signed a contract with his publisher to turn in a thick 75,000-word book that could anchor a major marketing campaign and awardbait push (which indeed worked; this won that year's Hugo and Locus Awards), and so as a result features so much brain-numbingly mundane and elliptically looping dialogue as to drive most readers freaking crazy. ("So much brain-numbingly mundane and elliptically looping dialogue as to drive most readers freaking crazy?" Baley asked again, incredulously. "So much brain-numbingly mundane and elliptically looping dialogue as to drive most readers freaking crazy!" Fastolfe again replied, exasperated.) These bridging novels are also a great example of the dangers of reading a fiction series in the order the events take place (like I am with this newest re-read), and not in the order that the author actually wrote them; because the tone and style veer wildly all over the place when you do, with one book being a self-assured prose piece that's not trying to accomplish anything else but be an entertaining standalone story, but the next one having so much of an outside agenda that it sometimes reads more like a Wikipedia article than a novel. For example, Asimov's attempts here to inject the idea of the "Foundation" series' concept of psychohistory are done so awkwardly and hamfistedly, we might as well be back in the Star Wars prequels, watching Liam Neeson exaggeratingly say with a wink to the camera, "Annakin Skywalker, meet Obi-Wan Kenobi!!!"; and the less said about this book's infamously logic-defying and barely explained climax, which Asimov was forced to do solely in an attempt to awkwardly explain why there's so many logistical differences between the originally unconnected "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation" trilogies, the better. And this is to say nothing of the fact that Asimov unwisely in the 1980s decided to keep in all the sexism and racism of his original 1950s Robot stories, a sort of unapologetically douchebaggy move that does nothing but support all the arguments being made here in our contemporary times about the legacy of exclusion and deliberate offensiveness these Silver Age authors and editors created into order to pump themselves up into legend status. For one particularly glaring example, look at Baley's continued habit here of displaying his contempt for robots by addressing them as "boy," essentially saying by extension, "Why, these robots are no more human or deserving of respect than a common Negro! A common Negro, I tell you!" This was already borderline-offensive in the '50s when he originally did it, but at least reflected the real speech that was actually being unironically used daily by millions in this time period; but given how very, very easily Asimov could've removed this aspect from the sequel written 30 years later, a time period when calling a person "boy" was now unambiguously identified as aggressively racist, for him to continue including it can be interpreted in no other way than Asimov doubling-down on his willful refusal to regard anyone else's feelings besides his fellow straight white males, exactly the kind of passive-aggressive behavior that for example led to the John W. Campbell Award having Campbell's name stripped from it earlier this year. You can see multiple examples of this tone-deafness at work here, including the early scene in which Baley's new female boss is described as being coldly defiant because of having breasts "the prominence of which she made no attempt to hide," which again is the kind of statement you could only barely get away with even back in the '50s, and by all rights has absolutely no place in a book that was published in 1983. I loved Asimov when I was a teenager and first starting to get into adult science-fiction, and I still like him enough to bother doing this 15-book reread in the first place. But doing so here in the late 2010s has been an eye-opening experience, especially at a point like now when sci-fi has become so mainstreamed and now has the space for all kinds of different types of creators. Reading these old classics and realizing just how clunky and problematic they are makes you realize how much smaller and more insular the entire sci-fi community used to be as little as 30 years ago; and the fact that this is so easy to recognize is a good thing for all of us, because it means that sci-fi is thriving and profoundly growing as a genre, becoming the kind of complex and politically aware, multicultural, multi-generational endeavor that genre fans could've only wished for in the Mid-Century Modernist years. We have people like Asimov to thank for getting us there in the first place; but much like old Victorian novels that are peppered with the kind of casual racism that makes us gasp when now coming across it, care and attention need to be taken with sci-fi novels from the early 20th century now, with a forgiving attitude and frequent rolling of the eyes if you want a chance of enjoying them in any way whatsoever. 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 |
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Sep 19, 2019
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Aug 09, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 4.19
| 103,289
| Oct 1953
| 1997
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really liked it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 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 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 |
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1
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not set
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May 22, 2019
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Aug 09, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 4.16
| 89,732
| May 1988
| Aug 22, 1994
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it was ok
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse 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
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0553587579
| 9780553587579
| 0553587579
| 4.07
| 74,379
| Oct 1986
| Aug 31, 2004
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it was ok
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse 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' "planet-sized city" 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
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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
| 188,707
| 1953
| Jun 01, 2004
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it was ok
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse 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 |
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Aug 09, 2008
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| 0553803727
| 9780553803723
| 0553803727
| 4.22
| 209,549
| 1952
| Jun 01, 2004
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really liked it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse 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 |
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May 24, 2022
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Aug 09, 2008
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| 0553803700
| 9780553803709
| 0553803700
| 4.21
| 353,364
| Dec 02, 1950
| Jun 2004
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liked it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 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 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 |
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May 22, 2019
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Aug 09, 2008
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| 0441004822
| 9780441004829
| 0441004822
| 3.99
| 4,426
| 1993
| Sep 01, 1997
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it was amazing
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Aug 09, 2008
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| 055329461X
| 9780553294613
| 055329461X
| 3.46
| 22,306
| Sep 1990
| Feb 1992
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really liked it
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Goodreads 2019 Summer Reading Challenge 8. It takes two: Read a coauthored book THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older Goodreads 2019 Summer Reading Challenge 8. It takes two: Read a coauthored book THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse 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 Clement Vallandigham (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 |
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Nov 08, 2019
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Aug 09, 2008
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0425190447
| 9780425190449
| 0425190447
| 3.93
| 16,578
| Oct 1999
| Jan 2003
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really liked it
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| 0060539828
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| 0060539828
| 4.06
| 40,372
| Apr 1986
| Jul 29, 2003
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really liked it
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| 1591025435
| 9781591025436
| 1591025435
| 3.66
| 3,047
| May 01, 2007
| May 03, 2007
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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.) Regular readers know that I ended up lucking into a cool situation this month; I just happened to be able to get my hands on half of the ten books nominated this year for either the Philip K Dick Award (recognizing the best experimental science-fiction novel of the year) or the Hugo Award (acknowledging simply the best SF novel of the year, recognized by most as the most prestigious award in that genre). And as I've made my way through these five novels this month, as a long-term fanboy who has sorta lost touch with the genre recently, I've been reminded once again of one of the biggest and most bitter ironies of genre work in general; that there is just the tiniest difference between a simply okay project and a super ridiculous insanely great one, a difference sometimes so subtle that the author in question isn't even consciously affecting it, but was rather was just born with the ability or inability. And that's ironic, of course, because one of the well-known stereotypes about genre work is that it's easy to get published there; and that's true to a certain extent, or at least to the extent that it's easier for amateurs and fans and beginning writers to get published within genre fields, but it's also true that it's much harder to stand out within a genre than in traditional "mainstream literature" (which I argue is a genre unto itself, but that's a whole discussion we'll table for today), the lessons for being in the top of your field very subtle ones that are difficult to understand. I can think of no better example of what I'm talking about, in fact, than the Hugo-nominated Brasyl by Ian McDonald, so far easily the best of the now three nominees I've finished and reviewed. Because it's brilliant, frankly, it's freaking brilliant, as dense and trippy and plain entertaining as William Gibson in his '80s heyday, even sharing some of his stylistic tricks and plot devices, but also set thoroughly in the modern world and reflecting the exact cutting-edge issues that we all are dealing with in a rapidly globalizing 21st century. But now that I sit down to write my review, I find that I'm having a hard time in my head detailing exactly what about this book made me go gaga, versus the other two award-nominated SF books I've now reviewed (Jon Armstrong's Grey and Sean Williams' Astropolis: Saturn Returns); because frankly, all three books are thorough genre projects through and through, any of which can be held up by any fan in public while saying, "This is what science-fiction is." So what makes one so much better than the others, in my opinion? What are the tiny little things that make hardcore SF fans go crazy in the first place? So let's start, then, with a pretty important detail, one that non-fans might not even realize is a hallmark of the genre; hardcore SF fans generally like their books to be kind of confusing at first, a game-like puzzle full of terms they don't yet understand, a plot we're in the middle of without knowing the background yet, and they like to be only slowly pulled into the necessary exposition of the story over the first half of that novel. And that's something I can honestly say is a big difference between Brasyl and the other two novels mentioned; that by picking his unknown technology carefully and referring to them lightly, he doesn't overwhelm the reader into throwing down the book in confusing disgust twenty pages into it (something I've heard online reviewers exactly say, for example, about Saturn Returns), but by setting it in a hot and sweaty Rio de Janeiro full of actual Portuguese hipster slang terms, he provides that exact sense of confusion and puzzle-solving joy that hardcore fans like. (Psst -- don't forget there's a glossary at the end.) And by actually setting the story among three different time periods of Rio's history at once (the 1730s, 2000s, and 2030s), without explaining until halfway through why he's done so, he also provides the game-like element so prevalent in such fellow great genre projects as Lost and Heroes. And in fact, this brings us to one of the first big things about Brasyl to remind me of Gibson's work; McDonald is masterful at portraying cutting-edge technology as it might actually be deployed in the sweaty, dirty world of the working-class, a world where cheats and shortcuts are created as often as can be gotten away with, all of it wired together McGuyver-like with baling string and a couple of quantum processors. And in fact by setting two of these stories in 2006 and 2032, he essentially lets us have our futuristic cake and eat it too: he at once gives us a world just like our own but much cooler (think Gibson's Virtual Light), full of shirtless kids on motorbikes getting their secret directions from their GPS-enabled cellphone; plus a bonus "world of tomorrow" story (think Gibson's Neuromancer), where laptops have been replaced by 'iShades' and there exists huge giant floating city-states that simply circle the globe, circle the globe (which of course is yet another Gibson trademark from his '80s work). And by setting that third story in the 1700s, McDonald also manages to throw a steampunk tale in there (think Gibson's The Difference Engine), a tale that manages to stick a European "natural philosopher" (proto-scientist) in the Brazilian rainforest with a sword-fighting Catholic monk, both of them transporting an ornate wood and brass device for determining the exact circumference of the Earth once finally reaching the equator, and while tracking a rogue missionary who's gone crazy and started his own Colonel-Kurtz-style indigenous spartan cult out in the middle of the jungle. Sheesh! In a lesser writer's hands, such material would simply fall apart so very quickly, would become just such a pulpy mess that literally would crumble in your hands; but McDonald, see, has actually made a whole career now out of this exact type of material and these exact types of stories, with a slavish fan base that already exists and a whole pile of awards and award nominations under his belt now. And indeed, what he is precisely most known for as a fantastical author is setting his stories in third-world situations, and making a majority of their plots hang on such details as "refugee cities" and the gray market that makes such million-person communities work; his most famous series, for example, the "Chaga Saga" from the '90s, at least partially deals with the AIDS crisis in Africa, while his 2004 cult hit River of Gods is set in mid-21st-century India. This is what makes McDonald so unique, his stories so special, even while reflecting the best of what the "cyberpunks" from the '80s had to say as well; he knows exactly how to wrap up cutting-edge concepts and items into a filthy, sweaty, very very real human milieu, knows exactly how to both take you there mentally and put a Matrix-like "Q Blade" in your hand once you arrive, without you breaking into laughter at the absurdity of it all. Because like I said, McDonald takes you down some strange roads by the time Brasyl is done, and this is ultimately much more than a simple "the kids of tomorrow all have cool cars" tale; as mentioned, there's a very good plot-based reason that these three stories are told in such different time periods, all of them simultaneously, which I won't get into in any more detail today, but let's just say it's no accident that I've made several references to quantum physics in today's review. Make no mistake, this is a hard SF story, as satisfying to any hardcore fanboy or girl as to a general audience member wanting to read a fascinating story about cutting-edge squatter communities and obsessions with World Cup soccer. And this of course is yet another little detail that hardcore fans take seriously, that so many authors are always accidentally getting wrong, of trying to find a balance between the fun understandable elements and the "hard-science" part of it all. Make it too simple (which McDonald almost does here; you'll know what I mean when you read it yourself), and suddenly the genre fans are crying out in Comic Book Guy glee, "Worst! Teleportation! Explanation! Ever!," while make it too complicated and you suddenly have nobody but Comic Book Guys reading. (I mean no offense, by the way, to all you Comic Book Guys; I just mean that that isn't a large-enough audience to sustain an entire career.) This is for sure a difference between Brasyl and the other two SF books I've now reviewed this month; Brasyl treads this line well, feeds you just enough background information while leaving as much as possible up to the imagination, while both Grey and Saturn Returns had a lot more problems trying to find this balance. I have to admit, this book was a real treat to read, something that got me excited about science-fiction in a way I haven't felt in years. I think it has a very strong chance of winning the Hugo this year, and I'm now highly looking forward to getting caught up on his past work. It comes highly recommended today, to both existing fans of the genre and people who usually don't touch science-fiction with a ten-foot pole. Out of 10: Story: 9.9 Characters: 9.1 Style: 9.4 Overall: 9.6 ...more |
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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 here illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read a hundred so-called "classic" novels, then write reports on whether or not I think they deserve the label Book #8: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne (1870) The story in a nutshell: Writing in the same Victorian time period that first saw the rise of "weird" fiction (leading to such modern genres as horror and fantasy), French author Jules Verne is along with HG Wells considered one of the founders of the "science fiction" genre, whereby the latest discoveries from the world of science are elegantly enfolded into action-based or contemplative story plots. And indeed, of the hundreds of novels, stories and essays that Verne published over the course of his life, what he is easily most known for are the 54 books making up the "Extraordinary Voyages" series he wrote for publisher Jules Hetzel, all of them prototypical sci-fi tales that in one way or another told grand science-laced sagas about giant treks across the earth or into the planet's core or into space or underwater or whatever. (In fact, Verne started his career writing mostly HG Wells-style short stories on specific subjects, before quickly discovering that weighty epic novels were more his style.) The majority of Verne's most well-known work*, frankly, is part of this Extraordinary Voyages series, including Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days; today's title, for example, was the sixth book in the series, written near the beginning of his career and really setting the template for a lot of the books that came afterwards. It is ultimately the story of a mysterious and brilliant Indian** sea captain known only as "Nemo" (the Latin word for "no one"), whose family was killed by the British in the 1850s Raj uprising, who is now permanently angry at the world and has declared himself his own autonomous nation; and to that end, he has built a beyond-cutting-edge submarine called the Nautilus for himself and the fellow rogues that make up his crew, one that can do things no other ship at that time could even contemplate (like reach the ocean floor, run entirely off electricity, house a small army of deep-sea divers, etc), leaving him pretty much a half-ghost, half-legend in the eyes of landlocked "civilized" society. In fact, this civilized society has recently formed an opinion that it is a giant sea monster that has been terrorizing their oceans recently; Pierre Aronnax, the narrator of our story, is a French professor and sea-creature expert, who has been invited to join an American whaling crew about to go out and attempt tracking down the creature. But alas, after a direct confrontation, Aronnax and a few of his buddies learn the truth, and are swept aboard the Nautilus with the daunting instructions from Nemo that they are never again to leave the ship. And thus does the traditional plot of Twenty Thousand Leagues pretty much end; the rest of the 400-page book is simply a series of action set pieces set in various locales around the world, such as squid-fighting in underwater forests, encountering schools of phosphorescent fish, finding secret tunnels connecting the Red and Mediterranean Seas, and more. Oh yeah, and making a side trip to the sunken ruins of the lost city of Atlantis, which turns out is right off the western edge of Spain. Oh yeah, and being the first human beings to set foot on the south pole too. You know, your basic ten-month voyage on an impossibly slick and inventive submersible vessel, essentially circling the planet about a half-dozen times altogether. The argument for it being a classic: I think almost anyone would argue anymore that Twenty Thousand Leagues' main strength is in its historical significance; it is one of the first books to usher in the entire genre of science-fiction in general (a genre now enjoyed by millions of people and that generates billions of dollars in revenue), and is specifically one of the primary source projects to inspire the entire contemporary subgenre of "steampunk," largely based on the fantastically ornate 1954 Disney film adaptation. It is the book, fans say, that has set a million young boys' minds racing over the last century and a half; one of the books that inspired Hollywood to become what it did, basically a fantasy factory churning out one jaw-dropping visual image after another. But at the same time, the argument goes, this is also a nice historical document of the Victorian Age in particular, and especially the way that Verne explores the subject of the "Victorian Gentleman" here -- how not a single one of the men on display here fully live up to the male ideal of the age, even with each of them possessing a few of the Victorian virtues. (And as a matter of fact, speculation continues to this day over whether or not Verne was actually gay, and whether his entire ouevre can actually be seen as a sneaky examination of male-on-male relationships.) The argument against: Like many Victorian novels at this particular moment in history (see, for example, my previous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables), the main argument against this being a classic is simply that it is not aging well, not aging well at all. I mean, sheesh, say its critics, if all you do is remove just Verne's detailed descriptions of fish they encounter along their journeys, that alone cuts 75 freakin' pages out of the total book; and this is not to mention the dozens of other pages devoted to underwater plant life, the physics behind what could possibly make a long-term submarine like this work, and all the other endless pseudo-science babble that unfortunately constituted the bulk of most Victorian fantastical novels. No one is denying that the book is important, its critics say, and full credit should be given for all the historical precedents mentioned above; it's just that this novel anymore is of main interest to scholars and historians only, and that it would be difficult for most modern readers to see this as an actual thrilling escapist adventure anymore. My verdict: After reading the book myself now, I have to admit that I fall quickly and firmly on the side of its critics; after all, the main thrill of this book is in supposing technological advances that have in reality actually been part of our lives for a century or more now, making them profoundly lose their original thrill in our modern age. ("My God, Captain, are you telling me that this entire ship runs off...electricity?" "Yes, professor -- off electricity!" Yawn.) I mean, it's definitely fascinating to see how the science-fiction genre got its start, and how in many ways you can even see such contemporary authors as Michael Crichton heavily reflected in this book; but it's also true that giant sections of this novel, just huge 50-page sections at a time, are basically the equivalent of sitting in an IMAX theatre blindfolded while someone sitting next to you explains what's going on. ("Okay, now they've sailed somewhere else and are looking at a bunch of pretty crap. Okay, now they've sailed somewhere else and are looking at even more pretty crap.") Reading this book will be an interesting intellectual exercise to a lot of genre fans, to see where exactly such cutting-edge genres as steampunk get their original inspirations; otherwise, though, most general audience members are actually better off tackling those steampunk projects themselves, which duplicate all the ornate visual richness of these original Victorian tales but now with much smarter, much more complex storylines, to reflect a much more sophisticated modern audience. Like many Victorian novels, I think it's time to finally take Twenty Thousand Leagues off the canon lists and required-reading syllabi for good, and to let it take its rightful historical place in the literary arts instead. Is it a classic? No *And by the way, if you want to have some fun, sit around one afternoon at Wikipedia and read through some of the crazier titles from the Extraordinary Voyages series: books such as 1879's The Steam House (in which a group of British colonists take a tour of Raj India via giant steam-powered mechanical elephant) or 1895's Propeller Island (about a string quartet who provide entertainment for an entire floating city in the middle of the ocean, owned and completely inhabited by eccentric corporate millionaires). **Technically we don't learn of Nemo's Indian heritage and background until this book's sequel, 1875's The Mysterious Island. And actually, Verne's original plan was to make Nemo Polish, his family the victims of a Russian massacre; but given that the French were official allies of Tsarist Russia at the time, Verne's publisher thought it financially prudent to change the villains to the British, not exactly an unpopular thing to do in France at the time. ...more |
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(The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].) As regular readers know, one of the (The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].) As regular readers know, one of the topics that often comes up here at the CCLaP website is of the slippery line between what we commonly refer to as "mainstream" literature versus "genre;" of not only where that line should be drawn, but of how we look at books differently based on what side it falls, not to mention the different smaller lines that can be drawn once you're on one side or another. For example, I'm a general fan of the science-fiction genre, as are many of CCLaP's readers; but then within sci-fi, I myself am a particular fan of a subgenre known as "steampunk." A play on the '80s sci-fi term "cyberpunk," it is basically a mix of speculative fiction and Victorian-era (or older) historical fiction, running with science-fictiony concepts based on real events from the time period; for example, what the world would've been like if computers had actually been invented back then instead of the 1950s, which actually did almost happen in real life except for the prototypes' prohibitive costs and enormous space requirements back then. At its aesthetic heart, steampunk is basically the attempt to take various high-tech concepts from our real present day, and "retrofit" them into beautifully-designed wood and metal forms, to imagine a world where robots work off of burning coal and double as exquisite objets de art, all for the good of our Glorious Queen and Her Empire. That's why I was so excited, after all, to pick up German writer Robert Lohr's first novel, the very smart and fun action adventure The Chess Machine; because it too can be technically counted as a steampunk novel, although in this case is set around a hundred years before most of the genre's other examples, or in other words the late 1700s. And that's because, interestingly enough, the core of the novel's storyline is based around an actual object with shady origins: an actual "Mechanical Turk" chess-playing automaton, in reality an elaborate hoax, well-known as a touring historical item in the 1800s but with society having collectively forgotten its beginnings. Lohr uses this lost origin to his advantage, taking the object itself and moving backwards in time creatively to imagine a colorful and danger-filled Vienna, when a cloudy haze existed between magic and science and where lots of hucksters were ready to step in and take advantage of it. The result is a delightfully exciting story, one that has more potential mainstream appeal than other steampunk novels because of it being rooted in reality; it is a book sure to thrill not only nerdy hard-edged sci-fi fans such as myself, but also those who love the mystery genre and straight-ahead historical fiction as well. There's a reason, after all, that the book rights have already been sold in twenty countries, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear of a major Hollywood deal at any moment too. So as mentioned, probably the best place to start a discussion of The Chess Machine is... ...more |
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One of those classics I haven't read in a long time, that I remember being very good, but that I should really read again soon in order to confirm. Ev
One of those classics I haven't read in a long time, that I remember being very good, but that I should really read again soon in order to confirm. Even more important than before these days, in fact, in that it was one of the first projects ever to precisely define exactly what Fascism is; remember, before this novel, there were lots of disagreements over what linked Hitler and Mussolini together (for example) ideologically, apart from it being advantageous for them to team up against the Allies. When I think back now to so many of this book's plot points, they match up with actual items from the Bush administration so precisely to be scary; that's why I'm thinking of sitting down soon and reading this again for the first time in a decade.
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse 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. 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 |
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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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| 3.90
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Aug 09, 2008
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|||||
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| 3.74
|
really liked it
|
Oct 13, 2021
|
Aug 09, 2008
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|||||
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| 4.22
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it was ok
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Mar 02, 2020
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
|||||
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| 4.19
|
really liked it
|
May 22, 2019
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
|||||
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| 4.19
|
it was ok
|
Sep 19, 2019
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
|||||
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| 4.19
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really liked it
|
May 22, 2019
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.16
|
it was ok
|
Feb 18, 2022
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.07
|
it was ok
|
Jun 12, 2022
|
Aug 09, 2008
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|||||
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| 4.27
|
it was ok
|
Jun 2022
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
|||||
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| 4.22
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really liked it
|
May 24, 2022
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.21
|
liked it
|
May 22, 2019
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 3.99
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 3.46
|
really liked it
|
Nov 08, 2019
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 3.93
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 4.06
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 3.66
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 2008
|
Jun 20, 2008
|
|||||
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| 3.75
|
liked it
|
Mar 2008
|
Mar 14, 2008
|
|||||
|
| 3.51
|
really liked it
|
Oct 2007
|
Oct 14, 2007
|
|||||
|
| 4.19
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Jul 09, 2007
|
|||||
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| 4.17
|
it was amazing
|
May 14, 2022
|
Jul 09, 2007
|
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