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Steve's Bookshelf 2014


Karsa Orlong

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Excellent review!  Haven't heard of Morgan, but he is on my radar now, for sure.  Sounds very good.

 

Added in Edit:  Oddly enough when I visited Amazon, his later book, Woken Furies was one of my Gold Box deals..... :D

Edited by pontalba
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Thanks guys :smile:

 

 

 

Added in Edit:  Oddly enough when I visited Amazon, his later book, Woken Furies was one of my Gold Box deals..... :D

 

I think, even though it's classed as a trilogy, it's just the character that carries over from book to book, but otherwise they're standalone, so you could probably get away with reading the last one first :shrug:  I'll let you know in a few weeks  :D

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# 11

 

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

 

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1951 - Harper Voyager paperback - 234 pages

 

 

 

From Amazon:

 

Foundation marks the first of a series of tales set so far in the future that Earth is all but forgotten by humans who live throughout the galaxy. Yet all is not well with the Galactic Empire. Its vast size is crippling to it. In particular, the administrative planet, honeycombed and tunneled with offices and staff, is vulnerable to attack or breakdown. The only person willing to confront this imminent catastrophe is Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian and mathematician. Seldon can scientifically predict the future, and it doesn't look pretty: a new Dark Age is scheduled to send humanity into barbarism in 500 years. He concocts a scheme to save the knowledge of the race in an Encyclopedia Galactica. But this project will take generations to complete, and who will take up the torch after him? The first Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) won a Hugo Award in 1965 for "Best All-Time Series". It's science fiction on the grand scale; one of the classics of the field.

 

 

 

Thoughts:

 

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is a series of interconnected short stories which were originally published in the 1940’s, and then gathered together into novel form in the early 1950s.  Set many thousands of years in the future, they tell tales of a time when humanity has spread throughout the galaxy, so far and so long ago that they have forgotten Earth even exists.  

 

But the Galactic Empire is tumbling through its final years, and a man called Harry Seldon has developed a new science that claims to predict the future of large populations over vast periods of time.  He calls it ‘psychohistory’ and he has predicted the fall of the Empire, and a subsequent 30,000 years of barbarism, unless he and his Encyclopaedia Foundation can complete their task of preserving all of mankind’s history and knowledge.

 

Using psychohistory, Seldon correctly predicts, manipulates, and accommodates the fact that he and his Foundation will be banished to the edge of the galaxy, and the uninhabited planet of Terminus, where they will begin their task.

 

The five short stories included in this first volume cover a period of roughly  two centuries, with each story being told from the point of view of a major figure in the Foundation’s story, and the so-called ‘Seldon Crises’ that they face, and which he has predicted.  It’s a kicking-off point for Asimov to explore various themes from politics to religion to economics – and if that sounds a little boring, well, it isn’t, and that, I think, is down to the amazing clarity of the writing.  Asimov made complex ideas so easy to follow that the book, for the most part, is a joy to read – a huge amount of fun (there’s an underlying wit to the writing that is enjoyably subtle), very thought-provoking, and somehow quite thrilling, even though there is not a single action scene during the whole book.  In fact, each short story amounts to little more than various characters having various conversations, but it is through their dialogue that the stories evolve, and it’s so well done that I was swept along by it.

 

Of course, being written the best part of 70 years ago, there is some fallout from the attitudes of the time: all of the men smoke like chimneys and drink like fish; they talk formally; they sport moustaches and play political tennis in virtually every conversation.  This is all easy to overlook, even if it is unintentionally amusing these days, and gives the narrative a slightly stiff-upper-lip feel. 

 

But the one aspect it is difficult to overlook is that there is only one female character in the entire book, and she only has two minor scenes.  It’s almost as if the thought of women in important and/or powerful positions was something Asimov thought the future couldn’t possibly contain.  It’s somehow anachronistic, reading it now, as if his vast imagination and foresight couldn’t comprehend this most important aspect.  Get back in the kitchen, basically.  It’s summed up in one particular paragraph, when one (male) character describes how he is going to control a particular piece of technology:

 

“The small household appliances go first.  After half a year of this stalemate that you abhor, a woman’s atomic knife won’t work anymore.  Her stove begins failing.  Her washer doesn’t do a good job.  The temperature-humidity control in her house dies on a hot summer day.”

 

This annoyance aside, it’s easy to see how influential this book has been (George Lucas even nicked the capital city planet of Trantor for Coruscant in the Star Wars movies).  It’s almost as if it created its own genre, the ‘socio-political’ SF novel, moving away from more pulpy aspects (the sci-fi, if you like :P  :giggle2: ) and trying to do something altogether more thought-provoking.  I thought it was, by and large, excellent.

 

 

8/10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Thanks guys :smile:

 

 

Hope you had a great birthday! I've had Asimov's Foundation series along with tonnes of his others for a while. It sounds really interesting.

 

I managed to get the three paperbacks as a set through Amazon Marketplace for £9.50 - the cheaper option, rather than £75 for the Folio Society editions :lol:

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# 12

 

Foundation & Empire by Isaac Asimov

 

post-6588-0-97360000-1392711667_thumb.jpg

 

1952 - Harper Voyager paperback - 240 pages

 

 

From Amazon:

 

The Seldon Plan guided the First Foundation safely through two centuries of chaos as the Galactic Empire disintegrated.  But Hari Seldon had no way of predicting the birth of the Mule, a mutant of uncanny power and unlimited ambition. The Mule's conquests are effortless and his subjects mind-controlled slaves.  The Foundation is powerless against the supernormal force the Mule exerts. The Seldon Plan is in tatters. Two men and a woman from Terminus flee to the ruins of might Trantor in an effort to discover where the mysterious Second Foundation was established. Its help is needed desperately against the mental powers of the Mule. But the Mule, using those same astonishing powers, is also looking for the Second Foundation.

 

 

Thoughts:

 

I won't give too much detail on this one, as it's a sequel and a couple of people have said they are going to read them at some point.  Foundation & Empire contains two longer stories, as opposed to the five shorter ones in the first book. 

 

Beginning soon after the end of Foundation, these two stories span the next century.  I think the novella length of each gives them a bit more room to breathe, and the stories benefit from this greatly.  They are still fast-paced and full of big ideas, but the characters work better.  I wouldn't call them brilliant - it's more about the ideas than the people - but they seemed to me to be more natural.  Plus Asimov actually included a major female character who plays a vital role in the second story, so this mostly addressed the previous book's major failing, imo, although she still seems to spend some of her time in the kitchen making sandwiches :doh:

 

There are some intriguing developments in the idea of Seldon's Foundation and psychohistory.

 

 

Although mentioned in the first book, I didn't mention it in my earlier review so as not to spoil:  Seldon set up two Foundations, one at the periphery of the galaxy - the Foundation all the stories have been about so far - and a second Foundation, hidden away somewhere - nobody knows where - the mystery of which only begins to be uncovered in the latter stages of this book.

 

 

Also, these stories see quite a lot more to the narrative than the talking heads of the first book.  Although I wouldn't say there was action, as such, the inference is there, and there is much more in the way of descriptive storytelling.

 

Overall, I've found these stories exciting, but in a more thoughtful way than I would have expected.  These are tales where knowledge and intelligence win out over force and violence, and Asimov's writing is very clear, concise, and never confusing.  At one stage, around halfway through, I was thinking it might be my first 10 of the year, but this was slightly knocked down by the fact that the big 'twist' in the second story is obvious from very early on (in fact, I couldn't believe the characters didn't figure it out sooner, it's so glaring).  Fortunately there's another, far better twist in store, which I didn't see coming, but then the last five pages of the story are given over to a character explaining everything that had gone on before   - a little unnecessary! :doh:

 

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and would say it was superior to the first.  I'm moving straight on to the final book of this original trilogy.

 

 

9/10

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I doubt very much that I'll read the other books in the series, not in a hurry anyway.  Everything I've read about them says they're quite inferior to this trilogy :shrug:  I expect I'll get The Complete Robot at some point, though :smile:

 

Usually reading a whole trilogy in quick succession like this works badly for me, as my interest tends to wane, I get author burn-out etc.  But I've got so many series on the go, plus more that I want to read, I think I'm going to have to do it more to get through and finish some of them.  So I'm planning on going straight back to Richard Morgan after this, then some more Cornwell and Dresden, then I'm going to re-read Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space and finally get on to reading the rest of the books in that series.  That's the plan at the moment, anyway! :giggle2:

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Just saw that the £9.50 set of the trilogy is back on Amazon Marketplace from the same seller I got mine from, if anyone's interested :smile:

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Isaac-Asimov-Foundation-Trilogy-Empire/dp/B00DHJMVE4/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1392720907&sr=1-8&keywords=foundation+isaac+asimov

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Usually reading a whole trilogy in quick succession like this works badly for me, as my interest tends to wane, I get author burn-out etc.  But I've got so many series on the go, plus more that I want to read, I think I'm going to have to do it more to get through and finish some of them.  So I'm planning on going straight back to Richard Morgan after this, then some more Cornwell and Dresden, then I'm going to re-read Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space and finally get on to reading the rest of the books in that series.  That's the plan at the moment, anyway! :giggle2:

x

Good luck with the plan, it sounds good :)!

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