2024 reads, #38. I recently had an opportunity to re-read one of my favorite childhood books, Bertrand Brinley’s The Mad Scientists’ Club, so I though2024 reads, #38. I recently had an opportunity to re-read one of my favorite childhood books, Bertrand Brinley’s The Mad Scientists’ Club, so I thought, hey, why not? This novel is a great reminder that, even though when we look back in history and think of the kids of a certain decade primarily enjoying children’s projects of that decade, the pop culture making up a kid’s daily life actually stretches back 20 or 30 years before their birth, in that so many of a kid’s regular books, movies and TV shows enter their lives through things like garage sales, the public library, afternoon syndicated television and more; and that’s why it was one of my favorites as a pre-teen in the late 1970s, even though it was originally published in 1965, after first being published serially in the official Boy Scouts magazine Boys’ Life a few years before that. (One thing I had forgotten until re-reading it this week, in fact, is that the club of the book’s title is technically supposed to be a Boy Scouts Explorer post, which for those who don’t know is a looser organization by the BSA specifically for late teens, with posts based around specific subjects and often co-sponsored by a local business; I, for example, was in one in the early ‘80s for learning the computer programming language FORTRAN, which we did on the mainframe of our post’s sponsor, defense contractor McDonnell Douglas [where my dad worked at the time].)
It’s essentially a Mid-Century-Modernist’s wet dream, funny and clever stories about a group of teenage boys who are totally educated and up to speed on all the latest consumer electronics of their post-war age (think ham radios, motion-controlled cameras, soldering your own circuits and other 1950s Boy Scouty-like stuff), and use it all to keep themselves entertained in their sleepy small town of Mammoth Falls, adopting a healthy disrespect for stupidity (especially in authority figures) and essentially acting as a group of genteel merry pranksters, gently sticking it to the Man simply for their own amusement through such hijinx as (just to mention the very first story of the collection) building a remote-controlled papier mâché sea monster after some local goon drunkenly proclaimed one day that he’d spotted one in the local lagoon, then milking it all summer to get their town a bunch of media attention and eventually make their blowhard mayor look like an idiot.
That’s a huge selling point of these books, and what made them such a favorite of mine when around ten years old; I loved that the boys were so smart and original, and I loved that they used these smarts and originality in the name of fomenting chaos and worshipping Discordia, an early commitment to subversion that would eventually lead me as an adult to the Church of the SubGenius, the Illuminatus! Trilogy, the work of Cory Doctorow and other such transgressive cultural milestones. If you’ve never heard of these somewhat obscure children’s books, you can think of them in that spirit, gentle enough for a Boy Scouts magazine in the early ‘60s but while embracing all the smartypants cleverness of Mid-Century Modernism at its best. Long out of print, it was actually Brinley’s son who nobly found a contemporary publisher for them in the early 2000s; so now not only are the two original story collections easily available, but the standalone novel Brinley wrote about these characters (little-read because of the original publisher going bankrupt just a few months later), and a formerly unseen second novel that would’ve been published by that press if they hadn’t gone out of business. All of them are real crackers, so I recommend them strongly if you somehow got all the way through childhood without hearing of them before....more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "literary classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label
Essay #61: A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), by John Kennedy Toole
The story in a nutshell: Originally written in the 1960s, although not published until 1980 (but more on that in a bit), John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is set in the Late Modernist New Orleans of 1963, and mostly follows the ignoble adventures of one Ignatius J. Reilly, perhaps the most unpleasant "hero" in the entire history of the narrative arts -- an absurdist amalgam of The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy and The Office's Michael Scott, this morbidly obese, self-deluded intellectual is just a critical mass of smugness, hyperbole and hypocrisy, a lazy, racist, self-satisfied gadabout who believes that every human invention since literally the Renaissance has been an apocalyptic detriment to society, and is sincerely flummoxed as to why the world doesn't just naturally accept him as their moral superior as he knows he is. Or, perhaps "racist" isn't the right word for Ignatius, since it's clear that he's a champion of blacks and gays in a pre-civil-rights Deep South, albeit for his own comically twisted reasons (he's sure that he can convince them to perpetuate a lumpen/luddite revolt that will revert America back to a pre-technological society, with of course himself as their Trotskyist leader); and to be frank, the main reason to even read this book is not for the minimalist plot holding it together (Ignatius's live-in mother needs money, forcing Ignatius to ineptly hold a series of bottom-rung jobs for the first time in his life), but rather for the way it languidly and with much love explores all the dark back alleys of '60s New Orleans itself, from the crumbling go-go district to pre-Stonewall gay soirees, black slums, the mentally ill and homeless crowd that is centered around a low-class hot dog franchise, and a lot more, as our disgusting but fascinating unreliable narrator takes us on a cracked tour of it all, never understanding why the "mongoloids and whores" won't simply defer to his own unquestioned brilliance.
The argument for it being a classic: The main reason this seems to be considered a classic is from that mesmerizing real-life history I referred to before; originally written in the Kennedy years, its utter rejection by the academic world was one of the contributing factors that led to Toole's mental breakdown and eventual suicide in 1969*, with his mother of all people finding a smeared carbon copy of the manuscript in a trunk and spending years literally begging people in the publishing industry to read it, with its eventual printing in 1980 resulting in not only a huge bestseller and an immediate new touchstone in the world of Southern fiction, but even with Toole posthumously winning the Pulitzer Prize a year later. But there's an important reason that people went so crazy for it once it was out, argue its fans, besides merely its interesting history; and that's because it's a dark comic masterpiece, they claim, a work truly ahead of its time whose reflections can be seen in our current popular culture no matter where you turn, and that heralded the birth of an entirely new literary genre (the curmudgeonly, sneakily charming, self-satisfied retro-obsessed lout) which has influenced everyone from Daniel Clowes to Paul Giamatti to literally an entire wing of full-time academic authors.
The argument against: There seems to be two main arguments against this being a classic, both of them ones we've discussed in this essay series before: first, like the criticism leveled at many of the genteel writers of the Edwardian period, critics say that neither Toole nor his one adult novel have had enough of an impact on the arts in general to be considered a classic, certainly a great book but more a modern fluke than anything else, one that will quickly be forgotten once the generation that was around when it was first published (i.e. us) are eventually dead and gone; and then second, like you sometimes also see from angry online reviewers of Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, some people find the characters in A Confederacy of Dunces to be simply too repulsive to be worth reading about, an entire parade of unredeemable losers whose pathetic antics and Archie-Bunker-like casual prejudices are like fingernails on a chalkboard to some readers, making this not only a non-classic in their eyes but an abomination to be violently tossed across the room into the nearest trashcan.
My verdict: It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of so-called "anti-villain" tales, the term I came up with a few years ago for literary narrators who at first seem like quirky yet normal protagonists, but then become more and more monstrous as the story continues (for two excellent examples, see Sam Savage's Cry of the Sloth and Tod Wodicka's mindblowingly great And All Shall Be Well…); and now that I've read A Confederacy of Dunces, I realize that all these characters can be traced back to the douchbaggy master Ignatius himself, the ur-antivillain from which all the rest are merely pale copies. And so of course I not only adored this novel, but very quickly deemed it to be one of the greatest novels in history; but I also acknowledge that this is a highly personal, therefore highly biased opinion today, for a supposed "objective" series of write-ups like these CCLaP 100 essays, and that there's also a very strong and valid case to be made for this novel by despicable in some people's eyes, and for its critics to not only mildly dislike it but to hate it with a burning passion.
And indeed, even if you eventually end up loving the book yourself, admittedly there's a lot to get used to at the beginning of it that simply doesn't conform to the usual hallmarks of the three-act narrative story arc; we're not used to our novels' narrators being so thoroughly vile and detestable, certainly not used anymore to seeing racism and homophobia so openly displayed, and have been conditioned our entire lives to believe that a piece of literature isn't worth reading unless we find ourselves rooting for the main character to succeed at their quest, unless they are sympathetic enough that we care what happens to them. That's a tricky tightrope to straddle, to write a whole book about disgusting people but that makes us still compelled to find out what happens to them; but much like David Simon did with his utterly remarkable television show The Wire, Toole is a master here at making us interested in utterly unlikeable people, a comic tour-de-force that incidentally teaches us more about the coming countercultural revolution just around the historical corner than a thousand beat poets and proto-hippies all added together. Although in many ways the flash in the pan that its critics accuse it of being, in this case it's also hard to deny that A Confederacy of Dunces is a legitimate classic, if for nothing else the way its style and concepts have so thoroughly infiltrated our general culture by now, thirty years since its publication and now fifty years since its original penning.
*And by the way, despite the similarities, don't mistake this for an autobiographical novel; although the overweight Toole obviously suffered from mental problems himself, lived with his mother as an adult for a short time, and based a few of the plot developments on real experiences (for example, he once actually was a hot dog vendor who quickly ate all his profits), it's also clear that in the academic world he was a witty, popular, respected professor, in a steady relationship for most of his youth, who apparently did wicked impressions at cocktail parties, making his eventual mental breakdown and suicide even more tragic. ...more
2023 reads, #29. DID NOT FINISH. This infamous book from 1970 popped up recently in some article somewhere I was reading, and I thought it would be fu2023 reads, #29. DID NOT FINISH. This infamous book from 1970 popped up recently in some article somewhere I was reading, and I thought it would be fun to read it for the first time a full 50 years after it was originally published, to see how Toffler's predictions about how the scary future world of the 2020s actually turned out. Unfortunately, though, this is not really what the book is about; or, I should say, predictions are sprinkled into these densely packed 400 pages of small type, but the majority of it is written in a much more academic style, using the examples to motivate us to think about the bigger sociological issues going on in our "modern days" (i.e. 1970s) of "future shock," by which he means when things progress so fast in a society that it literally makes us feel ill and disoriented, much like the term "culture shock" which had come into vogue not long before this book was written, after jumbo jets suddenly let people be in an entirely new and often bizarre culture in mere hours after leaving home, instead of weeks and months like it used to take in an age before jetliners. That made this book not nearly as much fun as I thought it was going to be, and I have to confess that I got bored with its dry, fact-filled tone quite fast, literally after Chapter 2.
For what it's worth, when you read just the chapter titles, it actually looks pretty solid that he actually got a lot of his predictions right, even though they're way more general of predictions than I realized this book was made of -- that in the future, things will become so cheap that many people will just throw stuff away instead of getting it fixed, that people will be much bigger nomads who live farther and farther away from where they were raised, that businesses will not be run in the kind of strict, authoritarian hierarchies that pre-war companies like Ford were, that we'll get a lot more of our information from video than by the printed word, that there will be artificial organs to replace faulty biological ones, that entire industries will exist not to sell a product but an "experience," that the nuclear family will be only one of many valid options for a familial unit, that there will be a LOT more people with attention deficit disorder, and all kinds of other interesting predictions that sound blase to us but must've blown people's minds half a century ago when this book first came out. So, you know, if you want to read Toffler go into excruciating detail about all this, based on reams of data from the late 1960s, knock yourself out! Otherwise, you can probably just read a synopsis online to get everything you need from this fascinating volume but the literal definition of "outdated." ...more
2021 reads, #14. Stop everything! BEVERLY CLEARY HAS DIED! Like millions of others, Cleary is one of the authors I used to regularly read back in my c2021 reads, #14. Stop everything! BEVERLY CLEARY HAS DIED! Like millions of others, Cleary is one of the authors I used to regularly read back in my childhood in the 1970s; and I've been meaning to do a middle-aged reassessment of her work, much like I did with Judy Blume in 2019, so her unfortunate passing seemed as good a day as any to jump on the Chicago Public Library website and check out eight of her ebooks before everyone else could come around to the idea of doing so themselves.
First up, her very first book, 1950's Henry Huggins, which Cleary was famously inspired to write during her time as a public librarian, after listening to the neighborhood boys endlessly complain about the silly Victorian Little Lord Fauntleroy nonsense they were being forced to read at school, and asking Cleary, "Where are the books about us?" Set in Cleary's longtime hometown of Portland, Oregon (making it all the funnier that in the 21st century, the city's now mostly known for its pot-smoking indie-rock hipsters), this was the author's attempt to answer that kid's question, presenting us a flawed, dorky everyboy hero whose travails and tribulations were not of the mistaken-identity inherited fortune variety*, but more domestic adventures like the time he impulsively buys some guppies at the local pet store one day with some birthday money, the fish start breeding like...well, guppies, and Henry soon finds himself with dozens of jars lining every surface of his room and with no way to get rid of them all. (Spoiler alert: He sells them all back to the pet store, and uses his store credit to get a single catfish that won't breed in its tank.)
The book's filled with silly, fluffy stories like this, which to 21st century eyes will seem like the exact kind of innocuous, sweetly innocent pieces we would exactly expect from "chapter-book" literature designed specifically for tweens between the ages of 8 and 12; so it's remarkable to reflect that, 71 years ago when this first came out, it caused a literal revolution in children's literature, leading first to mainstream acceptance of the genre (this was the same period that the Newbery and Caldecott awards changed from obscure industry accolades to part of the national consciousness), then to the genre's maturity (The Catcher in the Rye, arguably the world's first YA novel, came out exactly one year after this book, Lord of the Flies three years after that, and Blume's first novel 15 years after that), and eventually to the genre's commercial ascendency (the first "Harry Potter" book was released almost exactly 50 years after Henry Huggins).
Those are some giant footprints for a self-admitted shy homebody like Cleary, and it's pretty remarkable that she not only caused all this to happen, but actually lived to see the entire thing. All this should be kept in mind when actually reading her books, which at least in this first case was a story I suspect modern kids will have a harder and harder time connecting to from this point forward, much like how Booth Tarkington's old "Penrod" children's stories also once used to sell in the millions and now are barely remembered. If you're ever going to read Cleary's books with an eye towards them being relatable to contemporary kids, right this second would be the time to do so, because I suspect this soon won't be the case ever again.
*And indeed, one of the aspects of this book I only appreciated here in my middle-aged reapproaching of it is that Cleary acknowledges this schism in children's literature right in the story itself, by devoting a chapter to the kids at Henry's school being forced to perform a Christmas pageant based on one of these hoary old Victorian tales, in which Henry is forced to play a pajamas-sporting five-year-old whose dialogue consists of such mortifying lines as "Good night, dearest Mother!" and "Ho hum, my am I sleepy!" This is essentially what all children's literature read like back in the late 1940s when Cleary wrote this book, and it was quite clever of her to include the reference in her own updating of the genre.
Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children'sEarlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's author Beverly Cleary that I could get my hands on, which turned out to be eight volumes spanning her entire career that I got done reviewing a little while ago (full list at the bottom of this review). But I realized that my middle-aged reassessment of Cleary would never be truly complete without revisiting the entire series of the one character I cared about as a kid way more than any other, which is our perpetually put-upon tween hero Henry Huggins. He was the protagonist of her very first book, after all, written while working as a public librarian in Portland, Oregon, and hearing little boys in there constantly complaining about the badly outdated Victorian "Little Lord Fauntleroy" nonsense constantly being crammed down their throats at school; and he would remain Cleary's "main character" from his explosive start in 1950 all the way until the mid-'70s, when as a grandmother she embraced the new wave of "young adult" writers like Judy Blume and Betsy Byars, and took her former impish devil Ramona Quimby and aged her up to a tween herself in order to write stories more emotionally revealing and bittersweet than the Huggins books earlier in her career.
But that's okay with me! I loved the Huggins books as a kid, especially that magical age between seven or eight and twelve to thirteen, and would re-read the entire six-book series seemingly every summer* (including 1950's Henry Huggins, '52's Henry and Beezus, '57's Henry and the Paper Route, '62's Henry and the Clubhouse, and '64's Ribsy). Now that I've reread them as a middle-ager, it's easy to see why, because they clearly have the same tone and spirit as Jeff Kinney's modern hit Diary of a Wimpy Kid, of tween boys acting stupid and silly and very real, but also coming to grips with some adult truths about the world for the very first time, and growing into some adult traits for the first time like natural politeness, concern for others, etc. Henry doesn't have the "stolen inheritance" adventures of Victorian children's tales, but very real adventures -- the one year he and his buddies build a clubhouse, his agony about not being old enough yet for his first summer job -- and instead of fairytale villains he has very real villains -- such as the aforementioned Ramona Quimby, seen as a hellion four-year-old in these books, a personification of Discordia who leaves a FEMA-level disaster in her wake anywhere she walks.
It's basically a genteel version of social realism, showing the great drama inherent just in these small ordinary lives here in this pleasant mid-sized city; we take it so much for granted now in children's literature, so it's a fresh shock all over again to remember how groundbreaking and controversial it was when Cleary started writing books for children in this fashion, starting just one year before JD Salinger kickstarted the Young Adult genre into existence with The Catcher in the Rye (helped immensely of course three years later with William Golding's Lord of the Flies). Cleary's Henry Huggins books are kind of like that for those readers' little brothers in fourth through sixth grade, which is what makes them still so timeless and readable to this day, especially series high point Henry and the Clubhouse which features almost a perfect blend of zany standalone stories but all of them combining into a grand finale at the very end, with a good dose of earned sentimentality too. If you take on these six books, and then the '70s more touchy-feely fellow six-book series of Ramona as a tween, you'll have pretty much read the top twelve books of her career, making the rest only really of worth to diehard completists. They come recommended in this spirit.
*Like I suspect is the case with a lot of the nerds here at Goodreads, every year of my childhood I participated in my public library's summer reading program, in which goals at home for books checked off a list was combined with live social events at the library's large back field, and that this combination of indoor and outdoor activities makes up a giant sweet spot of my fond memories of my tween years (whatever ones I can still remember here in my fifties, anyway). I always went for the biggest goal you could get, which was something ridiculous like 30 books in the 15 weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day; but the only way I could get to that number by the end of the summer was to re-read a certain amount of books I was already familiar with, which is how I ended up re-reading the entire Huggins series every summer, a lot of Judy Blume books every summer, the "Mad Scientist Club" books every summer, etc. I was actually reading them again from cover to cover, so I suppose technically that counts!
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote
Currently in the challenge: Martin AmisTHE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote
Currently in the challenge: Martin Amis | Isaac Asimov (Robot/Empire/Foundation) | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Philip K Dick | Daphne Du Maurier | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse
Eek, I just realized I never actually wrote my reviews of the first two books in this series! Oh well, I guess I need to do so here, then post this extra-long review to all three book pages...
For those who don't know, Isaac Asimov first got famous in the 1950s from three different novel series that at first seemed to have nothing to do with each other: the "Robot" novels, set in a moderately near future in which humans are first colonizing the galaxy, using an explosion of robots for the task and not quite sure how to think about it; the "Empire" novels, set of thousands of years later, in which a now scattered humanity has coalesced into a single galaxial empire full of intrigue (one of the first book series to inspire the term "space opera"); and the "Foundation" novels, set thousands of years after that, in which a brilliant math-based sociologist comes to realize that this galaxial empire is about to crumble, and sets secret plans in motion to ensure that humanity survives and is able to re-organize afterwards. Each of these series originally had three books in them apiece (plus a book of day-after-tomorrow "Robot" short stories), which is how it remained for decades; but then in the 1980s, as Asimov neared the end of his life, he realized that with a few well-placed bridging novels he could actually link these ten books into one coherent and pervasive 10,000-year history of the human race, which is what prompted him to crank out another five novels that decade to now expand this "mega-series" into 15 books*.
[*This is not counting the three "Inferno" robot novels from the 1990s, which Asimov had been sketching out as his next project before dying, and subsequently were written out from his notes by Roger MacBride Allen; and it's worth noting that an entire cottage industry has popped up since his death for novels by other authors set in this massive pervasive universe, endorsed and sometimes commissioned by Asimov's estate, including two more Foundation books and another 11 robot novels. Whew!]
I've read maybe two-thirds of these books already, scattered over the years in a random order, but I thought it'd be fun to finally read them all in the chronological order of the events themselves, which means hopping back and forth between the '50s books and the '80s books on a regular basis. I started with the "Robot" stories, which for many years was collected into a single book known as I, Robot, but then expanded in the '80s into the newly titled The Complete Robot. They were generally like I remembered them being, although I have to confess that early Asimov isn't holding up well at all as we get ready here to enter the 2020s, a kind of shiny optimistic Mid-Century Modernist approach to science-fiction that seemed fine if not a little dated when I was a teen in the '80s myself, but that in the 35 years since then (and the now 70 years since they were first written) often seems hopelessly outdated to the point of historical curiosity instead of contemporary pleasure read. These '40s and '50s stories seem to be most remarkable now for what Asimov missed about the future than what he got right, or for the ways that the standards and more of his own times bleed into these fantastical stories; they're set in a world where people can travel between planets but smoke unfiltered cigarettes the entire way, where women can build robots but are still non-ironically criticized for their "crazy hormonal mood swings," where computers are still the size of rooms and are still operated through thousands of mechanical switches. (In fact, one of the most telling stories here is the one where humans direct an artificially intelligent computer to build a cutting-edge spaceship on their behalf, then are convinced that the computer has malfunctioned when it builds a ship whose bridge contains only a single plasma screen to run the entire thing.)
Thankfully, though, the later Robot novels continue to hold up a lot better; and that's mainly because Asimov made the decision to write them as traditional murder mysteries, only set in a futuristic world where a hard-edged cop gets partnered with a bleeding-edge human-looking robot, giving Asimov plenty of opportunities to obliquely look at the robot-filled universe where the stories take place, as well as build up an impressive history of this universe-building that would ultimately end up informing the rest of the series after them. The first, The Caves of Steel, is set at a time when humanity has basically broken up into two subsects -- there are the "Spacers," who have embraced robots as a means of expanding into roughly 50 other planets, and then the remaining Earthlings, who treat robots with contempt and fear, but whose planet has become so overcrowded as a result that humanity now lives in giant megacities that burrow miles underneath the planet's crust, forcing most humans to have crippling agoraphobia because of never spending even a single moment anymore on the planet's surface. We follow one of these harried molemen Earthlings, police detective Elijah Baley, as he investigates the murder of a Spacer ambassador, and is unwillingly assigned as his partner a Spacer robot named R. Daneel Olivaw, the latest model in a largely unknown new series of robots that look and act almost exactly like flesh-and-blood humans. Then in the second novel, The Naked Sun, the action moves to an almost opposite situation -- the Spacer planet Solaria, which houses a population of only 20,000 people, making each citizen essentially the sole master of their own individual city-state maintained by thousands of robots, but who have a crippling fear of being in the same room as any other biological creature.
Just like the Robot short stories, the Robot novels have to be taken with a grain of salt, and forgiven for their 1950s literary crimes if they're to be enjoyed at all; and it's also important to remember that they both originally ran serially in science-fiction pulp magazines before being collected as books, which tends to make each chapter end on an overly melodramatic cliffhanger note, just to be immediately resolved in the first paragraph of the next chapter. But still, these are loads better than the short stories which started the series, still enjoyable as contemporary reads as long as you squint a little and are tolerant of their clunky bits. And most importantly, Asimov is very clever here at setting up what he wants the main message of the entire series to be, simply by making little side comments here and there throughout their page counts; that humanity is doomed by taking either the Earth attitude or the Solaria one, that we as a species need to embrace not only technology but also good old-fashioned human effort and fellowship, to use robots to ease the backbreaking menial work of terraforming but not let them usurp our ability to think and innovate. Asimov would expand on this theory in the third Robot novel, then use the concept as the basis for the background of the Empire and Foundation novels (basically, the idea that the original 50 Spacer worlds eventually died out through inertia, while the humans of Earth eventually abandoned the planet altogether in order to populate the entire rest of the galaxy). But more on this when I review The Robots of Dawn next month.
Isaac Asimov books now reviewed: I, Robot | The Caves of Steel...more
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.