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0553293435
| 9780553293432
| 0553293435
| 3.74
| 25,774
| 1951
| Dec 01, 1991
|
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
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
B0DLT6DQFK
| 4.19
| 109,846
| Oct 1953
| 1997
|
really liked it
|
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 |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
May 22, 2019
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
0553803727
| 9780553803723
| 0553803727
| 4.22
| 221,336
| Apr 1952
| Jun 01, 2004
|
really liked it
|
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 |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
May 24, 2022
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0553803700
| 9780553803709
| 0553803700
| 4.21
| 371,300
| Dec 02, 1950
| Jun 2004
|
liked it
|
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 |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
May 22, 2019
|
Aug 09, 2008
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0316769177
| 9780316769174
| 0316769177
| 3.80
| 3,815,299
| Jul 16, 1951
| Jan 30, 2001
|
really liked it
|
(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 "classics" for the first time, then write reports on whether they deserve the label Review #10: The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger (1951) The story in a nutshell: Not so much of a traditional plot-based story, The Catcher in the Rye is instead a look at a 48-hour block in the life of an American teen named Holden Caulfield, a skinny and obnoxious kid who comes from a generally comfortable, decent family on the east coast, but who for some reason just seemingly can't get along with anyone or fit in anywhere. In fact, as the novel opens, Holden has just gotten kicked out of yet another private prep school; it is right before holiday, in fact, with his family expecting him home in two days anyway, so he's decided to just hoof it around the New York area for the next 48 hours and spend some time thinking about his life. As a result, not much of note actually happens to Holden over the next two days -- he visits an old teacher he doesn't like very much, invites an ex-girlfriend he doesn't like very much to go traveling with him, eventually ends up in Manhattan, then back at his parents' place, and then finally an amusement park while entertaining his little sister. The main point of the book, then, is to try to understand Holden as a character and deeply flawed human; to watch the way he looks at life, to notice the way he idolizes his older brother, out in Hollywood and making a living as a screenwriter. Holden is both restless and old-fashioned, tender and cruel, someone who is sometimes blurting out uncomfortable truths and sometimes lying right to your face. And by the time we're done, hopefully we've learned something not only about him in particular but about teens in general, and especially the sense of alienation and standoffishness that comes to so many at that age no matter when in history we're talking about. The argument for it being a classic: The argument for this being a classic is a clean and simple one -- it is demonstrably the very first book in history to establish the "confessional young adult" genre, one that has grown in our modern times to accommodate tens of thousands of books and millions of grateful teen fans. Before Catcher in the Rye, its fans say, there were only two types of stories considered appropriate for younger readers -- either moralistic tales that very sternly taught right from wrong, or the kind of psuedo-science babble mysteries like I was mentioning last week, when I was reviewing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Salinger was the very first person to publish a book about a teen written from the teen's point of view himself, a very raw point of view that contains sex, filth, cursing galore, and all the other prurient stuff that comes with peeking inside a 16-year-old boy's head; it was a breakthrough of the Modernist era, fans claim, one of those seminal projects that broke the ground for all the naturalistic books and films in the '50s, '60s and '70s that came afterwards. Oh, and if this weren't enough, it just also happens to be the most censored book in the history of the United States, as well as a personal favorite of both Mark David Chapman (who killed John Lennon) and John Hinckley Jr (who shot Ronald Reagan); these facts alone almost guarantee it a spot on any list of classics. The argument against: The main argument against this being a classic seems to be that it's become a victim of its own success; indeed, Catcher in the Rye has been so influential over the decades, its critics say, an entire genre of "Salingeresque" work now exists (which like I said is more formally known as "confessional young adult"), many books of which are actually much better than the original that started them all. After all, let's admit it, Catcher in the Rye has its problems, ones typical of any young and inexperienced writer (which Salinger was when first penning this); just as one good example, there are only so many times you can use the word 'g-ddam' in one story before it becomes a self-parodying joke. Like many of the books being reviewed in this essay series, I don't think there's a single human out there who would deny this novel's historical importance; but that's not what we're trying to determine here with the CCLaP 100, but rather whether it's a book you personally should read before you die. My verdict: So imagine my shock when I found myself finishing this book and saying to myself, "My God -- JD Salinger is basically Judy Blume with more cursing." (Or to be completely fair, I guess that should be worded -- "My God, Judy Blume is basically JD Salinger with Jews and menstruation.") I guess I had been expecting a lot more, given what a supernaturally high regard this book has among such a large swath of the general population; I was expecting it to not only be a good Young Adult novel (which it admittedly is) but also something that was going to reveal some sort of transcendent truth about the world to me as a fully-grown adult. Er...it doesn't. This is just a good Young Adult novel, and you owe it to yourself to know that going into it; that unless you're a teen yourself when you read it, there really isn't going to be anything too terribly original or groundbreaking found in this manuscript. In fact, you could argue that Salinger was quite smart to basically wall himself off from the press and general public after this book, and never publish again (he's still alive, by the way, for those who don't know, reputedly living a happy and quiet life somewhere on the Atlantic Seaboard); because ultimately this is not a great book but simply a good one, eventually made legendary because of the time period it was published, and the subsequent reclusive career that Salinger has had. Its overwhelming historical significance I think earns it a place on the classics list, plus the fact that it's not actually a bad book at all; it's just that this is a kind of book that adults have already read many times before, especially if you were a fan of such authors as Betsy Byars when you were a teen yourself. Is it a classic? I suppose ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Mar 2008
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Mar 21, 2008
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Paperback
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4.20
| 5,263,094
| Jun 08, 1949
| Jul 01, 1950
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it was amazing
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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.
...more
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not set
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not set
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Jul 09, 2007
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Mass Market Paperback
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0452011876
| 9780452011878
| 0452011876
| 3.69
| 403,502
| Oct 10, 1957
| Aug 01, 1999
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liked it
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Would you like to hear the only joke I've ever written? Q: "How many Objectivists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" A: (Pause, then disdainfully)
Would you like to hear the only joke I've ever written? Q: "How many Objectivists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" A: (Pause, then disdainfully) "Uh...one!" And thus it is that so many of us have such a complicated relationship with the work of Ayn Rand; unabashed admirers at the age of 19, unabashedly horrified by 25, after hanging out with some actual Objectivists and witnessing what a--holes they actually are, and also realizing that Rand and her cronies were one of the guiltiest parties when it came to the 1950s "Red Scare" here in America. Here in Rand's second massive manifesto-slash-novel, we follow the stories of a number of Titans of the Industrial Age -- the big, powerful white males who built the railroad industry, the big, powerful white males who built the electrical utility companies -- as well as a thinly-veiled Roosevelt New Deal administration whose every attempt to regulate these Titans, according to Rand, is tantamount evil-wise to killing and eating babies, even when it's child labor laws they are ironically passing. Ultimately it's easy to see in novels like this one why Rand is so perfect for late teenagers, but why she elicits eye rolls by one's mid-twenties; because Objectivism is all about BEING RIGHT, and DROPPING OUT IF OTHERS CAN'T UNDERSTAND THAT, and LET 'EM ALL GO TO HELL AS FAR AS I'M CONCERNED, without ever taking into account the unending amount of compromise and cooperation and sometimes sheer altruism that actually makes the world work. Recommended, but with a caveat; that you read it before you're old enough to know better.
...more
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Jul 09, 2007
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0553803719
| 9780553803716
| 0553803719
| 4.17
| 583,319
| Aug 30, 1951
| Jun 01, 2004
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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 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 |
Notes are private!
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May 14, 2022
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Jul 09, 2007
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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3.74
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really liked it
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Oct 13, 2021
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Aug 09, 2008
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4.19
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really liked it
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May 22, 2019
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Aug 09, 2008
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4.22
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really liked it
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May 24, 2022
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Aug 09, 2008
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4.21
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liked it
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May 22, 2019
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Aug 09, 2008
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3.80
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really liked it
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Mar 2008
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Mar 21, 2008
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4.20
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it was amazing
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not set
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Jul 09, 2007
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3.69
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liked it
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not set
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Jul 09, 2007
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4.17
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it was amazing
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May 14, 2022
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Jul 09, 2007
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