Forward The Foundation - Isaac Asimov

Well, I finished the Foundation series. This book was tough to get through. It takes place before the events of the first Foundation novel, and after his previous book, Prelude to the Foundation. It focuses on Hari Seldon’s development of the ideas that led to the two Foundations, and Hari’s life on Trantor. This book sealed my new Law of Asimov Quality: The quality of a book written by Isaac Asimov is inversely proportional to the length of the book.

This book was long, and it wasn’t very good. I’ve said before that Asimov doesn’t do character-driven exposition, and this book is no different. Also, it was written in 1193, about 40 years after some of his best work. Overall, I liked the Foundation series, but I would recommend that people only read the original trilogy. I’m looking forward to reading sci-fi that is not about Hari Seldon.

Douglas Coupland - Eleanor Rigby

Eleanor Rigby is told as a memoir, written by Liz Dunn. She looks back at the point in her life when her son Jeremy came into her life. She was 36 and he was 20, and suffering from a very progressive form of Multiple Sclerosis. It also recounts the events that lead up to Jeremy’s birth and adoption. The book then jumps to the present, where Liz meets with Jeremy’s father for the first time since he was conceived. Like most of Douglas Coupland’s books, this book isn’t so much about plot as it is about capturing moments and moods, exploring concept. Though there are lots of plot points, this book is really about one woman’s loneliness, and about how her son’s life and death lifted that veil of loneliness, if only for a short period of time.

I enjoyed this book. It wasn’t one of my favourite Coupland books (those being Girlfriend In A Coma, All Families Are Psychotic, and Hey Nostradamus!), but I really felt like Liz was a real person, an every woman who you could pass on the street without noticing. I didn’t really connect with her personally, but I certainly empathized with her, and I can’t deny that I wanted to see her have a better life than she did. It was a nice break from sci-fi, though. Also, I have now read all of Douglas Coupland’s novels (except God Hates Japan, which was only published in Japan, in Japanese).

Prelude To Foundation - Isaac Asimov

Much like the last book I reviewed, Foundation And Earth, Prelude To Foundation is a dumptruck-full-of-money book. This book is a prequel to the Foundation series, and I’d like to think it was slightly better than Foundation And Earth.

This book focuses on the great Hari Seldon. Before the book begins, Seldon discovered psychohistory and presented a paper on it at a mathematical conference on Trantor, seat of the Galactic Empire, and now everybody wants him to predict a favorable future for their political faction. The only problem is that Seldon doesn’t believe there is any practical application for his new discovery. He meets with the Emperor, and tells him as much, and is about to head to his home planet when he meets with a journalist, Hummin, who advises that he is in danger due to the Emperor’s henchman, Eto Demerzel. The journalist takes Seldon under his wing, and from then the chase is on. The journalist hides Seldon in a local University and puts him under the watchful eye of Dors Venabili, a history professor at the university. After a scary situation, they are moved from sector to sector in Trantor by the journalist, always staying one half step ahead of Demerzel. It is through these adventures that Seldon learns about Galactic history and the truth of robots and Earth, and begins to have faith in the practicality of psychohistory.

This book has much the same plot structure as Foundation and Earth which I whined so eloquently about, and I won’t repeat it here. I always knew what was about to happen as far as plot twists, which took some of the fun out of the book, and was disappointed at how spineless and pliable the young Hari Seldon was. There was a romantic subplot, and it was handled with much more subtlety than the previous book, but I still wouldn’t call it good.

My verdict? Stick with the original trilogy.

Isaac Asimov - Foundation and Earth

Foundation and Earth picks up almost immediately after the events of Foundation’s Edge: Foundation councilman Golan Trevize, historian Janov Perolat and their new companion Bliss, head off in search of Earth, a mythical planet where it is suggested that human life originated. They hop from planet to planet, mostly hostile, in search for clues to the location of the planet that most people think does not even exists. That’s really the plot. Eventually, they end up on Earth and we learn what happened to it many millennia before.

This is one of the books that Asimov wrote in exchange for a dump truck full of money, and somehow it feels like he phoned it in. It wasn’t a terrible book by any extent, but at the same point, it didn’t feel like he was trying to add mystery and intrigue to the book. It felt very much like straight line the characters went in to reach Earth.

Also, I think that some time in the 1980s Issac Asimov must learned about sex, because he wrote about it quite a bit in this book. Asimov is good at many things, but should not be writing about sex. It just doesn’t fit his style, or the tone of the previous books in this series.

If you don’t feel like reading 500 pages, here is a re-creation of the book, in under 100 words:

Planet X: No, we don’t know where Earth is, but we do know about Planet A.
Foundationers: Well, let’s go to Planet A.
Planet A: No, we don’t know about Earth, but have you heard about Planets B and C?
Foundationers: Let’s try Planet B.
Planet B: GRRR! WOOF! (it was full of feral dogs)
Foundationers: Eek! Let’s go to Planet C.
Foundationers: (on planet C) hey look, there’s a carving that has the coordinates of 50 worlds. Let’s go to the first one!
Planet D: Let’s have sex! I don’t know what you’re asking us about.
Foundationers: Let’s go look at that star, it’s close to here.
Foundationers: Hey, look it’s Earth. Let’s ask that person over there what’s going on.
Earthman: Welcome to Earth. How may I help you?

Obviously, other stuff happened on the planets they visited, but it mostly felt like filler.

My verdict: Stop with the original trilogy and then read the robot books. I’m going to read the prequels, but only because we already own them.

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

American Gods tells the story of a man named Shadow and his journeys with the mysterious Mr. Wednesday. Mere days before he is set to be released from prison, his wife and best friend are killed in a car accident. On the flight back to the funeral, Shadow meets Mr. Wednesday, who seems to know everything about him before they meet. Mr. Wednesday hires Shadow as a bodyguard and errand boy, and they set off on a deeply bizarre trek through America, meeting with the forgotten and beaten down gods who came to America with the people of the old worlds who believed in them. Mr. Wednesday and Shadow’s goal is to enlist the assistance of all of the old-world gods in the war that is about to happen. The book tells the story of the lead up to the battle between the old and forgotten old-world gods and the new world gods, personified mostly as modern inventions (Internet, Telephone, Train, etc.). As gods are slowly forgotten, they lose their strength and become destitute, and they believe this turf war with the new god will save them from further decay.

My favourite section of this book was the middle part, where Shadow is stuck in a remote community in Wisconsin for the winter. I think Gaiman was able to capture both the positive and negative aspects of small town living effectively, and I thought the characters that Shadow meets in this town were not mere caricatures, but real people. Sometimes the dialog seemed a little stilted, but there wasn’t a ton of dialog, the book was mostly narrative, always from inside Shadow’s head. Also, I totally missed that Low Key == Loki until the very end.

American Gods was wonderful. It was dark and moody without being creepy, and there was a zombie and a leprechaun. What else does a good book need? I was frequently reminded while reading this book of The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul by Douglas Adams, which works with a lot of the same notions. However, this book is certainly not a comedy. With everything I read by Neil Gaiman, I become more and more interested in reading the rest of his work. Also, he was great on Colbert on Monday night, and his blog and Twitter feed are both pretty great.