Category Archives: Readings

On the heels of finishing SyFy’s Childhood’s End, I also managed to get through a novel: Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest Vorkosigan book, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. I absolutely love Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga; I think it is one of the greatest works of science fiction, up there with Herbert’s Dune, Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, and Brin’s Uplift Saga. However, it is a very different type of story from those other series above; while the above stories are all about meaning and grand-scale, universe-shattering changes, Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga is much more modest in terms of astral scale, but it more than makes up for it in its deep probing of social questions and development of characters. Her accounts of the interaction between a backwards, feudal society and the technologies of the more advanced universe are a joy to read and extremely thought-provoking, in particular the way in which she explores the gradual granting of autonomy to women’s bodies, and the forces that resist this.

Of course, the series itself also develops several of science fiction’s most memorable characters, from Piotr, Aral, Mark and (the titular) Miles Vorkosigan, to Simon Illyan, Ivan Vorpatril, Bel Thorne, Elli Quinn, and Ky Tung, and of course, to Cordelia Vorkosigan (nee Naismith). I had no idea what to expect from this book from the title, which is neatly vague, but was pleased to see a return to focus on Cordelia, a galactic stranded in the backwards Barrayaran Empire for love. Yet, Cordelia manages to avoid falling into the woman-who-does-anything-for-her-man trope, while still being able to love deeply. It is Cordelia’s love and love-life that make for the focus of this book, which is also the latest chronologically in the series.

Not much goes on in the book, until a sort of very short climax at the very end. This was surprising, given the relatively action-packed rest of the series (which, I should mention, also slowly changes genre, from military science fiction to political commentary to romance, while always having elements of all three), but in no way diminished it; despite the lack of a real plot, I was hooked from the first chapter. Bujold has an amazing ability to draw characters, and these characters I already knew well. While most Vorkosigan books can, I think, be enjoyed on their own without having read others, this one is full of enough references that you really need to have read almost all of the rest of the series to enjoy.

There is also surprisingly little of the series’ central character, Miles, who the series for the most part follows from childhood to old adult, in favor of his mother; a nice return to the old Shards of Honor and Barrayar stories (with plenty of references to the former!). It was fascinating to see Miles (grown Miles) from the point of view of someone who is smarter than him, which was a welcome viewpoint and helped expose some of Miles’ vulnerabilities that don’t come across as much when he is the center of attention. The book itself takes place on the Barrayaran colony world Sergyar (which Cordelia helped discover), and deals with Cordelia and a close friend, Admiral Jole, dealing with the aftermath of the death of Cordelia’s husband and Jole’s mentor. The story deals with the pair of them (re)-finding each other while trying to manage an expanding colony, and reveals a lot of surprising facts about the past relationship between Cordelia, Jole, and the late Aral Vorkosigan. The introduction of Jole – an entirely new character as far as I can recall – was a bit clunky at first, and I never felt he really developed much, but the discussion of the relationship between the three of them, and its evolution (despite one of them being dead!) was very moving and, as always with Bujold, thought-provoking. Though nothing happens, the book still somehow remains a page-turner due to Bujold’s great gift with the pen (or rather, the keyboard). Though not what I was expecting, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen was still a joy to read!

I read Joe Haldeman’s most famous novel, The Forever War, in only a little more than twenty-four hours. That alone speaks volumes about the work, which isn’t a long novel, but it isn’t short either.

I read this book right after having read Neuromancer (which I had some problems with, as this review shows), and so The Forever War was like a breath of fresh air. Like Neuromancer, it was extremely fast paced, but in an entirely different way. The chapters were very short (like in Neuromancer), but the book was mostly description, but description done so artfully that it was enough to move along the plot on its own, even in lieu of character interactions. Of course, there was plenty of dialogue and a lot of character interactions, but the description and narrative in The Forever War really stood out, and (unlike Neuromancer), made it incredibly easy to follow – and thus I was able to think more about the themes and ideas it brought up.

The novel is clearly about the Vietnam War, which the author has himself admitted. At its most basic, The Forever War is about a man drafted into a war against an unknown enemy, who it (rather predictably) turns out had been misunderstood from the very beginning (the ending of the novel was its weakest point by far; I won’t say anything more here, but it was weird, in a sort of cliched way, and I don’t think Haldeman came up with the cliche himself).

So, the novel is a war novel. However, it is a novel about war with surprisingly little combat; only two ground operations and one space battle are actually part of the narrative, and the rest of the combat is implied. However, the book isn’t so much about combat against aliens (with commentaries on first-contact and the nature of humanity thrown in at the end as an afterthought), but rather about the effects of war on two levels: the individual and the social.

Both of these effects are interwoven by following one man – William Mandella – as he is drafted into the human army to fight the mysterious, threatening “Tauran” foes, as he goes from trainee to Major. However, what is unique about this “Forever War” – which lasts, in the end, over a thousand years – is that it is a war across star systems affected hugely by relativity. Ships go so quickly between star systems through “collapsars” at enormous speeds, and so while little time passes on the ships, many years pass in the outside world. This has enormous effects on individuals involved in the war, as they go to complete one combat mission and return home decades later, to find that the world they came from is not what it used to be. In The Forever War, the first return home reveals Earth has become a dystopia, its economy and political system entirely dependent on the war, and is rife with violence. Throughout the novel, as the main character ages much more slowly than the rest of human kind (and ultimately survives the whole war), we get glimpses of how society is changes through his interaction with new recruits, including a period where heterosexuality becomes a dysfunction and, at the end of the war, one of the strangest visions of advanced humanity I have yet read about.

We also see the effect the war has on him, not only through fighting Taurans, being hypnotically conditioned, surviving brutal training, and becoming a high-ranking officer, but through the people he loses, both in the war and just be aging so slowly due to relativity. The effect of the war on the individual is extremely powerful, and the centerpiece of the novel.

What is also interesting is Haldeman’s vision of how the war is fought when relativity is taken into account. The war lasts a thousand years, and due to the time lag due to relativistic travel, one is never sure what level of technology the enemy you meet at any system is; you could be fighting Taurans armed with advanced technology you’ve never seen before, or Taurans even weaker than the ones you had just fought. As someone says of the Earth military high command, they plan “in centuries,” which is necessary due to the time dilations experiences by soldiers during the war.

The book is never slow, and though at times it has immersion breaking moments where you think “that’s odd” (such as the first return to Earth and the strange, somewhat troubling role of semi-forced sex in themilitary), it is definitely a worthwhile read and, I think, one of the best science fiction novels I’ve had the pleasure to read.

On June 29th, I Tweeted my (very brief) thoughts about my current reading project, Neuromancer, and mentioned that it hadn’t been what I had been expecting, and got seven retweets. For someone who is lucky to get a single retweet, I was surprised at the (relatively high) response to this one Tweet with almost no content. Clearly (in my psuedo-scientific analysis of one Tweet), #Neuromancer is important to the denizens of the Internet, and discussion about it catches peoples’ attention. This is not surprising, given how important Neuromancer‘s conceptualization of the Internet – before the Internet was even a thing – has been to the actual development of the Internet.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer is considered by many to be the seminal work in the cyberpunk genre. While it certainly did not found the genre, it is likely responsible for the genre’s rise in popularity, as well as its consolidation as a unique area of science fiction. The novel also was the first winner of the science fiction “triple crown,” winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards. As such, I went into reading this book with very high expectations.

I was both disappointed and impressed.

When thinking about and evaluating Neuromancer, I was forced to do so on two levels: Neuromancer as I read it today, and Neuromancer as I would have read it when it was published. My two evaluations at these levels are very different.

Had I read the novel when it was published, I would have been blown away, as many people at the time clearly were, given its reception, its spawning two sequels (into the Sprawl trilogy), and a whole literary genre. Reading the novel now, though, I was underwhelmed.

Neuromancer depicts a future society (presumably even after the current day), in which human society is becoming increasingly cyberized, has colonized Earth’s orbit, and is also increasingly run by huge multinational corporations. This is an incredibly rich playground (I sort of play around with it myself, particularly in my work on parts of Dreadship Omnipotence), but Gibson does not use it to its fullest extent in Neuromancer (though he very well might in the other books of the Sprawl trilogy). Instead, he focuses in on a very small cast of characters, and their manipulation by and struggle to free a rebellious Artificial Intelligence from the chains that prevent it from becoming all-powerful.

The character Gibson follows are members of a small strikeforce brought together by a mysterious man to do a hacking job on an artificial intelligence, a notoriously dangerous task that could kill everyone involved. The central figure is Case, a hacker whose ability to link into/jack into the net has just been restored. He is supported primarily by Molly, a “razorgirl” who is essentially a cyborg commando (think Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell, but with extendable blades in her fingers) who takes care of whatever analog work has to be done to complement Case’s hacking.

The content and ideas of Neuromancer are extremely well-developed, especially for its time. Gibson’s conceptualization of the global Internet, especially in the way he describes Case’s hacking in terms of visualizations of geometric shapes changing color and shape, is breathtaking and thought provoking. He gives the Internet a personality, and he lays out the groundwork for a very interesting cyberculture attached to it, as well as to the dark side of cybercorporate rule on the streets of Chiba City and the Sprawl.

I say “groundwork” here because it emphasizes what I liked least about Neuromancer, and that was the lack of a full exploration of the world and characters. There is nothing wrong with Molly and Case as characters, and they seem real enough (though there are a few ‘what the hell’ moments, such as the first sex scene), but they just aren’t as explored as well as they could have been. The exploration of the setting – which is utterly fascinating – is even less developed, and you only catch glimpses of the strange, cyberpunk world of the future.

I think the culprit for these weaknesses is my other criticism of Gibson’s masterpiece, and that is his writing. His ideas are brilliant, if underdeveloped (which is fine for one of the earlier works in the genre that laid the groundwork for other works to come). However, the way in which he presents these ideas is severely limited due to the way in which the book was written. The book is incredibly fast-paced, with short chapters, and short sections within chapters. Description is kept to a minimum, and the majority of the text is either dialogue (which I loved) or else internal monologues (which I found annoying). However, the dialogue does not reveal very much about the world (or, really, the characters), and serves mostly just to move the plot along. A focus on the plot is good, as it keeps things moving, but in the case of Neuromancer, I felt there was too much focus on the plot, and it worked to the detriment of world-building and character creation.

This was compounded by the very fractured nature of the writing. There were lots of sentence fragments and short sentences; they were very to the point, but for me they were also somewhat immersion breaking (though one could argue that the writing style was meant to be evocative of the world Gibson was creating). The descriptions, when they were there, were also very sparse, and a lot was left up to the reader’s imagination; in my opinion, a bit too much. It took my fifty pages to figure out what was going on, as I was thrown without mercy into a world of slang and jargon that would have been incomprehensible for even longer had I not been familiar with some science fiction and cyberpunk tropes. While I applaud his complete lack of exposition, the lack of any sort of explanatory text was difficult for me to handle – though perhaps that speaks more about me as a reader than about him as an author.

Overall, though, Neuromancer was an enjoyable read, and I would recommend it, but with the caveat to prepare to be confused at first, and not to expect any clear answers – but then, when has society ever given us a clear answer?

I emerge once more from the void to regale you all, my dear readers (however few you may be!), with tales of my latest literary conquests! Or, in this case, literary conquest (it turns out it’s hard to find time to read fiction when you’re studying for a preliminary exam for your PhD program at the end of the summer and are working on papers for two conferences at the end of August… eep!).

The aforementioned literary conquest is none other than Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. This is the third LeGuin novel I’ve read, after (relatively) recently finishing The Dispossessed (which I loved) and The Word for World is Forest, which I read a while ago but I still find to me one of the most thought-provoking and evocative works of science fiction I have ever had the pleasure to read.

It was thus with great enthusiasm that I dove into The Left Hand of Darkness… and was immediately disappointed. Not because it was bad – by no means was it a bad novel – but because it felt like work. In my non-writer alternate life (which I am going to pretend is my secondary one, despite it taking up all of my time), I study sociology, which has recently consisted of reading a fair bit of ethnographies. Having been raised by anthropologists, LeGuin is extremely good at evoking the feel of an ethnography in this novel, which is actually framed as a fictional ethnography from the future. She is so good at it, in fact, that it actually felt like I was doing work by reading it. I found it at the beginning to be slow and cumbersome, full of ethnographic conventions and commentary that made me feel like I wasn’t reading for pleasure, but for work (when I was, in theory, reading for pleasure).

As such, it took me a long time to make substantial progress. However, I am extremely glad I did, for this novel was well worth the trudging! Most people I don’t think will have the same trouble I did with the opening of the novel, and so might breeze through it. After the first few chapters, the ethnographic tone became much less prevalent, and I again felt like I was reading a novel, and was utterly drawn into her world.

LeGuin is a master of worldbuilding – or more specifically, of society-building. We can see this in the hyper-capitalist and anarcho-communist societies in The Dispossessed, and in the indigenous and colonial cultures in The Word for World is Forest. Like these other works, the world of The Left Hand of Darkness is explored through a culture clash, and what defines and undermines the differences between these cultures is gender.

The story chronicles the journeys of Genly Ai (who, it is covertly slipped in, is a Terran of African descent), an envoy from the Ekumen, a huge interstellar organization of human-types, as he attempts to bring a newly discovered planet of humanoids, Gethen (or Winter), into this organization. In order to do this, he needs to convince the world that it is ready for this integration with the larger universe, and help ease its transition. He goes down alone in order to learn all he can about the planet and slowly work the planet so that it can accept its place among the stars.

Genly is the audience (or readers), and coming from Terra/Earth, embodies many of the cultural beliefs and assumptions that many humans have about society and norms. On the world of Gethen, there is no distinction between male and female, as Gethenians spend most of their time as sexless humans, and once a month become biologically able to engage in intercourse, and their sex at that time is determined by hormone levels that react to those near them.

LeGuin then explores that a sexless society would look like, through the eyes of a typical, male Terran. There is no gender on Gethen, which makes Genly extremely uncomfortable, and which makes Genly’s gender uncomfortable for Gethenians to deal with. The interaction between these two societies is primarily shown through the friendship of Ai with a Gethenian named Estraven, as they wade through the mess of Gethenian politics and get caught in a bitter struggle between two rival nations. This friendship – and the way it ebbs and flows – is one of the most powerful parts of the book, and ultimately is what kept me reading.

However, what is most thought-provoking is LeGuin’s depiction of a genderless society. Sex is not a constant drive or urge. There is no gender, and so there is no sexism. The philosophy of Gethen is entirely different from that of Earth, religion is entirely different as well, and most interestingly, there is no war.

Despite my slow start, The Left Hand of Darkness is definitely worth reading. I still prefer The Dispossessed and The Word for World is Forest, but it is easy to see why The Left Hand of Darkness is as influential as it is!

It’s been a while since I updated my readers (few and far between though you are!) on my reading list (or much else, for that matter). I have, of late, been tearing through Terry Pratchett novels (rest in peace, Sir Terry), which are as brilliant, witty, and insightful as always (though I must admit, Unseen Academicals disappointed me; it started so strong and went in a direction I was ambivalent about; I think there weren’t enough wizards in it, in the end). I also, a while ago, made it through two more science fiction “classics” written by authors at opposite ends of the political spectrum: Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love, and Ursula K LeGuin’s The Dispossessed.

Heinlein’s novel is really a collection of short stories linked together in varying ways. Some of these short stories are told by one of Heinlein’s recurring characters, the inestimable Lazarus Long/Woodrow Wilson Smith, while others chart Long’s “present day” situation. The stories range from the charming (“The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail”) to the annoyingly technical (“The Tale of the Twins Who Weren’t”), to the somewhat… unsettling (“The Tale of the Adopted Daughter”) to the bizarre (“De Capo”) to the thought-provoking (“Boondock”). Scattered throughout these stories are collections of Lazarus Long’s ‘sayings,’ some of which were amusing, some sensible, and most were annoying to someone who did not share his particular political beliefs.

As was the case with Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein’s work here focuses on sex, and particularly what people today would consider somewhat transgressive sex. Heinlein was a vocal proponent of free love, and his treatment of open sexual/familial relationships was thought-provoking in “The Boondocks,” even if the early sexualization of his clones was slightly off-putting. However, in “The Tale of the Adopted Daughter” Lazarus (a thinly-veiled stand-in for the author) sleeps with his adopted daughter, and in “The Tale of the Twins Who Weren’t” there is brother/sister-like sex (it’s a bit more complex than that, though). In the series’ finale, Long also infamously falls in love with and sleeps with his mother. Somewhat taboo subjects, some of which I will admit made me squirm, but I am glad that Heinlein made me do that and question by own thoughts about human sexuality. Kudos to him for that.

Overall, the collection was uneven; some stories were slow-paced or boring, including most of the “current day” stories, while others were much more engaging and really drew me in. Throughout, however, the writing was brilliant; I read this book right after a lot of Asimov, so I appreciated the flowing writing.

LeGuin’s The Dispossessed was almost perfect. While Heinlein deals with free love, she deals with free people – sort of. In her short novel (a part of the larger Hainish cycle), there is a planet and a moon: the planet (Urras) is a reflection of contemporary Earthly society, and consists of various nations dominated by a capitalist logic, while the moon is inhabited by anarcho-communist rebels, given the moon (Anarres) to settle as part of a deal with the larger governments on the planet. The story follows a brilliant physicist named Shevek from the resource-poor moon Anarres who travels to Urras in the name of science, only to discover the good and the bad of this alien society, having grown up without the idea of property.

What makes this novel work is the comparison between the two planets. The work is structured in alternating chapters, one detailing Shevek’s coming of age on Anarres, and one detailing his adventures on Urras, with the two meeting up in time in the final chapter. The two different timelines complement each other beautifully, and thoughtfully portray the culture shock of this switch, as well as how political power functions in a capitalist society, and in an anarchist one. Neither planet and neither society is a utopia (though LeGuin clearly favors the anarchist society, and I am inclined to agree). Even the theoretically utopian anarchist society has its problems in the form of pseudo-states and social vagrants.

The most interesting thing about the novel to me, though, was the language. On Anarres, there is no property, and the language used reflects this. For example, individuals never say “my handkerchief,” but “the handkerchief I use.” The author also made a nice distinction between property and personal possessions in the vein of Communist theory, which was appreciated.

The only thing that prevented it from being perfect was the ending, which felt like a cop-out with the Terrans and Hainish keeping Shevek’s science from being used for political gain in a deus ex machina. That being said, the ending didn’t ruin the novel, but made it less than it could have been.

I am now making my way through LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness, but am having trouble with it because it reads like an ethnography (not surprising given that LeGuin was raised by anthropologists), so it feels like homework to me!

But until next time, ta-ta!

In between getting ready to head back to another semester of graduate studies and working on The Eldritch Wastes, I’ve managed to get a little bit of reading for pleasure done! My latest literary conquest has been Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a book I’ve been meaning to get around to reading for a while now. I’ve been a long-time follower of Neil Gaiman online, including on Twitter and Facebook, and I enjoy reading his writing tips and journal, but other than his brilliant I, Cthulhu, until recently I had not read any of his fiction work. I was first introduced to Mr. Gaiman as a conspirator involved in some of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (their collaborations, I regret to say, I have not read either), and ever since learning of this I have intended to read Gaiman’s solo work (aside from his work in the comics arena). Alas, until now, I have not gotten around to it.

So, when at the library a few weeks back, I picked up American Gods, as it seems to be Gaiman’s most well-known novel. My father warned me against reading it, but I did anyway, because I do things like that. I’m still trying to decide if I’m glad I did.

Don’t get me wrong; American Gods was (and still is) a beautifully written book. What this comes down to is a question of personal preference. While the novel was very well-crafted, it didn’t do much for me as a reader.

The basic idea is that an ex-convict named Shadow (an odd name, especially because you aren’t given another name for him) is released from prison only to find that everything (and everyone) from his former life are gone or dead. He quickly gets a job offer from a “Mr. Wednesday” that amounts to being his assistant while he goes around the US rallying the old gods immigrants brought to the country to fight against the new gods of media, internet, and the like. Scattered among this “main” storyline were lots of little vignettes illustrating the passages of various gods across the Atlantic (or Pacific). These vignettes were my favorite part of the book, but also distracted somewhat from the main storyline; I can see that they were meant to give more context and weight to what was going on, but for me they didn’t work; they functioned more like independent short stories to me.

The novel’s cast, aside from Shadow and his (dead) wife, consist mostly of gods and the inhabitants of a small wintry town Shadow lives in between trips with Mr. Wednesday. The town Gaiman created had a lot of character, and I feel like a whole other novel could have been written just about what was going on there, and it would have been good. Alas, we don’t get that, and instead what the book does is present us with a travelogue of sorts across the United States. All of the locations (and associated gods) were so briefly explored, however, that I left wanting to more and was never satisfied. As a result of the semi-disconnected nature of the main plot and the vignettes, I never grew attached to the characters and the novel seemed unfocused.

My other major quibble with the novel was the metaphysics behind the existence of the gods. world-building is always the most important thing to me, and never knowing what was going on – but feeling like I should know what was going on – bothered me throughout reading the novel. Something also just didn’t click about how the gods worked; Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather tackled the god who is sustained on belief model better than Gaiman did, I think.

That all being said, the writing was brilliant, and the characters, though most appear only briefly, were golden and accurately reflected the myths surrounding the gods. More than one joke or well-placed one-liner made me giggle, and I was drawn into the story, despite my reservations, by the writing itself. However, the writing was very surreal, and fantasy and reality blended together and made it hard to separate which was which – which was doubtless Mr. Gaiman’s intention – and while it annoyed me a little bit, Neil Gaiman executed it very well.

All in all, it was mostly a fun read for the brilliant and fluid writing, but the world-building and fragmented plot bothered me enough to give it my full endorsement. Still, if you want an interesting fantasy travelogue of United States culture, this book might be worth a read, and by no means has the novel turned me off of Gaiman’s other work.

Vernor Vinge is one of my favorite authors; his Zones of Thought books are brilliant (especially his depiction of the Tines and the spiders of the world circling the OnOff star, both in terms of individuals and societies) and his Realtime/Bobble series is some of the best science fiction ever written. Thus, it was with high expectations that I turned to his 2006 novel Rainbows End, set in an alternate version of his short story “Fast Times at Fairmont High.” The short story and the novel have many similarities, including the same characters (Juan Orozco and the Gu family, though the names of the father and mother changed in the novel) and a similar fascination with what reality really is and the social effects of an internet carried to its extreme. While the short story is interesting, it really pales in comparison to the novel, which expands upon everything “Fast Times at Fairmont High” had to offer.

Rainbows End centers around the Gu family; in particular, world-renowned poet Robert Gu, who after having barely survived Alzheimer’s, is now learning how to live in a world where the real and the virtual are blended together. Almost everyone uses special clothes and contacts to be constantly wired into a global internet made possibly by a series of localizing nodes, and they can overlay various realities over what really exists. Essentially, everyone’s reality can be tailored to their own preferences, and people can work together to create larger “belief circles,” which are large virtual realities often based around works of fiction.

This whole idea of everyone having their own reality was the most fascinating part of Rainbows End, but alas it was not fully explored. Instead, Vinge set this as merely a backdrop for a more personal story about an old man trying to find his place in the world, a young woman trying to keep her grandfather out of trouble, a young boy trying to pass his classes, a conspirator trying to make the world a better place by less-than-savory means, and a rabbit intelligence whose power is only hinted at. This plot is well-done for the most part, though a bit complex and at times confusing, but to served to distract from a more thorough examination of a society firmly embedded in multiple clashing virtual realities. These clashes are hinted at, but never realized, as the book gets a little bit lost in its personal stories and plot. I think, in the end, it suffered from trying to do much.

Still, the book was very well-written, very engaging, and while a bit confusing, really made me think. I wish some aspects of it had been explored more thoroughly, and I hope that his probably sequel will do exactly that. It didn’t live up to my expectations, but it is still well worth a read.

Ending my recent spate of Asimov reading comes one of his earlier works, 1955’s The End of Eternity. This book was published shortly after the stories that made up the Foundation trilogy. Indeed, I think the same ideas driving Foundation were still very much in Asimov’s mind as he wrote this book, as it also deals with the social sciences – in this case, just called sociology and psychology and not psychohistory – influencing human development. Unlike Foundation‘s psychohistory, though, the sociology and psychology Asimov discusses in this work can predict individual behavior.

The premise of the End of Eternity is simple and very interesting: there exists a dimension outside of space and time called “Eternity” alongside our universe, and humans are taken from the real universe to live in this universe, where they work to help mankind by changing events across all of history to cause the least possible harm. In essence, it deals with time-travel and social engineering on both large and small scales. The main character – who, like most Asimov characters, is rather forgettable – is an Eternal who falls in love with a timebound woman, and risks the existence of all Eternity to be with her. While this romance is painful at times, it serves as a useful plot device to explore all of the problems inherent in a group of outsiders guiding human history to cause the least possible harm. Ultimately, the novel revolves around two questions: why the Eternals can’t access a series of centuries in the far future, after which mankind is extinct, and why there is no significant space travel (and no Foundation-esque Galactic Empire). Both questions turn out to be intimately related, and Asimov’s exploration of them really make this book stand out as well worth-reading. I highly recommend it, and for the sake of not spoiling anything, I will stop here.

I think Isaac Asimov secretly wished he had been a social scientist. Though he was a respected biochemist, his works, particularly the Foundation trilogy, privilege social scientists. At one point, Asimov even notes that the physical sciences are more lauded because their results are immediately beneficial, yet ultimately superficial, while the work of the social sciences have little immediate benefit, but in the long run yield far greater results. Asimov’s fascination with the social sciences led him to fuse his physical science training with his idea of social science (particularly sociology), to create the fictional science of psychohistory: the reduction of the collective actions of vast numbers of people into equations, enabling a skilled practitioner to predict future human behavior using advanced statistical techniques. This science is the basis of Asimov’s lauded Foundation trilogy, and to some extent the prequels and sequels (the series was awarded the “best all-time series” Hugo in 1966). This post is only concerned with the first five Foundation books, and excludes the prequels. Thus, I will only discuss Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, Foundation’s Edge, and Foundation and Earth.

The premise of the Foundation series is simple enough: in a future so distant that mankind has colonized the entire galaxy and Earth is a mere myth, psychohistorian Hari Seldon perfects the art of psychohistory on the Galactic Imperial capital Trantor. During the process, he discovers that the Galactic Empire is in decline, and predicts that 30,000 years of barbarism will follow its collapse. However, his psychohistory allows him to see a way to reduce this period to a mere millennium by establishing two “foundations” at opposite ends of the galaxy to preserve human knowledge and provide the seeds for a new Galactic Empire even greater than before. The original trilogy deals with the people of the First Foundation, a great collection of physical scientists, who follow the “Seldon Plan” and work towards a new Galactic Empire.

Over the course of these first three books (the later two I will discuss later), Asimov comes in on a very old argument within sociology: which is more important in thinking about human society, social structures or human agency? Psychohistory, the physical science of society, is the pinnacle of the structuralist argument, though it leaves room for agency. Seldon uses psychohistory to predict history for the next thousand years, and grounds his predictions on two assumptions (plus an unspoken third assumption key to Foundation and Earth): that people to not consciously know of psychohistorical predictions, and that there are sufficiently large numbers of people to make the predictions from. In Seldon’s model, the individual cannot change history, and social forces will always triumph. However, psychohistory cannot predict the actions of individuals, who can more or less rule their own life. It is only large-scale, macrosocial events that are subject to psychohistorical principles.

Of course, the series would be relatively boring if everything went according to Hari Seldon’s plan. In the second book, an individual gains the power to change history, thus representing the triumph of agency over structure, and destroying the Seldon plan. This triumph was only made possible by a “mutation” that, in a way, made this individual no longer human by giving him the power to influence the minds of others, and thus fell outside of Seldon’s psychohistory. Thus, for the first time, the individual was not a pawn of social forces. As such, in the original trilogy, the struggle between structure, as represented by the Seldon Plan, and agency, as represented by those resisting the Seldon plan (successfully only in the case of the mutant).

In the end, Asimov explores the structuralist argument more, and when agency does come up, it is treated as an aberration that can (and maybe even should) be corrected. As such, I think Asimov tends to side with the structuralist argument more than the agency argument. That said, I’m not sure his idea of structure is completely devoid of agency. During periods of “crisis” in the Seldon Plan (which are part of the plan and only apparent crises to the First Foundation’s existence, which are resolved by the social forces already set in motion), the First Foundation is supposed to do very little and let social inertia solve the crisis for them, thus rendering individual action useless. Yet, despite his characters saying this, individual agency seems to matter; the first great Mayor Salvor Hardin and the great Merchant Hober Mallow both use what seems to be agency to solve their crises. Granted, they both make use of existing social forces, but especially in the case of Salvor Hardin and the Anacreon crisis, it seemed to be Hardin’s ingenuity and clever use of these social forces that won the day, rather than the social forces themselves. Sure, maybe if Hardin hadn’t done it someone else would have, but I am not so sure. The structure/agency question is a complex one and still the topic of much debate, and Asimov does portray this complexity well in the trilogy.

Despite the great ideas and beautiful Galaxy-building Asimov does, the Foundation trilogy does have some problems, and I think is vastly overrated. Asimov’s writing is not terribly good, and at times his grammar, phrasing, and pacing made me wince. Furthermore, his characters are utterly forgettable, and are largely the same few cardboard cutouts rehashed again and again. He also only includes two named women, Bayta and Arkadia Darrell (other women are present, but only as unnamed male attachments). However, despite these deficiencies, the original Foundation trilogy is a brilliant series that covers hundreds of years of human history, and are well worth a read.

The sequels to the trilogy, however, are an entirely different story. While the first three Foundation books more or less read like a collection of linked short stories and novellas and take place over the course of centuries, the second two feature the same cast and take place over the course of about a year. This gives Asimov more opportunity to develop characters (and, since these were written about twenty years later, his writing also improved – but not all that much), and he does. However, the characters are still a bit unconvincing and feel like cutouts, partly because they are written somewhat inconsistently (especially Trevize).

Now, I have no problems with this, but this gives the latter two books a vastly different feel. However, I strongly feel that Asimov should have left Foundation at the original trilogy and let it stand there. However, under pressure from readers and editors for a sequel, Asimov committed a cardinal sin: he tried to combine the Foundation trilogy with his other works – most notably his Empire and Robots series – into a single universe, and thus twisted the underlying plot of the latter two books almost beyond recognition, in the process destroying everything that made the original trilogy as good as they were. He destroys and dismisses psychohistory, renders meaningless all of the events of the original trilogy, and introduces several deus ex machinas and inexplicable plot phenomena to move the story along. While these two books would have made fine standalone books (with a little editing), the fact that he tied them to Foundation ruined a lot of the work he had already done, and thus I prefer to think of them as not really counting (these two sequels have also turned me off of the prequels he, and others, wrote).

So in the end, I highly recommend the original Foundation trilogy, despite its flaws. I cannot in good conscience recommend the other books in the series, but perhaps familiarity with the Empire and Robot sagas would help a reader there. If you haven’t read Foundation yet, do it, and think about Asimov’s application of structure and agency, which I feel to be at the heart of what makes Foundation so (relatively) timeless and so fascinating.