Tag: Book (Fiction)

“Foundation and Empire” Isaac Asimov

I was a bit wary about reading this book, after not enjoying the first in the trilogy very much when I read it a few days ago (post). But this one went better. I think the problem I was having with the first one was that each section had different characters & was so short that none of the characters really got a chance to expand beyond a name & a handful of traits. There are only two sections in this book, and so the characters have more room to breathe. Oddly this is most strongly the case in the second part, even tho in this story several of the characters end up under someone else’s emotional control they still feel more like people.

The plot is another couple of episodes in the history of the First Foundation. The first one deals with the last gasp of the Old Empire before it decays into utter irrelevancy. The Foundation has finally grown big enough & powerful enough to be noticed by at least some factions in the decaying Empire, who desire to put it back in its “proper” place – subordinate to the Emperor. The Foundation survives the crisis, but not really because it does anything (the story is about the people trying to do things and never seeming to get anywhere) – it’s because the Empire is now so unstable that internal politics get in the way of conquering ambition. The Foundation now has a sense of invincibility – the “dead hand of Hari Seldon” or the “Seldon tidal wave” will sweep away any & all forces that oppose it.

And that is where the second part of the book leaps off from. The Foundation is now a totalitarian state, ruled by a hereditary Mayor. Its people, in particular the descendants of the Traders of an earlier age, plot against the government. It’s predicted that a Seldon Crisis is nigh, but the authorities think the best thing to do is just to keep on keeping on – they’ll win, won’t they? And out on the periphery the rumours of The Mule grow – he’s conquering all in his path and heading for the Foundation. He does indeed conquer the Foundation and most of the rest of the galaxy (technically that’s a spoiler but the book has been out for 60 years …). Now he’s searching for the Second Foundation set up by Seldon, and just when the secret is in his grasp a woman saves the day. I particularly liked this because she wins because of who she is. She isn’t under emotional control because she’s genuinely kind – the mistake the Mule makes is to revel in this unforced kindness, rather than control her under general principles. She’s also shown as observant, intelligent and capable of doing what needs to be done, so it’s not a surprise when she figures out what’s going on and then does something about it. So having complained about the paper thin characters of the last book, it was nice to see someone whose character was shown rather than told and whose actions grew out of their character.

One other thing that struck me about this second section was how reading it from this perspective of 60 years later undermines one of the main plot points. The plot revolves around how the Seldon Plan is not infalliable – the Mule is a mutant and so was unpredictable. And his powers of emotional control mean that people stop acting like autonomous people – they are bent to do what the Mule wants. So the Seldon Plan can no longer predict them accurately, and when Seldon’s image appears he talks about the wrong crisis – the one that would’ve happened if the Mule had not been born and disrupted the galaxy. At one point one of the characters pontificates about the two ways that the predictions could fail. The first is if technology changed significantly and the second is if the nature of people changed. The first hasn’t happened in 300 years, so it must be the second. And yet looking at how technology has changed between when this book was written & now, it seems unimaginable that in 300 years as a Galaxy descends into chaos & wars between kingdoms no-one has invented a better weapon than the last of the Old Empire’s tech. So how could Seldon’s Plan have predicted anything well enough to last 300 years before being brought down by a super-powered mutant? Not that I think our current rate of technological change is necessarily sustainable, but over 300 years of “anarchy” with a power like the Foundation trying to assimilate its neighbours, well, you’d think there’d be an incentive to concentrate on out thinking them. I guess the “science as religion” trope of the last book is part of why this doesn’t happen immediately around the Foundation – but further afield you’d think it would.

And on that sort of amusing note – one major way society has changed in the last 60 years is smoking. I expect to handwave past manual calculations of interstellar navigation in a story of this vintage, but somehow the “everyone smokes” thing took me by surprise. Asimov even uses “won’t let other people smoke in his office” as a shorthand for “this character is prissy & officious”. All the other men lights up cigars here, there & everywhere, the women smoke cigarettes.

Overall this volume has aged better than the first in the trilogy in terms of storytelling & my enjoyment of it, let’s hope that’s also true for the third one 🙂

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“Foundation” Isaac Asimov

This isn’t one of the Asimov books we own – we’ve got the next two in the trilogy and I’ve had to get this out of the library so I could read it first. J bought the other two, in a second hand bookshop somewhere many many years ago. I did think about buying this one but as I’m just about to put the rest in a box it seemed silly to buy something only to box it up.

I believe Foundation started off life as a series of short stories, and this makes the novel very episodic. But this isn’t a flaw, as a structure it works for the story Asimov is telling. The first section is set just before the fall of the Galactic Empire after about 12,000 years of stability. Hari Seldon has perfected the science of psychohistory which makes statistical predictions about the future behaviour of people. He predicts the fall of the Empire and sets up two Foundations “at opposite ends of the galaxy” to reduce the period & depth of anarchy that would follow & hasten the setting up of a new galaxy spanning society. The following sections follow the fate of the first Foundation on the planet Terminus across about 150 years & each details a crisis point that they face & overcome. These crises were all predicted by Seldon & he left time-locked recordings for the future.

I’m not sure if it’s just because I’ve been reading about China recently or if the resonance is intentional on Asimov’s part. The old Empire feels like a China analogue, and the crumbling into Kingdoms round the periphery makes me think of one of the various bits of Chinese history where the Empire shrank back to a core leaving autonomous territories at the outskirts. That resonance serves to highlight the oddities of timescale in the novel, however. 12,000 years of stability is an incomprehensible amount of time. When I think of long lived civilisations on Earth China & Ancient Egypt spring to mind, but both of them have been periods of stability lasting a few centuries punctuated by periods of breakdown of the central government. So the Galactic Empire has lasted unimaginably longer than these, yet within 50 years the planets at the periphery have lost significant amounts of vital scientific knowledge. That’s within the lifetimes of the people who previously ran this tech! And by 150 years even the centre of the old Empire has lost a lot of knowledge (that’s a plot point in the last section of the book). And that just feels too quick. It’s like suggesting that during the First Intermediate Period of Egyptian civilisation they all forgot how to irrigate their fields because the central governmental structure had broken down. And the Galactic Empire was a literate educated society, surely instruction manuals would survive and other educational materials. Of course there’s other manipulation going on via the Second Foundation, and I can’t remember if that explains some of this – I’ll find out when I get there in the series.

It’s interesting how much of this book was about religion and the power of religion to manipulate. Terminus is weak compared to its neighbouring kingdoms but they manage to turn their scientific knowledge to their advantage. Instead of teaching their neighbours how things work they train them as priests who follow ritual procedures to operate the atomic generators etc. And they dress it all up with talk of the Galactic Spirit & so on. The priests can only learn by coming to Terminus, and the High Priests on each planet are actually Foundation diplomats. It’s a religion entirely designed to deceive and manipulate people. And it has its parallels in the over-arching plot of the novel. Hari Seldon sets up the Foundation on Terminus, but lies to them about their purpose initially. Then he appears at critical moments and effectively bestows his blessing on them. In fairly generic terms, saying things like “the solution is of course obvious”. The only thing that makes it clear he’s not a charlatan is that he appears at the right time, but even that isn’t much – it was only a Seldon Crisis if Seldon appeared, obviously if there’s no recording then it didn’t meet the criteria. The other parallel is that the Foundation is deliberately not educated in psychohistory because it would affect their actions and spoil the predictions.

Overall the book feels like “an interesting idea for a novel, now he just needs to flesh it out a bit” 😉 The characters feel a bit thin & like they’re only there to allow Asimov to write out the cerebral exercise of the plot. In some ways it’s more like reading thinly fictionalised history than reading a story, which is (I think) a stylistic choice by Asimov for this story. But it means that for me it’s not aging well.

“Pebble in the Sky” Isaac Asimov

Pebble in the Sky was Asimov’s first novel, published in 1950, and is one of the few Asimov novels I actually bought. My mother owns most of the ones I’ve read, and J brought copies of the Foundation ones that I’ll be getting to next into the house so I’ve never actually got round to buying many.

Having just read the short story version it grew out of (post) I think this is a much better telling of that story, but it’ll still never be a favourite. There’s still no women, really, although Pola Shekt gets a bit more on-screen time however she’s still very much “the love interest”.

The plot is much the same as the short story. Josef Schwartz, one of our two main characters, is transported from 1949 to the far far future. There he suffers culture shock & gets caught up in the politics & conspiracy of the time. Earth is now radioactive and can only barely support the population which means when you get to the age of 60 you get euthanised. So much time has passed since the 20th Century that no-one knows that Earth was the original planet that mankind came from, and the Galactic Empire treats Earth & Earth people as an insignificant cultural backwater. The Earth government smarts under this, and there are plans afoot to Do Something About This (these are the antagonists). Our other protagonist is a brilliant young Galactic archaeologist, Bel Arvardan, with theories about the origins of humanity – and on his visit to Earth he gets caught up in the political situation along with Schwartz.

However behind the plot, what I think the book is about is colonialism and racism. It’s probably been 15 years since I last read this book and I can’t remember if that struck me before, it surely must’ve done tho as it’s seemed obvious this time. The Procurator of Earth – i.e. the Galactic Empire’s representative/ruler on the planet – reminds me of a British Governor in India during the days of the British Empire. He lives in a palace that’s a little part of the Empire on Earth, and takes pills to reduce his chances of getting local diseases while bemoaning the lack of “civilised” company. Arvardan comes from a planet that’s particularly bigoted against Earthmen and starts with the sort of self-deceit you’d expect – he thinks of himself as enlightened, why he thinks he’d even employ an Earthman in one of his archaeological teams but the other chaps would refuse to work with one so such a shame he can’t. And then reacts poorly to meeting actual Earth people in the actual flesh, going back to his culturally conditioned ways. But he falls in love with an Earthgirl and changes his mind – about her, her Dad & Schwartz at least, we don’t get quite enough time in his head after to believe he’s completely changed. Arvardan’s theories about the origins of humanity are clearly analogues for the debates in archaeology of the time – did Homo sapiens evolve once in Africa and spread, or did we evolve in each region separately. Just switch “in Africa” for “on one planet, that just so happens to be the one that’s looked down on”. And the second hypothesis is used to justify racism as “scientific” in the same way in the book as in real life.

I think it’s painted with too broad brushstrokes, practically hitting you over the head with the analogies. But equally it’s hard for me to see it the way it would’ve been read at the time – in 1950 in the USA segregation of races was still legal (my grasp on this subject is hazy, but poking on wikipedia it seem that the major milestone for the start of desegregation is 1954 and a court decision that ruled that separate schools for blacks & whites was unconstitutional). Prohibition of interracial marriages isn’t declared unconstitutional till 1967 … so in that light hitting the reader over the head with the Bel Avardan/Pola Shekt relationship as being an analogy for an interracial relationship is possibly what was needed to make the point. Would more subtlety have let people ignore the parallels too much? Asimov does a good job of making sure there’s people to sympathise with on both sides of the divide – people are people and some of them are bigots, some of them are not, and all of them are products of their culture. And obviously by putting the whole of Earth as the targets of the racism he puts us on their side at first, but then he counterbalances this by making the way the antagonists plan to rise up against the Empire & fight back be morally wrong. I’m not quite sure if that works or if it ends up too close to “so you should stay in your place”.

Which brings up the way this book definitely doesn’t feel current – it’s so short! Just a couple of hundred pages. And it does feel a little like it’s been kept short by keeping it just a touch too shallow. Everything gets tied up very neatly at the end with an air of “and now they all lived happily ever after” but it clearly can’t be true – you don’t solve millennia of bigotry with one foiled coup & a marriage. I exaggerate a bit, but it definitely feels overly optimistic as an ending to me.

Not a favourite, but there was more to it than I remembered.

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“Shift” Hugh Howey

Shift is the sequel to Wool which I read earlier this year (post). In Wool we saw a few months in a post-apocalyptic world where what’s left of humanity is cooped up in a great underground complex (a silo) with a hidden rottenness somewhere at the centre of their society. When I wrote about that book I said it was clear that despite the reveals we hadn’t quite got to the heart of it yet, and Shift gets there.

It starts before, in a world that’s almost our own, a future only 50 or so years away. In the middle of a familiar world there’s a few technological advances that matter to the story – nanotech is a reality, cryogenics too & there are drugs that make you forget traumatic events. Through the book we mostly follow Donald Keene, who’s a newly elected Congressman pulled into a top secret project designing & building an underground bunker – he’s told it’s a safety feature to go next to some nuclear waste disposal facilities. His story is interspersed with other stories of events between this near future and the time of Wool. At the end of the book we see some of the events from the end of Wool from the other side – and they look different form this perspective. So I think we now know what’s rotten at the centre of this world, and book three is going to be what our protagonists from both Wool & Shift do about it.

Shift continues to have interestingly flawed characters. Front & centre is Donald – one of the characters later on says that “good men” like Donald should be in charge. But I don’t think that’s a particularly good description of Donald – he’s certainly not a bad man, but good would be stretching it. He’s very self-centred, on more than on occasion not looking past his own concerns to the wider picture and doing the wrong things because of this. He’s also prone to willful blindness, there are definitely hints even before he’s told what’s going on – and once he’s told he would rather forget than face it until it’s nearly too late. Rather do his job & think about the career opportunities, rather than face up to an unpleasant truth. Equally, he’s still someone I’d rather have running things than the people who were – he’s not a good man, he does things that are morally wrong & does selfish things, but he’s not ruthless and he still sees people as people instead of pieces on a board.

One of the themes running through the book is that if you set up a system and protocols for situations then people follow them – it ends up with the system in charge rather than an individual. This thing happens, do what it says here. And everyone does their little bit, acts like a cog in the machine, and even if no-one knows the whole plan it will still get done. Another thread running through both this book & the first one is that if your information stream is faulty/censored then so are all your conclusions. That’s rather obvious as a statement, but Howey shows us it working out over & over – he even does it to us. As I said above there’s a bit of overlap with the end of Wool, only this time we see a few conversations from the other side. Knowing what we know by the end of this book changes things.

Book 3 doesn’t come out till August – just need to remember about it nearer the time to get hold of it from the library! 🙂

“The Alternate Asimovs” Isaac Asimov

I was a bit surprised when I saw this book was still on the shelf – I know I’ve boxed up some Asimov before (my librarything account lists a couple that aren’t on the shelf) and I’m a little surprised that this one made the cut. It’s a collection of three previously unpublished stories, one of which became “Pebble in the Sky”, one of which became “The End of Eternity” and one of which was published with an alternate ending. And the stories have forewords & afterwords explaining their history & how Asimov felt about them now (ie 1987 when this was published).

It’s an interesting idea for an anthology because it shows how the stories evolved, and I think this was probably my first proper introduction to the fact that books aren’t written by someone just sitting down and putting one word after another from beginning to end. That actually stories might be written in one form and then get re-drafted more than once before they get to the reader. But even though it’s interesting it’s still two stories that got rejected then turned into better novels, and one reasonable short story that got a happier ending for publication. Interesting rather than good.

I think I read this anthology before I bought or read “Pebble in the Sky”. So “Grow Old Along with Me” was my introduction to that story (and I still prefer the original title). The novel is next in my re-read so I’ll have to wait until then to discover if I like the story better in that version (pretty sure I do), but structurally speaking this one isn’t great. Asimov makes a big song & dance in a prologue, intermission and epilogue about how he’s telling the story from both ends at once … and it’s not as interesting or entertaining as he clearly thought it was at the time. The afterword says that’s what he thinks by 1987 as well. The thing that struck me most when reading this so soon after reading “Nemesis” was that there are no real women characters in this story – there’s a couple of wives & a daughter but they’re plot devices not people, they only exist to be love interest or to have one conversation that lets someone exposition at the reader then they vanish from the story again.

“The End of Eternity” is one of the Asimov books my mother owns, and as a result I both read it over & over & over when I was in my early teens … and I don’t have a copy of my own. So now the version of the story in this anthology is the only version I have, and that’s probably why the book was still on the shelf. It’s not as good, though. The basic premise is that there is a secret collection of people living outside time in Eternity, and they can move between Reality & Eternity as well as move uptime and downtime in Eternity. They police Reality, making tiny changes which ripple through time to effect big changes later on and change Reality to make it “better” for people (better as defined by the people who live in Eternity, not necessarily anyone else). The plot has to do with the beginning of Eternity, and the novel version (as I remember it) is much more interestingly complex but this story has one of those neat “gotchas” of time travel tales so it’s still pretty good. My favourite of the three here.

“Belief” in its original version is a terribly depressing story of a man who discovers he can levitate but no-one will believe him. I like it in that form, and the happy ending that Campbell wanted instead strikes me as false feeling. But it’s hard to tell how I’d feel if I’d read the two versions the other way round.

Asimov’s bits & pieces in between the stories were informative, but as with his autobiographical stuff in the “Before the Golden Age” books (post) I’m less keen on the tone than I used to be. He comes across as a bit smugly self-satisfied and lacking in self-awareness. There’s a bit right at the end where Asimov says that he doesn’t get rejections or editorial insistence on change any more because he’s just that good & his editors all love him and would of course ask him to change things if it was necessary. This is more than a little undercut by the long section earlier devoted to talking about how he & one particular editor (Horace Gold) rarely saw eye to eye and throughout it Asimov comes across as someone who would be hell to work with. It contains sentences like this one talking about Gold requesting revisions:

“He was quite apologetic about it because by that time he knew very well that requests for revision would be met by me with the sternest possible resistance and that he might have to wait a long time before I was willing to try him again.”

Not quite the rosy picture Asimov paints in the afterword to this book then … There was also a somewhat unpleasant little story where Asimov is self-righteously saying how Gold had asked him to put a female character in a particular story. Asimov just can’t see why there’s any need for that (“since the plot didn’t demand a female”) but he doesn’t want to seem “totally unreasonable” so he writes in a shrewish wife to one of the main characters & Gold was “forced to run the story as revised”. This happened in the 1950s, but clearly in the late 80s he’s still trotting this out as an amusing little tale of how he put one over an editor. Seems a little odd that the man who wrote “Nemesis” (post) with all its female characters (who after all aren’t demanded by the plot to be female) around the same time as he wrote these autobiographical bits was still so smug about how he avoided having a woman protagonist back in the old days.

Overall, interesting but not good sums it up for me. I’ll hang on to it (in a box) because it’s interesting but I don’t think it needs to sit on the shelf.

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“Flash” L. E. Modesitt Jr.

There’s a particular flavour to an L. E. Modesitt Jr. book, although I’m not quite sure I can describe it. Some of it is that his protagonists tend to be of a type (even tho distinct characters in their own right). They tend to be humble and to not quite believe that they are anything out of the ordinary. They have a core of integrity, and often feel forced into action by circumstances because they can’t comprehend choosing not to do anything and letting things go to hell in a handbasket around them. Most of the books I’ve read by Modesitt have been his fantasy books, and there the protagonist often ends up running a country or becoming a leader of some other sort because he or she can’t stand by, although that wasn’t the case here.

“Flash” is set in a 24th Century Earth that was also the setting for his book “Archform: Beauty”, which I don’t think I’ve read*. I don’t think this is a direct sequel, certainly it appeared to me to be complete in itself. In this future there’s been some sort of “Collapse” (ecological, I think) between our time & theirs and the rebuilt world feels different but like it came out of our world. Some politics continues as we’d expect (some early parts of the book have to do with senatorial elections in NorAm, the replacement for the USA), but large corporations called Multis also run the world. Tech has moved on – not just ubiquitous computing that’s way beyond current stuff, but also more out-there things like cydroids (non-sentient clones, remote controlled by computer or by a person). But some things feel familiar, wines have the same sorts of names for instance.

*Between writing that paragraph and this review going live I looked in my librarything catalogue and discovered I own “Archform: Beauty”. Ahem. It’s not on the shelf, must’ve been boxed up during a previous cull of the shelves and I’ve pretty much no recollection of reading it.

One thing I thought Modesitt did particularly well with his extrapolation was names. You can figure out what places were before in most cases, but the words have shifted in believable ways. For instance Denver is now Denv, Texas is Tejas. Other words also give you just enough to figure out what they are in combination with their context. Like safo = safety officer = police. Another example is you have a gatekeeper on your computer system that’s partly a firewall and partly there to announce callers, both at the door and on the equivalent of a phone. So the world felt quite solid and plausible, without Modesitt going into much detail.

The protagonist, Jonat deVrai is a consultant who analyses the effects of this future’s equivalent of adverts on sales of products. He’s the best at his job & has a reputation for honesty, and so he gets hired to investigate if a senatorial candidate is illegally using these adverts in his campaign and to analyse if it’s had an effect on the voting results. It soon becomes clear that there’s more going on beneath the surface than deVrai first thought, and the stakes are much higher than he anticipated. Jonat deVrai is also an ex-Marine with PTSD (who publically resigned on a point of principle, another pointer to his integrity), and his military training & background are important in how he reacts to the things he uncovers.

I’m not sure I always followed the details of what was going on, there are a lot of oblique conversations where what isn’t said is as important as what is said (and how it is said). But I did figure out what was going on with Central Four long before deVrai did (and I’m being vague because it would be a shame to spoil it) – to be fair, that was a case where he was blinded by his societal preconceptions whereas as the reader I didn’t have those, but still pleasing 🙂

This was a book I enjoyed reading. I think Modesitt is one of those authors where if you like his stuff, you like his stuff and this book was no exception for me. But all his books do have a distinctive flavour, so if you’re not so fond of it then you’ll probably find it off-putting here as well.

“A Memory of Light” Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson

The end of the Wheel of Time. Something I wasn’t quite sure would ever happen – not just because Robert Jordan died (although obviously that put a spanner in the works until they organised Brandon Sanderson to finish it off using Jordan’s notes), but also because the series seemed to get a bit out of control in the middle (books 8-10 in my opinion). But here it is, book 14 and The End. And Sanderson has done a bloody good job of writing 3 books by Robert Jordan (if that makes sense).

The first few paragraphs of this post are looking back over the series as a whole and are spoiler free, later there are massive spoilers for book 14 so read past the spoiler warning at your own risk.

The overall plot of the series is the quintessential epic fantasy plot – farmboy discovers he’s the chosen one who will save the world from evil. And Jordan takes that simple structure and makes something more complex and more real feeling out of it. For instance there are prophecies, as you’d expect, but some of them are wrong. Some of them are twisted by repetition through history into something that no longer resembles the truth, even tho they were true prophecy. Some of them are true, but not how you’d expect. Some of them are prophecies for the other side’s victory. None of them are intuitively obvious and true at first glance.

Another example is magic use – and obviously our farmboy is capable of using it and needs to use it, but the source of power for men is tainted by the evil he’s going to fight and will send him mad. And that doesn’t just have implications for him personally, it’s been like that for over three thousand years and the societies of the world are shaped by the knowledge that eventually a male channeller will go mad and will be capable of unleashing unspeakable destruction when he does.

Something Jordan does well is creating an actual world for this all to take place in. The area the action takes place in (the Westlands) is vaguely Renaissance Europe in culture – a patchwork of kingdoms and city states of various sizes, mostly but not all monarchies. All with superficially the same culture, but with differences. The various leaders bicker & posture & argue about relatively petty details – the world might be ending but it’s still politics as usual. It’s not even like most people believe the world is about to end until it gets pretty late on in the story. This area isn’t the whole world, either – there are other cultures like the Aiel (a desert warrior culture who regard wetlanders as weak) or the Seanchan who invade from over the sea because they believe themselves to be the true rulers of the Westlands due to descent from a colony sent out by a King who ruled a thousand years ago. And their prophecies back that up.

Having all these different cultures and factions within them means that nothing ever goes smoothly – even when everyone’s trying to communicate there are misunderstandings because of alien viewpoints. And just about everyone thinks that their place of origin does things right and everyone else is misguided at best and should be educated in the proper way of doing things, which obviously causes friction. Even within a culture people bring their own history and experience along with them, and their own blindspots. It feels real, even though (because?) it also occasionally makes you want to shake people and tell them to stop being so stupid. The Aes Sedai (the organised female magic users) in particular fall into this category – they are generally arrogantly sure they know exactly how things should be done and sometimes their manipulations just make things worse.

It’s not just the characters on the side of the Light who argue amongst themselves and find it hard to agree on a common goal let alone focus on it. The characters on the side of the Dark are even worse – as you’d expect, really. I think a large part of the characterisation of evil in the story is that it’s a desire for personal power. The characters of the Light might want power but those that do generally want to use it to do good or to shape society in a way they think will be good for people (although frequently the theory & practice of what is good don’t match up terribly well). But the major players on the side of the Dark, the Forsaken, want power to make their own lives better and revel in the idea that this is at the cost of other people’s lives & happiness.

It’s certainly not without it’s flaws. As I said above the story gets somewhat carried away with itself in the middle. Part of this is down to point-of-view creep. The series starts off with a few people whose eyes we see through, and gradually more & more are added as events take place in different places. If I was asked to name the primary characters of the series as a whole I’d list half a dozen immediately and then there’s another half a dozen or so to consider if they’re primary or not, and several more who’re definitely not primary characters but are still pretty important. And the net result feels like Jordan ended up with too many balls to juggle, and too many things he thought were too important to skip over. But in book 11 (the last one Jordan wrote) he pulls it back together and re-focuses the story, and from there on they feel big because there’s a lot of story rather than a lot of padding.

SPOILERS AHEAD! Hover mouse over text to read, or read on entry page:

I’m not kidding, if you haven’t read the whole series don’t read any further – there’s stuff that happens in book 14 that’s worth coming to unspoilt. The rest of this is going to be a bit more stream of consciousness reactions to the book itself.

I liked the way that the last battle both was & wasn’t important in terms of the actual conflict with the Dark One. I mean, really what was important was Rand & the Dark One outside the Pattern with their almost philosophical debate creating visions (proof-of-concept models) of the way the world would be afterwards. And then Rand managing to use the One Power & the True Power to remake the Pattern to seal in the Dark One rather than just patch it up. But if there had been no battle going on, then the Dark forces could’ve interrupted that conflict, so the battle had its purpose.

I was a bit confused by the body switch at the end, but I think from reading other commentary (in particular posts associated with Leigh Butler’s re-read of the whole series on tor.com) that I’ve mostly suffered from having not re-read everything just before reading this book as well as just reading this one too fast. Basically I think the mingling between Moridin & Rand was starting to happen already. Moridin is by this stage practically an avatar of the Dark One and he is killed as (or before?) the Dark One is sealed up, and Rand’s soul is pretty much in both bodies by that point. And his original body is more damaged, so that dies & he remains in Moridin’s body.

I liked how Rand pretty much becomes an avatar of the Creator in the conflict at the end, and that this stays in some ways once he is back in the Pattern. And it’s good that he “dies” as far as the general population is concerned, much more chance of him enjoying life – he’s done his bit, he should be able to retire in peace. Rather tough for people like his father though.

It was a bit of a surprise that Demandred really had been off somewhere on his “own” for the last 13 books, but once he appears to lead the Dark forces in the last battle I liked the way his desire not to play second fiddle to the Dragon again has warped his plans. I also liked the fact that he really is as badass as he thinks he is – Gawyn goes to duel him, and loses, Galad ditto. And then Lan, and Lan only wins by the one move Demandred wouldn’t’ve anticipated because Demandred wouldn’t conceive of winning a fight at the expense of one’s own life. (Well, Lan survives, but only barely.)

I spent a chunk of the first half of the book thinking “it’s all going awfully smoothly … this can’t be right”, but I still didn’t anticipate the generals being under a subtle Compulsion to just make lots of sub-optimal decisions. Now that was an insidious and sneaky plan. And in retrospect I can see the signs were there through the bit where I was wondering when the other shoe was going to drop.

One thing that the cast of hundreds turned out to be good for is that once the last battle got under way and people started dying they were people I cared about rather than just Footsoldier A or a high level view of Army A taking losses. In terms of main character death the body count isn’t all that large, but I thought those that happened were well done. After Gawyn dies I wasn’t too surprised that Egwene also died. And she went out in a blaze of glory, doing as much as she could without worrying about the price she would pay. And that just fits so well with her character & her story through the whole series. And you could see in the scenes with the treaty how Egwene & Rand between them were the centres of the forces & peoples on the side of the Light – balanced and needing to work together despite their differences. Which ties into one of the major themes of the series, after all, so it also seems fitting (from a story telling perspective) that as far as the world is concerned they both died saving the world.

I’m looking forward to re-reading this once I get to it in my giant re-read of all the fiction. And by then the paperback should be out so I’ll have my own copy not just a library book.

“Nemesis” Isaac Asimov

Nemesis is a book by Asimov written late in his career, published only a few years before his death. I think I might’ve bought it new (the edition I have says published in 1990, originally published 1989), and I’m not sure if I ever read it more than once. Certainly I had only the haziest recollection of the plot when I started reading it this time round – “something about a star on the way to the solar system”, which is about as much as the blurb on the back says.

It opens with a slightly bizarre author’s note, bizarre because I don’t know why Asimov felt it necessary to explain the two points he makes. Firstly it’s not part of one of his other series, and is an independent story. Secondly it’s not entirely linear, with two narrative strands one in the “present” of the story and one starting the story-past and advancing to meet the first. And really, couldn’t he have trusted the reader to figure that out? Neither are exactly strange things for a book to do.

Our first protagonist, whose story takes place in the story-present is Marlene Fisher a 15 year old girl who is both extremely plain and extremely intelligent. She’s gifted with an ability to read body language that goes far beyond the human norm (and there are hints here of a “supermen among us” type plot, but much more subtly done than the 1948 stories I’ve just recently re-read (post)). And our second protagonist is her father, Crile Fisher who split up with her mother when Marlene was still an infant. He doesn’t share her plain looks or her body-language reading skills, but she’s very like his long dead sister.

The story is set in a future where Earth is ruled by a single government and is fairly over populated, and there are self-sufficient space station colonies called Settlements orbiting the Earth. For all that this is a standalone universe it reminds me of the later books in the Robots series – where Earth is a dirty crowded place with people of all sorts living cheek by jowl and having to make the most of it, but the colonies (planets in the Robots series) are cleaner and have more living space, and are more homogeneous. And are rather smug about their superiority to Earth people. In this book Asimov is pretty pessimistic about humanity’s ability to get beyond racism. On Earth it’s socially unacceptable, and officially frowned upon, but the text makes the point explicitly that even despite this the Settlements have tended to segregate themselves into sorts. Rotor (the Settlement that Marlene lives on) is all white, all Euro in the parlance of the book. Not by fiat or anything, just that if you manage to get permission to move to a Settlement and you’re not the same as the other people there then you are just made to feel unwelcome and eventually you move out to somewhere more “friendly”. I guess Asimov felt (or rather, wrote into this book) that even if you try and move beyond racism in a society once you get back to a situation where there can be small self-contained groups then people will inevitably tend towards xenophobia.

The plot starts with Rotor using new tech to travel at lightspeed to a nearby star. This star, Nemesis, is actually closer to Earth than Alpha Centauri – Marlene’s mother (an astronomer) discovers it, and its proximity wasn’t discovered before because it’s behind a dust cloud when viewing from Earth. Marlene’s story takes place 14 years later when they’ve been in Nemesis’s solar system for about 12 years. Marlene has become fascinated with Erythro, a planet-sized moon around a gas giant in the system. A moon that they are trying to colonise, but there have been some curious effects on people’s minds. Crile’s story starts from his leaving his wife & child & returning to Earth when Rotor leaves and moves forwards till it meets up with Marlene’s storyline at the end. He didn’t meet Marlene’s mother by chance, he’s actually a spy for the Earth government detailed to figure out what Rotor’s new tech is. He’s then assigned to a new project, persuading another Settlement physicist to come to Earth to help them develop better tech than Rotor has.

I enjoyed reading the book, but it felt just on the edge of being dated. It also felt curiously like a YA book, although I don’t think it was marketed as such. Perhaps that was just because Marlene is a teenager, but also her arc seemed to me to be a coming of age story. Her mother is over-protective & treats her like a child, and Marlene is flexing her wings and taking her first steps as an adult. Marlene is the key to the end of the story, and it’s not just because of what she is but also because of her actions, and because she takes responsibility and does things.

The antagonist is interesting in the light of Asimov’s other work. Janus Pitt, who is the leader of the community that lives in Rotor, is fixated on the idea of isolating them from other human societies and engineering some sort of better society. So he’s picked Nemesis for them to go to hoping that no-one else will realise and follow. His obsession isn’t presented sympathetically, and he’s clearly depicted as not really treating other people as people – they’re game pieces for him to manipulate or get rid of (mostly by exile) as he sees fit. Which I found an interesting contrast to the Foundation books where the engineering of the future of a society & of the future of humanity is something shown as a good thing (I’ve not read the Foundation series for years, I may regret saying this when I get there in my re-read!).

Having read so much 1930s & 1940s fiction over the last two or three months it really jumped out at me that the two foregrounded brilliant scientists are both women (which includes Marlene’s mother who is very much characterised as astronomer who happens to also be a mother, rather than the other way round). And the people who are good with people (including Crile) are men. But having said that, the people who are actually in charge are all men, on Earth, on Rotor & on Erythro. I think that’s actually part of what makes it feel a bit dated – I think a more modern story would’ve had a woman as one of the people in charge given the rest of the society. Personally I’d like to swap out the man in charge of the Terrestrial Board of Inquiry (which is effectively in charge of the Earth, in a power behind the throne style) for a woman, I think. One other nice touch was that Marlene is frustrated about people judging her on her looks (not that great) rather than her personality or intelligence – so far so stereotypical, but the person who sympathises the most is the administrator on Erythro because that’s how he felt treated as a teenager too.

While I was reading the book it seemed a bit slight, but thinking about it afterwards to write about it I think there’s more depth there than first meets the eye. I’m still going to put it away in a box rather than leave it on the shelf, tho. I’ve not read it in over 20 years, and I don’t think I’ll want to re-read it in the next 10 years.

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“Shadow of Night” Deborah Harkness

This is the sequel to “A Discovery of Witches” which I read a while ago (but haven’t written up anywhere). It took me a little while to get back into this world & story. The basic premise is that creatures live among us – witches, vampires & daemons. Witches are magic workers, as you’d expect, and it breeds true in families. Vampires drink blood, are immortal and must be made by another vampire, but the rest of the legends (like inability to walk in daylight) aren’t true. Daemons appear to be more complicated (can be born to human families, even), and are very creative & erratic – in this book Christopher Marlowe is a daemon. The creatures are ruled over by the Congregation, with rules about fraternisation between creature types and rules intended to keep them secret from ordinary humans.

The plot is about Diana Bishop (a witch & historian) and Matthew Clairmont (a vampire), a mysterious book and the origins of creatures. The first book was the two of them meeting, falling in love, marrying, finding the book & figuring out there was something big going on. In this book they’ve travelled back into the past so that Diana can learn how to use her powers away from the dangers in the present. They go back to 1590 and slot into Matthew’s life at that time, but obviously it’s not all plain sailing. First Diana has to learn to fit in with Elizabethan life, and then they get caught up in bits of the politics (both human and creature) of the day. There was some handwave about how present-day-Matthew’s arrival in the past meant that past-Matthew vanished for the duration (and presumably will be back once they’ve left), which just serves to leave me wondering if he’d have a hole in his memory afterwards? Or memories from the wrong Matthew? Or of the things he would’ve done if not displaced? Paradox is one of the things that’s a thread running through this book – each section of the story ends with a chapter set back in the present day as little ripples run up through time. Finding miniatures Hilliard painted of the two of them, finding a day book Diana wrote etc. And it’s clear by the end of the book that they’d always gone back to 1590 and lived there for months, but it’s also clear that this isn’t the way it was when the book started … probably.

The thing I’m not keen on in these books is the relationship between the two main characters. It’s all told from Diana’s point of view and I just don’t see what she sees in Matthew. He treats her like a child in many ways, ordering her around, telling her she doesn’t know enough to keep herself safe. And he’s so much older than her, and in 1590 is close to the centre of both creature & human politics, that he’s right too. She’s stumbling through a time period she only knows from books (she is a historian tho, and this is her time period of interest, so she’s better off than the average witch would be). And she’s not a trained witch yet (for complicated reasons). And their marriage is forbidden by the Congregation (as a general thing, not specifically this witch & this vampire). But even when she asserts herself he’s still dismissive – for example, she married him during the last book, she’s insistent she wants to be his wife and has first hand knowledge of the risk but wants it anyway. And still he spends half this book keeping her at arms length, mostly because he doesn’t really think she knows what she’s doing. But equally, he’s the one who actually gets them into most of the trouble they get into in this book. He rushes in without a plan and without giving anyone quite enough information, time after time. An example of this is that he plans for them to go back to 1590, and neglects to tell her who his friends in that time are or what his occupation is. And she’s the one who improvises the way back out of trouble when his lack of plan causes problems. She’s the one who finds herself a teacher after his attempts backfire. So why can’t he respect her for the intelligence & sense he supposedly loves, rather than trying to stop her using them? To be fair, he’s called on that by various of the secondary characters as well, so he’s not being held up by the author as a paragon of virtue.

But don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed both these books. I liked the portrayal of the Elizabethan era, and that Diana has culture shock and Matthew slips back almost (but not quite) into the attitudes of the time. I think Harkness has a deft touch with intertwining the creature politics and the human ones, things that make sense in our world as human things are recast as part of creature politics and make sense that way too. I liked the way that Diana’s inexplicable & strange inability to learn how to use her magic turned out to have a good reason behind it. And one that made travelling to 1590 turn out to be the best possible way to have done things. I also like how something spoilery happens – one of those scenarios where clearly this will work out in one way because Plot and then it doesn’t at all, it’s much more realistic. I think actually that might be the main thing I like about these books – yes, in some ways it’s urban fantasy with witches & vampires, but it’s got that grounding element of realism. And I suppose for all my rant about Matthew above, he’s realistic too.

I think it will be a trilogy, but I don’t know when the next book is out. Presumably next year not this year, at least.

“Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories #10 (1948)” ed Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg

It turns out that this is where I picked up my ideas of what John Campbell looked for in a story when he was an editor. Asimov’s introductions to a few of these stories refer to Campbell’s liking for stories about supermen among us (preferably our descendants) and about plucky Earthmen outwitting the aliens. I think I liked those plots a bit more when I was a teenager, and certainly the dodgy biology irritates me more now. I can’t help but feel there’s a strong element of wish-fulfilment in the supermen ones too – you know, the “I’m so misunderstood, but one day I’ll find my own kind and we’ll rule the world” thing. And I’m afraid that makes me roll my eyes a bit now (tho I suspect that’s exactly what I was enjoying about them as a teenager … 🙂 ).

Interesting contrast between this anthology and the one for the previous year (post) in that the last one had a few stories that were very “we’re doomed and will die horribly” but this is more about superman mutants or unexpected weird effects of nuclear weapons. Perhaps not significant at all, perhaps an artifact of the editors’ choices? But still interesting. And I think this anthology has more paranoid stories than the last.

“Don’t Look Now” Henry Kuttner

Paranoid story about someone who can see the aliens among us. Not sure if I spotted the twist early on because I’ve read this before & remembered it or because it was obvious. It only occurs to me on this reading to wonder if all these paranoid stories about Martians are to do with the ramping up of the Cold War and the whole rooting out of the communists amongst us rhetoric? Or maybe this is too early.

“He Walked Around the Horses” H. Beam Piper

Alternate history, based on an actual disappearance – in 1809 Benjamin Bathurst walked around his horses in an inn courtyard in Prussia and vanished. This is the story of where he walked to – a Europe almost but not quite the same – told through the letters & witness statements of the people who saw him appear & had to deal with him. Possibly the first alternate history I ever read? One of my favourites in the anthology.

“The Strange Case of John Kingman” Murray Leinster (a pseudonym of Will F. Jenkins)

A man in a lunatic asylum has been there longer than seems possible, and has many other odd things about him. It’s both a “supermen/aliens among us” story and a story about not meddling with things you don’t understand. I find it a little too pat – it’s a trope Campbell was fond of as an editor, and I’m not so keen. At least in this case there’s not also a dodgy understanding of evolution/genetics to make it irritating.

“That Only a Mother” Judith Merril

Haunting story about a mother at the end of her time being pregnant & the first few months of her daughter’s life. The sense of ominous doom is built up well with the protagonist worrying about places she or her husband may’ve been exposed to radiation. And then the child is clearly different – extremely clever, faster developing brain – but still the sense of impending doom, only resolved at the very end. Nicely done.

“The Monster” A. E. van Vogt

Aliens arrive on a desolate Earth – and resurrect long dead humans to figure out why the Earth is empty (after all, if you’re going to colonise somewhere you want to make sure it’s fit for habitation). Things don’t go entirely to plan as one of our far future descendants out manoeuvres them.

“Dreams are Sacred” Peter Phillips

Bit of an odd story this one, tho quite fun. Some SFF writer has gone nuts, mind cracked under the strain of an illness, and he’s withdrawn from reality & in his imagination is living out the sorts of plots he puts in his books (very very pulp SF). Our hero is hooked up to a machine that inserts him into the man’s head so he can participate in the dreams and hopefully snap him out of it & back to reality. Afterwards there are indications of some effects on reality too, which seemed to come out of nowhere to me (and spoil the story a bit I think). I preferred the humorous puncturing of the plots in the dream.

“Mars is Heaven!” Ray Bradbury

The first manned landing on Mars, but some how it all looks like Earth circa 30 years earlier. As the crew explore they meet their dear departed loved ones – this must be heaven! Obviously not all is as it seems. I think this is the Bradbury story I remember when I think of him – paranoid Martian stories.

“Thang” Martin Gardner

Funny short-short about things bigger than us in the universe. I like it.

“Brooklyn Project” William Tenn (a pseudonym of Phillip Klass)

The Brooklyn Project is set up to make a device that can travel in time – and this is the demonstration. At each stop the apparatus takes a picture, and inevitably displaces whatever objects previously occupied that space. We start off one way and end quite differently, but our protagonists don’t notice they’re not the same. I think this is my favourite in this collection. And I want to read something set in the initial world (before it changes/without it changing) as it seems an interesting dystopia.

“Ring Around the Redhead” John D. MacDonald

Told as a murder trial – where the defendant turns out not to’ve murdered the victim, but instead the victim has meddled where he should not. The defendant has acquired (by some strange side effect of a nuclear weapon) a device that lets him reach through into other dimensions. He gets a girl (accidentally) from a time/place where tech etc is much superior to ours so that’s the romance subplot, and the victim tries to get gems & gold but his greed is punished. Fun, but you’ve got to approach it like Doctor Who – handwave the plot device & enjoy the ride, don’t pick at the details.

“Period Piece” J. J. “Coupling” (a pseudonym for John R. Pierce)

A 20th Century man brought forward through time attends an endless stream of parties talking to the people of the 31st Century about his own time. Or is that really what’s going on? Obviously it isn’t, and the inevitability of his discovery of the real truth is there from the very beginning of the story. The very end reminds me of a philosophical essay I read sometime ago, but I don’t want to explain as it would spoil the story a bit.

“Dormant” A. E. van Vogt

A remote island in the pacific ocean hosts an old device/creature that has been dormant for a very very long time indeed. This story both shows us the perspective of the people trying to figure out what on earth is going on with the very odd rock, and the device itself as it wakes up and tries to remember its purpose. A story of failure to communicate because of both sides not even seeing the other as communicable with.

“In Hiding” Wilmar H. Shiras

Another “supermen among us” story – a sweet and cheerful one about a teenage boy with extremely high intelligence. He’s hiding this to fit into school/society but opens up & trusts a psychiatrist and tells him about his real life & enthusiasms. I like the story while I’m reading it, and I liked it a lot when I first read this collection. But now I get stuck at the end of the story where there’s this supposedly optimistic note that perhaps there are others like him because he’s the result of a mutation because his parents were exposed to radiation. And it’s just not plausible – even if you accept that as how he came to be, the likelihood of a second identical mutation in another child is pretty much impossible. So it stops the story being quite as upbeat, and makes the end rather sad – he’ll never find an intellectual peer. (And I don’t think the author intended that.)

“Knock” Fredric Brown

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door …”. In this case, aliens have destroyed all creatures on the earth except for a pair of each. Plucky human man outwits the aliens and get them to leave, whereupon he, she and the other animals will repopulate the world (I guess the plants were all left alone …). I didn’t much enjoy this, not sure why – tone or style or something just didn’t sit right.

“A Child is Crying” John D. MacDonald

Another “supermen among us” story, this time disturbing and creepy. The highly intelligent child with mental superpowers is not sympathetic, and he and his cohorts are quite sure they’ll inherit the Earth when they’re good and ready. It’s also strongly influenced by the spectre of all out nuclear war. I liked this, even despite the dodgy biology.

“Late Night Final” Eric Frank Russell

Aliens (very human-type ones) come to conquer a far future Earth. But instead they go native. This is both “humans are better than aliens” and “hippies are better than warmongers” in flavour. It also reminds me of Bradbury’s Martian story, only we’re the Martians & it turns out the paranoia is wrong, going native really is the right answer.

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