Review - Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov

Short review: The hunt for Earth is on, but it turns out not to matter very much, because the omniscient robots have been guiding us all along.

Haiku
A search for lost Earth
Travels to spacer planets
Is that Olivaw?

Full review: Late in his career, and apparently running out of ideas, Asimov returned to his greatest works and decided to expand them, and eventually merge them. The less than impressive results are the collection of Foundation sequels and prequels. Foundation and Earth seems to want to tie as many of Asimov's books into the Foundation sequence as possible.

Following on after the events in Foundation's Edge (read review), Trevize, Palorat and Bliss all decide to find Earth. They stumble about, eventually figuring out which planets were the "Spacer" planets - from The Caves of Steel (read review), The Naked Sun (read review), and The Robots of Dawn (read review) - and land on several, including Solaria. On Solaria they find out that the inhabitants have seemingly redefined humanity so as to circumvent the Laws of Robotics - anyone who isn't a Solarian isn't human and can be harmed or even killed by a robot. They escape, and take with them an immature (and thus not yet "human" by Solarian standards) child named Fallon.

Using clues found in a Spacer database, they find a terraformed planet around Alpha Centauri, and then finally, Earth itself. Earth is a lifeless rock, but they land on the moon and find R. Daneel Olivaw waiting for them.

And this is what makes the book, and pretty much all of the subsequent Foundation books mediocre at best. Apparently, Olivaw is responsible for all human history since The Caves of Steel. Citing the Zeroeth Law, Olivaw has been working to benefit humanity for millennia, causing the settlement on Alpha, the development of psychohistory, the establishment of the Foundation, the settlement of Gaia, and pretty much everything else beneficial that happened in any of the Foundation books.

While I can accept that the development of Galaxia (as repugnant as the concept of a hive-mind version of humanity seems to me) might be seen by some as desirable, the introduction of a god-like shepherd of humanity in the form of a nigh-immortal robot (not completely immortal, in the climax of this novel, Olivaw binds his brain with Fallon's because his own brain is dying after millennia) drives the book off the edge of silliness. Introducing the robots as a benevolent, almost omniscient force to the story, to me, robs the books of a lot of their impact. Instead of humanity struggling to survive a galactic disaster, we have humanity manipulated by a small collection of well-meaning dictators. Plunking Olivaw into the later books was, in my opinion, a huge mistake, and one that makes this, and the subsequent prequels featuring him, average books at best.

Previous book in the series: Foundation's Edge
Subsequent book in the series: Prelude to Foundation

1987 Locus Award Nominees

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Review - Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov

Short review: Everyone is being manipulated from the shadows, but that's okay because it is all for the greater good.

Haiku
Now the Mule is gone
But the plan is too perfect
A new threat is there

Full review: This is the fourth book in the Foundation series, and was written after a long hiatus after the publication of the first three. This book picks up some time after the crisis of the Mule in Second Foundation (read review), and builds on the idea that the Second Foundation is manipulating events to keep the Seldon Plan on track. It also introduces the idea that a third, unknown, more subtle, and powerful force is manipulating the Second Foundation itself with an agenda all its own. The book won the 1983 Hugo Best Novel Award, and the 1983 Locus Best Science Fiction Novel Award and I can only assume there weren't very many particularly good nominees that year, or that the voters were giving a backdoor award to the original Foundation trilogy by voting for this book (the original Foundation series was published before the Hugo Awards existed, and thus could not be directly honored, although it won a Hugo Award in 1966 for "Best All-Time Series").

Through various political machinations and subterfuges, the main characters of the book all leave their respective homes and set out across the remnants of the Galactic Empire intent on finding either Earth or the mysterious third force that is apparently manipulating everyone. The novel culminates in a three way showdown between the various forces, and a solution of sorts is provided by the central character of the novel. Ultimately, it is the ending of the novel that doesn't work for me. Asimov reveals his belief that people can't be trusted to make decisions for themselves, but rather must be taken care of by those who are smarter than they are, or who are simply superior at decision making. In the disappointing denouement the main character cavalierly casts aside individual choice in favor of security against an ill-defined and possibly nonexistent threat.

Despite the weak ending, the novel is better than many of the later Foundation books, and is certainly better than the poorly thought out Robot-Foundation ret cons that dominated Asimov's later output. Even so, it is still a fairly mediocre novel, and a very noticeable step-down in quality from the original series.

Previous book in the series: Second Foundation
Subsequent book in the series: Foundation and Earth

1982 Hugo Best Novel Winner: Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh
1984 Hugo Best Novel Winner: Startide Rising by David Brin

1982 Locus Best Science Fiction Novel Winner: The Many Coloured Land by Julian May

1984 Locus Best Science Fiction Novel Winner: Startide Rising by David Brin

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Hugo Best Novel Winners
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1983 Locus Award Nominees
1983 Nebula Award Nominees

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Review - Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Short review: To get the Seldon Plan back on track the Second Foundation must first deal with the Mule, and then with the original Foundation.

Haiku
Alter the Mule's mind
Deceive the first Foundation
Save the Seldon Plan

Full review: Second Foundation picks up where Foundation and Empire (read review) left off - with the Mule hunting for the Second Foundation, which constitutes the only real threat to his hegemony. Like Foundation and Empire, the book is divided into two main parts.

The first part details the Mule's continued efforts to find the Second Foundation, and the Second Foundation's attempts to foil those efforts. Finally, the Second Foundation protects itself by simply modifying the Mule's thoughts so that he has no interest in finding them. Since the Mule is a mutant, the Second Foundation reasons that the plan can be placed back on track after he dies and his ability to control other people dies with him.

The second half of the book takes place after the Mule's death and covers the Second Foundation's efforts to hide itself once more following their "outing" during the reign of the Mule. It is revealed that the Second Foundation was a mirror of the original Foundation - while the Foundation was stocked with experts in the physical sciences and specifically included no psychohistorians, the Second Foundation was made up of psychohistorians and experts in "mentalics" (telepathy and related psionic abilities). With the Mule gone, the Foundation regains its independence and smashes his now leaderless empire. But, the leaders of the Foundation are offended that they might be manipulated by the Second Foundationers and try to find them themselves, using their physical science expertise to develop an anti-telepath device. Knowing only that the Second Foundation is at "stars end" or the "other end of the galaxy" they reason the Second Foundation must also be on Terminus (since that would be the "end" if you went around the galactic disk), and find and eliminate what they think is the threat.

They are wrong, of course, and the whole affair was set up by Second Foundationers to hide their existence again. Since they are made up of experts in psychohistory, they have been safeguarding the plan and keeping it on track (the Mule notwithstanding), but they couldn't do that if the Foundation knew they were being manipulated, so they arranged to hide again, and return to "stars end" - Trantor.

The events in this book are, to me, what separates the Foundation books from most of the science fiction that preceded it. Instead of huge battles between starships settling things, the battles are a sideshow. What is more important is the manipulation of the people who control the starships, and the ability to misdirect, allowing for the manipulators to take a long view of history. This book shows the mechanics of the Seldon plan, without cheapening them, which is a difficult task (many books that expose the hidden details of a setting or plot often detract from its impact, see for example, Prelude to Foundation and the other later written Foundation books). The book is disturbing in some ways, as an elite group of self-appointed shepherds end up directing things from the shadows, which I find to be an unsettling prospect (the wisdom of which is annoyingly never really examined in any of the books of the series, not the original trilogy, not the sequels, and not the prequels). This, with the rest of the original Foundation trilogy, should be on every science fiction reader's bookshelf.

Previous book in the series: Foundation and Empire
Subsequent book in the series: Foundation's Edge

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Follow Friday - The Thirty-Nine Steps Was a Book by John Buchan and a Movie by Alfred Hitchcock

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Lauren Gets Literal and Fic Book Reviews.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What is your biggest pet peeve when it comes to books? Maybe you don’t like love triangles or thin plots? Tell us about it!

Continuity errors. I hate them. Some are laughably bad, such as the sequence in Pureheart (read review) in which some events take place on a Friday, and then two days later it is Friday again. Others are more subtle - since I read a lot of speculative fiction, the most common gaffe of this sort is the result of characters inexplicably forgetting previously established supernatural powers or technological devices that would easily solve a conundrum they face later in the book. I have heard this called the "Superman syndrome", since in many of his stories Superman has to "forget" some of his powers in order to make the villain of the story an even remotely credible problem. But it applies equally well to characters who "forget" that they have a star ship that can travel faster than light that would be able to get the message to the colony in time, or "forget" that they can read minds when interrogating a captured bad guy for critical information, and so on. And it is truly annoying.

Another thing I hate in books are sequences in which characters act improbably out of character in order to make a particular story element work. As an example, I point to a scene in Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles series - which is a retelling of the myth of King Arthur as it might have actually happened, with Arthur being portrayed as a post-Roman British warlord fighting the encroaching Saxons. Through most of the series Arthur is something of a maverick, frequently flouting both established law and social convention. But when Cornwell tried to weave in the story of Tristan and Isoulde into the story, it becomes necessary for Arthur to become a stickler for following the rules in order to make the story work. So for about a chapter of the book, Arthur becomes a by-the-book stick-in-the-mud, because the story required him to be so. And then, once Tristan and Isoulde are tragically dealt with by King Mark, Arthur goes back to being the unconventional rebel that he was through the rest of the book. This isn't me griping about characters changing and developing through the course of a book or a series. But when the character makes a rapid about face and it is clearly solely for the sake of making a plot point work, that irks me.

And the final pet peeve of mine is when authors don't think through the implications of their fictional worlds. This is probably a pet peeve that is mostly applicable to science fiction and fantasy, but it can crop up in almost any genre. The problem occurs when an author comes up with some interesting technological advance, societal arrangement, magical power, or something else of that ilk, and then proceeds with his story as if everything else in the world is exactly the same as in our world, and having the inhabitants of his fictional world act surprised when the new element shakes things up. A classic example would be a fantasy world in which flying beasts are ridden like horses, and when the hero uses his cadre of griffon-mounted warriors to fly over the castle walls, everyone is stunned by his brilliant innovation in military tactics. Another example is in the novel Dancing With Eternity (read review), in which a war is described that took place between militant feminists and the rest of humanity. But the author had earlier established that radical genetic engineering of people was a commonplace practice (a procedure the protagonist had undergone himself earlier in the book to remove the pangolin-like scales he had earlier had engineered onto himself), and one relatively easy engineering change described is changing the gender of the subject. The question one has to ask is how gender identity could loom so large in a world in which the gender of individuals was so easily malleable. The author simply didn't think through the implications of his own imagined future, and as a result, inserted a plot element that just didn't make sense.

Go to previous Follow Friday: The Thirty-Eighth Parallel Separates the Koreas

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Ali Baba Faced Off Against Forty Thieves

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Review - Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov

Short review: Hari Seldon's plan proceeds like clockwork until a completely unpredictable fly in the ointment shows up to muck up the works.

Haiku
As the Empire dies
The Seldon Plan runs off the rails
Because of the Mule

Full review: This book is the middle of the original Foundation trilogy. It is is divided into two distinct parts. In the first half of the book, the Foundation confronts the remnants of the Galactic Empire, whose forces are commanded by the brilliant general Bel Riose. While in decline, the Empire is still a match for the Foundation, requiring some subterfuge to defeat. The Foundation manages to drive a wedge between Bel Riose and his emperor Cleon II, resulting in Bel Riose's execution, averting the threat. Everything seems to be following Seldon's plan.

The second part of the book, titled The Mule, is where the rubber hits the road so to speak. The Foundation itself has become corrupt, leading to dissatisfaction and potential revolt. However, a new force appears led by the Mule, a mutant telepath who conquers the Foundation. The Foundation's members complacently assume that Seldon has a solution for the Mule. When Seldon's hologram appears, he mentions nothing of the Mule, or the political situation, and instead talks about the aborted revolt. In other words, the plan has gone awry. Psychohistory is the science of predicting the behavior of large groups of people, and the Mule is only one man, and his special powers allow him to drive the political agenda in unpredicted ways. This is a huge shock to the members of the Foundation, and a significant change in the direction of the books: instead of confidently following a predetermined path to success, now the plan is no longer a useful guide.

Meanwhile, the Mule, disguised as a circus clown, travels with two Foundation citizens Toran and Bayta and a psychologist named Ebling trying to locate the hidden (and possibly imaginary) Second Foundation, that was supposedly set up at the opposite end of the galaxy from Terminus. With the Mule's assistance, Ebling discovers the location of the Second Foundation, but is killed by Batya before he can reveal it, leaving the Mule to run his newly conquered Empire, but with the Second Foundation as yet undiscovered and free to plan a counterattack.

The predictability of Foundation (read review) and the first half of Foundation and Empire which was in danger of becoming stale, is disrupted by The Mule, which introduces uncertainty into what would have otherwise been a boring march of inevitability to the restoration of the second Galactic Empire. While the first half of Foundation and Empire is a good story, without The Mule and the final book of the trilogy, the Foundation series would not have been nearly as compelling a story. However, without establishing the validity of Seldon's predictions through the first portion of the trilogy, the about face brought on in The Mule would not have been particularly interesting. By combining the two sides of the story, Asimov created a powerful story that is rightly regarded as one of the best works of science fiction.

In 1996 The Mule was awarded a "Retro Hugo" for Best Novel, winning for the year 1946. Why what is essentially a half a story would be given the award over the available competition (including the A.E. van Vogt classic The World of Null-A) is not clear. The award cannot be explained as a case of  fans looking for a way to retrospectively honor the Foundation series, as the series as a whole was given the Hugo award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966, beating out Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom series, Robert A. Heinlein's Future History series, E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series, and J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Because the award was given as an honor to fiction from 1946, this technically makes The Mule the "oldest" winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Previous book in the series: Foundation
Subsequent book in the series: Second Foundation

1941 Hugo Winner for Best Novel: Slan by A.E. van Vogt

1951 Hugo Winner for Best Novel: Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

What are the Hugo Awards?

Hugo Best Novel Winners

1946 Retro Hugo Award Nominees

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Review - Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Short review: Hari Seldon has predicted the collapse of the Galactic Empire, but he has a plan to make it less awful.

Haiku
Psychohistory
And the fall of the Empire
A plan to save all

Full review: It is hard to properly review Foundation, as it is so influential a work within the science fiction genre. It is also one of the first "serious" science fiction books I read years ago when I was barely in double digits in age, and I have read it more than once since. The book details the Foundation, established at the request of Hari Seldon, a mathematician who discovered how to accurately predict the behavior of humans in large numbers using mathematical formulas. Seldon predicts the collapse of the Galactic Empire, which is considered treason, and is put on trial. He makes a deal with the prosecution, and the Foundation is built on a planet named Terminus located on the edge of the galaxy.

The alleged reason for the Foundation's existence is to compile all human knowledge into a galactic encyclopedia which (Seldon asserts) will allow the period of anarchy following the collapse of the Empire to be reduced from thirty thousand years to a mere one thousand years. The structure of the book is a series of short stories that cover important developments in the Foundation's history. It turns out the encyclopedia is entirely a ruse, and Seldon, via a series of prerecorded holographic lectures, appears every so often and explains what he predicted would be happening (via psychohistory), and offers vague suggestions as to how to proceed in the future. Though mineral poor, Terminus leverages its wealth of knowledge to take over or dominate the surrounding areas with its superior technology.

The episodic format of the book works well by allowing for the Foundation's story to progress without long tedious periods being detailed. The books have been compared to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which Asimov says influenced the work. The only thing I found to be silly was the concept that is introduced in one of the stories that one of the nearby "barbarian kingdoms" remains an interstellar power despite having "lost" atomic power (i.e. they don't have the know-how to produce atomic power). At the time Asimov wrote the books, atomic energy seems to have been something of a buzz word in science fiction, and losing it was clearly supposed to show how far the Foundation's rivals had fallen, but the depiction just brought to my mind the incredibly silly image of coal fired or gas-turbine starships. As usual for the era's science fiction, no one predicted the microchip revolution, and scientists are still using slide rules and computers are the size of buildings (or cities) while atomic generators are made the size of belt buckles.

Technology weirdness aside, this is one of the foundational (note the pun) works of science fiction. It is a must read for any science fiction fan.

Subsequent book in the series: Foundation and Empire

Hugo Award Winners for Best Novelette

1943 Retro Hugo Award Finalists (awarded in 2018)

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Review - The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov

Short review: A robot is destroyed and Baley and Olivaw are sent to solve the mystery. Again.

Haiku
Back for a third time
To solve a robot murder
Tie things together

Full review: This is the third of the Elijah Baley/R. Daneel Olivaw murder mystery novels, and the one that opened the door for connecting the robot series with the Foundation series. It is better than many of the Robot-Foundation crossovers because although the crime to be solved also probably the weakest of the three Robot mysteries, the story contains a frightening depiction of the dysfunctional nature of spacer society.

The mystery at the heart of the book concerns the destruction of the human form robot Jander on the planet Aurora. Once again, Lige Baley is teamed with Olivaw to hunt down the culprit, but the mystery serves mostly as a vehicle to explore the oddity of the spacer culture. Once on the outwardly utopian Aurora, Lige delves further into dysfunctional nature of spacer society revealed in The Naked Sun. Gladia, introduced in The Naked Sun, turns out to be Jander's owner, and is so distanced from human contact that she took Jander as her lover and "husband". The murder mystery leads Lige into Auroran politics, featuring a struggle between Aurorans who believe that colonizing the galaxy is their destiny, and others opposed to such a goal.

Along the way, Lige discovers attempts to construct further human form robots to further the goal of colonizing the galaxy, the seeds of the idea that will be developed by Hari Seldon as psychohistory, and a love triangle. The intersection of these elements, especially the attempts to construct human form robots without the assistance of the one roboticist who knows the secret of their construction, proves to be the thread that ties together the answer to the mystery. Unfortunately, the answer, and Baley's handling of the dénouement of the book is mostly just a set up for the various Foundation-Robot crossovers that came later.

The weakness of this book is not necessarily contained in the story or characters in the book, but the implications that the story has for other Asimov works. The introduction of psychohistory here, thousands of years before Seldon, lessens the "revolutionary" insight that got Seldon arrested and put on trial in Foundation. The introduction of Olivaw and Giskard as more or less benevolent robot-gods shepherding humanity through a crisis begins the process that ends with the omniscient robot guardian of Foundation and Earth. While the story contained within the book itself is well-crafted, the connections it makes with other works serves only to cheapen them.

Previous book in the series: The Naked Sun
Subsequent book in the series: Robots and Empire

1984 Hugo Award Nominees
1984 Locus Award Nominees

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Review - The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov

Short review: Elijah Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw are back to solve another murder, but this time they are on Solaria instead of Earth.

Haiku
Isaac Asimov
An extreme agoraphobe
As is his hero

Full review: The Naked Sun is the sequel to The Caves of Steel, once again featuring Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw as they attempt to solve a seemingly impossible murder. Unlike The Caves of Steel, which was set on Earth, this time the pair head to Solaria, the most extremely "spacer" of all the spacer planets.

As before, the mystery in the novel is well-crafted, and the process of solving it is well-written. Much of the book serves to contrast the conditions on overcrowded impoverished Earth where the bulk of the population is hostile to robots, agoraphobic, and live in an almost communal manner, to those on wealthy Solaria, with strict controls limiting the human population of the entire planet to twenty thousand people, where robots outnumber humans tens of thousands to one, and where face-to-face human contact is regarded as obscene.

As usual for Asimov's robot novels, the plot revolves around the meaning and application of the Three Laws of Robotics, and some frightening implications those laws have that had not been previously considered which are fully explored much later in Foundation and Earth. The mystery also allows Asimov to explore the problems of Earth culture (exposed by Baley's contact with the Solarians), and the troubles faced by the dysfunctional Solarian culture specifically, and the spacer culture in general.

While this book isn't quite as good as The Caves of Steel, it remains one of Asimov's best.

Previous book in the series: The Caves of Steel
Subsequent book in the series: The Robots of Dawn

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Review - The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

Short review: A spacer is killed and it is up to a robot and a human to solve it. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics come up a lot.

Haiku
A spacer gets killed
A robot to help solve it
And Earth is dirt poor

Full review: The Caves of Steel is the first and best of Asimov's Robot mysteries. Essentially an exploration in novel length of the ideas introduced by Asimov in his various Robot short stories, the novel details human detective Elijah Baley, an Earth native, and his partner, spacer robot R. Daneel Olivaw (the "R." stands for robot) as they try to solve the politically sensitive murder of a spacer ambassador.

While the mystery is more or less a classic closed-door mystery that is well-written and interesting, the book mostly revolves around showing an overpopulated impoverished Earth in which everyone lives in giant underground cities (the caves of steel of the title) and the arrogant wealthy spacer culture that is contrasted with Earth. The book, as with most Asimov books featuring robots, is concerned with the effects of the Three Laws of Robotics, which, of course, prove to be the key to unraveling the murder.

The book is the first introduction of R. Daneel Olivaw, a character who, I believe, appears in more Asimov books than any other - although his appearances in later books are somewhat of a disappointment. The book also introduces a fairly common theme in Asimovian fiction - the poverty of those on Earth compared to those who have ventured out into space. This is one of my favorite Asimov books: The mystery is good, the characters interesting (although a bit too much time is spent obsessing over bodily functions), and the competing cultures described are both plausible and frightening.

Subsequent book in the series: The Naked Sun

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Review - L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume XXVII by K.D. Wentworth (editor)

Stories included:
The Unreachable Voices of Ghosts by Jeffrey Lyman
Maddy Dune's First and Only Spelling Bee by Patrick O'Sullivan
The Truth, from a Lie of Convenience by Brennan Harvey
In Apprehension, How Like a God by R.P.L. Johnson
An Acolyte of Black Spires by Ryan Harvey
The Dualist by Van Aaron Hughes
Bonehouse by Keffy R.M. Kehrli
This Peaceful State of War by Patty Jansen
Sailing the Sky Sea by Geir Lanesskog
Unfamiliar Territory by Ben Mann
Medic! by Adam Perin
Vector Victoria by D.A. D'Amico
The Sundial by John Arkwright

Articles included:
How to View Art by L. Ron Hubbard
Making It by Mike Resnick
Creating Your Own Destiny by Robert Castillo

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Short story collections are prevalent in speculative fiction - much more so it seems than any other publishing genres. As a result, someone who reads and reviews science fiction is often going to find himself reviewing one of these collections, which can be problematic. Many collections have a defined theme, or are the collections of the works of a particular author, or a particular time period, and so you can try to look for some sort of unifying theme to them. But the Writers of the Future theme is simply this: writers of speculative fiction who entered the Writers of the Future competition and have not previously been professionally published. As a result, this particular collection is more or less a grab bag of whatever fiction happened to be the best in the submission pile that quarter.

That said, there are a few commonalities to the stories, which is only natural given that they were all evaluated by the same panel of judges. A couple of stories which seem to evoke an older era of science fiction are the hard science fiction stories The Unreachable Voices of Ghosts by Jeffrey Lyman and Sailing the Sky Sea by Geir Lanesskog, both of which evoke the kind of engineering fiction of the early works of Asimov, Heinlein, and Niven. The Unreachable Voices of Ghosts envisions a future in which desperate or nihilistic individuals set out into the Kuiper Belt in tiny ships to hunt for miniature black holes in voyages that last for years, and for those who don't find their elusive quarry, are one-way. Against this backdrop Lyman builds a cozy love story between two people who had both given up hope of having a human connection again. The story is not bad, but a bit formulaic and the romance feels a bit forced. In Sailing the Sea Sky the protagonist finds himself having to figure out a way to rescue himself from falling into the heart of Uranus after the floating platform he had been working on was destroyed by a surprise attack. He picks up some unexpected help along the way, and as each problem comes up, he and the group he falls in with manage to buy themselves just a little more time even though it never seems to be quite enough to get them to safety. The story wraps up fairly well, and is one of the better crafted stories in the volume.

While the focus of the Writers of the Future contest seems to be mostly science fiction, there are a handful of fantasy stories in the volume as well. The first, Maddy Dune's First and Only Spelling Bee by Patrick O'Sullivan, is a kind of paranormal mystery with a youthful protagonist who participates in a magical contest despite some fairly obvious prejudice against her species. The contest serves as a framing device for the real story, involving a strange competitor in a cabinet, but the story is just a little too mysterious and never really seems to come together. The second fantasy story, An Acolyte of Black Spires by Ryan Harvey, seems more like a snippet of a much larger story than a story on its own. All in all, Harvey seems to try to take on too much to reasonably accomplish in the space he has to tell the story. An alien culture, an alien political structure, a strange alien racial curse, all of which are crucial to the plot. So much background has to be explained in the story that little actual action takes place, and what does happen seems to leave so many unanswered questions that the resolution is somewhat unsatisfying. The final fantasy story, The Sundial by Joan Arkwright, is a tale of love and death set against the backdrop of the U.S. Civil War built upon Egyptian mythology. The story takes a bit to get going, but it is the best of the fantasy stories in the volume.

The volume has two stories featuring humans trying to understand an alien culture, which is fairly well-trodden science fiction territory, and consequently both seem more or less formulaic. The first, The Dualist by Van Aaron Hughes, is about an envoy sent to a planet by a humanity seeking to obtain resources from an alien planet, but also charged with preventing one of the resident alien races from killing the other resident alien race. The difference between the two factions basically boils down to a theological difference that seems so slight to human eyes as to be negligible but is clearly a huge issue for the aliens. After stumbling about, the envoy solves the conflict by essentially ignoring the cultural mores of both alien races, leading to a fairly cliched resolution. The other, This Peaceful State of War by Patti Jansen, also revolves around a human envoy trying to make sense of an inexplicable conflict between two alien species. There is also a religious element in the story, but this time it comes in the form of meddling humans who think they know what is good for the aliens based upon little more than their own prejudices. The mystery of the alien conflict comes to a head in a way that won't really surprise most science fiction fans - the source of the "conflict" was fairly well telegraphed - and makes one wonder how stupid the human characters really are and as a result just didn't work form me.

In a post 9/11 world coupled with the undercurrent of anti-authoritarianism that runs through a lot of science fiction, it is almost de rigeur to include stories about plucky  hero confronting a vast government conspiracies. The Truth, from a Lie of Convenience by Brennan Harvey features a washed up reporter covering the memorial observances on the tenth anniversary of a horrific terrorist attack that sparked Lunar independence. As the story unfolds, our hero uncovers a sloppy cover up that unravels almost immediately. The story is very reminiscent of the sort of tales told by the fringe lunatics that go under the label of "9/11 Truthers", with the distinction that in the imagined reality of the story the people ranting about a shadowy conspiracy are actually right. The story proceeds in a fairly linear fashion to a mostly predictable conclusion. The other conspiracy story is Vector Victoria by D.A. D'Amico, a tale set in a dystopian cyperpunkish future in which the heroes are covertly spreading a counter-virus to counteract the evil viruses the government is spreading among the populace. They run across a government agent, and through the rest of the story the confused viewpoint character (and the reader) learns that what they thought was true may not actually be the real story. The story ends on an ambiguous note and is thoughtful and thought-provoking.

In addition to Vector, Victoria, the collection has a few other explicitly cyberpunk style stories, including Bonehouse by Keffy R.M. Kehrli, a cyberpunk story about what happens to the bodies of those who jack into cyberspace permanently. The story delves in to how those who are left behind react to their loved ones being sucked into a world that they don't approve of or even necessarily understand. The protagonist is ostensibly acting on the right side of the law and on behalf of concerned loving families, but as events unfold it becomes clear that the law, and the protagonists profession, may be out of step with where they should be. But only maybe, because Kehrli doesn't make either side of the issue clearly correct, which is one of the marks of a strong story. The other cyberpunk style story in the volume is In Apprehension, How Like a God by R.P.L. Johnson, featuring a murder mystery at an institution run by a group of monastic academics who maintain the information net that underpins civilization. The story is filled with interesting ideas - the biggest of which is that the information net is actually an outgrowth of the Higgs field, and consequently anything that exists in reality is incorporated directly into the next as long as someone takes the time to do it. Against this background the murder investigation is fairly mundane, and given the identity of the killer seems a bit too easy to unravel. On the other hand, once the murderer is uncovered, it becomes clear that there is no reason for the murderer to fear exposure, and one doubts the security of humanity's future. It is an unsettling tale, even if it is executed somewhat blandly.

Unfamiliar Territory by Ben Mann is a space based mystery involving a protagonist working for a space salvage company tasked with guarding the engineers who actually do the salvage work. Our hero is teamed, to her dismay, with a rookie engineer. Despite the fact that this element is harped upon a fair amount in the story, it turns out to have almost no impact on the actual plot. Ships start mysteriously turning up derelict, and our hero is sent to investigate. The story meanders along until there is a dramatic but poorly explained turn of events and the story ends. The story seems promising, but it appears the author tried to pack a story that should have been larger into a short story format, and it just doesn't work very well. Finally, Medic! by Adam Perin is a fairly standard tale of military science fiction featuring a medic pressed into service in a war against an alien race. It turns out that the protagonist was given a choice to enlist or go to prison had been given a quota of lives he had to save before he could go home. In the story he is coming to the close of his term of service and desperate attempts are being made by the military hierarchy to get him to reenlist, but all he wants to do is go home to the love of his life. The "twist" ending at the end is horribly predictable, and on the whole, the story is nothing particularly memorable.

The handful of essays in the volume are fairly bland. The reprint of How to View Art, an essay written by L. Ron Hubbard, is mostly noteworthy for the worshipful and unintentionally hilarious introduction that claims that at one point Hubbard's name was "virtually synonymous" with American popular fiction. The essay itself is pretty bland, but I suppose it might be of use to someone who had never thought about art before. Making It by Mike Resnick is about the process of getting your writing into print, and Creating Your Own Destiny by Robert Castillo is about taking control of your creative life. Both are serviceable, but neither was particularly noteworthy.

Many short story collections are decidedly uneven in quality. Coupled with the fact that this volume is comprised of authors unified only by the fact that this is their first professional sale, this is very much true with respect to this collection. While none of the stories are great, a number, including Bonehouse and Sailing the Sky Sea, are quite good, and the rest are decent despite some niggling problems. The only really subpar elements of the volume are the essays, which are mostly bland and uninteresting. One has to wonder if the other uninspiring essays contributed by contemporary writers were chosen for their blandness so as not to expose the utter banality of Hubbard's included essay. Given the limited number of venues for finding debut speculative fiction these days, for anyone interested in seeing new writers it is always worth picking up the annual volume of Writers of the Future, and this year's edition is no exception.

Previous book in the series: L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume XXVI

Subsequent book in the series: L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume XXVIII

K.D. Wentworth     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein

Short review: Hardball politics result in a lifelong deception of epic magnitude.

Haiku
Out of work actor
A political kidnapping
Epic deception

Full review: After the debacle of the 1955 Hugo Award being handed out to They'd Rather Be Right, the next year the ship was righted and in 1956 the award was handed out to Heinlein's Double Star, a work of political science fiction featuring a kidnapped politician, an actor pressed into service, and a lot of discussion about the dirty business of parliamentary politics.

The story is fairly straightforward. Lorenzo Smythe, an out of work actor is approached by a spacer named Dak in a bar with what he thinks is a routine proposition for work. When he goes to meet his contact, he finds himself involved in a high stakes game of political intrigue in which the participants are willing to play to the death. Due to the exigencies of culture and politics, John Bonforte, the leader of the Empire's loyal parliamentary opposition, must appear at a specific event or his political career will be ruined and discord possibly resulting in substantial loss of life will ensue. Knowing this, and seeking to derail his political faction, unknown forced have kidnapped Bonforte. Due to the similarities in appearance between Bonforte and himself, Smythe finds himself part of a plan to replace Bonforte with a double to fill in for the event and stave off political disaster, with Smythe in the role as Bonforte's double. Soon one event becomes two, and as the story progresses circumstances seem to conspire to keep him in the role of Bonforte for longer and longer periods, until finally Smythe ceases to exist and all that is left of the man formerly known as Smythe is a reborn Bonforte.

Double Star is quite brief - my copy only runs to 128 pages. But in that handful of pages, Heinlein is able to describe a Solar system spanning empire, two alien races (although one is described in a very cursory manner), an entire political system, all in addition to the specific details that make up the plot of the novel. Heinlein accomplishes this, as he does in many of his novels, by mostly eschewing explanation until absolutely necessary. When a Martian shows up early in the book with a "life-wand", Heinlein doesn't stop to explain what a life-wand is, or what it can do. He just has the characters react to it as an element of their world and trusts the reader to pick up what it is from context. By doing this throughout the book, Heinlein is able to move the story along at a rapid clip and avoid getting bogged down while characters spend time doing the equivalent of explaining to one another how a combustion engine works.

One interesting thing about the story is that there's not a whole lot to it that really had to be science fiction. The particular psychology of the Martians is a plot point, but that element could have been transferred to a non-science fictional one without too much difficulty. Just about everything else about the book could have easily been moved to a contemporary political thriller without any substantial effort. Mostly the book is an excuse to talk about politics and the psychology of campaigning and governing. By using Lorenzo Smythe as his lens into the story, who is both a capable actor and student of how to influence human emotion as well as a political neophyte, Heinlein is able to introduce the reader to his take on the political process one step at a time. And while one might not agree with Heinlein's take on politics, he does lay out his positions and the reasoning behind them clearly (including his explanation for why having a Constitutional monarchy can be justified).

The only real weakness the book has is that it was written in the 1950s, and it shows. Despite imagining a government that covers Earth, the Moon, Venus, Mars, and beyond, Heinlein, like most other writers of his era, completely failed to anticipate the advances in computing that the next few decades would bring. As a result, he imagines people calculating election result probabilities with slide rules, vast archive vaults full of millions of rolls of tape, and a system for keeping track of other people comprised of piles of manila folders stuffed with typewritten sheets of data - all of which make the book feel very dated. The typically sexist attitudes of the 1950s also poke through - Penny, the one female character in the book, is Bonfort's secretary (and consequently, Lorenzo's secretary) who we later learn is both highly educated and a member of the Imperial parliament. But in Bonfort's office she is only qualified to serve as a secretary who is  hopelessly smitten in-love with her boss. I suppose it is somewhat progressive that Penny is a member of parliament at all, but then again, the FDR administration had a female cabinet secretary already, so one might consider Penny's position to be par for the course at the time. In addition, several of the other member's of Bonfort's staff, who are all male, are also members of parliament (and some, quite pointedly, are not), so Penny holding a mundane staff position while serving in the government is not unique to her.

From a certain perspective it seems somewhat odd that a book with so little science fiction in its plot would win the Hugo award. On the other hand, political science fiction is one of Heinlein's most common topics, so from that perspective it seems fitting that this was the first of his four best novel Hugo's was for Double Star. Although elements of the book are dated, the novel still holds up as a fine example of Heinlein's better work, and is well worth reading.

1955 Hugo Winner for Best Novel: They'd Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley

1957 Hugo Winner for Best Novel: The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

What Are the Hugo Awards?

Hugo Best Novel Winners

1956 Hugo Award Nominees

Robert A. Heinlein     Book Award Reviews      Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Follow Friday - The Thirty-Eighth Parallel Separates the Koreas

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Books & Barks and Lauren's Book Blog.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Tell Santa what books you want for Christmas!

I have over seven thousand books in my personal library, so there aren't a whole lot of books that I really want that I don't already have. However, the book I would most like to get is Edgar Pangborn's A Mirror for Observers, which is the only winner of the International Fantasy Award for best fiction novel that I do not own. Unfortunately, the book is very rare and hard to find.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Thirty-Seven Is the Smallest Non-Supersingular Prime

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: The Thirty-Nine Steps Was a Book by John Buchan and a Movie by Alfred Hitchcock

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Review - Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov

Short review: Spontaneous time travel results in telepathy and regime change

Haiku
By flying through time
To irradiated Earth
He changes everything

Full review: Joseph Schwartz is an ordinary man, a retired tailor in the twentieth century. He is catapulted forward in time and winds up on a devastated radioactive Earth that is so poor every inhabitant who reaches the age of sixty is euthanized. This poses quite a problem for Schwartz, as he is sixty-two. Unable to speak the language due to language drift, he is taken to be mentally defective by the first people he meets, and they send him (in exchange for a bribe) to a scientist working on enhancing mental abilities. As a result of the experiments Schwartz becomes much more intelligent and acquires telepathic abilities.

Once able to communicate, Schwartz and the reader learn that Earth is a poverty stricken backwater in a Galactic Empire. Earth is also known for its rebelliousness and is discriminated against. Schwartz then becomes involved in a plot by pro-Earth fanatics to kill everyone else in the Empire with a super-virus, a plot he foils. The novel ends on an up note as the Imperial Procurator of Earth agrees to try to restore the planet by bringing in uncontaminated soil.

Aside from the rather odd time travel element, this is a pretty straightforward story. Some things seem implausible - the ability of humans to survive on the radioactive earth (the improbability of which Asimov talks about in a later added afterward), the implausibility of the plan to restore Earth, and so on, but the adventure in between holds up well.

Previous book in the series: The Currents of Space

1951 Retro Hugo Award Nominees

Isaac Asimov     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Follow Friday - Thirty-Seven Is the Smallest Non-Supersingular Prime

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Mother Lode and The Book Nympho.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: In light of 11/11/11 and Veteran’s Day, tell us about your favorite soldier and how he or she is saving the world. Fictional or real life.

I'm going to answer this the way I think a lot of people will answer this by tagging my two late grandfathers as my favorite soldiers. Both were World War II veterans.

My maternal grandfather was Paul A. Wright. He had no middle name and chose the middle initial "A" when he enlisted so that he could be at the front of any list of Paul Wrights that was alphabetized. He had to get a special exemption to enlist because he was working in a "war critical" industry at the time (as a truck driver for an oil company). He served in North Africa, but then went to paratrooper school and joined the 101^st Airborne just in time to be in the defense of Bastogne. After the war he came home, settled down, got a job working for the oil company and didn't talk about the war very much. He lived long enough to see me get married, but died before either of my kids were born.

My paternal grandfather was Joe Thomas Pound. He joined the Army Air Corps and flew multi-engine planes. My favorite story I heard from him was his first flying assignment. After finishing flight school, he was waiting for orders and saw a notice on the base bulletin board seeking pilots who wanted to volunteer for duty. He was bored and showed up for the meeting. They were looking for pilots to ferry planes to England. Because he had eight hours of experience in this type of plane, and his friend (and copilot) only had four, he was commander for the flight. Having grown up in a small town in Indiana, this flight was his first time out of the United States, and his first time seeing the ocean. The group started with one hundred planes. When they got to England after an all-night flight, they only had ninety-one. No one knows what happened to the other nine planes. They probably got lost somewhere over the North Atlantic and crashed into Greenland or the sea.

He eventually ended up flying supplies from Burma to China for most of the war, taking material to help supply the Chinese nationalist army "over the hump" (as the pilots called the Himalayas). After the war he used the G.I. Bill to go to college and launched my family on a completely different trajectory than it would have been otherwise. He worked as an accountant for a while, and then went back into the Air Force and stayed in the service for most of the rest of his life - he loved to fly. He was one of my favorite people in the world, and he died much too young when I was still in high school.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Thirty-Six Is Six Squared

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: The Thirty-Eighth Parallel Separates the Two Koreas

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Review - The Currents of Space by Isaac Asimov

Short review: A man with no memories upsets the unequal political balance between two planets and a now discredited scientific theory features prominently.

Haiku
Without memories
He's trapped on a slave planet
Matter flows through space

Full review: The Currents of Space is part of Asimov's Galactic Empire trilogy (although they weren't really written as a trilogy as most people use the term today, and they can be read separately without any trouble). I found this to be the best of the three.

The novel is set on Floriana, a planet that is essentially a fiefdom of the planet Sark. Floriana is valuable for a rare and irreproducible agricultural product, and the rulers of Sark have no intention of ever losing control of this valuable resource. Floriana is a heavily controlled society, in which education is denied to all but a handful, and the inhabitants are taught to perceive the "Squires" of Sark as almost godlike beings. Into this situation a man with no memory and no past is found and taken in by the denizens of a small Florinian village. First the stranger's mere presence, and then his slowly recovering memories upset the society imposed upon the Florinians.

Running in parallel to this story is the tale of agents of the Galactic Empire at Trantor seeking to break the power of the Squires of Sark without resorting to war. Eventually, the two sides of the story weave together, until several surprising secrets are revealed concerning the wealth produced by Floriana, the threat it is under, the identity of the mysterious amnesiac stranger, and how all three are interrelated.

This is one of Asimov's better novels - not as good as the Foundation or Robot books, but in the groups that falls right behind them. The characters are well-written, and (unlike those in some other Asimov books) have rational reactions to the events they find themselves confronted with. The story is quite good, both as a story of political intrigue, and a story of the impact of the surrounding environment that affects the skulduggery (although the science behind the science fiction in the book is well out of date). I found it to be an interesting and engaging book that is well worth reading.

Previous book in the series: The Stars, Like Dust
Subsequent book in the series: Pebble in the Sky

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