I’m glad to report that my journey with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is ending on a positive note. I wasn’t a fan of the previous entry, so I was a little worried about Foundation and Earth. Fortunately, I thought it was a huge improvement. It’s a direct continuation from Foundation’s Edge, so in hindsight, it’s almost as if the previous book was all a setup for the truly compelling part of the story.
I didn’t like the messy parallel plotlines in Foundation’s Edge, and so the main thing I appreciated about this one was its focus on a single group of characters, who are embarking on a single quest. We have Trevize, a member of the Foundation who’s got the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders, and his best bud, Pelorat, a scholar and all-round chill guy. Pelorat’s romantic partner, Bliss, is also part of the crew, and it’s in this three-sided dynamic that I got most of my enjoyment. It’s surprisingly sweet and relatable, how Trevize distrusts Bliss, simply because she’s Pelorat’s new girlfriend, and he doesn’t want his pal to get hurt. Add to that the conflict between Trevize’s and Bliss’s viewpoints about the fate of the galaxy, and you have some real satisfying character development.
The book is by no means perfect… I think it could have used some editing, because the debates between Trevize and Bliss, while thematically relevant, often feel repetitive, hitting the same beats over and over again. And any time a new female character was introduced, I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable tasteless description of her body.
Foundation’s Edge was published almost 30 years after the original Foundation trilogy, and you can feel that distance when you’re reading it. The sociological ideas that were at the forefront of the original books are kind of in the background now, replaced by a more conventional sci-fi adventure.
The setup of the novel doubles down on the mind-control conceit introduced in the previous books: Trevize, a councilman of the Foundation, suspects that the Second Foundation is secretly pulling the strings of human history using their “mentalic” powers. At the same time, Gendibal, one of the leaders of the Second Foundation, also suspects that there’s yet another more powerful force out there, mentally controlling them.
For me, this made the mind-control plot device feel tired: if there’s always the possibility that some unseen force is actually calling the shots, then as a reader, I lose track of the characters’ motivations. I also found the two protagonists too similar: they’re both young and arrogant iconoclasts who don’t toe the party line, hunting for a hidden adversary, and to me, the two parallel storylines started to blend together.
By coincidence, I experienced a funny bit of synergy by reading this book and watching the show Bad Sisters at the same time. They’re both murder mysteries set in Ireland, and bled together slightly in my mind. I started to imagine the detective character in the book with the same appearance as the actor in the series. And because my ear had been hearing the spoken dialogue, I was able to mentally approximate the sound of the Irish accent while reading.
The novel is told from the perspective of Toby, and before the main mystery even kicks in, he gets assaulted by burglers breaking into his home, leaving him with a head injury. As he’s recovering at his fancy family home, his cousin’s kids accidentally discover a skeleton inside a tree in the yard. It shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to say that the body belongs to someone from Toby’s high school days1, and various members of his family—his uncle and his cousins—all become suspects. Including Toby himself.
Here we are, at the end of the original Foundation trilogy. Over the course of reading the three books, I could sense that Isaac Asimov was gaining in confidence and skill. The style of the first novel was somewhat staid and dry, but by this third book, his writing had gained some flourishes, making it more fun to read.
By introducing the Mule and his powers in Foundation and Empire, the series added a new layer to the plotting. Both the Mule and the Second Foundation—a secretive parallel counterpart to the First Foundation that we’ve been following so far—possess mental abilities, which allows them to brainwash and control the actions of ordinary people.
Much of this novel feels like a spy thriller. Characters form alliances, but nobody can be fully trusted, because anyone can be a secret agent under the control of the other side. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the conclusion involves a series of scenes where an answer is revealed, only to be turned around with a twist, and the real answer being revealed… but then there’s another twist, etc. It’s almost comical how many times it undercuts itself, but I had a blast with it.
I much preferred this to the previous book, especially the second half, called “The Mule.” In the original Foundation novel, there’s a feeling of inevitability, which is kind of the point. The fledgling Foundation faces crises, i.e. threats from other planetary civilations, but it always turns out that Hari Seldon predicted what was going to happen. When the crises are resolved, always in the Foundation’s favour, it’s revealed that it was the only way that events could have unfolded.
Foundation and Empire turns the idea on its head by introducing a character called “The Mule,” who conquers planets at an alarming rate, and threatens to take over the Foundation. Without spoiling too much, I’ll just say that the Mule is unique, and since Seldon’s predictions only work on broad social events, the Mule throws the preordained plan into chaos.
In contrast to the “everything always works out” ethos of the previous novel, the Mule creates real tension and suspense. We experience the story through characters who don’t know what’s going to happen next… which is basically like most stories we read, but feels refreshing in this world of predestination.
This novel came to my attention during the Booker Prize shortlist period. On paper, it’s right up my alley—a literary novel with a space travel/sci-fi theme—and so, when it won the award, I became quite eager to get my hands on it.
The novel puts us on board the International Space Station, along with its crew of six astronauts, as they orbit the Earth. It covers a 24-hour period, during which they go around the world 16 times. There’s no plot really, other than a growing typhoon over Asia, and the fact that another crew is launching a mission to the moon on that same day.
The prose is well-written, with many poetic turns of phrase and lyrical passages. It does a good job of evoking the hardships that the astronauts go through: their sense of time is all out of whack because they experience 16 sunrises and sunsets every “day,” and they’re fighting to keep their bodies healthy in an envirnoment that humans are not built for.
After six months in space they will, in technical terms, have aged 0.007 seconds less than someone on earth. But in other respects they’ll have aged five or ten years more, and this is only in the ways they currently understand. They know that the vision can weaken and the bones deteriorate. Even with so much exercise still the muscles will atrophy. The blood will clot and the brain shift in its fluid. The spine lengthens, the T cells struggle to reproduce, kidney stones form. While they’re here food tastes of little. Their sinuses are murder.
But ultimately, I was disappointed with my reading experience. I found it frustrating because there was little narrative drive for me.
I’m really hesitant to say it, but I didn’t really enjoy this one… of course it’s revered as a classic and I don’t doubt that it deserves it, but could it be that its stature is due to the strength of the series that it started, rather than its own merit?
A big part of the problem for me is the way that the story is told mainly through dialogue. Almost every scene involves a few people in a room, talking about grand abstract political or sociological ideas. There’s very little shown of how the various crises play out on the ground.
What does work are the ideas themselves: it is a fascinating bird’s-eye view of how a future civilization would develop over time. At first, the Foundation is set up to create a compendium of knowledge called the Encyclopedia Galactica, but it turns out this goal is simply the means to another end: namely, to give a reason for a small colony of scientifically-minded people to grow and thrive. Inevitably, they run up against the forces of surrounding planets, and they have to use unconventional (i.e. non-military) methods to continue as a society, including the creation of a religion based on the seeming magic of atomic power; and later, the use of economic trade to control their adversaries. In both cases, it’s their superior technology that allows them to win; the story’s conceit is that because the Foundation started as an academic endeavour, it allowed them to have the intellectual resources to develop said technology.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I wrote out that last paragraph that the chain of cause and effect actually clicked for me. During my time reading it, I found it hard to follow because it’s told at such a distance, with characters that are more mouthpieces than people. The two prequel novels that I’ve already read managed to balance the sociological concepts with adventure and character, so I think that Asimov’s skill as a storyteller improved as his career went on.
Set in a remote snowbound Polish village, this novel was a fitting read for the type of winter we’re having this year. The protagonist and narrator, Mrs. Duszejko, lives mostly in isolation. Most of the residents only spend their summers there, and she’s one of a handful of people who brave the cold over the winter.
The plot kicks off with her and her neighbour discovering the dead body of another neighbour, who had choked on a bone while eating. Soon, other villagers are found dead in increasingly bizarre circumstances. The book is sold as a crime/mystery novel, but it didn’t feel like that to me. Instead, the focus is on Mrs. Duszejko’s inner life.
A fun page-turner about a woman who visits “The Centre,” a place where people can go to learn new languages. Amazingly, you can go from complete ignorance to full fluency in only 10 days. All it takes is to cut yourself off from the outside world, sit in a cubicle with headphones on, and listen to a recording of someone speaking in your target language all day. There’s a dark mystery surrounding how the process actually works, and the novel gets a lot of mileage from doling out little pieces of the puzzle over time.
The protagonist is a Pakistani immigrant to England, and at one point, she visits her family back home; also, she befriends the manager of the Centre, and together, they go to India, where the founders of the Centre reside. These travels allow the novel to touch on the immigrant experience, as well as the fraught history of India and Pakistan, and how those two nations relate to each other.
Unfortunately, these digressions, while interesting, felt a bit disconnected to me. I enjoyed the book mainly because I wanted to find out what the twist was, and the relationships between the characters, and the accompanying cultural and society commentary, seemed engineered to allow the plot to reveal itself, and therefore not entirely believable.
I’m not sure how you would categorize this novel, but maybe it wouldn’t be a stretch to call it a rom-com. The main character, Greta, works as a transcriptionist for a therapist, listening to recordings of the sessions and typing them up. (Sounds like a great job to me.) But what gives the story a surreal edge is that she lives in such a small town that she’s constantly encountering the people whose voices she’s been listening to. Imagine that whenever you meet someone in a social situation, you already know their deepest and most secret thoughts, even though you’re a stranger to them.
The title refers to Greta’s nickname for one of the patients, a young Swiss woman, who shares with the therapist (and therefore, Greta) a traumatic story of physical assault. Predictably, Greta ends up meeting Big Swiss, at the dog park, and the two of them strike up a friendship which becomes a fling. Because Greta knows about Big Swiss’s past, the relationship dynamic is messed up from the start. It feels both funny and icky at the same time, similar to how Tom Hanks is both charming and sleazy in You’ve Got Mail.
Greta herself also survived trauma in her past, and one of the novel’s strengths is the conflict between the two women’s worldviews regarding their history. Greta has the tendency to fall back on her past as an excuse for her misdeeds, while Big Swiss believes in moving on by repressing her experience. The novel isn’t saying that there’s a right or wrong way to deal with trauma, only that people must try their best to figure out how to survive and flourish after. You’re left hoping that Greta and Big Swiss come away from their relationship having learned the lessons that they needed from each other.
