February Books 10) Foundation's Edge
10) Foundation's Edge, by Isaac Asimov
Still catching up here with reviews of the books I read while in bed in Belgrade at the weekend. (The remaining three all feature presidents of the USA as more or less satirical characters; oddly enough this one, set 20,000 years into the future, does not.) It must be twenty years since I last read the original Foundation trilogy -and I remember them with more fondness than other Asimov - so effectively I was reading this almost as if it were a book on its own, not part of a series. In fact, to be more exact, I was reading it as the third last book in a somewhat different series of over fifty sf books by different authors.
And slightly to my surprise I rather enjoyed it. Plot summary: the Second Foundation guys are still manipulating the First Foundation guys, but is someone in turn manipulating them? It all seemed to make sense, and we even had something resembling character development, far more than I am used to in Asimov. The ending: well, it was a little unconvincing, but it's a theme that Greg Bear has recently crashed and burned with much more spectularly. And there were none of the things that really annoy me about Asimov - flat-footed dialogue, smartypants scientific plot twists - indeed if anything he raised some rather good questions about his own invented science of psychohistory. So, not bad at all.
Still catching up here with reviews of the books I read while in bed in Belgrade at the weekend. (The remaining three all feature presidents of the USA as more or less satirical characters; oddly enough this one, set 20,000 years into the future, does not.) It must be twenty years since I last read the original Foundation trilogy -and I remember them with more fondness than other Asimov - so effectively I was reading this almost as if it were a book on its own, not part of a series. In fact, to be more exact, I was reading it as the third last book in a somewhat different series of over fifty sf books by different authors.
And slightly to my surprise I rather enjoyed it. Plot summary: the Second Foundation guys are still manipulating the First Foundation guys, but is someone in turn manipulating them? It all seemed to make sense, and we even had something resembling character development, far more than I am used to in Asimov. The ending: well, it was a little unconvincing, but it's a theme that Greg Bear has recently crashed and burned with much more spectularly. And there were none of the things that really annoy me about Asimov - flat-footed dialogue, smartypants scientific plot twists - indeed if anything he raised some rather good questions about his own invented science of psychohistory. So, not bad at all.