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Foundation's Edge
"Where is the weakness, young man, that you should brand the Plan as meaningless?"
Gendibal stood stiffly upright. "You are right, First Speaker. The Seldon Plan has no flaw."
"You withdraw your remark, then?"
"No, First Speaker. Its lack of flaw is its flaw. Its flawlessness is fatal!"
Four hundred and ninety-eight years since the Foundation was set up the Seldon Plan is going well, having returned to its path after the Century of Deviations caused by the Mule. But are events now too perfectly aligned with Hari Seldon's original plan to be believable? On Terminus, newly elected Councilman Galon Trevize becomes convinced that the Second Foundation still exists and is manipulating events to keep the plan on track, while Stor Gendibal, the most junior of the Second Foundation's twelve Speakers, starts to suspect something even more alarming.
Unlike the original Foundation Trilogy, this book was not written as separate short stories, so it reads like a novel. I found it a quick and enjoyable read, even though both Trevize and Gendibal are rather annoying characters.
Foundation and Earth
'You stressed your desire to find Earth and insisted on its importance. I do not see that importance but you have the knack of being right so I/we/Gaia must accept what you say. If the mission is crucial to your decision concerning Gaia, it is of crucial importance to Gaia, and so Gaia must go with you, if only to try to protect you.'
This book picks up the story of Trevize and Pelorat's search for Earth immediately after the events of "Foundation's Edge", so I decided to read them one after the other. Galon Trevize reminds me of Nickie Haflinger in "Shockwave Rider", being extremely arrogant, convinced that he is always right , and prone to behaving as if he is constantly surrounded by fools (and even though he does have the knack of making correct decision s on insufficient data, Trevize is not always right).
The search for Earth led the crew of the Far Star to some of the Spacer worlds that readers of the Robot novels will recognise, and the revelation of who is ultimately responsible for the Seldon Plan led to a satisfactory conclusion.
At last, some science fiction with a proper ending!
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I am so out of the book loop anymore that I had never even heard of this apparently really popular/hyped YA novel, but my friend Allie lent me her copy and told me I had to read it, so I did. I started it this morning. So I guess you could say it's rather engrossing!! I can't wait to read the next one (it's a trilogy), but I'm sad because book 3 doesn't come out until August!
The subject matter is kind of insane, and definitely dark for YA lit but then I started reading Stephen King when I was in 7th grade so... |
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"I'll probably be back here around five in the morning for a snack," he says. "I'll be hungry again. I hope I see you then."
"Why?"
"Hmm, I wonder why."
"'Cause you're worried about me?"
"That's part of it."
"'Cause you want me to say hi to my sister?"
"That might be a little part of it, too."
"My sister wouldn't know the difference between a trombone and a toaster oven. She could tell the difference between a Gucci and a Prada at a glance, though, I'm pretty sure."
"Everybody's got their own battlefields," he says with a smile.
A short book, whose events take place over the course of one night. So soon after reading "Grotesque", it was strange to read another Japanese book, featuring both a young woman who is jealous of her beautiful sister, and illegal immigrants from China. However, although Mari Asai is insecure, she is not so insanely jealous of her elder sister Eri as the protagonist of "Grotesque", and her meeting with the tomobonist Takahashi and the women who work at the Alphaville love hotel seems likely to be a turning point in her life.
To start with I wasn't sure that the story was going to go anywhere, but as soon as Kaoru appeared and asked Mari to interpret for a Chinese prostitute, I began to enjoy it, and at a couple of hundred pages long, it is well worth a few hours of your time.
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"This party of yours. An elaborate piece of self-gratification. You must always take it out of somebody, mustn't you? Life is one log revenge for your own shortcomings."
"You've been reading the Russians," I said. Nothing else. It was furiously annoying.
I found this book virtually unreadable despite some enjoyable flashes of wit, as in the quotation above. Every time I picked it up again, the page my bookmark was in looked unfamiliar and I had to re-read a couple of paragraphs in an attempt to re-orientate myself. I gave up around page 64, as I couldn't see that it was likely to improve.
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'Where is here, anyway?'
'We call the planet Eurydice. The star — we don't have a name for it. We know it is in the Sagittarius Arm.’
'No shit!' Carlyle grinned with unfeigned delight. 'We didn't know the skein stretched this far.'
'Skein?'
She waved her hands. 'That wormhole, it's linked to lots of others in a sort of messy tangle.'
He stared at her' his teeth playing on his lower lip.
'And you and your colleagues came here through the wormhole?'
'Of course.' She wrapped her arms around herself while the thermal elements in the undersuit warmed up. 'You didn't know this was a gate?'
Armand shook his head. 'We've always kept clear of the alien structure' for reasons which should be obvious, but apparently are not.' He pointed a finger; the sweep of his hand indicated the horizon, and the hilltop henges. 'We took the circle of megaliths to be a boundary indicator, left by the indigenes. Today is the first time in a century that anyone has set foot within it. We keep it under continuous surveillance, of course, which is why your intrusion was detected. That and the signal burst. It went off like a goddamn nuclear EMP, but that's the least of the damage.' He glared at her. 'Something for which you will pay, whoever you are. What did you say you were?'
'The Carlyles,' she reiterated, proudly and firmly.
'And who're they, when they're at home?'
She was unfamiliar with the idiom. 'We're at home everywhere,' she said. 'People have a name for the wormhole skein. They call it Carlyle's Drift.'
This is an enjoyable space opera, but overall I found it a bit confusing. There is a lot going on and things like the political differences between the Returners and Reformers were never explained clearly enough. The implications of backing yourself up on a regular basis so that you could be resurrected if you died were touched upon, but never resolved. Now as she sat in the monorail shuttle facing the Armands and holding her knees together to stop their trembling, she felt the same horror. James Winter and Alan Calder were not uploads or downloads, or even resurrectees. They had prosthetic personalities. They had false memories. Without reliable human memory there could be no identity, no continuity, no humanity. The idea affected her like motion sickness. Although Lucinda was panicked when she discovered that Winter and Calder had been resurrected from the little that remained of their brains after they died in a car crash with their missing memories reconstructed from information about them that was held on computer, she soon convinced herself that there wasn't any problem after all. Even though when the resurrected Lucinda read a letter her dying self had written to her, she could tell that the original Lucinda was different, having been changed by the experiences she underwent after her last back-up.
The conclusion appears to be that 'memories maketh the man'. If you see yourself as a person then you are one, whether you are alive for the first time or have been resurrected from a back-up, whether you are a back-up of a real person living in a virtual reality, or a construct of a human being living in that same virtual reality. But in my opinion, although Lucinda #2 may think she is the same person as Lucinda #1, seeing them both as one continuous Lucinda, Lucinda #1 is dead and gone, to an afterlife, reincarnation or nothingness. There is no continuity of Lucinda-consciousness for her.
Don't you find it annoying when the person who wrote the back cover blurb has obviously not read the book. "Lucinda Carlyle, head of an ambitious clan of galactic entrepreneurs, had carved out a profitable niche for herself and her kin by taking control of the Skein, a chain of interplanetary star-gates left behind by the posthumans. But on a world called Eurydice, a remote planet at the farthest rim of the galaxy, Lucinda stumbled upon a forgotten relic of the past that could threaten her way of life." If they had read even the first chapter, they would have known that Lucinda is not the head of the Carlyles; she is a youngster of 24 and the mission to Eurydice is her first as team leader of a squad of combat archaeologists.
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