Review of "The Gods Themselves" by Isaac Asimov

After what might be understated as active output in the 1950s, Isaac Asimov took a bit of a breather, waiting more than a decade to publish his next novel, The Gods Themselves.  Serialized in 1972, it sees Asimov taking his criticisms to heart (e.g. no aliens, no women, scientists as altruistic gods, etc.) and challenging himself to write a story which defied his storytelling to date, as well as experimenting with format.  That he dedicates the book to “mankind” only heightens the ambition. Though revealing a certain timidity working outside his zone of comfort, Asimov’s effort is admirable, the novel he produced deserving of the genre categorization if ever there were one.

The Gods Themselves is a difficult book to summarize from a story point of view.  Actually three novellas, the first Against stupidity… tells of a proud and demanding physicist’s accidental discovery that beings from a parallel universe are siphoning energy from Earth.  Like a circuit, energy is likewise transferred back to Earth, albeit in a different form.  The debate whether this exchange is safe for the planet, one ideology versus another, is something that can only have been taken from Asimov’s real world experience in the laboratory encountering scientists with conflicting agendas.  (The “scientists as altruistic gods” demon, slain.)

Review of "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov

The books of the Foundation series are among Isaac Asimov’s most famous works.  The first, called simply Foundation, is actually a fix-up of five short stories/novellas and introduces the highly original concept of ‘psychohistory’, defined on Wikipedia as “a field of science and psychology that equates all possibilities in large societies to mathematics, allowing for the prediction of future events”.  Asimov’s prose pedestrian and his characters cardboard cut-outs of each other, the book is nevertheless a quality example of Golden Age science fiction which scratches at something deeper in the evolution and behavior of humanity.

Set innumerable years in the future with mankind inhabiting the stars, the premise of Foundation is that intergalactic government has grown internally weak without its knowledge and faces a Dark Age of 30,000 years, that is, if the ramblings of the professor Harry Seldon are to be believed.  A psychohistorian, Seldon seeks to create an Encyclopaedia Galactica to preserve knowledge and thus significantly reduce the number of “dark” years to come.  After unsuccessfully defending himself at trial, Seldon goes into exile on the distant planet Terminus where he and other Encyclopedists are left free to put his ideas into action.  How civilization in the galaxy evolves from there is anybody’s guess—or is it?