Joshua

This book is just wow. I love how everything from the previous books forms together to make this amazing story and even introduces new concepts such as collective consciousness of the Gaians.

I liked all the characters in this book. I even liked the protagonist, Golan Trevize, which is a surprise because protagonists rarely tend to get any interest (of course Elijah Baley is an exception!). The antagonist was also great. So many great things to say about the characters.

I also loved how the robots were re-introduced to be relevant again! I love robots so this was a huge surprise, but a welcome one.

The only minor criticism I have is on the approach to Gaia. The book makes the point that Golan is taking his time to get to Gaia and I really felt it. It's good character development but it was just a little too slow for me. But other than it was perfect.

The First and Second Foundation were both brilliant in this and the Gaians were mindblowing and their connections to robots was just awesome.

I also liked how the Mule is a Gaian and that really adds to his backstory and explains why nobody knows where he's from.

Such a great book.

I previously watched the TV show when it released in ~2015 and I enjoyed it quite a bit! Reading the book a couple years later I expected it to be different but not this different. The TV show leans more into sci-fi with alternative realities. The book suggests and maybe implies it with Tagomi's spiritual experience. As a result, I cannot call this book sci-fi. For alt-history though it's pretty great! I rather enjoyed the characters of Childan, Frank, Juliana, Tagomi, Wegener and Joe. I found them to be well written and interesting to see their insights. I really liked Wegener's conversation with Lotze on the rocket ultimately revealing himself to be Jewish (but maybe he was joking as he's Abwehr or maybe not). I also liked the whole in universe anxiety about who succeeds Bormann. The Japanese occupation was pretty good. I loved the whole idea of the British commandos going berserk and starting to get more violent as the war was nearing the end for the Allies. I really liked it for it's alt-history and pretty good characters. It's unfortunate it's marketed as sci-fi when it's alt-history with spiritualist influences.

I read this book before when I was 14 during my school's attempt to get us to read more. There was a copy of this book in my house so I decided to read it. Back then I didn't care much for reading and as a result I didn't get a whole lot this book particularly.

Fast forward many years later I'm reading it again but in the same way I didn't get a whole lot from it. The translation I used was really good and it was great that it included various other writers to add on what Sun Tzu is saying or to even simplify what he said. But ultimately I feel like this book will have limited impact in my life going forward. There are some interesting aspects to take away but overall it is not that astonishing as something like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations - of course philosopy and military theory are very different and the application of military theory is very limited to the military. Perhaps I'll enjoy this book more as I engage further in military theory reading if I ever do engage in it further.

The main focus of the book was twofold: the elaboration of Gaia and the search for Earth. Asimov managed to combined these two in a pretty masterful way by showing the results of humanity abandoning nature and nature having to become primitive and beastly: Aurora's dogs, Solaria's cancerous hermaphroditic society and Melpomenia's bareness & resistive moss. All of these shows that when human community dies, something worse takes its place. It was nice how the book showed this and even when we thought there was an exception through Alpha, they try to pull a Pebble in the Sky extermination of non-Earthians. The relationship between Bliss and Trevise is also developed nicely and my fears for Pelorat being left behind are not quite there for his role in translation but it did feel it was Bliss & Trevise travelling with Pelorat as a side character but a lovable one at that (once again offering to sacrifice himself for the greater good as he did in Foundation's Edge!).

I thought it was interesting how Asimov wrote these very different planets and really goes to show that the Spatian way of life is so limited and ultimately a dead end.

Daneel's reveal was pretty awesome. It's a shame we never get to see him merge with Fallom and what story that could bring. I'm happy that he's still around and that he did ultimately lead the galaxy into a better future, one that he won't be a part of for much longer. He must be quite tired seeing the rise of galactic civilization and ultimately leading it into Galaxia against a possible extra-
galactic threat.

I don't think it was quite as strong as Foundation's Edge in terms of interesting ideas explored but it did get me interested in biology, ecology, astronomy and plantelogy more than anything else could have.

Pretty good book regardless and it'll be interesting seeing Daneel's handiwork throughout the series of I ever re-read the books.

4.5.

A great book. I don't believe that by judging the book for its outdated language and understanding of the world is useful. Conrad I argue sympathises with the African people - Marlow is told they are barbaric, it is not something he concludes himself, rather he concludes that in the seeming barbarity there is human connection that is very possible to be deciphered.

Kurtz is the most interesting character here. He's certainly a villain for his high likelihood of crimes in the region (he threatened the Russian for his ivory) and the only praises he really receives are from strange people - the Russian adores him but it can be inferred that it's a kind of Nightingale Syndrome where he essentially fell in love with his patient, that being Kurtz. The fiancé is also deeply in love with him but she is obviously biased as he believes to know him extremely well despite spending years abroad and nobody knowing what he really does for a living.

The book as a result does two things: a critique on colonialism and a ambiguous critique on the hunter-explorer. I think it does it well in great prose as well. I certainly look forward to my re-read.