Joshua
Pretty great book. It's not very dense and pretty easy to read. He does a good job in establishing the ground work and then builds up into religion and then eventually Christianity. I think this book is not so useful for evangelising but rather building up the faith of someone who already believes. Maybe the first couple chapters are useful for evangelising but the aspect on practical Christian living is maybe not necessary for someone who does believe yet. As a Christian it helped me a good bit.
I thought it was good but not amazing. I didn't particularly like the return to the Foundation Trilogy-esque time skips. I much prefer a story to be isolated over a day or week like in Prelude to the Foundation. Seldon was better in this book and felt more like his incarnation in Foundation. Dors unfortunately felt too one-note and lost all her character from Prelude. Raych was good and his death was quite sad. Wanda wasn't really in it for long enough but it was cool that she's the first generation of the Second Foundation.
Aging feels to be the main theme of the book. Seldon gets older and older and everyone is dying while he's still alive. He's left alone in a deteriorating Empire and ultimately Wanda leaves in order to establish the Second Foundation. It's a rather touching ending that his last words aren't about psychohistory but his love for Dors. Ultimately it's revealed to me that what touches me most about this franchise of books I've been reading for over 2 years now is that it's beautiful the relationship between intelligence, in case of Asimov, the relationship of humans and robots - Daneel & Elijah and Dors & Seldon. In the end, it's all about how we relate and live through the short time we have temporally speaking. I am happy I read these books and I think it will stay with me for a bit.
While reading I feel it was a 3/5 but the ending rephrased everything that I had to bump it to a 4/5. The fact that Hummin was Demerzel AND Daneel was crazy and changed the way you read the book. Further on, it's even crazier that Dors is a robot as well! It also explores the idea of robot-human romantic relationships and I hope Forward the Foundation continues on their relationship as well as Daneel. It's really interesting to finally get more story on what Daneel has been up to; it seems that the Zeroth Law is really hard to work with. His inability to intervene constantly and his limitations still allow for human agency in this world. Even if Trevize was guided by Daneel in the previous books, Daneel is not omnipotent and can not predict everything. It seems that the establishment of psychohistory and Gaia by Daneel were contingency plans to give him options rather than making sense out of chaos. Perhaps the idea is that the Foundation would go on to establish the Second Empire 500 years after Foundation and Earth but in the far far future Galaxia would be established. Trevize's choice was not about denouncing psychohistory but rather maintaining it as Seldon would have wanted.
Seldon was alright in this book. He was unconfident and scared throughout most of it and nothing like he was in the beginning of Foundation #1. He starts to become like that throughout the book and gets more confident, especially with the Mycogenian Aerie plan and eventually deducing that Hummin/Demerzel is Daneel, which supposedly nobody was able to figure out in 20k years. I guess it shows how smart he is.
It was interesting exploring different sectors within Trantor. It felt similar to Foundation and Earth by exploring different societies. Asimov really does a great job in exploring different cultures without having to bring in aliens; he makes very different societies out of just humans. The most interesting thing to me of course, were the Mycogenians who were the descendants of the Aurorans! So we ultimately found out what happened to the Aurorans and Solarians (from Foundation and Earth). Asimov's contention seems to be that regardless of how old a civilisation might be or how strong it is, it will eventually form a new civilisation. This might tie in with my idea that a culture is formed from both the positives and negatives of what happens to a people; losing a war is just as influential to a people as winning a war.
I hope Forward the Foundation will be a great book ending these 15 books that took me 2 or so years to get through.
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.
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.
The Mule to me is more interesting when discussed historically rather than seeing his actions directly. The Second Foundation storyline in the latter half was much stronger and I liked the character of Arkady though she didn't really do a whole lot after Preem left. The talk between the Speakers was really cool and elaborated further on the universe and the Plan. The twist that the Second Foundation was on Trantor was pretty cool. Preem being the First Speaker was also totally unexpected!
I wonder if the idea that humans could always communicate telepathically is why Schwarz got the ability in Pebble in the Sky, it could be trying to connect these ideas together.
Foundation and Empire was a bit disappointing. Riose was cool but the protagonists in that story were mid. I didn't really like the Mule storyline either, I thought it was going to be a big plot twist that the Mule was Daneel gone rogue and used his mental powers to conquer the galaxy for the benefit of humanity: the zeroth law. I also didn't particularly care for Bayta and Toran though their relationship was cute and reveals how important love can be in stories, it can teach us a lot about a character in some ways. I also found the book a bit samey and nothing too original from the original Foundation. The biggest twist is that Seldon could be wrong if his assumptions were wrong so it was a great scene of him talking about the wrong Seldon Crisis. I felt the Mule/Magnifico reveal a bit amateurish and nothing compared to the Giskard reveal which was more subtle. Hopefully the next book is better.
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.
It was pretty good! I'm glad the psychohistory of Caves of Steel and Robots of Dawn have finally been sufficiently developed to have a whole new science. It's still pretty early in this series but I'm hoping there will be more references to previous works like mentioning Elijah Bailey, the Solarians and robots. This was pretty good as well as it had good protagonists and the antagonists were built into the storyline as a strategic problem which I found really well done. Mallow's trial was pretty amazing and definitely one of the highlights of the book.
I thought it was alright. I didn't particularly like Joseph Schwarz as a character and felt Arvadan was more compelling. Balkis wasn't a good villain as we never got to understand his motivations as we did for Aratap and Fife who were way better villains and I preferred seeing them. Balkis is given a whole section in which he uses good logic but totally misunderstands the plot making him feel idiotic which is what you don't want in a villain. The Empire was cool and had an interesting presence but I think I preferred the dynamics of the Tyranni or Sark. The radioactivity of Earth was interesting. I feel like they didn't explore the time travel element enough but rather focused on Schwartz's telepathy instead of Schwartz bringing a new Renaissance of old knowledge. For instance, the US Constitution is rumoured to have helped create the Trantorian Empire, thus, wouldn't Schwartz's knowledge be immensely valuable? I think a story in which Schwartz's renaissance conflicts with the traditionalists of Earth could be interesting. It was alright nonetheless and I think might be my least favourite of the trilogy since there's no interesting villain which I like most in a novel.
This was a pretty great book. The protagonists: Rik and the Townman were not my favourite characters but I really enjoyed the antagonists: the Great Squires and their conflict with the Trantorian, Abel. The high politics was a lot more pronounced in this book which I loved. The twist that the Townman was X all along was not my favourite one, it makes sense considering his radical ideology to fight Sark and Trantor but I think it could have been more interesting if it really was Fife all along. Nonetheless I greatly enjoyed this story!
I thought it was pretty good but not amazing. I didn't really care for Biron as a character. The plot was so-so. I found that using the terms such as ‘Khan' or ‘Tyranni' (basically they're Tyrants!), felt like bad writing. The idea of a Rancher being a lord of the land is pretty cool idea though. I think this definitely suffers from early Asimovian writing but he certainly improves. I did like the plot twist at the end in which the document was just the constitution of America suggesting that democracy is some sort of lost political system. Overall I probably won't read this book again but I'm happy I did, at least to appreciate the wider universe.
This book is great. I love biographies and autobiographies and this definitely hit the spot. It's not perfectly chronological and he does seem to jump around time but there's certainly signposted periods, i.e. his early life, his undergraduate, his postgraduate, the Manhattan Project and life after the Manhattan Project.
This book made me love him as a person so much more than I already did. I knew of him through short clips on Youtube that made me appreciate his thinking but seeing his life told in a very entertaining way was just so fun to experience. Of course, as a history student I had no idea what he was talking about when talking about physics but that was not important, I felt his passion and that he was a genuinely passionate person. He did so much more at my age (22 at the time of writing this) than I have with my life. It's perhaps given me a bigger motivation to do more and try more things that seem ‘unsuited' to my personality.
Wholeheartedly recommend.
I liked it a lot! I found the characters to be great and interesting. I loved the relationship of the gods between each other and also how they intervened in human affairs. I wasn't huge on the massive battle sequences and felt that they could drag on for too long. I did like when they did the 1v1 battles with dialogue interspersed. This book also taught me about writing techniques I never thought of such as giving multiple names for the same character or referring to a character in different ways. Overall, I am very happy I read this and I plan to read more classical literature!
It was good for sure. There are some really intriguing aspects such as more lore on Tarkin (obviously!) but also on Vader-Tarkin relations, Vader-Palpatine relations and also more about Palpatine himself which was surprising. I also really liked the rebellion; Teller, Anora, Hask mainly. They were enjoyable characters to read and I found their dialogue to be better than the relatively dry and confusing dialogue of the Military and Naval Intelligence (I basically forgot who Rancit was by the time they revealed to him to be the Imperial traitor helping the rebels).
What lets me down on this book is the writing style. It's obvious that Luceno is a good writer but I just didn't like the way he wrote this story. It's also not the most engaging story; the most engaging aspects of the story for me was not the present day stuff but his flashbacks to the Carrion Plateau and his life before and during the Clone Wars. The whole story he told Vader about the Carrion Spike was really intriguing and interesting. I think if there was two books; one on his upbringing, the Carrion, the Clone Wars, etc and another book on the current affairs of the Empire it would be a better treatment.
Overall I'm happy I read it for lore reasons and for intriguing ideas (such as the idea of the Imperials being a far-right group within the Republic, of course never mentioned in the book but rather an idea that came to me while reading it).
Pretty great. I really liked how Camus described the environment and individuals so deeply. I really felt like I was in the same room with Meursault. I felt that he was a compelling character and I can understand his indifference at times and find myself being indifferent to major things in my life, or am I understanding my indifference incorrectly but rather as a firm belief in spiritual hope? I really enjoyed the religious ideas discussed as well.
I found this book to be the best out of the Robot series because it really focused on the interaction between Daneel and Giskard. The relationship between them is so human. The death scene of Eljiah was particularly heartbreaking and was the first book to actually make me shed tears! The death of Giskard was also heartbreaking.
I really look forward to how the future series connect with the Robot series.
Amazing! The ending that Giskard was actually the most important character and that he could read minds was such a crazy twist and actually makes sense to everything that was said in the book.
It's also really interesting how it's always the smallest stuff that is said in passing that reveals the truth, not the big phrases.
I felt that it was too neat in a way. It probably could've been 200 pages longer to really get into the meat of the case but I suppose the gambling nature of Baley in this book fit with the Chairman scene.
That last scene with Baley and Giskard is so good. It was also so interesting to see Giskard talk not as a robot but as a being beyond servitude. He was talking for far longer and showed so much intelligence. It's familiar to the end of Caves of Steel where Daneel quoted the Bible.
I think this book made the Naked Sun a lot better with the further development of the relationship between Baley and Gladia. I wonder if Baley will ever tell Jessie what happened between them.
Anyways I really enjoyed it.
This was pretty enjoyable! This book was less about Human-Robot relations like Caves of Steel. This book is more about Earthman-Alien relations (despite the Solarians being human, their way of life is basically alien. While robots are an important aspect, they are not the focus which I do like. Asimov built an interesting world so I do like that he's exploring other themes instead of just pure Human-Robot relations.
I'm not exactly sure whether this was better or worse than Caves of Steel. They're both equally good I think.
I am finally finished! I've been wanting to read this book for awhile and I'm glad I did.
The book is relatively broad in scope. It is not the history of the Hohenzollern family but rather what was happening in Prussia from 1600 to 1947. So you obviously see a lot of monarchial history (such as the biographies of the various Electors of Brandenburg, Kings in Prussia and Kings of Prussia) but also religious history, social history and some military history. For a book on Prussia you would think military history would be a bigger topic but he seemed more interested in social history such as talking about the Jewish community of Prussia. I noticed (perhaps due to my personal biases) that after the Napoleonic Wars monarchial history tends to take backstage to the affairs of Minister-Presidents and Chancellors. As a result information on Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II is a lot shorter than what Friedrich Wilhelm, Friedrich Wilhelm I and Friedrich II got. I wasn't a huge fan of his post-WW1 writing and it definitely seems that his higher quality writing was before WW1. Nonetheless every chapter was good and worthy of reading. There was also a lack of historiography and I really only noticed a couple overt mentions to other historians in the field. Nonetheless, I would recommend to anyone with an interest in German or European history.
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.
Pretty solid story! The idea was most certainly to do a detective story (since the protagonist was himself a detective) and it worked well. The protagonist, Elijah or Ljie was pretty good. He made sense and was well written. My favourite part of the book was the interactions between Ljie and Daneel. I especially loved the part where Ljie recounted John 8:1-11 of the Bible. I really liked how Ljie mentioned the Bible; it's really interesting to think how Christianity and Sci-Fi would interact. I wonder if the future books will mention it, especially Ljie's remark that half of Earth's population are Christian. I also hope that we'll see the beginnings of galactic colonisation in the future books and the consequences of it in the future franchises. Overall I like the one story over the multiple short stories of I, Robot.
