Sometime early in March of 2019, I was reading Henry Thomas Buckle's magnificent History of Civilization in England, and it kept hitting me that much of what he was saying reminded me of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, which I'd previously read when I was in high school. (*) Long story short, I broke out the Asimov.
Which I'd been meaning to do sooner or later, anyway--which is why I had copies of the books on hand.
The Foundation "Trilogy" had grown up in the forty-five years since I'd last read it, though. There were now two prequels and two sequels to the trilogy, so it was actually 7 books long. Unless, of course, you count the second trilogy which was written by Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Greg Bear, which would make it 10 books long. 1 I decided to go for the completion backwards principle and read them all.
And so I went at it. At a very slow pace, as I have lots of other books on my plate already, but they were such enthralling reads that before I knew it (a mere two years later) I was 150 pages away from the end of Book 10.
At which point I realized that reading this series 2 had reignited my love for the Good Doctor.
When I was very young, I read a lot of his books...fiction and non-fiction. It's been so long that I can no longer be counted on to remember all of the titles, but I am sure that I read somewhere around 60 of Asimov's books back then. But after that I drifted away from him. I read cooler science fiction writers, for one thing...like Harlan Ellison and his pals. (Ironically, Asimov introduced me to Harlan via The Hugo Winners anthology.)
I'd poked into an Asimov book or two since then, but hadn't actually finished any of them until my Foundation Experience. But now...I wanted more.
I've been trying to avoid buying books lately (since my house is filled with books already), so I looked on my shelves to see what was on hand. (I knew there was still some Asimov in there...most of which I'd never read.) And I found a few. I decided to have a go at Opus 100.
Opus 100 was Asimov's celebration of having written 99 books before it. It has new material in which Asimov talks about his life and stories, then sets up excerpts from some of his first 99 books. There are times when it gets a little tedious, I'll admit...for instance, I don't speak math, so when he gave excerpts that had to do with mathematics, I wasn't thrilled...but when I found myself in a section about which I didn't care much, I just marked my place and flipped to another section, read that, then came back to where I had left off. And by the end of it, I found that I'd really enjoyed the read. Most of it, anyway. I'll confess that in the last section, "Humor," there was a story--"The Holmes-Ginsbook Device"--which I found hard to take. It was pretty much non-stop low level misogyny...stuff like, "I had to pinch the girls good-bye,"...and it not only wasn't even slightly funny, it was (obviously) disrespectful towards women. Of course, those were different times, and I am admittedly more sensitive to that kind of stuff that some folks, but still...it's a shame that the book ended on that note.
But fortunately for me, I had already read that section earlier on, when I bailed out of a math section, so the last bit I read was "The Bible," which I found very interesting. Asimov even touched on Gnosticism 3 a bit, and I'm always game for a bit of that.
I've still got 100 some pages to go in Foundation and Earth, but Opus 100 has lit my fire, and I am thinking that I'm going to have to read some more Asimov. I have a few more books here...and the library has quite a few...but unfortunately, what I'm really wanting to read is some of his autobiographical stuff: In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 (which I read a long time ago but no longer have), In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov 1954-1978 (which I read a long time ago but no longer have), I. Asimov: A Memoir 4 (which I read about half of some time ago but never had), It's Been a Good Life, and Yours, Isaac Asimov: A Life in Letters (neither of which I've previously read nor had nor have). The library doesn't have any of these books, alas. In fact, it's hard to find copies of some of these books at reasonable prices. HOWEVER...I've just located the first three listed above for a grand total of about $31.
Hmmmm.
ANYway...two thumbs up for Opus 100. And I DO have Opus 200 and Opus 300 on hand, so I will no doubt be going there and there in the near future. And as for the non-existent but should exist Opus 400 and Opus 500...well, more on that later.
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1 Unless you count the other books which have now been tied in to the Foundation series, which include 5 Robot Books and 3 Empire Novels, which puts us up to 18 books. And yes, it does get worse from there, but thats about enough of that, isn't it?
2 And re-reading the original trilogy.
3 From Asimov's The Egyptians (1967): "During the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, Marcion held that it was the God of the Old Testament who was the demiurge - the evil and inferior being who had created the universe. Jesus, on the other hand, was the representative of the true God, of Wisdom. Since Jesus did not partake of the creation of the demiurge, he was pure spirit, and his human shape and experiences were merely a deliberate illusion taken on to accomplish his purposes." (236 to 237)
4 I think it's funny that both Amazon and Wikipedia insist that the title of this book is I, Asimov, when it is clearly I. Asimov. See:
Just goes to show that a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest, la la la la la la la la la la la la.
There are some advantages to living in the 21st Century, after all. And I'm already 80 pages into The Early Asimov.
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