Month: October 2018

I finished Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novel.  The entire setting is in a far-off galaxy in the distant future.  The story shows how religion and economics influence and shape society.  The setting is futuristic and fictional, but the core of the story could easily be told with modern day Earth as a setting and each of the fictional worlds as different countries and their representative governments.  Asimov appears to have a keen understanding of how large groups of people function and malfunction as a society.  This novel could easily be made into several films.  I believe it would actually tell much better as a film.

There are far more characters in this book than most people are able to follow without backtracking, myself included.  Multimedia(film/tv) would allow this story to be told without the viewer/reader losing track of who is who.  There are five characters in the beginning  “Psychohistorian” chapters, nine in the “Encyclopedists” chapters, and fifteen in the “Mayors” chapters alone.  I have read that this novel was compiled as a “fix-up” – a collection of four short stories grouped as a novel.  There are two Foundation novels following this one, forming a Trilogy.  It does not appear that the other two novels were compiled in this manner.  I love the story-telling and writing style, but prefer a much shorter list of more-developed characters.   I recommend this book for the great insight that Asimov gives on human behavior, but believe most readers will find the voluminous cast of characters tiresome to follow.  I am likely going to read the next novel in the Foundation trilogy because I enjoyed the story-telling of Asimov and hope the following novels will be more cohesive as they were not written piecemeal as a collection of short stories.  For the time being, however, I already have a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, so that is next on my list.

I misplaced my Foundations book last weekend, so I read Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God.  I became familiar with Theodore Sturgeon through reading Kurt Vonnegut’s novels.  Vonnegut has a fictional author named “Kilgore Trout” as a character in several of his novels.  Kilgore sounds like Theodore, and Trout is a fish just as a sturgeon is a fish.  Vonnegut and Sturgeon were friends and this is, presumably, why his fictional representation exists in Vonnegut novels.  The fictional character is a brilliant, but ignored author who is always a moment away from greatness that is inevitably cut short through a series of extremely unfortunate events.  Perhaps this mirrored Sturgeon’s own life?

Microcosmic God tells the story of an incredibly brilliant, reclusive inventor, Kidder, who, despite making many great inventions at a furious pace, is dissatisfied with his progress.  To combat this, Kidder engineers miniature, human-like species that he keeps in little half-acre, enclosed, worlds on his own private island.  These intelligent creations live entire lifetimes within months.  He employs these communities to do scientific research on his behalf.  They do several generations of scientific work every year to bring Kidder’s ideas to life.  One would worry that these brilliant little people would surpass Kidder’s intelligence and do away with him, but Kidder has thought of everything.  His creations were bred to breathe ammonia and find oxygen toxic, so escape from their little enclosed world is not an option.  Kidder is viewed by his creations as a God.  In the end, unfortunately, Kidder’s undoing is the outside human world.  A banker whose greed has skyrocketed off of Kidder’s continuous stream of profitable inventions forces Kidder to enclose himself and his island under an invisible dome.  A dome that presumably will come down after Kidder lives out his natural life and his little creations eventually figure out a way to take over Earth.