Brandon Sanderson – Mistborn: The Hero of Ages

Sanderson’s books are puzzling. Take their surface, their visual ideas and the overall story and you’re left with a rollicking adventure that occasionally goes deep. Add his stilted, unoriginal prose and method of solving conflicts and you’re left with a generic Fantasy book that doesn’t insult the reader. After reading his essays and his view on the genre I’ve come to the conclusion he’s an awful writer who stumbled upon some great ideas.

The problem with Sanderson isn’t the story itself, but his approach to storytelling. He views his stories as a mechanical process, with the purpose of everything is get to the end. Characters, magic and objects have meaning which is determined only by how much they can solve conflict.

If we’re talking reality, this view can make sense. Life is full of conflicts and we need tools to solve it. Literature and Philosophy can be such tools. The difference is in the nature of conflicts in real life, and conflicts in fictional world. The conflict in real life is imposed on us. By that, I mean we don’t fully control it. We can instigate, but never design it from scratch. I can go out and start a fight with someone I don’t like, but I don’t control all the elements – our personal histories, which influence the conflict, are out of our control. The other person’s reactions and choices are also out of my control.

Fictional conflicts are the opposites. You build them from scratch. This is something many people forget when they talk about stories. Authors fully control their work. Authors can – and should – impose laws on their work, but even those laws are something the authors can control. Creating a problem just so you could solve it is like the brilliant Useless Machine. It’s a contraption that you turn on so it would turns itself off. If the purpose of everything in your story is that you’d solve the conflict, why create the conflict in the first place?

Sanderson’s parts fit nicely, but I see nothing admirable about that. Complexity doesn’t equal depth, and depth is what matters in fiction. Compexity can be engaging in activities that are thinking for thinking’s sake, but Chess also involves human interaction and a real conflict whose elements you don’t fully control. Reading the Mistborn novels is like playing Chess against yourself, only with a fancier dressing.

It was so disappointing when Sanderson took an important symbol and turned it into the final plot coupon. Sazed’s story is absorbing. It is the existensial crisis made physical, questioning what the hyper-intellectual who only researches, instead of providing answers and doing things, will do when the world is ending. The idea is sometimes explored, but Sazed mostly stares off into space and ruminates. By the time he takes the center stage, he realizes all his knowledge is the last screw to seal the Bad Ending’s coffin.

Too many scenes are about doing Allomantic stunts. Sanderson writes them like they’re a blow-by-blow account of a role-playing game. Even in those role-playing games, they are the most boring parts. No one cares about Fallout‘s battle systems. Planescape: Torment is a towering achievement because of the writing. These games can employ a battle system, because the person experiencing the art actually gets to use them.

Fantasy authors often forget that the position of the reader isn’t like the writer’s. The author may feel like he’s discovering a new land when writing. For the reader, it’s all laid out, no exploration of thought needed but just an info dump. The author may feel like he’s using a complex system of game rules to solve conflicts, but the reader only gets to observe it. The reader doesn’t actually use these rules. Imagine if a sports caster told you exactly how the basketball player’s legs work.

All these details in those big fights don’t matter. They don’t affect anything. Remove them, and the battle will be slightly shorter. In general, battles don’t work in literature. Violence is visual and immediate, something that’s hard to replicate in the relatively calm activitiy of reading. It’s also swift, so exact descriptions of it come off as silly. People don’t experience violence like Sanderson writes about it. It’s always over before we know what happened. He never once tries to capture the thrill of violence.

The story is more focused this time around. Stalling, the defining feature of the second book, is gone. Sanderson also deserves credit for his ability to structure stories. He never gets lost, never rambles too much or digress. He understands epicness doesn’t have to come from how many miles your characters walk, but the scope of the conflict. So making his story about stopping the end of the world is a good idea, and there is an energy in the final scenes, the emotionally appealing concept of the world torn between creation and destruction.

I want to hear Sanderson tells such a story. He can tell it without losing track, but when it’s covered in dull prose I lose hope. Many a pointless sentence fill the book. Inner thoughts drown the books in obvious or unnecessary details. I truly don’t understand why authors do this so much. I sometimes edit out of kindness prose of young writers, and they do it all the time. Are they afraid that nobody will understand? So long as you don’t write like Hegel, we can understand you just fine.

I do give him credit for not digressing too much. Scenes do gel together for a coherent story. One arc does feel like it’s separated from the main story, but Sanderson tells it like it’s self-contained, with its own conflict and resolutions. It doesn’t exist just to add details, but as an actual story. His descriptions are often to the point.

His exploration of themes is particularly bad. He wants to say something, and his fairly sparse story means ideas emerge clearly. For all the talk of worldbuilding, there aren’t too many details to keep up with. When the ideas emerge though, they’re just there. Sanderson does nothing with them. The secondary arc is about the evils of revolution, but all it has is a bunch of extremists using the government for their own selfish needs. There is no understanding or insight or sympathy towards them. It doesn’t reveal anything about this archetype, but perpetuates an empty pattern. The final antagonist also stands for nothing but death’n’destruction. It’s fun enough in a simple story, but Sanderson aims higher – a complex machine which has no reason to exist but to turn itself off.

Occasionally, it’s fun and it concludes. Mostly, it’s a Useless Machine, but not as amusing and not as offensive as George R. R. Martin. I understand some people dig epic fantasy, but this is 700 pages. Dunsany wrote a brilliant novel with only 230 pages, and reading it three times will keep revealing new things and is a better usage of my time.

2 heroes out of 5 ages

Brandon Sanderson – The Well of Ascension

Just like that, Brandon Sanderson has turned into George R. R. Martin. A more appropriate title would’ve been ‘The Hell of Continuaton’. There’s no excuse to write such a dull, plodding sequel to a fairly exciting fantasy adventure. What happened? Imagine if a Grindcore band released a twinkly Post-Rock album but kept the noise and the screaming. Actually, that sounds too ambitious. If a Grindcore band did that, it’ll be a push towards new territories. Sanderson had no money for an editor.

Static paragraphs are a disease, especially in adventure stories. These are paragraphs in which literally nothing happens. All we get is the rambling of the narrator or of the character. Since the narrator is often 3rd-person omniscient, we don’t really care about its thoughts. This narrator doesn’t even exist. If it’s the rambling of the characters, a question arises. Why not just write in first person?

It’s a symptom I see in many rookie writers who lack confidence. They don’t see the reader’s point of view or understand what is necessary to them. They don’t understand art is an experience, not a collection of facts. Paragraphs teasing what will happen, what could have happened, what the characters are like litter the pages. As notes, they might be useful. By writing down who your characters are, you have a solid idea of what you should be writing. By writing down what might happen, you have a solid idea of what routes you can take. As a technique to avoid ‘just write the next scene’ writing, it’s brilliant.

These are just notes for a novel, not a novel itself. Bands don’t put all their jam sessions and demos smack in the middle of a song. Imagine if, in the middle of “One Step Closer”, Linkin Park put a random jam session that later gave birth to the chorus of “Numb”. Sure, it’s interesting but what is it doing in the middle of a punchy Nu Metal song? Any time an author puts rhetorical questions in a 3rd person narrative, he’s being a horrible author.

Narrative questions are always answered, so asking us ‘will he be able to save her’ is pointless. We’ll see in a few pages. As for philosophical questions, they must not appear since fiction is expression of philosophy, not an essay about it. I did put some rhetorical questions in this review. The purpose was to make you imagine, to focus your attention by varying sentence structure and expressing disdain at such techniques. In narrative prose, they make zero sense.

What’s odd is that it’s the only bad technique Sanderson falls into. In all other aspects, he remains fine. His story is still shallow, but he avoids the long-winding descriptions of Martin or his misogyny, or his multiple plot threads that go nowhere. Sanderson describes rooms using, at best, 3 sentences. It’s never profound, but he emphasizes the right details. The plot is also tightly focused, with a small arc inside the gigantic save-the-world one. The book was padded to 700 solely because of these static paragraphs. If Sanderson got rid of them, we would’ve been had 300-400 pages of a shallow but exciting story. Did Sanderson pad it so it would look cool on the Fantasy shelf?

As for the story itself, it’s just as shallow as the previous one. All hints of something deeper, more original are gone. As a role-player, I noticed there’s a scale between games heavy on playing a pesonality and games playing on skill. The latter are elaborate puzzle games with a bit of pretending, whereas the former are an improvised theater. The former are more fun, since they’re more emotionally engrossing and memorable. Whenever I jump into a game I always aim for that direction and find myself not doing anything. My character has a lot of skills which I’m supposed to use but forget about. I don’t care how good the paper says I am with a sword. I want to understand my character, get into his mindset and interact with other characters.

Sanderson comes from the opposite tradition. His magic system exists solely for RPG’s, with instruction manuals and technical information but little meaning. This is a world where people can influence emotions, store attributes yet the psychology of this never appears. I don’t buy the excuse that they all had to go into hiding. That’s just Sanderson avoiding confronting the meaning behind his magic. As a role-playing system, it seems exciting. Reading about it is dull.

All these details about what they push, how they push, how they recover strength is so dull. When someone tells you their character in their RPG has 80 STR, do you care? Does it make you want to play the game? The problem with writing about fictional fighting is that it’s so arbitrary. Sanderson dispenses a lot of physical facts about non-physical objects. Non-physical objects don’t have physical traits. All fiction is symbolic since in the end it’s just some ink on the page. The action scenes consist of unimportant physical information with nothing symbolic. Conflicts are elaborate chess games, with enemies having a weak point you need to use V.A.T.S. to target. One scene even features a dungeon crawl. To his credit, the final confrontation had some emotional depth.

His characters remain his strong point. Even if by this point they won’t ever have a complex psychology, they have personalities and distinct dialogues. His dialogues are the most excited parts and not just because dialogues are exciting by nature. He gives his characters obvious quirks that affect all of their speech patterns. Even when Ham isn’t musing philosophically, he has a more thoughtful tone. Breeze’s conceit is always apparent, sometime more and sometimes less. That’s why even if Sanderson’s story is, at its heart, shallow his characters are alive enough to make it exciting.

His story mode also eschew the typical long journey story mode for a more static one. Most of it is spent waiting for the big climax, but by sealing our characters in a small area he gives them a lot of room to interact. His story is less driven by action and more by character interaction. If there was any opportunity to launch his story into something truly special, it was here. Sadly, it padded by a lot of static paragraphs. The ending is also disconnected from the main story. Whereas the novel’s center is the siege, the ending brings back the Hero of Ages myth. Sanderson isn’t very good at splitting his books and dividing them into individual stories. That’s sad since they are here. He only needed to finish the book when the siege was over.

Sanderson doesn’t deliver on the promise of Mistborn. Then again, I heard this was typical, run-of-the-mill fantasy. Sanderson’s storytelling is more energetic, more character driven and his writing isn’t so stiff. It helped make the first book an exciting adventure, but this one is a good writer in search of an editor to help his writing give shape. I’ll still tackle the final book but I’m worried.

1.5 failed ascensions out of 5

The End of Evangelion

Let’s get rid of the obvious first. The End of Evangelion is inaccessible to anyone who didn’t watch the series. This shouldn’t be a point against the movie, though. There are enough great sequels who needed the first film. The fact this is two episodes smashed together to form a movie has no bearings on its quality.

There are far worse problems here. Evangelion was a brilliant series with a disappointing ending. Instead of using intelligence to lift up its story of saving the world, it went full retard. The deviation is only impressive if you haven’t been to the edge of weird storytelling. It contributed nothing to the series but was just a scattered essay with moving pictures.

The film was supposed to fix that, but sadly it doesn’t. Evangelion was never as deep as people say it is. It attempted subversions, but it lacked a theme to unite it all together. Religious symbolism and psychological portraits do not necessarily mean there’s a grand theme. They are ways to express ideas.

The problems are already apparent in the beginning. It kicks off into a huge action sequence that lives little room for character development. It also perfectly replicates the intensity that made the TV show so fun.

Nobody talks about how fun the TV show us. The drama was engrossing and the action scenes were beautifully animated. Every metal bending, every hit, every explosion is full of power. The enemies have the unique, Angel-esque design and the scene is clean. The environment is bare, making it easy to follow exactly what’s happening. Michael Bay has a lot to learn from this film.

The film attempts the same psychological-monologue-slideshow thing, and it’s just as unnecessary and messy as in the series. It’s a little better, but the core problem remains.

Moving to such territory is unnecessary. The story isn’t made for such experimental methods. At its heart, it’s a simple story about saving the world from the Unknown Enemy while realizing that humanity can be its own enemy, too. All you need for this story are characters who are convincing enough.

The monologues just go in circles, bouncing from one subject into another with no ideas concluding or connecting. This technique works in novels, but not so for films. You read novels in your own pace, so you take your own time to digest the word salad.

Movies set their own pace, so Anno is throwing at you images and words in machine-gun velocity. This could still have a chance of being entertaining, but experimental films often have a plot that works well with the method. You couldn’t tell the story of Pi without going full retard. It’s an abstract story at heart that happens only in Max Cohen’s head.

There is something about loneliness and the desire to connect. I heard this before and searched for it in this film. While the conclusion does touch that in a symbolic way that works, everything else was over the place like I remembered. Shinji is a neurotic and angsty teen, but his type of angst isn’t focused on enough. Is he a person who gave up on connecting to people like Mirai Nikki‘s Yukki? Is he an obsessive person who sees everything in absolutes like Max Cohen?

Perhaps I missed something in the series, but nothing here connected to a single theme. It starts to look like Digimon Tamers is an attempt to remake Evangelion with coherency. At least Tamers has a theme and symbols that point to it.

I once read that Anno said Evangelion could mean anything the viewer wants to. If so, then the show is about nothing. This isn’t how vagueness works. A story should not give simple answers, but it still needs to ask questions. Asking questions means it confronts a subject, and it’s not just about anything. Medabots asks whether weapons only lead to destruction, or whether they can be used for fun. The vagueness is in how the series makes strong cases for both viewpoints.

The film still gets by because of its visuals. Despite the attempts at philosophy, the second part works in the same way the first part. Its epicness is exciting. It’s not as meaningful as before. We get monologues, instead of seeing characters in action but the visuals are still beautiful, and there’s a sense of self-importance that actually makes it fun. It stretches itself so far so just seeing how crazy it will go is entertaining. Despite the philosophizing, the film never forgets it’s a visual medium and that it should take advantage of it.

It’s an interesting addition to the Evangelion canon, but it supports the haters more than the fans. Instead of giving Evangelion a coherent ending, it shows how the series never had a grand theme to begin with. Knowing your limitations is important. If Evangelion stuck to its story of saving the world, it would’ve been fantastic. Still, a scattered but creative mind still has plenty of worthwhile ideas.

3.5 Angels out of 5

 

Attack on Titan (Shinkegi No Kyojin)

We have a weird obsession with our own self-destruction. It’s not just stories about how we’re destroying the Earth. We are attracted to the sight of humans being butchered, cut up and eaten. The arts have constantly provided a safe place for people to view these things, knowing these people aren’t really dying.

As profound and deep as it sounds, it also gave rise to exploitation films. Sometimes, they get a budget and we get something like the Saw series. The worst offenders are those that use the grim’n’dark atmosphere of violence to shock. The audience for Saw is there for the visual spectacle, but many people are still sure grimdarkness is a sign of depth and maturity. Just look at all those crappy FPS games with monochromatic tough guys, or that very popular fantasy series that’s all about who will be the king.

The premise sure sounds like it will join these ranks. Anime is full of overblown violence, especially in shows with a very serious tone. There’s also a realistic art style to boot. After a few episodes, though, you notice you spent more time with the characters rather than looking at titans eating humans.

Attack on Titan never feels like it’s even trying to join the rank of shlock grimdarkness. This is a very humane story, one where the characters are much more important than what happens next. It doesn’t even sink into exploitating their suffering. It’s far more excited with the variety of humans to linger on one detail.

Calling Attack on Titan a story that loves humans sound silly. Heads are being chopped off and there are a lot of assholes around, but that’s the strength. It looks at humanity’s worst aspects, admits their exist and still refuses to give up on it.

In fact, it’s a criticism of such misanthropy. The titans are distorted versions of us. That’s a visualization of how misanthropes see humanity – as senseless animals just bent on destruction. Yet the whole purpose the titans exist, just to chop humans to destroy them all is the logical end of misanthropy.

It’s not a caricature, though. The creators understand why misanthropes exist in the first place. Cruelty is everywhere. Sometimes it’s cliches about how the elite only cares about themselves (Thankfully, the series doesn’t linger on that too much). Sometimes we get a more interesting look at how assholes are born. A military police officer can’t hear the explanation of how all these destruction is going to get humanity anywhere. Right now his own world is under attack. We care more about our home environment than we do about humanity as a whole.

Caring about the whole isn’t easy. The series presents two ways of doing it. Either persevere as if nothing is happening and hide behind the walls, or make great sacrifices, risk losing everything but also gain everything.

It’s not an easy choice at all. The ideal situation is that Erwin’s plans will work, but there’s no guarantee it will. We’re always encouraged to take risks, but the reason it’s a risk in the first place is because of the possibility of failure.

Failure is an ever-looming presence in Attack on Titan. Plans never go as expected, and sometimes even Erwin isn’t sure where to go from that failure. The series asks whether the risk is worth taking even if the plan fails. It doesn’t present a simplistic, complete failure. The characters always gain something from the risks they take. A complete loss is easy to write and doesn’t leave much to explore. Rather, it asks whether what was gained was worth the exchange.

While this focus on dealing with failure is admirable (and possibly pretty rare in these types of anime), it sometimes become repetitive. The series never sinks into milking its tragedy. We see titans eating humans, but just enough to understand the horror of it all. The camera never lingers on dead bodies and titans chewing on a human. We still get an overpowered enemy for the ending, though.

The last part of the series goes in a different direction. It’s a nice risk, but I’m still not sure whether it was worth it. It’s an extended action sequence that’s well-animated and exciting, but can feel too out-of-place. Up until then the series was concerned with the characters. We got various worldviews and personalities and saw them interact. The training arc is especially great. The action sequence relies on more on what will happen next than on the characers’ personalities.

There are still character moments there. A moment of banter between the elite soldier defines what makes this series so engrossing. The way each of them talks is modified by their personality (Oluo’s narcissism, Petra’s empathy). The action is also entertaining enough. It’s well-animated, unique to the series rather than just generic sword swinging and uses extended, moving shots. There is a kinetic energy to it. The camera moves as the soldiers fly with their gear, and that transmits this motion more effective.

Too bad their enemy is pretty dull. It borders on invincible. Fighting an all-powerful enemy can be used well, but only psychologically (As in Harlan Ellison’s story about mouths and screaming). An action scene against an enemy who can block each attack quickly becomes repetitive. There’s a reason why the last fighting scene in Medabots is so short.

The enemy is given the occasional downfall and these are the most intense moments. Anytime it breaks out and finds a way around there’s a sense of been-there-done-that. At that point, it just felt like the creators was dragging the series on and piling on tragedies.

Up until then, it constantly kept moving forward and didn’t linger on unnecessary details. The reason we get these time skips because we don’t need 40 episodes of Eren’s childhood to understand him. We’re given enough to understand and then it moves on. Why linger on the least exciting section? Maybe they’re trying to appeal to an audience who’s in it for the action. At least they gave them unique action scenes.

Overpowered enemy means the ending isn’t very different than what happened a few episodes before it. The lack of conclusion isn’t the big problem. The manga keeps going, and the series doesn’t put all its money on the Big Conclusion anyway. The conclusion is not satisfying enough, but it doesn’t negate all that came before. The problem is that not enough changed when it ends. Change is only hinted at, but the enemy hasn’t been really defeated and not a lot of progress was made. I did not want all points wrapped up, but I wanted a lesson learned. A good ending is one that wraps up the themes, not plot points.

The series also gets credit for changing my view on realistic character design. My previous experience was with Monster, where everyone looked like real people and no one looked interesting or unique. Animation gives total control. The animators decide everything – the size of the head, the shape of the eyes, the color of the hair.

There is supposed to be a good reason to include a detail. If not, it’s just meaningless fluff with no purpose. That’s why, in cartoons, the characters tend to have ridiculous designs that are either interesting to look at or to inform us about the character’s personality. Attack on Titan has this attention to detail. The facial expression especially have a lot of work put into them. Levi has small, narrow eyes that reflect his world that’s nothing but killing titans. Eren’s eyes are wide but muscular, which fit with his idealism, extremist views and desire to go to the world outside. Petra also has such wide eyes, but they’re softer. She’s more emphatic than anyone around here.

It also avoids the shounen trap and let women look like women. A lot of shounen anime give the women breasts, but not actual female beauty. It’s no attempt to subvert gender norms. The femininity is removed without something to replace it. Here, though, women are allowed to look like women whether they’re mother figures (Petra), hardened warriors (Annie, Mikasa) or wild eccentrics (Hanji, Sasha).

It’s a good moment to say that the series avoids all cliches of misogyny and feminism in its representation of women. The women in Attack on Titan are allowed to be human beings, not walking pin-up posters or bland strong women. They have characters and personalities just like the guys. They do drop the ball Mikasa, but that’s less because they try to make her strong and more because they forgot to give her a personality. Why do we waste our time, asking whether a sexy schoolgirl with a one armed scissor is feminist when this one gets it all right?

Despite the small flaws, Attack on Titan is well worth the fame. It’s good to easy it became so big. There are at times when it feels unstoppable, like it’s hell-bent on becoming the best anime ever. Almost every scene has purpose and every dialogue exchange contributes to the characters and worlds. Even when it becomes just an extended action sequence, it’s fantastic. That’s how good it is.

4 titans out of 5

Isaac Asimov – Second Foundation

There are two sayings about reading literature that I hear often. The first is that the person just can’t get into the book. The second is that I should wait 1000 pages until the character killed in the epilogue for A Storm of Swords for a cheap twist, is connected to the larger picture. True, these statements aren’t said by the same people, but even the people of the second group don’t display an interest in reading. You’d think that if reading is such a task, people would prefer more minimalistic works.

The general public has better things to do than search the net for new books to read. The Sci-Fi/Fantasy community is more disappointing. We’re all familiar with Asimov, so how come nobody asked why the hell people are preferring a longer, less focused, less meaningful version of Foundation?

Asimov’s focus has tigthened, and in this novel he abandons the short-story format of the previous novels. These are still two seperate stories, only with a much stronger connection between them. Unlike a lot of trilogies, Asimov’s books don’t get worse as they go on. Rather, he has a better idea of what inspired his first book in the first place and he discards what’s useless.

Asimov, despite being famous for being a hard sci-fi writer and a scientist, doesn’t resemble any of the ‘scientific’ people I encountered. Go to your typical science class, and people will worship physics while being sure that psychology is for the rubble. Since it can’t be represented in pure mathematics, it’s therefore meaningless.

Asimov gets around that by saying ‘psychohistory’ also has hardcore mathematics and equation, but no one in the novel can really comperehend this subject. That doesn’t make it less important. Understanding people is, above all, the most important thing. Whether you want power or to advance society, human society is first of all made of people.

Without people, the physical sciences can’t exist. If people are the basis of all science, they are therefore should be a top priority for research. In a genre that’s more about science than people, it’s a bold statement. Never mind that Asimov can’t (and doesn’t try) to create characters. He must have had bad social skills. His conclusion has more in common with literary fiction than a lot of popular sci-fi.

While his characterization remains weak, they got to be a little more human last time and here the Mule is improved upon. He’s still simple, but the climax gives him a moment of humanity that Asimov didn’t seem capable of. Asimov tried to make him sympathetic in the previous novel – that’s another plus for the author by the way, how his work doesn’t actually have ‘heroes and villains’ – but here it feels real.

In Foundation and Empire, the Mule was a generic weakling who decides to take revenge on the world. On Second Foundation, his journey reveals itself to be something like Manson’s Antichrist Superstar. Like the Worm, he achieves all that power but is not sure what to do next. He may have defeated the external enemy, but he didn’t do anything about himself. The Mule got into a habit of conquering and defeating that he couldn’t stop, even if his next enemy is possibly not even real.

If Asimov combined the two novellas concerning the Mule into a single one, it’d probably be worthy of considered a classic. It’s this moment of humanity that’s so rare from epic fiction nowadays. Even if the Mule remains simplistic, he’s a well-made, sympathetic antagonist who’s not here for us to hate or root for his defeat, but to understand his mistakes.

The rest of the novel brings Asimov back to his pulp style, and it remains surprisingly in control. This is where Asimov destroys everything that was ever good in Game of Thrones. Like Martin, his plot is dense, in large scale and features plenty of twists and riddles. Asimov’s minimalism means you’re never drowning in details don’t help to move the story forward.

Asimov wants you to solve his puzzle, but you can’t solve the puzzle if you’re given 100 extra pieces that got nothing to do with anything. There’s a reason puzzle games, even plot-driven ones tend to be minimalistic. No matter how many riddles and twists Asimov pulls, they’re always in focus. They’re never drowned out by long descriptions of rooms or of what the character thinking. There are a few embarassing moments of techno-babble, but they’re read more like Asimov was sure he was going to invent the thing. There is charm in that excitement

It does get a bit silly in the end, where everyone suddenly assumes he thinks he knows he assumes he thinks he knows what the other person thinks he assumes he knows what the fifth person is eating. The climax, while fun, is ridiculous and borders on self-parody. It’s a series of amusing twists, but they’re more confusing than clear. Confusion isn’t Asimov’s purpose. He keeps you at the dark at first, but then makes everything crystal clear. It’s a minor slip, though. It doesn’t completely undermine the coherency that makes these books so fun. Asimov just let the pen get away from him a little.

This is the best of the first of the original trilogy. It may not provide a big, final conclusion but it’s not needed. It sees Asimov getting better at both his strength, and he gets over some of his weaknesses. It’s still not a classic, but as far as simple, fun adventures go it sets the standards. Asimov wrote an adventure that’s smart, fun and occasionally has something to say. If he’s so popular, how come nobody replicates it?

3 mules out of 5

Isaac Asimov – Foundation and Empire

For a person who wrote so many books, it starts to look like maybe fiction isn’t Asimov’s thing. It doesn’t even read like he’s a got lot passion for it. He’s far more interested in grand ideas. That’s why there are no characters, and he cares little about pretending that they’re more than game pieces. Then again, he also knows the dangers of being pretentious, and Foundation and Empire remains a brisk, pulpy novel. It’s a weird thing. It’s a fun, shallow adventure written by an intelligent man who was probably too busy thinking to actually experience life.

Asimov occasionally inserts his grand ideas into the story. The conclusion to the first novella contained in this volume is a big deus ex machina. It renders all this running around irrelevant. The characters we followed had nothing to do with solution. Yet, it makes perfect sense in Asimov’s world. The only reason it was unexpected is because we’re still used to characters, even though they’re not driving the story. A solution that the characters came up with would’ve been easier to swallow, but will also see Asimov breaking the rules he created.

Doesn’t it sounded like the rules of psychohistory? Individuals are mostly meaningless. It’s the great masses that should be researched. Maybe Asimov got confused with masses of people and mass, the physical term. A hole is starting to appear, and it’s hard to ignore it when rappers are riding through it with the booming system.

If you can’t predict the behavior of one individual, how can you predict the behavior of masses of individuals? There is a composition/division fallacy here, but I can’t see how it connects. If the masses think in a certain way, doesn’t it stand to reason that an individual will most likely think in that some way? Psychohistory then does predict the behavior of individuals. It predicts the most common behavior ammong masses of individuals.

The science is messy, but if it were real and practical then Asimov would’ve written papers, not novels. At least he doesn’t use this as a crutch. ‘Prophecy’ is often used to make characters move the plot. It’s a great way to eliminate active personalities from your story and make it convenient. Since Asimov’s psychohistory deals with masses and not with individuals, it predicts that the whole Foundation enterpise will win – or at least, that its purpose will be achieved.

Time and again we see that it’s far more complex than it seems. The actual purpose of all these foundations remains in the shadows. Asimov also still has to create solutions for his conflicts that fit his rules. That’s why the first novella was successful, but it’s in the second one that Asimov goes to the edge. What’s beyond it is pretty foggy.

He introduces a character that messes up the whole equation. The predictions had a chance to be wrong, and by introducing a villain whose skill has power to completely change the equation – it’s more than a brand new variable – he raises up the question of whether or not this foundation thing will succeed.

He even tries to add some charactes. Bayta and Mis are the first real personalities here. They have dialogues that is recoginizably theirs, and behavior that is unique to them that doesn’t just move the plot. He even tries to create a unique villain with the Mule. The second novella shows a braver Asimov, one who tries to write more than a pulpy story.

He completely fails when he tries to be profound. When the Mule reveals itself in a pretty obvious twist, we get the obligatory villain’s monolgue. You’d think this was a tool of writers with zero creativity, but Asimov put some hard work into the Mule’s monolgue. He thinks that if the Mule will pour his heart out to us, it’ll make him more complex. He is more intriguing than a guy who just wants world domination, but it’s not enough.

Asimov spelling it all out clearly for us just emphasizes how shallow these novels are, in the end. He didn’t even try the obvious thing, to examine how an individual lives when he’s well aware of a ‘prophecy’ that has scientific basis. This is an interesting psychology to explore, because science’s role is, in the end, to predict. It’s one of the things that makes for a legitimate scientific theory. Asimov could have explored the individual and the collective, religion and science and I’m sure he has a lot of interesting things to say about this subject.

Alas, what Asimov really thinks is not here. Like its predecessor, the novel uses big ideas as a beautifying prop. It’s incorrect to say Asimov uses it to cover the lack of depth. Asimov remains as unpretentious as they come, with bullshit-free writing. Any time he does bother to describe characters or the scenary, he never rambles. He just wants to give you a general idea of who these people are and where they’re at, and then he moves onward with the plot. It removes any subtlety from the novel, but no rambling makes it easy and fun.

The series is often criticized for being episodic and lacking a main protagonist. That’s its strength, and what prevents it from spinning out of control. Imagine if George Martin took Asimov’s approach, and wrote episodic novels in Westeros instead of a sprawling melodrama. By giving out these little bits, Asimov’s world feels much more alive. It’s odd to say it about such a novel disconnected from human life, but it’s a series that points to a world that’s too big to capture in a single book, or a few. So, it will just give you a few bits here and a few stories here, and let you fill up the holes. It’s also useful not to beat the reader with your coolest symbols. If Trantor was over-described like anything in Martin’s novels, it would lose its mystique.

The series remains a fun adventure dressed up in big ideas, but not much beyond that. I hope there’s an exciting enough story in this series somewhere, because then it might finally be a classic worthy of its name. I have faith in Asimov. So far, he’s very in control of his ideas and knows what he’s doing best. The second novella’s pushing forward and then regressing is a bit sad, but maybe it’s not the right time yet.

3 mules out of 5