Review: Foundation

Foundation by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I decided to read the Foundation novels in chronological order, and before this I read Asimov's two precursor novels about Harry Seldon. I greatly enjoyed those books, which were just odd enough. I also liked the literary feel of those books, that felt like the writing from an Analog short story, where you had generally one deep thought and wove a whole story around it without engineering levels of meaning so prevalent in literary novels. Asimov kept that up here, by breaking the story into a few illustrative short stories. But I did miss the longer story arcs from the prequels, and I greatly missed the characters, who have "aged out" of this chronologically distant set of tales., While this one wasn't my cup of tea, it didn't scare me off of reading the next one -- I want to see what the worlds have in store.

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Review: The Every

The Every by Dave Eggers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really quite enjoyed this book's predecessor "The Circle" for the way it predicted the work environment and the work of workers in the future. It seemed quite prescient. I was hoping for more of that here, Egger's concepts of the future world. But here the novel world building was less about the work environment but more about the world, changed quite drastically from our world, but a quite obvious possibility, perhaps even likelihood, of a future. And it felt much less positive than the first book. "The Every" is Egger's cautionary tale about putting too much power in the hands of a few well-meaning technocrats. The novel's protagonists are smart folks that try to destroy the Every, an amalgamation of Google and Amazon, from within. But whatever our heroes do, the opposite impacts occur. Instead of their sabotage making things worse for The Every, it enriches them. In the end, the story is quite Biblical. I enjoyed the story, and found parts of it, like the visit to the seals, humorous in a cringeworthy, too much like people I know, way. Eggers story of the ruling woke mob of technocrats is entertaining and, at the same time, frightening, as it feels all too likely. And if you are an app developer and want to have some ideas that are wonderful and moral at first blush, but could be perverted to enslave people in some way, Eggers has a ton of ideas.

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