In the lase few days I’ve quickly gone through a few classic science fiction books that I just wanted to write a little bit about here. The books I’ve just finished are Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. I really enjoyed Foundation, Clarke’s book was good, at least I enjoyed the writing, but the story involves race memory unhinged from time and a dualism that I find distasteful in hard sci-fi. Why am I reading these books now? Well I found a list, and both of these books were on the list. I would have eventually read Foundation, as it is often heralded as the best sci-fi book ever written, which I don’t know enough about to confirm or deny… I do know though that if you know anything of late Roman history and early European history you know how this book is going to go, and while it’s good the actual history is much more fascinating and detailed then Asimov’s work ever could be, and Asimov is really rushing things along, it took quite a bit more than 100 odd years for the Roman empire to collapse and for European states to form and the era of Merchant Princes to develop. I know why he had to rush the history along, but it still irks…
Anyway I started to reading James Clemens a.k.a James Rollins a.k.a. Jim Czajkowski’s first fantasy novel Wit’ch Fire, the link is over there to the right if you want to check it out. Without a doubt I think this first effort is better than his first mystery/thriller, Subterranean which somehow manages to have a 4 star rating at Amazon.com, maybe I shouldn’t be using them as my link source, Subterranean is the most ridiculous book I’ve ever read, and I’ve read some really crazy shit (like the original planet of the apes novel and some of Burroughs odder adventures). It has sentient monotremes/marsupials living in caves underneath Antarctica, who talk psychically with Australian aborigines. Yup, you heard that right, psychic underground kangaroo/platypi… Sigh, I sure hope the man has gotten better, I don’t know how his first book ever sold. Anyway… So far, while Wit’ch Fire hasn’t been terribly original, okay the story is the same one you’ve read over and over again, so far it is enjoyable. It is part of a series though and I don’t want to get bogged down in reading three or four 400 page books just to get a story out of the way…
