Your Humble Blogger had read The Gods Themselves (New York: Doubleday 1972) in my adolescent Asimov-reading days, but never got around to it during my more or less middle-aged Asimov re-reading days. It’s, um, well, it’s an Asimov book, but less like an Asimov book than most Asimov books. Y’know?
It’s the only Asimov novel I recall that creates a fully non-human society. The middle section of the book has fun revealing bits and bits of this society, which has lots of bits to it that aren’t clear to the main characters. The reader gets a surprise twist, which certainly took me completely by surprise this time through, which implies that it wasn’t very memorable twenty years ago, but there it is. The first and last bits are in a near future earth, and are, well, Asimovian. Asimovish? Asimovich? No, that isn’t right.
Anyway, it’s a science what-if, the main characters are scientists, and the plot involves the working out of scientific and social consequences of the what-if. I don’t want to say there isn’t any character development, but there certainly isn’t any gratuitous character development. That is, characters change in ways that move the plot along, and the plot isn’t about the characters and the way they change, but the scientific puzzle and its resolution. It’s hard to imagine it winning a Hugo this year (not that I’ve read all the nominees, but I’ll judge from the half-dozen nominees I’ve read over the last few years). Tastes have changed.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
I read the first third or so of this on a car trip down to DC during college (I think we were going to a programming contest, and I think Michael B. and I ended up having dinner with Susan R., who was in DC that semester). I liked it a lot more than I like most of Asimov’s work, but somehow never got around to reading the rest of it.
The dinner was at a marvelous Afghan restaurant, and encouraged me to learn (the following year in graduate school) how to make the traditional Afghan bread that they served there. Nothing like having a perfectly clean apartment with a bowl of dough fermenting in a corner of the kitchen for three days, and trying to explain to guests that you’re going to cook and eat that stuff once it gets more gross-looking.
I remember liking this book more than average as a middle-schooler but being a bit annoyed by the quote the title’s drawn from: “against stupidity the gods themselves strive in vain”, to some approximation. It’s sort of the sneering, “gotcha” side of another thing Asimov is famous for saying: “never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.”