{"id":1971,"date":"2004-04-20T09:24:36","date_gmt":"2004-04-20T13:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/04\/20\/1971.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:03","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:03","slug":"book-report-the-gods-themselve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/04\/20\/book-report-the-gods-themselve\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Gods Themselves"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger had read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.com\/catalog\/display.pperl?0553288105\"><I>The Gods Themselves<\/I><\/a> (New York: Doubleday 1972) in my adolescent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.asimovonline.com\/\">Asimov<\/a>-reading days, but never got around to it during my more or less middle-aged Asimov re-reading days. It&#8217;s, um, well, it&#8217;s an Asimov book, but less like an Asimov book than most Asimov books. Y&#8217;know?\n<p>It&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;t right.\n<p>Anyway, it&#8217;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&#8217;t want to say there isn&#8217;t any character development, but there certainly isn&#8217;t any gratuitous character development. That is, characters change in ways that move the plot along, and the plot isn&#8217;t about the characters and the way they change, but the scientific puzzle and its resolution. It&#8217;s hard to imagine it winning a Hugo this year (not that I&#8217;ve read all the nominees, but I&#8217;ll judge from the half-dozen nominees I&#8217;ve read over the last few years). Tastes have changed.\n<p>Redintegro Iraq,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019s, um, well, it\u2019s an Asimov book, but&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1971"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16997,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1971\/revisions\/16997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}