I ran out of time and energy for going to the library in the last two weeks, so I have been reduced to reading fiction off my shelves. I reread the Foundation Trilogy of novels by Isaac Asimov, a set stamped as "no longer belonging to Hayden Lake Library", copyrighted starting 1951, and the actual books I have are very yellowed and fragile, published starting in about 1967 or so.
The first book and a half is deadly dull [which I took as a personal challenge to read anyway], with very flat writing and most notable to me for a multitude of worlds set tens of thousands of years in the future, still hobbling along with a 1950 worldview. How people reproduced is a real study, as there were only two or three women in the original stories, counting the occasional courtesan, wife or secretary. Still, they do read along well--either that, or I'm easily entertained. I hadn't read the books since the early eighties or so, and wasn't as uncritical now as I was then.
The rather flat "voice" of the author, lack of visual imagery, and method of propelling the plot via a series of conversations is a limiting style. However, the intricacies of plot, cross and double-cross, still pulled me along. I finished by reading the fourth Foundation book, Foundation's Edge, written over ten years later and fleshed out better with several more main characters who are female. I went online to find out the title of the next book in the series [Foundation and Earth], which is not on my shelf.
What kept me up and writing until 3 in the morning today was that I came across a three-part interview of Isaac Asimov by Bill Moyer in about 1984 on U Tube. It was a pleasure to see and hear the author speak for the first time since I regularly read his books and developed an affection for him. [I often have conversations with authors in my mind, and wish I could meet them.]
I was rather surprised by his Brooklyn accent [think Billy Crystal in the movie "Princess Bride"] and found myself sort of drinking it all in. His accent, mannerisms, ideas and Humanist ideals and so forth. He died in 1992, while I was still in nursing school. Turns out that he had been infected by HIV from blood transfusions during bypass surgery, which contributed to his death from heart and kidney failure.
He was a contemporary of my parents.
A very interesting man, with intriguing views. We never met, but I miss him.
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