Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
This is it! Isaac Asimov’s Foundation will finally make it to visual media. After the rights passing through a few hands, they’ve finally made their way to HBO. Check out the entire article at The Wrap where Jonah Nolan talks about the new project. I’ll definitely keeping tabs on the development. No dates were given, so I’ll try to hold back most of my excitement until I hear more.
Arthur C. Clarke died early this morning after a long battle with post-polio syndrome. The New York Times has an interesting summary of his life and major accomplishments. I’m ashamed to say that I still haven’t read 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it is on my ever expanding reading list. Hopefully I can review it some time in the near future. Clark is well known for his laws of prediction, which are as follows:
As I sat down to write this review, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I read an entire physical book. Since 2018, all my novel reading has been on a Kindle Paperwhite. Before that, I used a Kindle Fire but still alternated with physical books. Reading on the Fire was always a bit of a hassle because of the glare. The Paperwhite’s e-paper display is in a completely different league. I like it so much that when I revisited the Foundation novels a few years ago, I borrowed the ebooks from my local library even though I already had the physical copies on my shelf. One nice perk of the Paperwhite is that it’s easier to read while eating because I can flip pages with my knuckle.
Recently I wanted to disconnect from electronics before bed. The best way seemed to be grabbing something from my bookshelf that I hadn’t read yet and didn’t already have digitally. That’s when I noticed Svaha by Charles de Lint. I vaguely remembered seeing a recommendation for it years ago and picking up a copy through Book Mooch, a site where people trade books they’re done with. I’m pretty sure it’s been sitting unread for over ten years.
When I pulled Svaha off the shelf, I could barely remember how or why I got it. The cover, showing a Native American man with a wolf, didn’t ring any bells, and the back-cover description didn’t sound like my usual genre. Most of my reading leans toward science fiction and, more recently, fantasy. Still, I decided to trust my past self and give it a shot.
The story takes place in Canada sometime after 2094. Without spoiling too much, the setup is that in the 1990s a Native American named Daniel Hollow Horn became a music superstar and used his fortune to educate and empower his people. Over time they became world leaders in science, technology, and law, eventually surpassing the rest of the world. After a period of war, they withdrew into self-contained “Enclaves,” kind of like Wakanda from Black Panther, except everyone knows where they are. They managed to protect themselves from the pollution and fallout left behind while the rest of the world fell apart.
This review will most likely contain spoilers for any previous books in the series, read at your own risk.
Sometime after the end of Renegade, Derec has developed some problems using his chemfets to control Robot City. Derec, Ariel, Mandelbrot, Wolruf are on their way back to Robot City along with Adam & Eve (the changelings now referred to as Silversides). This book reminds me most of “Prodigy” from the Robot City series where we saw creative drives evolve in the robots. This volume is definitely more interesting than Renegade in my opinion. Amazingly, quite a bit of the main story plot is developed and we see some more information as to the purpose of the Silversides and their quest to define what is truly “human”.