Isaac Asimov – The Last Question and The Last Answer

My wife was surprised that I had never read Brave New World. It seemed to her that this novel by Aldous Huxley was generally considered required reading in school. She ordered it for me along with 1984 by George Orwell, which by coincidence I haven’t read either. It seems that I somehow went to the wrong schools as a kid, and missed out on some classics. I’m trying to remedy this.

I wouldn’t really call Brave New World a sci-fi novel. It’s more of a criticism of utopian society. The setting is in London around 2540 AD, where society is broken down into castes. Human reproduction is done in a “hatchery” where babies are created in bottles and subjected to varying conditions in order to guide development into one of the five classes (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon). Aside from modifying biological factors, each child is “trained” with techniques ranging from aversion therapy to repeating phrases over and over when they sleep.

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I recently started reading the Cobra Trilogy by Timothy Zahn. Cobra, the first book in the series, starts off just after the beginning of the Troft war with the Dominion of Man. At the beginning of the novel, the Trofts have already conquered a two key worlds in the outer systems. The military, in a desperate move, created the Cobra program to train an elite force of enhanced soldiers. One of the first things that came to mind when I came across this series was Starship Troopers, the BOOK, not the movie. I immensely enjoyed the first few chapters of Starship Troopers with the cap troopers in the Mobile Infantry. The main difference is that instead of troopers inside of huge external mech hardware, the Cobras’ enhancements are essentially hidden, yet very deadly. On the outside they look like a normal human, which is one of their advantages.
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