The End of Eternity Review

Hey folks, it’s been a bit since my last blog post. I more or less fell off the face of the earth for a combination of reasons, but no worries, I’m back. In the next couple days I have all sorts of great new stuff for you including some book reviews, some rambling thoughts on cryptography, the hazards of getting bogged down on a project, and kumquats.

Now, if you’ve been following along you’ll know that I read alot (2-3 books a week, sometimes 4 if I’m feeling particularly spunky). So, it’ll come as a surprise, or maybe not–depends on your threshold for being surprised, I suppose (I startle easily for instance)–that in the past two weeks I’ve only read…one book. Yeah, you read that correctly. Only one book.

Here’s why: I got myself knee-deep in two quicksand books that are sucking me under: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

Both of these books are behemoths in their own right, but when taken in conjunction I’ve been staring down the barrel of nearly 2,500 pages. Cryptonomicon, thankfully, is an easy enough read (albeit a bit boring), but Godel, Escher, Bach is a friggin’ minefield of dense thought experiments that I can only trudge through a dozen pages at a time.

Anyways, I just wanted to throw that out there for those who might have been wondering where I disappeared too. During that time I also went through a rough (though predictable) loss of enthusiasm for Mind Breach and Infinity Lost. It ultimately happens somewhere in the third draft phase, just before they go to the editor, that all the words on the page start looking really silly. I start doubting the story, the idea, the characters.

It’s all garbage, I say! String me up by the toes! I deserve the most obscene tortures for unleashing this dreck on the world.

Anyways, I think this is a really common place for most writers to be. If you’re doing it right, eventually you’ll come to a place where you just can’t see the good from the bad anymore. It’ll all seem overwhelming and futile and the only option seems to be crawling into a hole and crying for a couple weeks.

So that’s what I did. I cried for a couple weeks, but now it’s time to return to the keyboard and finish what I started. In the meantime enjoy a tasty little review of Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity.

The End of Eternity – Isaac Asimov (For those who like a topsy-turvy time traveling story)

In the grand pantheon of sci-fi writers there are few who stand above Asimov. This guy was prolific across such a wide swatch of genre that it truly boggles the mind at times. Two years ago I set out to start reading the great masters of sci-fi and tore into nearly every Asimov book, except The End of Eternity, which sounded fantastic, but after the Foundation Series and Robot’s of Dawn series I started getting burned out on Asimov and needed a break. Until now.

One of the things I love about Asimov is how simply he writes his characters. He doesn’t give you a ton to go on, but his ability to fill in your mental picture by supplying tiny details is astounding. His writing is an example of making each of your words/sentences do more.

In The End of Eternity Asimov takes on one of the trickier sci-fi tropes in time-traveling and the careful manipulation of reality. I’ve only ever written one time-travel story (replete with vampires no less) and while that was fun, inevitably one runs into a number of paradoxes that are difficult to slog through. Asimov deals with this by claiming “There are no paradoxes in eternity.” Which means that whenever there is the potential for a paradox, reality will alter itself in such a way as to negate the paradox.

Um… okay, I’m gonna need Doc Brown and a Delorean to get to the bottom of this one, but regardless it lays the foundation for the rest of the story which is, on the whole, good, if not a product of it’s time (the 1950’s).

If you’ve read and enjoyed other Asimov stories, then you’ll probably like this (though be warned that it is a peculiar tale at times). If you’ve never read Asimov, you should start with the Foundation series or Robots of Dawn before moving on to The End of Eternity.

Don’t have time for a full novel experience? Check out some of Asimov’s short stories, which on their own are fantastic. Nightfall is commonly considered the best sci-fi short story ever written (which I don’t actually agree with, but it is quite good).

Click the picture to read NIGHTFALL for Free.

Or you could check out The Last Question, which Asimov considered to be his favorite short story he ever wrote.

Click the picture to read The Last Question for Free.

Okay, so, moral of the story… go read some Asimov.