Donald Kingsbury had written an interesting spin-off of Isaac Asimov’s celebrated Foundation Trilogy. Kingsbury was a Math professor in Canada and has authored several other sci-fi books. Other reviewers note his excess length, odd sentence structure and old-fashion gender norms. Not wanting to retread already worn ground, I’ll leave it to the reader to read comments on Amazon or Google it. Now, onto new territory!
Science fiction is useful as long as it makes us more aware of the present. Typically, author utilize their expertise in some field or another to teach us something from a new angle. Kingsbury’s contributions to society are:
- The state of things (from a physics perspective) can be thought of as information. Newtonian billiard balls tell you about the past and the future by the inertia, since we know the rules of motion. But once you get to the quantum level, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle guarantees that information is being lost continuously. The universe, therefore, cannot be deterministic since there isn’t ever enough information to go too far forward or backwards in time accurately.
- The amount of information present isn’t enough to derive an absolute system for all conditions. Prediction must be constantly refined and reapplied.
- Prediction is higher form of Man’s survival mechanisms: we contemplate unfavorable senarios until we can avoid them. Only the lazy aren’t constantly thinking of what is to their disadvantage in the world, right up until the moment it clunks them in the head!
There are many other nu gets of insight littered throughout the 500 pages, all the kinds of stuff that occurs to math professors! They make good food for thought, but as said by others, they could’ve been presented more concisely.
What is most annoying about this book is its unquestioned late-modern/post-modern assumptions. Illicit sex and abortions are ubiquitous features of the future world. Religion is just some political force from the past, passing away as humans become advanced. Science is slowly advancing us towards “The Truth” but the lessons of history are only of use to politicians. Love is simply the maternal gene acting up or ways people get what they want out of each other.
Asimov was cavalier and condescending towards religion in his books, but he was constantly either profound in his plot twists or engrossing in his characters thought-lives. Kingsbury does neither for too many pages upon pages. The main character, Eron, loses his brain-supplement-machine, but we barely spend a dozen pages delving into his torment before we are whisked away to flash backs and competing main characters. Kingsbury brilliantly reveals psychohistory to be Modernist intellectual chauvinism but spends a half page on what should have been an engrossing denouement. The thrill of out-smarting Asimov the Genius is taken away by too many pages of poo-pooing human history. Still, an interesting read.
