The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

read by Paul Boehmer

So humanity has found a way to time travel, and to edit history (and therefore the future) for the good of humanity. But it’s run by a cadre of chest-thumping nerd boys who live together with next to no female companionship (and no female colleagues at all) outside of time, in a no-place called Eternity. 

Eternity is meant to be a safe bubble of idealism and intellectual stimulation, free from distractions and the sorts of personal prejudices that would lead to bad decisions… but which, in reality, is a seething cauldron of bitter competition, thwarted desire, unexamined privilege, and unchecked neurosis. 

Basically, if you put a bunch of Silicon Valley bros in charge of all of time, it would look something like this.

I spent a lot of time gnashing my teeth at the obvious error of putting a bunch of putatively meritocratous hormone-soaked monks in charge of humanity’s destiny, and trying to tell myself that Asimov grew up when and where he grew up and so had some serious but understandable blind spots when writing this. And then, when the main character (duh) becomes willing to mess up all of history and therefore the entire future of everyone purely because he wants to get laid, I gnashed my teeth even harder.

But I kept reading… because it was a classic that I’d never gotten around to, and it’s not that long, and I figured what the heck.

And then it turns out that Asimov was taking all of this into account… but if I tell you how, I’ll spoil the book for you.

Verdict: read it. But only if you can stand to grit your teeth for the first 90% of the book. In my opinion, it was worth it.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman: #tbt review

Full disclosure: I love this series so much that I'm planning to get an alethiometer tattoo when I'm feeling a little more flush. (After the scarlet A and the Deathly Hallows symbol, that is.) My second time through the series (I've read it three times now) was on audio CDs in my car when my kid was 5 years old, and even though it was far too advanced for them at the time, they fell in love with it too. I wrote this review after my second reading but before the third, and long before the prequel was published.

So:

In this alternate universe where people’s souls have a physical reality and manifest themselves outside people’s bodies as animal-shaped “daemons,” and the Magisterium (think of the Catholic Church during the days of the Inquisition) rules politics, morality, and, as far as possible, people's minds, Lyra is an orphan who lives at Jordan College, Oxford. She is being raised haphazardly amid the benign neglect of the professors there and has a good, if chaotic, life.

Then a mysterious relative appears and Lyra saves his life; she ends up with a unique artifact called an alethiometer (the eponymous Golden Compass), in her possession; her friend Roger is disappeared by the much-feared Gobblers; and she is taken to live with the beautiful, self-willed Mrs. Coulter, whom the Jordan scholars obviously fear. Now Lyra needs to learn the nature of the relationship between all of these events, and what they have to do with Dust, a substance whose very existence is inimical to the Magisterium, and which nobody is supposed to know about--least of all a half-wild young girl.

This is an incredibly beautiful metaphysical work (I can't just call it a work of fantasy, though it is that) about the nature of truth and the soul, along the lines of the best C. S. Lewis books--but written by someone with a deep distrust of organized religion and of anybody who withholds important truths in order to control people.

The protagonist, Lyra, is a liar, a teller of tales, and the product of a society based on lies, brought up not knowing the most basic facts of her existence. But she is also intelligent, resourceful, intensely curious, and deeply loyal to her friends. This gets her into trouble, of course, but it may also be, along with her boundless ability to love and her fierce determination to find her disappeared friend, what ultimately saves her and her world.

Five out of five stars. At least.