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Destinies Volume 1 Number 1

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Stand Pat, Ruby Stone (Roger Zelany): a story of alien marriage. Interesting. Old Woman By The Road (Gregory Benford): not my favorite author (given he wrote the worst book in Asimov's Foundation universe, which is a bit of an achievement given some of the others. This story isn't terrible, it just doesn't go anywhere. There is a single small plot element, which has been repeated in many other books (for example The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, which predates this story by 12 years). New Beginnings (Jerry Pournelle): a non-fiction column about design choices baked into our existing infrastructure which make it hard for it to be efficient, the failure to save for baby boomer retirement, and our need to be concerned about growing oil use and failure to find alternative energy sources like solar. The scary bit? This article from 1978 reads like it could have been written yesterday. Transition team (Charles Sheffield): are we suited to life on a space station? A good short story. Antimony (Spider Robinson): a pretty good cryonics story. Its a pity 1990 didn't give me a personal flyer like he promised. Very Proper Charlies (Dean Ing): a novelette about terrorism, specifically how terrorists…

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Foundation’s Fear

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This book is a solid zero stars in my mind. I got to page 372, but simply couldn't wade through the chore any longer. The plot meanders, and its not clear to me where the story is going. Worse still, basically nothing has happened yet. I am a little surprised, given the generally positive LibraryThing reviews. I should have read the Amazon reviews instead. Some examples: Normally, I do a lot of my reading on the train (BART for those of you familiar with San Francisco), getting to and from work. An engrossing book keeps me awake and I read it relatively quickly. "Foundation's Fear", especially the first half of it, set a record for putting me to sleep. There were days in when I only managed to read a couple of pages. A paragraph or two and I'd be out, even before the train started moving. As others here have pointed out, there is a lot of boring dialogue and description and much of it focuses around the Voltaire and Joan of Arc artificial entities. Hundreds of pages of philosophical noodling and descriptions of imaginary scenes conjured up in cyberspace become numbing. And another: This book is not good,…

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