by Isaac Asimov
I picked this up on the coast for $3.00.
When I say coast, I mean sweater and book coast, not bikinis and sun coast.
It was originally $1.75 in 1972 which is $10.51 today. Not bad. It has the stamp of a previous bookstore meaning it was sold or traded countless times before but I like old yellow books.
Roberts book shop in Lincoln City (www.robertsbookshop.com) has every book you never knew you needed, including another I picked up concerning bad tattoos called, “No Regrets” by Yael & Chen, a must read for anyone considering getting a tattoo.
“What about the God’s themselves?” you say. Oh, right on. I picked up the Gods Themselves partly because I had previously gotten and read, Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun (not as sexy as one would think but still a good read). Anyway, I really bought this book because of the cover. When it comes to Science Fiction or Fantasy, that’s the only way to go.
First of all, the cons and they few and inconsequential. Number one is, there are no robots. This is perhaps a personal preference and in this case Asimov can be forgiven, since he has written extensively on the subject and The Gods is really a book about the complexity of human relationships, (love, sex, rivalry, etc) but seen through the lens of a completely novel alien race; hence the mysterious orbs, fetuses, and floating orbs and eyeballs on the cover.
The second con is related to the story’s structure, and this one is as unimportant as the robots. It is a book that is written in three parts. It was first published in three parts in two different magazines, and that may explain some things. The middle section is by far the most bizarre, emotionally engaging and intensely interesting part. The First and second parts seem like mostly book ends. There is an over arching theme that ties them together. It concerns a transfer of seemingly unlimited energy between two universes. This and a limited form of messaging are the only things that tie these otherwise unconnected realities together. The alien universe is so different from our own, that it goes a long way in explaining the reason for this structure. They have to be different.
Isaac Asimov had a monumental mind, producing a substantial cannon of fiction and non-fiction covering science, the cosmos, philosophy, and the future of the human race. The theme that ties The Gods Themselves together as one piece is still relevant because it describes our tunnel vision when it comes to energy, especially energy that seems consequence free.
However for my $3.00, that is just a pretext for the personal message. In 1972 Asimov creates an entirely new reality, so different from our own at that time, that he could talk about love and sex and gender in way that would otherwise have been shocking to the general audience of the day, and still today in some sectors. That is the beauty and the job of science fiction. We create new realities by imaging new realities.