Dead again.

The laptop crashed on me again, as expected. It seems that anything that tasks the CPU (installations, applications, opening large files) sends it into a tailspin and, shortly thereafter, the Blue Screen of Death rears its ugly head once more. I'm assuming this is a hardware problem now, so I'll likely be shipping my machine off to an undisclosed location for an as-yet undetermined amount of time. This is all well and good, as I had the foresight to purchase an extended warranty on the laptop way back when, but at the same time I'm going to miss my link to the "Collective". True enough, I'll have all the internet connectivity I can shake a stick at here at Harvard, but it's funny how much I've come to depend on the web on a day to day basis. I positively hate television news, and although newspapers are marginally better, they're almost a day old by the time you pick them up at the newsstand. I also tend to consult the internet compulsively for all of my reference questions, a fact which became clear to me last night when the laptop died and I was forced to pace around the apartment rifling my bookshelves for the tome which contained the particular bit of trivia my mind had decided it couldn't function without knowing at that very moment.

Now there's a thought: without the internet to graze on when I get home from work in the evening, I might be forced to actually pick up a book again, every now and then. When forced with the choice between spending my commuting time on reading of writing, there simply is no choice - I have to write. And any time that I do read on the train-ride home to the North Shore I always feel somewhat guilty about having "wasted" the time, when I could have been pecking out another few hundred works on one of my stories or the novel.

Last week while waiting for Windows XP to reinstall itself, I plucked my copy of Isaac Asimov's Foundation from an adjacent bookshelf and started reading, and quite frankly I didn't stop until I had finished the whole thing. I'd forgotten how well Asimov writes, in a clear and unaffected style that is maddeningly difficult to emulate. Another thing I had not remembered about the Foundation series was that it was originally written as a collection of interconnected short stories, and not the novel format that I had first encountered them in. Reading through the first book again this time I was more aware of the architecture of the individual "episodes", and found myself appreciating the writer's craft from a behind-the-scenes perspective that I didn't exactly have before (I also took heart from the fact that Asimov was able to pull off telling short stories that stood on their own while at the same time fitting into the big picture - perhaps my goal of a interlinked set of horror stories might just work after all!).

What really leapt out at me while reading Foundation, however, was how formative a period I must have been in when I first had read it, because I kept stumbling across idea after idea in the book that I recognized as being the inspiration for so many of my own creative ventures! The fantasy world of "Confessions", for example, is hugely indebted to Asimov's Foundation series, although the kinship is more in spirit than anything else as my world has grown and matured into its own. Asimov remains to me the gold standard of storytelling to which I aspire, I'm happy to report, and now I want to go digging through my books in storage to find the second volume in the series...

(Although I've just determined that the Lamont Library, which is adjacent to Widener, is supposed to have a copy of Foundation and Empire - the 1952 edition, to boot!)