Looking for books

in all the wrong places. Well, no - the location is correct, but the book I'm currently stalking (volume one of the Sandman collection) is nowhere to be found. I did however find The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Stephen King's novella about a young Red Sox fan lost in the Maine woods with the game on the radio her only companion. I've never read a King book from cover to cover, save for his On Writing - which is hands-down one of the best and most useful books about the subject - and perhaps a collection or two of his short stories. But I've always wanted to take a peek at this one. Maybe I'll have time to finish it before Widener's Interlibrary Loan staff find me a copy of Asimov's Second Foundation, the third book in that "trilogy". I read Foundation and Empire last week and enjoyed it immensely. Even though I remembered the main plot twist, there were a few minor surprises that I had completely forgotten, so it was fun to be blindsided a second time by the master of science fiction.

For those of you not in the know about this seminal series, Foundation is a tale set in humanity's far future, when a Galactic Empire that has ruled over a million worlds for countless centuries is teetering on the brink of collapse - or so says Hari Seldon, father of a scientific discipline called psychohistory, which enables him to divine the course of future events. Professor Seldon proposes the establishment of a Foundation at the edge of the galaxy (well, two, actually), where a group of encyclopedists will assemble and preserve the sum total of human knowledge so that when this empire does fall, a Second Empire can be rebuilt after only a thousand years of barbarism, and not the thirty thousand it would otherwise take. The novels tell the tale of this thousand-year period - the rising and falling fortunes of the Foundation and its shadowy counterpart at the other end of the galaxy, the Second Foundation - with a cast of dozens of characters, including the spectre of Hari Seldon himself, who appears as a hologram at key moments in Galactic history as it unfolds as he predicted it would.

Weird but true: there is a small group of science-fiction enthusiasts who see an eerie parallel between the figure of Hari Seldon and Osama bin Laden. Both are prophetic figures heralding destruction; both claim to offer salvation; and both periodically appear to their faithful, Seldon in his holographic chamber and bin Laden from his cave. The real kicker here is the final piece of "evidence", suggesting that bin Laden may actually have been inspired by the Foundation novels, which were first printed in Arabic in the early 1970's under the title al-Qaeda. I still say coincidence, if only because I wouldn't like to think of Doctor Asimov as an (albeit extremely indirect) accessory to international terrorism! Nevertheless, it's enough to send a shiver down your spine.

I pulled a book out of the Depository called Foundation's Friends, which is a collection of short stories by other giants in the field that explore the nooks and crannies of Asimov's future universe. Should be a fun read while I wait for the third book in the series to arrive. My goal is to read the original four-book "trilogy", which is comprised of Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, and Foundation's Edge. After that things get a little hinky, as Asimov attempts to tie these books into his other popular Robots series of novels in a way that just feels forced to me, and opens the door to the horrific Second Foundation Trilogy, which are authorized prequels written by modern sci-fi superstars David Brin, Gregory Benford, and Greg Bear that capitalize on the unified "Asimoverse". The Killer B's must have been letting interns ghost-write for them, or at least I hope they did, because all three books suck to a degree that's surprising for bestselling authors, and to make matters worse take great pains to undermine all of Asimov's original concepts.

But let's not think about those books right now. Only happy thoughts. Happy thoughts.