Albert

Not really digging the main character. Too apathetic.

I've watched so much Nerdwriter that I heard his voice the whole time I was reading this book. 

This was a vacation read, started on my recent trip to Italy, which involved long rides on a tour bus. It was not the best environment for intense attentive reading, and this novel fit the bill. The prose style is simple and sometimes a little bit quirky, which I appreciated for a light read.

The story follows a teenage girl named Frankie. Over the summer holiday, she meets a boy, a fellow outsider, and together they create a piece of art that they photocopy and post all over town. The poster features a poetical phrase that she composes:

The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are the fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

The posters cause a panic across the country, reminiscent of the real-life Satanic panic that happened in the 80’s. The two of them decide to keep it a secret, and the novel follows Frankie into adulthood as she struggles with the guilt of causing such a widespread panic, and with the consequences of potentially revealing the secret.

While I enjoyed reading the novel, I felt that it ultimately lacked depth. It wants the reader to take for granted that creating the poster was the most significant event that ever happened to Frankie, and also, that revealing her secret would ruin her life. The latter, especially, didn’t land for me. I never really bought into her guilt because I didn’t believe that she had done anything wrong. I think there is a certain type of person who would shoulder the responsibility, and I guess I needed a bit more exploration into why and how Frankie is this type of person. Without a strong sense of her inner life, my objective view of the situation led me to believe that the world around her overreacted to her innocent act, and that she didn’t need to beat herself up about it.

I’m glad to report that my journey with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is ending on a positive note. I wasn’t a fan of the previous entry, so I was a little worried about Foundation and Earth. Fortunately, I thought it was a huge improvement. It’s a direct continuation from Foundation’s Edge, so in hindsight, it’s almost as if the previous book was all a setup for the truly compelling part of the story.

I didn’t like the messy parallel plotlines in Foundation’s Edge, and so the main thing I appreciated about this one was its focus on a single group of characters, who are embarking on a single quest. We have Trevize, a member of the Foundation who’s got the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders, and his best bud, Pelorat, a scholar and all-round chill guy. Pelorat’s romantic partner, Bliss, is also part of the crew, and it’s in this three-sided dynamic that I got most of my enjoyment. It’s surprisingly sweet and relatable, how Trevize distrusts Bliss, simply because she’s Pelorat’s new girlfriend, and he doesn’t want his pal to get hurt. Add to that the conflict between Trevize’s and Bliss’s viewpoints about the fate of the galaxy, and you have some real satisfying character development.

The book is by no means perfect… I think it could have used some editing, because the debates between Trevize and Bliss, while thematically relevant, often feel repetitive, hitting the same beats over and over again. And any time a new female character was introduced, I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable tasteless description of her body.

As for how this pair of sequels ties into the whole of the series, my reaction is a bit mixed. Since I read the prequels first (prequels which were written after this book), I kind of knew what the ultimate reveal was going to be. Spoilery thoughts ahead:

I’m pretty disappointed that the central concept of Hari Seldon’s psychohistory is basically discarded after the original trilogy. Seldon’s plan was supposed to be a prediction of how a thousand years of human history would play out, based on the behaviour of large populations. In the sequels and prequels, we find out that there is a single god-like entity pulling the strings the whole time. On the one hand, it’s cool that this one character is connected to Asimov’s other novels, creating a shared universe; but on the other hand, I would have really liked to have an answer to the question: did the Seldon Plan actually work? More to the point: did it matter?

I tried to tell myself not to read this book when I first heard what it was about. I’m already quite cynical about Big Tech, and I thought that this would only entrench my biases further, with no real benefit to my mental health. But I saw it sitting on the shelf at my library and I just couldn’t help myself.

The author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook in the global policy department, where her responsibility was (ostensibly) to help the company negotiate with countries around the world. She started with the optimism typical of tech companies in the early aughts, believing that she would “make the world a better place.” But over the course of the book, she becomes disillusioned by Facebook’s relentless pursuit of growth and profit, which came at the high cost of creating political instability in countries like Myanmar and ultimately the US.

None of this is very surprising, if you follow the news about social media companies over the last few years. But Wynn-Williams’ position gave her access to the top brass at Facebook, Cheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, and she reveals some really bizarre behaviour by the leaders of the company. For example, Zuckerberg once asked her, on a visit to Indonesia, to organize a “gentle mob,” for no apparent reason other than to make himself look cool. These sections were both hard to read and hard to put down, having the feeling of learning some juicy gossip about someone you don’t like. You kind of have to take her word for it, because corroboration from other sources is not really built into the narrative style, but if it’s true, these incidents confirm the old adage that power corrupts.