Sunday, November 14, 2004

I forced TheLimey to read Asimov's The End of Eternity, which I suspected he would like as much as I did. I hadn't read it in many years, maybe since my teens, and was surprised to find that it had weathered the years extremely well.

As I was reading it, I thought to myself, "Wow, for something written in the '50s, this somehow managed to remain very undated--even the descriptions of technology seem contemporary!" Then I seem to remember looking at the copyright date and it being in the '30s, which blew me away.

...But now I can't find any reference to its being anything other than 1955, when it was published, and TheLimey has my copy so I can't look inside to see what the heck I was looking at!

Well, anyway--it's still a damn good book. One whose plot hasn't aged in all this time. It makes a lot of current authors look like they're writing cheap retreads. And I hear that the plot twists kept TheLimey awake until 1am a couple of nights. Heh.

Maybe I should dust off The Caves of Steel next.

8 comments:

liz said...

What was I thinking, then? Maybe I was imagining it was written in the '70s, but saw that it was from the '50s.

liz said...

Those things occurred *because he predicted them*! (I'm pretty sure that's how it worked.) Maybe he really was a time-traveler.

(I have yet to see women's shoes with bells on become popular, though...from one of those Foundation books.)

argotnaut said...

_We_ could start those, except that the constant jingling would drive me nuts. Maybe that's why it never caught on.

liz said...

It works if one accepts a premise of predestination. If it were destined to happen, a loop would be irrelevant.

Or else with outside intervention, such as Eternity, of course.

Liddy said...

A librarian weighs in: 1955 was the first edition. Bibliography prevails again!

liz said...

Just goes to show once again how precarious memory of certain information types can be!

liz said...

Okay, but wait a minute--that was the publishing date, right? What was the *copyright* date?

Liddy said...

Also 1955. I could bore a hole in you with the history of book cataloging rules, but it'll be more pleasant for everyone involved if I don't have to do that.