★★★★★ The Gods Themselves, by Isaac Asimov
The novel that proves Isaac Asimov could write
The Gods Themselves
Isaac Asimov
The novel that proves Isaac Asimov could write
The late Isaac Asimov was a hugely famous and very successful Golden Age science fiction author. Let me just say, before I get into it, that I am an Asimov fan. My admiration is based mostly on his nonfiction books on such subjects as science and history. He informed and broadened my mind in my high school years. His Life and Energy taught me chemistry. (Seriously -- I never took a chemistry class in high school, and I skipped freshman chemistry in college.)
What about his fiction? Well, as I already hinted, he began as a Golden Age Science Fiction author. The Golden Age of Science Fiction is a term of art referring to the early days of science fiction, beginning in the first half of the twentieth century, when the pulp magazines controlled the genre. It was dominated by the proteges of John W. Campbell Jr., who edited several of those pulps. Asimov was one of Campbell's biggest authors. Asimov is famous, among other works, for the Foundation Series.
At this time science fiction was despised by all Serious Literary People, who were of course too highbrow to read any of it and therefore knew next to nothing of what they were condemning. It wasn't really until Ursula K. LeGuin came along that it began to be respectable. Now, to be fair, science fiction had a stinky aura in the Golden Age, typified by the lurid cover art of the pulps. It was around this time that Theodore Sturgeon, a truly great Golden Age author who deserved respect and didn't get it, formulated Sturgeon's Law, which states, quite correctly, that "ninety percent of everything is crap". This was in response to criticism that "Ninety percent of science fiction is crap."
Asimov's fiction, I am sorry to say, for the most part does not raise ones opinion of the literary merit of Golden Age science fiction. It flatters most of his novels to say the characters are two-dimensional.
But there is one striking exception -- this novel, The Gods Themselves. It is a truly imaginative plot about multiple universes before they were fashionable. It is a novel in three parts, entitled "Against Stupidity", "The Gods Themselves", "Contend in Vain?". (These come from a line from The Maid Of Orleans by Friedrich Schiller, “Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.”) The middle part, "The Gods Themselves", which lent its title to the entire novel, takes place in a different universe and features some of the most interesting aliens in all of science fiction. (Most science fiction aliens are just funny-looking humans.) Those interested in early literary genderfluid characters might take a look.