It was with some degree of sadness that I closed the cover of Patrick O’Brian’s “Blue at the Mizzen” last evening. The act marked the end of my second trip through the twenty-volume series since I first had “Master and Commander” recommended to me by my brother ten years ago or more. I enjoyed this journey every bit as much as, and perhaps more than, the first. But even as I savored those final pages melancholy crept in, hard on the heels of the almost certain knowledge that it would be my last visit to O’Brian’s world. I was saying good bye to Captain (nay, Admiral!) Aubrey and the Doctor, for good. I will reread a book more than once, even many times. I have read the four books in the main trunk of Tolkien’s work something like eight or nine times, at least. But I have to read them all, and in order, and well, there are twenty of them in O’Brian’s tale.

It takes a significant portion of a person’s life to read twenty novels once. It must be a truly rare writer who could motivate a second helping, and perhaps no writer living or dead could prompt a third. O’Brian was every bit that writer: fit to inhabit the same exalted perch and breathe the same rarified air as Conrad, London, Wells, Verne, and Forester. To be sure, O’Brian cannot claim their variety of subject matter and point of view, and there are some who might smirk at the literary pretensions of what we must all admit was a six-thousand page serial adventure novel, but I don’t believe many who have read the books would share that view. O’Brian was in many ways a one-hit wonder, but what a prodigious great hit it was. Page after lyrical, poetical page, the tales of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are an antiquarian feast for the literary senses.

And if it requires a rare writer to prepare such a feast, maybe it needs a rare reader to take a seat at the table once it is served. Great length is not the only characteristic of this tale that might deter the faint-hearted amateur. One of the great distinguishing features of O’Brian’s work is the language. Among the things novelists strive for are style, voice, and a sense of place. In the Aubrey-Maturin novels O’Brian emerged in the eye of the reading world as a master craftsman, whose every sentence, every perfectly placed paragraph, was so thoroughly steeped in the time, or his sense of it, that while reading them you found yourself immersed without ever feeling the water around your ankles. But this language can be daunting to those accustomed to the modern novel, that often flies by with the breathless pace of a movie. I have relatives who have tried to read O’Brian, but simply have not been able to make headway, even though they love a good sea story.

And it is as a sea story, one immensely long glorious sea story, that O’Brian’s work truly shines. He is neither as dark as Conrad, as gritty as London, nor as fanciful as Verne, and his vision of life at sea is somewhat too idealized to be read as history, but for an authentic image of an eighteenth-century full-rigged ship and its working he is not to be matched. For this he drew on comprehensive research, and personal experience. I am probably in a minority of O’Brian readers who have spent a significant amount of time in square-rigged wooden ships. I spent a large part of 1984 and 1985 sailing as crew aboard first a barkentine (square-rigged foremast, fore-and-aft-rigged main and mizzen) of 180′, and then a brigantine (same rig, one less mast) of 140′. Like the characters in “Master and Commander” and its sequels, I have been aloft in a blow, and know what it is like to lay out on a yard a hundred feet above deck, with one hand for the ship, and one hand for yourself. There is not one detail of O’Brian’s descriptions, from chainplates to futtock shrouds, from wearing to clubhauling, that did not ring true for me.

As authentic as they are, the novels are not one unbroken success from front to back. Some are better than others, and I think that on my second time through I read them with a somewhat more critical eye. Beginning with “The Yellow Admiral” I began to get a sense that perhaps O’Brian knew that things were getting a little repetitive, and even more to the point, he himself acknowledged, in one of the few forewords that he wrote, that he was “running out of history.” If he had known the story would be so popular, he said, then he might have begun in the 1780’s or even earlier. There was a great deal of smacking good Royal navy history that had passed beyond the tale’s reach when he decided to bring the Doctor and the Lieutenant together in Minorca in the year 1800. I doubt, though, that the tale would have been better for an earlier start.

Nor is it improved by a later end. There is a 21st “book” in the series, but I won’t read it. Published after the author died in Dublin in 2000, it consists of a couple of typeset chapters and some handwritten treatments and notes. If they are an accurate guide to the plot, then it seems that O’Brian, at least, was not yet tired of his characters. But for me the perfect ending is “Blue at the Mizzen.” I am content to see Jack with the promise of his pennant, and Stephen with the hope of Christine to salve his wounds, and all of them frozen forever in memory, riding to anchor in the bay of Valparaiso and looking after home and hearth at Woolcombe. The twenty books O’Brian actually completed give us the grand arc of the character’s lives from start to satisfying finish, from jobless Lieutenant to respected Admiral, from penniless surgeon to wealthy naturalist, and there is really nothing more that a reader can ask from an author. By any measurement, Patrick O’Brian gave this reader more pleasure to the page than he had any right to expect.

When Isaac Asimov first conceived the idea for his Foundation stories it was 1941, and World War II had just erupted. The first three stories in the series appeared in John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction magazine between 1941 and 1944. The whole breadth of the tale was not finalized and collected into book form until the early 1960’s. In 1966 it won a Hugo for Best Science Fiction Series, a category created to honor it and one other seminal competitor: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

I first read the Foundation series front to back in the early 1990’s. Recently I got the bug to reread it, probably because my steady diet of nonfiction had become overwhelming. A number of things stand out to my older and more critical eye. Some of them are anachronisms that certainly would have seemed reasonable to Asimov in the 1940’s, but which, when they appear in a far-future setting of galactic empire and interstellar travel, seem highly amusing to those of us in Asimov’s future who still don’t have any of those things. Others are just quirks of the writer’s own style that caught my eye. So here are a few of the funny things about Foundation:

They Use Paper

The setting is the far, far future. The Milky Way Galaxy consists of millions of populated worlds united under the Imperial rule of Trantor. Vessels of every description use hyperspace jumps to travel effortlessly and quickly between the stars. And yet, when Mayor Indbur of The Foundation is irritated or bored in Foundation and Empire he scratches little drawings on sheets of paper from a pad and then tosses them into an atomic flash disposal unit. When a secure personal message needs to be delivered it arrives sealed in a tube, engraved on silvery film that quickly destructs as it is read. Perhaps most amusingly, when in that same volume Ducem Barr visits Trantor in the company of Lathem Devers one of the first things he does is grab the topmost of a stack of newspapers. Here in the 21st century the debate rages as to whether newspapers have any economic role in the new world of information, and paper is used less and less each day. But to the Asimov of the 1940’s these seemed like important and durable features of civilization. Asimov did not predict email, or data encryption, or the web, at least not in Foundation.

Everyone Smokes

Tobacco use was prevalent and popular in Asimov’s day, and it is sprinkled liberally, though not artlessly, throughout Foundation. Cigars are most often mentioned, followed by cigarrettes and pipes. On two of the narrated appearances of Hari Seldon his simulacrum makes the unseen audience free to smoke as part of his introduction. Atomic flash dispensers are provided on desks and in waiting areas for the disposal of ash and the cleaning of pipe bowls. In the early story of Terminus the qualities of Vegan tobacco are extolled over the home grown variety, but as the empire fails home grown is all they have. As the Foundation establishes itself cigarrettes make a reappearance. When in Second Foundation the team of Toran, Bayta, Mis, and Magnifico visit the ruined world of Trantor to search the library there, they are offered home grown cigars from a ceremonial humidor, and even the woman, Bayta, partakes. The health effects of tobacco were not unknown when these stories were written, but they were buried under a tidal wave of positive messaging. Tobacco seemed like another permanent fixture of civilized society to Asimov, and he had no reason to foresee the negative perception that would attach to the tobacco leaf over the next fifty years.

Everything is Atomic

Speaking of nuclear flash disposal units, virtually all the high tech in the stories is nuclear powered, and often in amusingly naive ways. Atomic radiation is used to execute prisoners, destroy documents, dispose of waste, and lend an aura of godhead to the boy king Lepold of Anacreon. Nuclear power is the economic leverage which Terminus uses against Anacreon, which no longer has it. It powers all devices from the largest ships and their weapons down to the seemingly magical jewelry with which the Foundation trader Les Ponyets ensnares the nobility of Askone. In the 1940’s and 50’s the U.S. Government was happily subjecting thousands of soldiers and civilians to radiation to see what would happen. The dangers of radiation were not well-understood, and Asimov was predicting that it would come to be the basic source of power for all of modern civilization and beyond. Today we in the U.S. are so intimidated by it that we haven’t begun a new nuclear power plant in fifteen years or more. To be fair to the author, virtually all SF stories of this period made liberal use of the wonders of atomic power. Modern authors are required to be more sophisticated.

Computerized Star Maps!

In 1941 the first modern computer was two to four years from being invented, depending on whose version of the history you want to believe. In Asimov’s fictional world computers play a very minor role. They are calculating and counting machines, as in the one that controls Hari Seldon’s Time Vault on Terminus. These were the things that scientists were considering using computers for at the dawn of the second World War. Asimov did not predict networked information and the revolution it would have on media (see “They Use Paper” above). Messages are still written down or sent by “Hyperwave Relay.” Video is delivered by television, and in one case he actually mentions “television sets” being sent to a backward world as an item of trade. But the best example is the navigation of starships. In Second Foundation when Han Prichard and Bail Channis travel to Tazenda to seek the location of the Second Foundation they are aided by a useful new tool that has just been developed: a screen that can display the stars as they appear from any point in the galaxy, and even zoom in on and rotate around any point. Imagine! Those of us who use Celestia, or World-wide Telescope to do the same thing today from our desks at home, but who still can’t travel anywhere beyond the confines of our own planetary system, are allowed a chuckle, but will have to forgive Asimov’s inability to foresee all this.

Gender Roles

When the Foundation stories were born World War II was just about to lay down the first real challenge to traditional gender roles, as men marched off to war and Rosie marched down to the aircraft factory to spend her days with a riveting gun. There are few strong females in Foundation. All the great events of history are manipulated, discussed, and reacted to by men. Bayta, the wife of the trader Toran in Foundation and Empire is one of the few examples, and even she is not immune from the views of women as Asimov observed them in his day. When the planet Haven is under threat from the Mule, Bayta counsels one of the girls who works in her volunteer group to “visit the washroom and get your peaches and cream on.” Asimov is trying to demonstrate the emotional condition of the population of Haven, which we later learn is due to the Mule’s specific abilities. Naturally those most affected by an emotion-based attack are the females! Off to the washroom, ladies. Still, we can hardly give or take from Asimov on this account. He was just working from what he knew, and what he thought the things he knew might lead to.

It’s All Dialog

This last one is not an anachronism, but rather an interesting note on the author’s style. Asimov mentions it himself, in his introduction to the paperback edition of the series. When preparing to write the fourth story after a long hiatus he reread his earlier work, and was uneasy because there was no action. He must have gotten over that uneasiness, because he stuck more or less to the same pattern for the rest of the series. There are little bits of action here and there: someone fires a blaster, or a ship lands. But for the most part the entire plot is advanced through dialog. Each scene begins with a minimum of descriptive set-up in which the characters are introduced, and then proceeds through the dialog resulting from the set-up. It is in the dialog that open questions are resolved and the next set of questions introduced. As a writer who has made paltry attempts at fiction here and there I find this fascinating. It tells me that plot and character are the things that count. Description and action serve only to support and advance the characters and what happens to them, and Foundation is an extreme example of this in action, from a master of the art.