The Stars Like Dust by Isaac Asimov

My misspent reading youth must have been followed by a misspent young-adulthood. This is the only explanation I can think of for the fact that I’ve read so little Isaac Asimov. I can’t even remember what I knew of Asimov before I met my husband, a true Asimov enthusiast. Eventually, our merged libraries came to contain an overflowing box of Asimov’s work, mostly science fiction, but many, many mysteries and an astonishing array of nonfiction works as well.

Now that my adulthood isn’t so young, I thought I’d begin remedying my inexcusable lack of Asimov experience. (I did read the Foundation trilogy a while back, so I’m not a complete dunderhead!) The Stars Like Dust, a short but full novel, shuffled itself to the top of the “to be read” stack, so I started there.

The Stars Like Dust is the high-flying (as in way, way beyond the earth’s atmosphere) adventure of Biron Farrill, a young man about to graduate from an earth university. The story begins with him realizing that his life is in danger, and he spends the rest of the story running, hiding, hijacking, navigating in spherical co-ordinates (space is three-dimensional, after all), finding out who his real enemies are, and falling in love. He does all of this in the exotic setting of outer space and distant planets, but, since he was created by an author of sound scientific mind, he never seems to break the known laws of physics.

Characters are not who they seem to be. Whole planets, lost and found, are full of surprises. Farrill learns to navigate the political intrigue as well as the darkest nebulae and the deepest psychologies. The complex battle of wits is as exciting as the chase through space, and our hero is revealed to be a particularly good player. Of course, he is also a fairly realistic character, who cannot know absolutely everything about everyone, for “There are depths in feminine psychology, which, without experience, defy analysis.”

Asimov’s style manages to be to-the-point but never lacking in appropriate levels of detail or even humor. This makes the story skip along without any layovers or delays. Asimov’s sense of setting and perspective, however, make this story mind-bogglingly huge in scope. The universe is big and old and only those who have a firm grasp of that (as well as the politics of a humongous far-future empire) have any hope of finding what they are looking for in the void and dust of space or in time and history.

  

You might also like Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

 

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