Isaac Asimov - The End of Eternity (1955) Nominated for the Hugo Awards in 1956, The End of Eternity is one of the few Asimov novels which is not about his Robots story or The Foundation story. In fact the ending of this can be seen as leading, possibly, to the Foundation, but not necessarily so and as such it's very much a standalone novel. It's a fun novel which has been widely influential on later stories about time travel. Here we get a worldwide organization called Eternity which polices the timeline, avoiding disasters, controlling trade between times and so on. If you've ever seen a film like The Adjustment Bureau or other stuff with time cops, that's pretty much it and it comes from here. Of course if you have time travel you have time paradoxes, time loops and all of that. As you begin to read this, the scale of centuries seems so huge that it is a bit disorienting, when some one is in the 115th century or 100.000th century or something, and chatting to each other it just feels weird, you do quickly get used to it, though. It also feels weird that the technology and cultures are not that different throughout time, they still use perforated card computers! As I was reading I was thinking that all of this was pretty weak, but smartly enough Asimov makes this an actual part of the plot twist at the end! We also get a bit of a half-baked love story here, but Asimov was never that great at writing women characters, so almost as soon as she shows up she gets stranded somewhere out of the scene only to return near the end... oh well. So a novel more of ideas than anything else, it's still pretty much a joy to read. (4/5) #isaacasimov #theendofeternity #scifi #sciencefiction #book #books #bookish #bibliophile #bookgram #bookstagram #bookporn #bookworm #booklover #bookcover #timetravel (at Lisbon, Portugal) https://www.instagram.com/p/B3Nekzdlw9q/?igshid=zxp3204f6un7
