I was rather fond of Bartimaeus in that Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus (+1) Trilogy. Bartimaeus was funny. And I did enjoy being insulted by footnotes. I don't believe i would have known what footnotes were otherwise.
Aragorn, son of Arathorn, was pretty cool, too. But, boy, was that a long time ago.
I only have four Asimov books left, and I'm midway through Robots and Empire (so maybe that should be three-and-a-half books). For some reason, it absolutely gutted me that Elijah Baley wasn't at the center of this mess. I'd kind of started taking him and his Holmesian deductive powers for granted over the course of the last three books.
Too bad that two hundred Galactic Standard Years have passed since the last one.
And yet Asimov keeps bringing him up, throwing in little flashbacks that hint at the greater half of Baley's life that was left untold, each one ending with a heavy finality that is thwarted by the next flashback, killing and reviving in one breath. It's like Baley's ghost haunts these stories. Elijah Baley was mentioned in the last book of the Foundation series, thousands and thousands of Galactic Standard Years in the fictional future of the galaxy, and yet Foundation was started several real Earth-years before Elijah Baley was ever written to life.
So, in a way, Lije Baley never really dies, just as Daneel Olivaw never really lives.
I guess there's comfort in knowing that. Always the wheels of time spin forward, yet to the eye, they backwards sometimes turn.
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