Prelude to Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

You'd think I spent the summer lounging without a book; two months and counting since my last comment. I'm muscling my way through at least three books, one of which I managed to finish last evening. Embarrassingly, despite my affection for SciFi, I had read very little Asimov. I may have read one of his robot books a long time ago but cannot remember for certain and cannot pick it out from a list of the hundreds of books he wrote. I like this book for it's philosophical bent and its landscape is littered with cool little futuristic gadgets. The thrust of the story is the idea that the past, with appropriate statistical modeling, can be used to predict the future - when presented at a conference of mathematicians it sets off a cat and mouse chase. Crisp dialogue and some really thoughtful ideas on what it might mean to be able to predict the future make it appealing. Asimov also tackles the arc of history - humans had been settling the galaxy for over 12,000 years when the story takes place. One idea is that even though technology is excellent at recording history, the repeated reading and writing of the information to the media is still flawed and, over the millennia, old records are lost. I don't know how well that holds up to reality but it does call to mind DNA replication - despite its accuracy, the DNA polymerase still makes mistakes and the repair mechanisms are not perfect - introducing mutations and subsequent loss of fidelity. Repeat thousands of times and the product looks markedly different. I think I'll read Foundation next.