Just Finished Reading (Again) Asimov's The Stars, Like Dust

The late Isaac Asimov was one of those writers who created his own fictional "universe".  It is common knowledge that, within the fantasy genre of fiction, authors typically reshape the planet with completely different maps of imaginary continents, along with their topography and political divisions.  As a matter of fact, one of the first things I do when I pick up the beginning book in a fantasy series is to look at the map of the area.  Sometimes, as with authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin of Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire, respectively, these maps are very intricate and well thought out.  And then there are other maps, like those of Terry Goodkind in his Sword of Truth series, which are very sketchy and incomplete.  But Asimov was a science fiction writer, not confined to one made-up world...instead,  his created "world" spans the future history of our galaxy; his "map" is of time rather than geography.  This "Asimov Universe" wasn't created beforehand, but rather evolved over the span of decades as he wrote many different novels and short stories that fit together to form a cohesive picture of his vision of the future as to how it pertains to humanity.  These stories can roughly be grouped into three time eras: the Robot Era, the Empire Era, and the Foundation Era.  With the robot tales, you can read each story without too much concern about keeping "in order", but with Empire and Foundation (especially the latter) it's a pretty good idea to go from beginning to end. 

I just reread the first of Asimov's three Empire novels, titled The Stars, Like Dust.  It is set in our galaxy, with many worlds already having been settled for thousands of years, after the crucial ability to be able to "jump" through space/time had been acquired that made travel to the stars beyond our Solar System feasible (in Star Trek this advance is called the "space warp"). I feel a little uncomfortable when I speak of the future as past "history", but this apparent paradox works anyway.  The idea of future history becomes of paramount importance for the Foundation series, which is completely based on it.  But before Foundation could take place, a galaxy-wide united empire with a centralized capital city and government had to be established, and The Stars, Like Dust lays out the preliminary setting for the beginnings of this process by depicting a rebellion against a minor empire in a localized group of star systems.  The story involves an executed rebel landowner's son who finds himself sucked into a web of intrigue involving  rebellion, murder, romance, and revenge.  How it all ends is...well, to my thinking it ends pretty inconclusively, making me wonder why I invested my time in reading it a second time, much less the first!  I wasn't too happy with Asimov making such major efforts to scientifically describe the various technological innovations in his story as well as giving short lectures on chemistry and physics...I think he could have accomplished what he wanted to do without sounding so pedantic (I've had the same problem with Michael Crichton in his novels).  But it is the story's young protagonist, Biron Farrill, who bothered me the most with his childish emotional reactions to just about everything...only to reveal at the end that it was all just a ploy on his part to manipulate the behaviors of others to reach the higher objectives of discovering who betrayed his father and where the center of rebellion against the Tyrann empire was located.    But all in all, I'm glad I read it (and that it's over)...and am about to embark on a rereading of the (better) second book in the Empire series, titled The Currents of Space...