Status
Call number
Publication
Pages
Description
Classic Literature. Fiction. Science Fiction. HTML:The second of two prequel novels in Isaac Asimovâ??s classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series THE EPIC SAGA THAT INSPIRED THE APPLE TV+ SERIES FOUNDATION As Hari Seldon struggles to perfect his revolutionary theory of psychohistory and ensure a place for humanity among the stars, the great Galactic Empire totters on the brink of apocalyptic collapse. Caught in the maelstrom are Seldon and all he holds dear, pawns in the struggle for dominance. Whoever can control Seldon will control psychohistoryâ??and with it the future of the Galaxy. Among those seeking to turn psychohistory into the greatest weapon known to man are a populist political demagogue, the weak-willed Emperor Cleon I, and a ruthless militaristic general. In his last act of service to humankind, Hari Seldon must somehow save his lifeâ??s work from their grasp as he searches for its true heirsâ??a search that begins with his own granddaughter and the dream of a new… (more)
Collection
Language
Original language
Original publication date
Physical description
ISBN
Similar in this library
User reviews
Through much of the book Seldon serves the Emperor Cleon as First Minister, using the power granted by his position to push forward research on psychohistory, eventually perfecting it into a useful tool. Along the way, Seldon's enemies (and random events) strip away most of his loved ones, and he finally sends the last into exile to found the Second Foundation.
Like most of the later foundation-related books, this one is not as good as the original trilogy. Given that the original trilogy is rightly regarded as an essential work in the genre, a little fall-off is somewhat to be expected. Unfortunately, as often happens, by explaining the events that were implied in the original books as backstory, the tale is somewhat diminished. In the prequels, Seldon's charcter is transformed from a maverick scientists to a political functionary, which I think diminishes him. As in Prelude to Foundation, the introduction of the robots into the story is also jarring. However, the story is pure Asimov, and like most Asimov, it is an interesting, and well-thought out story.
So it was with some trepidation that I picked up the first prequel a few weeks ago, the sixth book, Prelude to Foundation, where we meet Hari Seldon and his companions and learn about the beginnings of psychohistory and I was struck by how good it was. I loved it! And I thought the ending was spectacular. So I picked this book up, the seventh and last book – but the alleged “second” in the series – that is meant to be read last and just finished reading it a few days ago. I’m only now getting around to writing this review because I’ve had to let thoughts percolate for a few days.
Forward the Foundation covers a hell of a lot of ground and it has to if it wants to tie in with the first Foundation novel. Because of that, the book is divided into five parts, each concerned with a major character – and Hari – and each taking us one decade further in Hari’s life. These parts are of Eto Demerzel, Cleon I, Dors Venabili, Wanda Seldon, and an epilogue.
The first part of the book starts when Hari is turning 40 – 40! – and he and his colleague, Yugo Amaryl, are working to improve psychohistory so that one day it can help foretell future probabilities and create a second Galactic Empire after the fall of the Empire they currently live in. Demerzel is the emperor’s First Minister and a very interesting individual. We meet him in the previous novel and he turns out to be Hari’s champion. Unfortunately, there’s an opposition leader who’s gathering populist support in an effort to unseat him and take his position and Demerzel can see his days are numbered. Even as Demerzel defeats this challenger, saving his position, he gives it up by turning in his notice to the emperor and naming Hari as his successor, much to Hari’s horror. Demerzel then disappears.
The second part of the book has to deal with Hari at age 50 and as acting First Minister to the emperor. An early attempt is made on his life and Dors, his wife and protector, saves his life. She doesn’t have the most pleasant personality and is kind of a little too focused, but she’s extremely devoted. Meanwhile, Hari continues to devote time to the research and pursuit of psychohistory. During this time, it seems the empire is crumbling. Infrastructure is decaying, money is disappearing, fringe planets are fleeing the empire, rebellions are fomenting, and the opposition party from the first part still exists. Hari hears rumors of this and, rather stupidly, convinces his now grown son, Raych, to go to Wye to infiltrate and report back. What he doesn’t expect is for his son to be recognized and to be used as an assassin to kill Hari. At the section’s climactic end, two things happen. Raych raises his gun and points it at Hari, as does as second assassin, and a female undercover agent who Raych took as a lover blows the other assassin away, saving Hari’s life while Raych is overcome. However, shots are heard and elsewhere on the property, the emperor lies dead at the hands of the new chief gardener, who didn’t want his promotion. The empire is about to disintegrate.
In the next chapter, titled Dors, Hari and Yugo and a huge team of scientists and historians have made substantial progress in psychohistory. But Hari is getting old. He’s now 60 and feels it. The government is run by a military junta and things have fallen apart. Hari has landed back at the old university he used to teach at. Raych has married that agent and has had a young daughter, Wanda, now eight, and another small child. Wanda has had a bad dream just in time for a three day birthday party celebration thrown in Hari’s honor. She’s dreamed he’s going to die, be killed. She overhears two men talking about it. No one takes her seriously. Except for Dors. Who starts questioning people. And questions a new, young supergenius mathematician, who has been instrumental in bringing psychohistory along. She confronts him and he levels some accusations against her, and attempts to kill her, weakening her greatly before she somehow kills him first. She reaches Hari, tells him the story and dies in his arms. It’s tragic.
In the Wanda section, Hari is now 70. His friend, Yugo, has died at a young age from overwork. His friend Demerzel is no longer with him. Dors is dead. Psychohistory is in danger of dying out due to lack of funding. The empire is nearly dead. Crime and anarchy are everywhere. Hari is attacked multiple times. On one occasion, Raych saves him. On another, a young researcher named Palver saves him and becomes his bodyguard. Wanda is growing up and is obsessed with psychohistory. And it appears she has some interesting mental powers. These intrigue Hari. See, he has some ideas about something he calls a Foundation. Or rather, two Foundations. To save the galaxy. With Wanda’s help, they encounter more mentalists, including Palver, and these people form the foundation of the people who will become the Second Foundationers. But Raych and his family, minus Wanda, move to another planet, saying goodbye to Hari forever. Now Hari has been abandoned by virtually everyone he has ever cared for in his life at this stage in his life. He feels old and helpless. Yet he must plug on. However, by the end of this section, Wanda and Palver leave Hari too, to go in search of others like them, to form a Foundation for the future of psychohistory and the galaxy. Hari is now truly alone.
The epilogue is quite short, just a couple of pages. Hari is 81. He has recorded his holograms for the First Foundation crises he foresees. Psychohistory has done all it can do and he has too. Everyone has been taken from him. The last thing we see is his seeing his life’s work, Foundation, Dors! And he is found slumped dead over his desk. It’s so f*ck*ng sad, I literally cried. I know there’s hope in Wanda and the two Foundations, but this book was so bleak and so sad, and yet so essential to the creation of the Foundation Trilogy, it was impossible not to read and understand and engage. But, damn, was it depressing! But, well done. Well done. Of course, the big secret about Dors comes as no surprise to anyone, but that’s okay. And not only was it sad to see Raych and his family leave, but to find that he is killed in a rebellion on his new planet while his wife and youngest child are lost forever on a starship that is never found. Hari’s tragedies. He dedicates his whole life to psychohistory and his fellow man and loses everything in the process. It’s a f*ck*ng tragedy. As is the case with all Asimov books, I’m not sure this merits five stars, due in part to poor dialogue, at a minimum. But I think I can overlook that in this case. It was an excellent book. Five stars. Recommended, but not as the second prequel. Instead, read it as the seventh and last book of the Foundation series to gain the greatest understanding as to what’s going on. Most definitely recommended.
Dors Venabili, acting as guardian in Prelude to Foundation, is now Seldon's wife but still insists on protecting him wherever he goes. When their granddaughter, Wanda, has reoccurring dreams of Seldon's death it is reason enough Dors needs to be extra attentive to Seldon's safety. We learn she has superhuman skills and never ages.
Raych is twenty years old at the beginning of Forward the Foundation and Seldon has adopted him as his son.
In Prelude to Foundation Yugo Amaryl had been a heatsinker in the Dahl Sector, the lowest rung on society's ladder, but Seldon had seen something in him worth saving. In Forward the Foundation Yugo is now a respected mathematician, intellectual, and budding obsessive psychohistorian. For all intents and purposes he has become Seldon's right hand man.
Eto Demerzel, Emperor Cleon's First Minister and the "person" responsible for Seldon meeting his wife, steps aside to let Seldon take the position. After ten years as First Minister he grows sick of it and finds a way to retire. Fast forward twenty more years and Seldon is now seventy. As the empire dies Seldon finds himself struggling to keep up with the demands of researching psychohistory.
Asimov has a subtle and sly humor that threads its way through Forward the Foundation. One of my favorite moments was when Seldon was describing mathematical symbolism using water themes - rivers, rivulets, and currents. After listening to this Amaryl replies to Seldon "dryly."
However, having by then already read Wells' The Shape of Things to Come and Stapleden's Last and First Men and realising that fictional prediction becomes more and more adrift with reality the further into the imagined future it proceeds, I was sceptical then; and remain so even now, especially as we seem to be living in a world where the present has been overtaken by an accelerating technological future which has arrived almost before it's expected. So I didn't really buy into Seldon's psychohistory though I readily accepted it for the sake of a promising narrative.
I thought it now time to revisit the trilogy and its subsequent sequels and prequels and chanced upon the previously unread Forward the Foundation. In this Hari Seldon is busy developing both the principles of psychohistory and the means of projecting the course of future history; in a series of flash-forwards (the outcome of the novel's original serial publication) we learn a bit about his successes and vicissitudes, his family and colleagues, his friends and enemies, the environment in which he researches his life's work, and the planned establishment of the Foundations upon which the future re-establishment of a Galactic Empire will be built. We gain insights into what it feels to be Hari Seldon growing old, worn down by the deaths of nearest and dearest, disappointed by setbacks, confronted by suspicion, despairing at societal breakdown; and we intuit that this is increasingly a self-portrait by Asimov, who died in 1992, the year before publication.
It is a sad story because of the picture of increasing senility that it paints and because it parallels the author's career, but it is not particularly impelling as a piece of fiction despite Asimov's unenfeebled narrative facility and regardless of its episodic nature. On the other hand it is an optimistic final novel looking forward, as it were, to the genesis of the original Foundation novels begun a half-century earlier, and integrated as it is into his various invented worlds of Robots, Empire and Foundation. I was pleased to have finished Forward the Foundation (a pun, this, which can be read as both a rallying cry and as a Preface to the Foundation series), at the very least for its introductory qualities, but less sure that it was essential reading. And I'm always suspicious of novels like this which, though seeming to be classic SF, in fact drift dangerously close into pure fantasy waters with plot devices like ESP and psychokinesis which smack of magic, pure and simple.
Finally a lot is revealed but I cannot help to found wanting to know more! There are many references to Hari's earlier life when he had to 'flee' all over Trantor and where he met Danneel and Dors, yet none of them actually tell the story...
An
I've been listening to the Foundation audio books for the past 7 months - consistently but not exhaustively. Now that they're finished - for I conclude that this is the last of the Foundation novels - I feel a little empty and wispy.
Okay, the review.
In
I'm satisfied with the way I read this series: starting with the original three Foundation novels. The myth of Harry Seldon is almost better kept so, a mystery.
The Emperor's First Minister has gone missing, one Eto
A great glimpse into the beginning of Foundation any fan of Asimov will enjoy. Also, fans of science fiction epics will generally enjoy this and other Foundation novels.
Because these events are really separate episodes it
I did very much like the stories, but it feels very much as an 'in-between' book, something to bridge the gaps between the first foundation book and the third one. I'm hoping the third one will be as good as the first one again...
The second prequel to the Foundation Trilogy starts eight years after the event of "Prelude to Foundation". Hari Sheldon is now a mathematics professor at Streeling University on Trantor, and is continuing his research into psychohistory under the protection of Eto Demerzel, the First Minister of Emperor Cleon I.
Over the next 40 years Sheldon and his colleagues find the development of psychohistory slow-going until Sheldon discovers the mental powers that will inspire him to create the Second Foundation.
This was a bit of a mix; as always Asimov is great when developing the grand sweep of history but some of the detailed plot items do depand rather too much on deus ex machina solutions almost as if he had to force the Seldon of this story back onto the track of the Seldon of the original Foundation trilogy.
Asimov's style just resonates with me. His
This will remain among my favorite series ever and am so pleased to have read them. I guarantee some will find them dull, or slow - there's not a ton of action, LOTS of talking and exposition, but all the sci-fi greatness that permeates these books is still thrilling to read decades after they were published.
It's the last book he wrote and I guess it's autobiographical, which is more depressing than