So Second Foundation begins with the finale to the Mule story arc which made me angry in so many ways, and only then begins a new story, which actually has to do with the Second Fondation that Hari Seldon said he would set up “at the other end of the galaxy”. Now if only he were a proper storyteller. He pulled the same trick (how very clever) several times to get book deals. So I guess Asimov wasn’t lying in his introduction, when he said he wanted to make sure they’d publish another book by him. Which, again, is finished only in the next book. The follow-up book then adresses the rest of this story and only then starts a new larger story arc. This impression is only strenghtened by the fact that each book ends with a sort of cliffhanger. And that’s because Asimov really doesn’t have a new story to tell, he just wanted to milk this idea he had for all it was worth. Which doesn’t leave all that many pages for, you know, an actual new story. You’ll get to read that crap in every single Foundation book and also have every character explain it to another character several times throughout that book.

So basically the first chapter of the first book.

That thing is the Foundation, how it came to be, and its purpose. Wow, I can’t believe this got published the way it did and that people actually ate that shit up… I have rarely read such an overhyped, totally undeserveing of its acclaim, classic as this.Īsimov spends pages upon pages re-explaining the same thing to us, over and over again. This is the story of the Second Foundation. The Mule and the remnants of the First Foundation will do anything to discover it. So far the second Foundation’s location, its most closely guarded secret of all, has been kept hidden. But the Second, at the other end of the galaxy, took shape behind a veil of total silence.īecause the Second Foundation guards the laws of psychohistory, which are valid only so long as they remain secret. The First was established on Terminus in the full daylight of publicity. To restore civilization in the shortest possible time, Seldon set up two Foundations.

The mathematics of psychohistory enabled Seldon to predict the collapse of the Empire and the onset of an era of chaos and war. This was Hari Seldon, the last great scientist of the First Empire. One man understood the shifting patterns of the inhabited cosmos. When the First Foundation was conquered by a force Seldon had not foreseen – the overwhelming power of a single individual, a mutant called the Mule – the second Foundation was forced to reveal its existence and, infinitely worse, a portion of its power. Opening line: The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years.

Asimov foundation