Forward The Foundation!

Product Information

Yet Cleon knows there are those who would see him fall those whom he would destroy if only he could read the future. Forward the Foundation", Asimov's last novel (written just before his death, published just after), suffers from all the problems of "Prelude to Foundation" only magnified tenfold. I will hang on to these books in my library for a while, and then perhaps one day I will trade them in or pass them on to the next people who are interested in this slice of sci-fi history.

Yugo Amaryl dies from overwork, suggesting to Seldon to gather people like Wanda to form the nucleus of a group that will watch over the development of psychohistory. As such it had for me at least an aura of sadness throughout, exacerbated by the sad demises of several of Seldon's loved ones.In and of itself though Forward the Foundation is a solid novel, rather leisurely paced, as is the case of the later Asimov works from the 80s and 90s. One aspect that irritates me slightly is the harping on about growing old at ages we don't normally regard as such ("Seldon's eyes twinkled in a face now lined by age, his sixty years given away as much by his wrinkles as much as by his white hair")!

It is written in much the same style as the original novel Foundation, a novel composed of chapters with long intervals in between. But honestly, this brief overview of Hari's life and as he aged was more of a fan service thing than a particularly brilliant novel.Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). But that takes bending some roads in really curvy ways to get all the details to line up, including the fact that the "Empire" trilogy envisions an expanded humanity where not a robot is in sight, while the "Robot" trilogy (taking place thousands of years previously, in a day-after-tomorrow Earth) features tens of thousands of robots everywhere; and that in the "Empire" books, Earth is now supposed to be a radioactive wasteland, while no such indication is given in the "Robot" books. I do not recommend Forward the Foundation to any but the most diehard of Asimov's fans (who may be more delighted with it than I was), and although I hesitate, I have to rate this one at only two out of five stars. Shocked as I am to admit it … this book might actually have good pacing and an all right plot structure. The series not only takes hard sic fi concepts like a intergalactic empire and space travel but overlays it with the incredible concept of psychohistory and then unravels an amazing tale of shadow governments, conspiracy, espionage, subterfuge, political brinksmanship all while exploring how different societies arrange themselves into autocracies, democracies and even communism.