Forward the Foundation (Foundation Novels) (original 1993; edition 1994)

I didn't like this part as much as the first part of the series. Rather than one complete story it is more of a collection of episodes from the life of Hari Seldon. Each episode gives the story of a vital event in the development of psychohistory.
Because these events are really separate episodes it doesn't have the flow the first part did; different parts are years or even decades apart, meaning that after finishing one part it can be somewhat hard to get into the flow of the next part.
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... ( )

I'm loving this whole series. The writing is kind of old fashion, but the characters are very likable. ( )

IA's second pre-quel to his original 3 book Foundation trilogy. Written during the beginning of the decline of the American empire I wonder if his descriptions of official denial, greed, and faltering bureaucracy mirrored what had been going on in the 80's and is being amplified in the 20-teens.
An easy and pleasant futuristic read for sure. Will probably read the first Foundation book again with a more in depth perspective. ( )

wow...this was very moving...though it had less to do with the foundation and is more of a tentative exploration of the emotions that wash over hari as he nears his death. without going overboard on the emotion, it shows beautifully how he desperately tries to strike a balance between his dream of psychohistory and his family.i love the end, where he realises that failure is not wrong, and not always exactly the opposite of success. ( )

I remember reading the original Foundation trilogy in the 70s, followed (or probably preceded) by listening to Hari Seldon's vision as recounted in the BBC radio dramatisation. I wasn't totally convinced by Asimov's psychohistory plot device then, but accepted that this was a reflection of a growing tendency to try to more accurately predict what was coming up in the future, whether in the markets, in technological or manufacturing trends or in developments in popular culture. Mix in some mathematics, add a bit of sociology, make allowances for random events and the broad sweep of future history is there to peruse.

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 Foreword or 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.

http://calmgrove.wordpress.com/ ( )