Foundation's Edge (Foundation Novels)
by Isaac Asimov
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Book Summary Information
Author: Isaac AsimovEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1991-11-01
ISBN: 0553293389
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Spectra
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780553293388
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Foundation's Edge (Foundation Novels)
Book Review: Say It Ain't So, Dr Asimov!
Summary: 2 Stars
Say you didn't take the most exciting story in science fiction and turn it into . . . this!
Foundation's Edge opens with a Seldon Crisis having just been /concluded/. Apparently it was a political squabble over whether to move the capital further toward the galactic core, now that the Foundation controls a massive amount of territory. Seldon Crises ain't what they used to be.
Actually, that's a point which the book makes, one of a handful of interesting points that led me, with some reluctance, to award it the second star. The First Foundation characters are aware that, with their nice cushy hegemony to give them stability and prosperity, the heroism of Hardin and Mallow, of the desperate struggle against Bel Riose and the even more desperate struggle against the Mule, of the days when women named Darrell were able to make themselves the only things standing between themselves and telepathic colonialism, is a thing of the past.
The mayor, a woman named Branno, has seen her political stock rise by correctly anticipating Seldon's "desire" that the capital remain on Terminus. But she chafes under the knowledge that she's a very ordinary mayor and that her place in history will be nowhere near that of great mayors past. She's also a far less compelling character than the protagonists and antagonists of the original series. She knows that the Foundation is strong enough to conquer the galaxy and rule as Trantor once did without having to wait another 500 years (we're halfway between the founding of the Foundation and the scheduled establishment of the Second Empire). The only thing is, the Second Foundation would stop her if she tried. So much for the very satisfying ending to Second Foundation the novel--It's been rolled back, and the powers that be on Terminus are once again suspicious that the Second Foundation has survived, as though Preem Palver had never fooled the Darrells into thinking they'd eradicated it.
Golan Trevize is an earnest young councilman who believes the same thing and publicly demands that Branno prepare to take action against the mentallics. That's publicity Branno can't have, because she's preparing to move against them, but in secret. So she convinces Trevize's friend to betray his treasonous actions (apparently he's a traitor) so that Branno can get him out of the way by sending him off to look for Earth with a doddering old historian. Trevize is actually looking for the Second Foundation, or trying to, but is doing it behind Branno's back, or trying to.
Before we go any further, I'd like to request a moment of silence as we reflect upon the great life and tragic death of the original premise of Foundation. Psychohistory used to be what Bel Riose called the "Dead Hand." Riose's position relative to the Foundation was as strong as would be Branno's against any prospective conquest en route to premature galactic imperialism, but he was defeated just the same, because sociopolitical forces had arranged themselves in a way that precluded victory, and that Seldon had known this ahead of time when he built the Foundation where and when he did. He wasn't defeated by telepaths but for whose intervention he would have conquered Terminus. The Mule was, but he was a special case. But Seldon, and then the Second Foundation which continued his work, had always been about /predicting/ inevitable outcomes, not manipulating people into otherwise avoidable ones.
Anyway, on Trantor the Speakers are squabbling politically as well. Like Branno knowing she's no Salvor Hardin, they're self conscious about the fact that their penises are shorter than Preem Palver's. A young Speaker named Stor Gendibal discusses with the First Speaker that, ever since the First Foundation was fooled (umm . . . ) into thinking they'd destroyed the Second, and the Second was able to get the Plan back on track, history has preceded EXACTLY according to plan--which is mathematically impossible, unless someone is manipulating history with far greater precision than the Second Foundation is capable of, manipulating it on the individual level. (Wouldn't a nation full of mathematicians have noticed by now that items in a statistical set are not arranging themselves in the curve they'd predicted, that every standard deviation is turning out to be zero? That's kind of hard to miss if you're well trained in mathematics.) The First Speaker calls this agency anti-Mules: They have the Mule's power, but they're using it to maintain the plan rather than disrupt it. I found it useful to think of them as the Third Foundation: They were checking the work over the Second Foundation's shoulder, as the Second always has for the First.
The problem is, Seldon created no Third Foundation, so this force is maintaining the Plan for its own purposes, which may stop aligning with Trantor's at any moment. Though we're now even farther from the original premise of Foundation, I do find this situation interesting, another reason for the second star. If its resolution weren't so lame, this might have even been a positive review.
The Second Foundation must search for the Third. They contact Trevize's friend-turned-betrayer, who has been their agent all along, and say they want Trevize tailed, believing he's the key to all of this. This is not without controversy, as Gendibal must face impeachment hearings from a political enemy among the Speakers, but it's really not interesting enough to talk about. One effect is that Gendibal ends up going after Trevize himself,eventually. Another is that he gets a sidekick, a woman from Trantor's non-Second Foundation population, which we knew had reverted to an agrarian society after the last vestiges of Empire were lost, but which we didn't know apparently turned into cave men while they were at it.
If this is hard to follow, that's because the book keeps jumping among these various threads. But gradually they all come together for a climactic ending--another reason this is not a one-star review. Trevize, the lynchpin of this entire convoluted operation, ends up on Sayshell, the capital of a small union of worlds which has maintained independence despite being completely surrounded by a superpower--an interstellar Lesotho. Sayshell, in turn, surrounds but does not rule Gaia, a super-mysterious world which destroys anyone who gets close enough to find out what it is, and which is so powerful the Mule himself was afraid to approach it. Of course Trevize must go there. And so must Gendibal, and his Trantorian cavewoman of a sidekick (who is in fact a Gaian), and Branno with a great fleet.
It takes a long, long time for them all to come together, but some worthwhile exposition fills the wait. For example, we learn the true nature of Gaia: that Gaians are all part of some weird collective consciousness. Not just the humans--the animals and plants and rocks and clouds and protons and neutrons and electrons. And of course they're mentallics, very powerful ones. The Mule was born into this Circle of Life but was declared a criminal because he left. Or maybe he left because he was a criminal. They offer both explanations at different points, and say that this should have been impossible--not the circular logic, the leaving without the collective's permission. All I know is, the Mule seems a lot less badass now that he was just a misfit running from these freaks, this wacky cult that somehow manages to be both a hippie compound and the soul-crushing Borg Collective. Also, it doesn't quite fit with the backstory he gave Bayta at the end of Foundation and Empire, but I guess you could say he was lying to her.
The Gaians want Trevize to do something but won't tell him what it is. They take him on a ship where he runs into both Gendibal and Branno, who has almost but not quite perfected the mentallic shield Toran Darrell had been tinkering with. She's prepared to attack Gaia and then Trantor and seize control of the galaxy free of mentallics. The Second Foundation has decided it's a good time to develop non-mental weapons and wants to use them to wipe out Gaia, then cause Branno to forget everything and go back to Terminus. These two developments have been building for a long time and were soon to come to a head, and the Gaians needed to intervene. They must not only prevent their own destruction--a distant priority indeed, actually--they must prevent either Foundation becoming a hegemon, fearing the consequences to humanity of both versions of Second Empire. But there's a catch.
Gaia, it seems, was founded by robots (thus connecting this series to Asimov's other great story) who had grown so advanced they realized their very existence was harming humanity by crushing the individual spirit. So they were obligated by the First Rule to withdraw from human affairs, but to do so in such a way that would leave humanity in as advantageous a position as possible. They determined respect among humans for one another's lives and for the worlds around them was needed, and they founded Gaia as an experiment in collectivism, with the hope that itwould one day expand into Galaxia.
Now whatever the Gaians need to do to create Galaxia is already figured out, but must be implemented before either Terminus builds an empire of blood or Trantor makes human society a mathematical abstraction. Unfortunately for the Gaians, they can't act independently due to being derived from the Laws of Robotics, so they must have someone instruct them on what to do--allow Branno to have her way, allow Gendibal to have his way, or allow Gaia to have its way. They identified Trevize as a man of uncommonly sound judgment and engineered this entire situation to let him decide for them. Representatives of all three camps make their cases, and then Trevize decides for Gaia.
Later, while accepting the gratitude of the senior Gaian, he reveals that he had done so because both Branno and Gendibal would have acted immediately and irrevocably, whereas Gaia's plan would take centuries--during which it would continue to maintain the Seldon Plan on behalf of the Second Foundation, and thus would lead to hegemony for the First Foundation. You see why I call them the Third Foundation? Trevize explains that he intends to use this window of time to find out why Gaia hid information on Earth from him, information which may have led him to decide against Gaia. The senior Gaian says Gaia has done no such thing, and they realize that Gendibal's cavewoman acted under the influence of a possible Fourth Foundation, a greater and more secretive power still. (If it was so great and secretive, why didn't it keep Trevize from deducing its existence?) So Trevize, his long-forgotten historian sidekick, and the senior Gaian must go off on another adventure, which I'm putting off reading.
The book does some things right. It convincingly shows how the Foundations should look once the Seldon Plan has really gone into high gear, enjoying peace and prosperity their predecessors couldn't have imagined, but in danger of falling into a decadent malaise because of it, and growing restless to avoid this. Trevize is quite nearly as strong and memorable a character as any of Asimov's earlier creations, and will perhaps leave an even stronger impression because he has an entire novel to himself--two, actually, though as I said I'm in no great hurry to read Foundation and Earth. The idea of *both* Foundations, not just the First, as unwitting pawns in someone else's project is at least intriguing despite its many problems. Trevize and his sidekick have some interesting diversionary conversations about the broad strokes and cycles of history in a 20,000 year old society which has quite literally forgotten where it came from, and discuss other interesting topics besides. Sayshell is a likeable setting, even though we're not there for very long. The way all the plot threads are gradually woven together into a tighter and tighter story until the epic final showdown is always fun to watch. The unification of Foundation with the Robot series is, I suppose, handled about as well as it could have been, though since I like Foundation better I would prefer if they had merged on equal terms, or at least, if one had to absorb the other, Foundation be The Bob Newhart Show to Robot's Newhart. (Maybe the next book will redress that.) And the bombshell ending does create cliffhanger suspense, even if I found it wore off quickly enough.
But I just can't get over the way this book kicked what had made Foundation great to the curb. Psychohistory's powers of anticipation are now far, far less important than mentalism's powers of manipulation, even though all of Foundation and half of Foundation and Empire were driven by the former exclusively (unless someone in Foundation and Earth is going to say "Oh, by the way, Hardin and Mallow and Riose were all being controlled." They've already made the Mule lame, so why not?) The outcome of the book completely throws out the Seldon Plan in favor of Gaia and whatever force is pulling Gaia's strings. This process of "There's a power manipulating us behind the scenes" "Yes, that's us, but we too are being manipulated from even farther behind the scenes" can continue ad infinitum, and each new layer makes the possibility of a satisfying conclusion more remote. Add to this the irritatingly stupid feel of Gaia and a series of pointless subplots like the impeachment of Gendibal and the romance between the doddering historian and a Gaian who's probably a robot but won't admit it, and this book's in a hole that's just too deep for a positive review to be possible. It makes me want to go back and reread the original trilogy--in the way that a gulp of what you learn too late is expired milk makes you desperate for another beverage to wipe the taste off your tongue.
Summary of Foundation's Edge (Foundation Novels)
At last, the costly and bitter war between the two Foundations had come to an end. The scientists of the First Foundation had proved victorious; and now they retum to Hari Seldon's long-established plan to build a new Empire that the Second Foundation is not destroyed after all-and that its still-defiant survivors are preparing their revenge. Now the two exiled citizens of the Foundation-a renegade Councilman and the doddering historian-set out in search of the mythical planet Earth. . .and proof that the Second Foundation still exists. Meanwhile someone-or something-outside of both Foundations sees to be orchestrating events to suit its own ominous purpose. Soon representatives of both the First and Second Foundations will find themselves racing toward a mysterious world called Gaia and a final shocking destiny at the very end of the universe!Literature & Fiction Books
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