Foundation’s Edge is the fourth novel in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. This book is set 500 years after the events of the first book, at what should be the halfway point between Seldon’s time and the beginning of the Second Galactic Empire.
To briefly recap the previous books in the series, the first novel introduces the science of psychohistory by which Hari Seldon predicts the downfall of the Galactic Empire and the following dark age. Seldon plots a course of future history that will shorten the dark age from 30,000 years to just 1,000 and which will henceforth be known as the “Seldon Plan.” Seldon establishes the Foundation to carry out his plan and help usher humanity toward the next stage of empire and, presumably, back to a preferable way of living.
In the following novels, the Empire slides into decline as the Foundation takes on greater importance. The Empire, of course, lashes out in its dying but is unable to fight against the superior Foundation. Along the way, with Seldon now long dead, the Foundation and the rest of humanity learn of a Second Foundation that Seldon had built at the same time, but on the other edge of the galaxy.
For some reason the Foundation believes that the Second Foundation is a threat to the Seldon Plan (despite the fact that Seldon built both, with the secret Second Foundation as a kind of insurance against the destruction or failure of the Foundation). Equally unaccountably, the Foundation comes to believe that since they are built upon the principles of science, the Second Foundation must be built upon principles of emotion.
At some point there enters a space clown nick-named The Mule who can control people’s emotions. Some Foundationers think that he is from the Second Foundation, but he isn’t and he almost unravels the whole Seldon Plan before the real Second Foundation swoops in to save it and defeat the Mule.
Now we get into the current novel. In Foundation’s Edge, the two Foundations are still in conflict, though the Second Foundation has gone back into secrecy and the tensions are more covert. Asimov mirrors intrigue on both sides of the conflict. Both Foundations feature a strong central council with an upstart member who wants to strike out to save the Seldon Plan, though they are moving in different directions, of course. Both Foundations are tracking each other and the whole plot involves double-agents who may be triple-agents and the thing ends up being more complicated than it needs to be for where it is going. But where it is going is actually pretty good.
I’m not going to spend too much time disentangling the whole plot here because it really is better to just read it and wade through the whole thing. There are two narrative points that I want to hit before moving on to some other analysis.
First is the plot line to find humanity’s origins. In this world, Earth is not a known, inhabited planet and humanity’s origins are shrouded in prehistory. This plot point picks up a thread from the first novel that I have written about elsewhere. Golan Trevize, the Foundation’s young upstart is sent off on a mission to find Earth as a cover for his real mission to find the Second Foundation. He is paired up with Janov Pelorat, a historian who specializes in Earth mythology. This plot line goes in some unexpected directions and actually ends up serving the overarching plot in a satisfying way. Pelorat is genuinely taken with the idea of finding Earth and ends up drumming up a lot of enthusiasm for the topic despite most people’s indifference to the question of the origin of the species. Pelorat forces others to question why the known, inhabited planets have species that are all so similar to each other and why there is so little biodiversity on any one given planet. He uses this line of questioning to introduce his thesis that Earth must have been a lot like what we know it to actually be like. Asimov builds in a nice use of the scientific method to get Pelorat to make the right logical jumps.
The second plot point is the connection that Asimov makes in this novel between the world of Foundation and his robot novels. Rather than finding Earth, Pelorat and Trevize find a planet that was first colonized by humans from Earth with the help of their robots. Up until this point there have been no robots in The Foundation series, and this book offers an explanation. Again, there is some satisfaction in reading through the steps to get there, so I won’t go into too much detail. Suffice to say that Asimov puts humanity through its paces and provides some philosophical exploration of the boundary between freedom and security.
One of the major questions that arises throughout the novel is central to the encyclopedic project in itself. That is, what happens when future generations no longer want to participate in the projects we give them? The whole concept of the encyclopedia is predicated upon the idea that scholars of the present will be able to communicate with scholars of the future, to provide them a basis from which to begin their own work. It is an encapsulation of both the great hope and the massive arrogance of the whole Enlightenment. It does not ask whether future scholars may share our same passions, or even acknowledge our own assumptions. More than once in the novel, the question is put to the Seldon Plan. Asimov never explicitly compare the plan to fate or raises questions of freedom of choice, but this problem parallels the questions raised around the role of robots protecting humanity and humanity’s desire to break free and live on its own. This was perhaps the most philosophical of the Foundation novels so far because of the way that these elements come together.
This was also my favorite of the Foundation novels that I have read so far. As far as I have been able to tell. The original trilogy were all originally written as short stories that were stitched together into a novel-length narrative and that this is the first one to be conceived as a novel. The difference shows. The character development is much better and the entire narrative is more empathic because of it. The different elements also come together much better. In Asimov’s earlier novels, there were constant narrative threads left unresolved and interesting ideas left unexplored. This novel shows better Asimov’s talents. The first novels worked because of the strength of the ideas and fell apart on the weaknesses of plot and character development. This narrative has the space to explore these threads and to bring them together.
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