Forward The Foundation!

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Includes Titles: Prelude to Foundation, Forward the Foundation, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, Foundation's Edge, Foundation and Earth.

Here in the great multidomed capital of the Galactic Empire, forty billion people have created a civilization of unimaginable technological and cultural complexity. This one has a hurried feel to it, almost as if Asimov knew that his time was drawing to an end, and he wanted it finished at all costs.Completed just weeks before his death in April 1992, 'Forward The Foundation' offers a dramatic climax to the 'Foundation' series, and is perhaps the greatest moment in science fiction to date.

Hari Seldon, the developer of psycho-history, the basis of the Foundation series, is pretty much the same character as Elijah Baley, in the Robot series, and Golan Trevize in the Foundation sequels, and probably most of Asimov's leading characters in other novels.It covers some 40 or more years of Seldon's life including his rather unlikely decade as First Minister of the Empire, and his increasingly frustrated attempts to keep his project going. So, in this book we see how the “concept” of psychohistory (which is all that Seldon has in the previous book) develops into the finely-tuned instrument that is in use in Foundation. I had decided that his short stories were better than his novels, that his novels were written like long short stories. 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.