Second Foundation (Book Three of The Foundation Series) - Softcover

Asimov, Isaac

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586017135 ISBN 13: 9780586017135

Publisher: Collins, 1994

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST ALL-TIME SERIES

The Foundation series is Isaac Asimov’s iconic masterpiece. Unfolding against the backdrop of a crumbling Galactic Empire, the story of Hari Seldon’s two Foundations is a lasting testament to an extraordinary imagination, one that shaped science fiction as we know it today.

The First Foundation has been defeated, crushed by the formidable mental powers of the Mule. But whispers of the mysterious Second Foundation, the only hope of defeating the Mule, are beginning to spread…

Surviving members of the First Foundation also fear the secret powers of the Second Foundation, vowing to find and destroy it. However, the location of the Second Foundation remains shrouded in mystery. Finding it will lead the Foundation to the opposite end of the Galaxy, where the fate of Seldon’s two Foundations awaits.

About this title

About the Author

Isaac Asimov was born in 1920 in Russia and was brought to the USA by his parents three years later. He grew up in Brooklyn and attended Columbia University. After a short spell in the army, he gained a doctorate and worked in academia and chemical research.

Asimov’s career as a science fiction writer began in 1939 with the short story ‘Marooned Off Vesta’. Thereafter he became a regular contributor to the leading SF magazines of the day. Asimov wrote hundreds of short stories and novels, including the iconic I, Robot and Foundation. He won the Hugo Award four times and the Nebula Award once.

Apart from his world-famous science fiction, Asimov also wrote highly successful detective mystery stories, a four-volume History of North America, a two-volume Guide to the Bible, a biographical dictionary, encyclopaedias, and textbooks, as well as two volumes of autobiography.

Asimov died in 1992 at the age of 72.

From the Back Cover

SECOND FOUNDATION

One man understood the shifting patterns of the inhabited cosmos. This was Hari Seldon, the last great scientist of the First Empire. The mathematics of psychohistory enabled Seldon to predict the collapse of the Empire and the onset of civilisation in the shortest possible time, Seldon set up two Foundations.

The First was established on Terminus in the full daylight of publicity. But the Second, ‘at the other end of the galaxy’, took shape behind a veil of total silence. Because the Second Foundation guards the laws of psychohistory, which are valid only so long as they remain secret.

When the First Foundation was conquered by a force Seldon had not foreseen – the overwhelming power of a single individual, a mutant called the Mule – the Second Foundation was forced to reveal its existence and, infinitely worse, a portion of its power. But so far its location, its most closely guarded secret of all, has been kept hidden. So far. The Mule and the remnants of the First Foundation will do anything to discover it.

This is the story of the Second Foundation.

“One of the most staggering achievements in modern SF”
THE TIMES

Edition details

• Publisher: Collins
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0586017135
• ISBN 13: 9780586017135
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240