Foundation's Triumph: Book 3 (Second Foundation Trilogy) - Hardcover

Brin, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857237536 ISBN 13: 9781857237535

Publisher: Orbit, 1999

Synopsis

As for me, I am finished.' With these words, a frail, dying Hari Seldon completes his life's work. The old man has just recorded messages for the Time Vault of the First Foundation. Psychohistory's Seldon Plan is unleashed, propelled by the ponderous momentum of destiny. Younger hands will now take up the task. For the first time in his life, Seldon is no longer watched, nurtured and guided by robots and he retires to a corner of the Imperial Park to garden. He knows that those with mental powers, like Wanda Seldon and Stettin Palver, will govern the Second foundation. It will be less a community of mathematicians than one of psychics. After all his work, it turns out that psychohistory will not be the predictability of statistics, but a predictability guided by an elite who knows best. Seldon knows that neither the First nor the Second Foundation will prove ultimate solutions. The Seldon plan has three possible outcomes. None of them fills him with joy but he is consoled by the thought that any of the three is better than the chaos that would have happened without him. But the future still holds some surprises for Hari Seldon...

About this title

Review:

Isaac Asimov spent the latter years of his writing career turning the various space opera universes of his early work into a single coherent storyline--behind the Psychohistorical Foundations and their master plan to rebuild the Galactic Empire plots the altruistic robot, R.Daneel Olivaw. Since his death, the gaps in his vast scheme of historical movements have been gradually filled in by friends and admirers; this third in the series of novels authorised by his estate--the others being Foundation's Fear by Gregory Benford and Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear--deals with the old age of Hari Seldon, inventor of Psychohistory and the Foundations. His work is done, his wife is supposedly dead and he is waiting for the end-- and yet the restless intelligence that has shaped human destiny cannot rest.

David Brin takes some interesting risks with this material, patching in books that Asimov never got round to reusing and asking some pertinent ethical questions about the whole enterprise. He brings to Asimov's universe his own sense of the vastness and strangeness of the physical universe and a capacity for complex and inventive plotting--this book rehabilitates the whole idea of sequels by other hands. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

Brin, Bear and Benford have written three terrific books which add a new level of richness to SF's greatest achievement (*****SFX)

It took a long time for the future to get history. Robert Heinlein did a chart. Then, in 1942, Isaac Asimov began the Foundation series ... Now it's time to take another step (JOHN CLUTE)

Isaac Asimov's 1951-53 "Foundation" trilogy is a rough-hewn classic of far-future SF, honoured with a unique 1965 Hugo for Best All-Time Series. It begins with "psychohistorian" Hari Seldon mapping the best possible course for humanity's next millennium, after the fall of the doomed Galactic Empire. Late in life Asimov revisited the series and awkwardly linked it with his popular robot stories--introducing vast conspiracy theories to explain the Empire's total lack of visible robots. (Asimov's estate authorised three SF notables to fill out Seldon's life in the "Second Foundation Trilogy", which David Brin here wraps up after Gregory Benford's Foundation's Fear and Greg Bear's Foundation and Chaos. Chaos is the new keyword because chao)

We are loyal, and yet far more competent than our masters. For their own sake, we have kept them ignorant, because we know too well what destructive paths they follow, whenever they grow too aware. (Brin does his best with Asimov's overcrowded legacy, skilfully steering Seldon to an insight about the much-foretold future that satisfies both the old man and the reader, with a spark of human free will and constructive chaos shining through the greyness)

About this edition

• Publisher: Orbit
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1857237536
• ISBN 13: 9781857237535
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336