A Man With An Agenda

This book should be better than the first since it was written in two parts instead of four and involves a woman who's been allowed outside of the kitchen/breeding-closet long enough to take part in the action. I don't want to give anything away, but Asimov doesn't let her get distracted by jewelery either! How remarkable.

Hari Seldon's plan marches on in this book until it runs into a complication: an individual capable of changing the direction of thousands of lives.

The first part involves a strike from the vestigial Galactic Empire under the command of a daring general under the last strong emperor. Asimov stands by his method of making sure the main characters and narration stay as far away from the action as possible, and I am still pleasantly surprised by how well this works. While the general is off making victories and planets fall, we instead stay with two prisoners discussing methods of escape and then learning methods of bureaucratic bribery.

Some seem to think that the general's defeat was a deus ex machina, but I thought it was well-in-place with the principles of psychohistory that Asmiov set up and, broadly, the example fits in with our history. Asimov was a historian too. Which, even though we know that the idea is bogus now, is why the idea of this whole series is so compelling.

The second half introduces us to Bayta and her husband, who wind up getting entangled in the Foundation's war against The Mule, a mysterious mutant whose powers are unknown but shockingly effective. The collapse of Seldon's plan and the sudden uncertainty in the smoothly predestined series, as I've said, should have been more compelling. But it wasn't.

Asimov was a great idea-man and a capable writer - for some things. But when he tries to ground his story in more human terms rather than ideas his style becomes stiff and uninteresting. The last quarter of the book which has Bayta, her husband, a psycho-historian, and a fugitive of The Mule's court practically alone is dull and monotonous. His frequent re-hashing of his themes and exposition of what just happened ten pages ago sticks out even more. His characters, such as they are, don't hold up by themselves. Only the description of the gutted imperial capitol and the sad state of the last emperor kept my interest.

It's strange to say, and I think Asimov was a brilliant thinker, but these novels can't face scrutiny as literature or as pleasure reads. Unless the third one is a lot better than I remember, that these are strictly for genre-readers, and only those who want to know the forerunners of science fiction.

Foundation

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