Foundation's Edge
by Isaac Asimov
Summary
Five hundred years into the Seldon Plan, the Foundation is winning exactly as predicted, and that is what worries Golan Trevize. The predictions are too good. Psychohistory can forecast the behaviour of quadrillions statistically, but it cannot account for individual accidents, and the Plan has been recovering from those far too neatly, which suggests someone is correcting it.
Trevize says so in public, is stripped of his council seat and exiled with a historian, Janov Pelorat, on a ship with orders to go and look for the Second Foundation, which everyone believes was destroyed. Pelorat has his own quest: he wants to find Earth, the single world of human origin, which has been erased from every record in the galaxy.
At the same time the Second Foundation, very much alive on Trantor, is running its own investigation, and its Speakers are discovering that their own careful mental adjustments to history have themselves been anticipated by someone else.
Both searches converge on a world called Gaia, and on a choice about what kind of future the galaxy should have that Asimov leaves to a single man.
The pleasure is the same as the original trilogy's: two sets of very clever people, each certain they are the ones doing the manipulating, and a reader who can see both boards at once and still not know who is winning.
Trevize himself is a departure. Asimov's earlier heroes solved things; this one is chosen for the ending precisely because his intuition works and nobody, including him, can explain why.
Around four hundred pages, and it is talk rather than action, which is what the Foundation books always were. Expect conversations in rooms and very little violence.
Read the original trilogy first, since nothing here means much otherwise. Best for readers who want the puzzle box of the Plan reopened by the man who built it, three decades on.
Historical Context & Significance
Foundation's Edge won the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
Isaac Asimov wrote it thirty two years after Second Foundation, at his publisher's insistence and against his own instincts, having spent the intervening decades on popular science and essays rather than novels. It became his first genuine bestseller, spending months on the New York Times list, and led him to spend most of his remaining career stitching the Foundation, Robot and Empire sequences into one continuous future history.
Whether that consolidation improved the earlier books is still argued. What is not in dispute is that this novel reopened a series most readers had assumed was finished in 1953, and it remains one of the longest gaps between volumes in science fiction.