Get Sponsored
[Note: Amazon.Com lists this title as out of print. You can still order it and see if Amazon.Com can find it for you, but it will probably be expensive.]
Sorry. No cover image is available for this book. If I can get one I'll post it here, though.
Synopsis: Golan Trevize, exiled Councilman of the Foundation, is miserable over the choice he made to subsume humanity into a super-organism containing every last particle in the Galaxy. He has to find a reason to change his choice, or the reason why he cannot do so. He believes the mythical world of Earth will provide an answer... if Earth can be found at all.
WARNING! The comments contain spoilers to the previous book in the series Foundation's Edge proceed at your own risk :)
Comments: This novel, like Foundation's Edge, was also written as a novel. It is also the end, chronologically, of the Foundation Series.
I will start this once with the novel's big flaw: Trevize and Bliss, the Gaian fragment, keep a running argument that gets old really fast. I'd compare it to a flaming thread on a newsgroup, but it really is civilized most of the time.
There are other flaws, naturally, for even the Good Doctor was not perfect. However, these are all minor compared to the never-ending argument. There is another scene between border guards, like in Foundation's Edge. This time, however, it is not useless and it does have a bearing on later developments.
There is one logical flaw at the beginning of the novel. Trevize is embarking on a search for Earth and he didn't think to ask Pelorat to come along, when Pelorat's life's work has been searching for Earth! This is rather a character flaw on Trevize's part, in my opinion. He never says he thinks Pelorat wouldn't be useful to him, rather that he didn't think his friend would like to leave Gaia.
Anyway. Trevize starts his search by asking Gaia to search her/its memory since the Gaians claim their world was settled from Earth (this is never confirmed by outside sources). When Gaia finds it doesn't remember the location of Earth, Trevize thinks that Earth must have removed such memories from Gaia as it removed references to Earth throughout the rest of the Galaxy. He concludes then that Earth is more powerful than Gaia. This sets us ip for a repeat of Gendibal's role in the preceding novel. Lucky for us Asimov was much smarter than that and this does not happen. Instead we get a methodical search for Earth.
So Trevize, Pelorat and Bliss take the Far Star to the world of Comporellon, a very old world which millennia before was known as Benbally World. Here the search may turn too easy in one respect: they are given information that, for some reason, no one has ever done anything about before. Asimov might have explained this away at the end, but he did not. It's too small a point, really.
Comporellon is very well done. A fact that the reader who recognize the world's ancestry will no doubt appreciate. It also presents them with a predicament which manages to bring out the worst side of Golan Trevize. If anything, the resolution of their problem takes a bit too long as does their consultation with a local historian, one Vasil Deniador. This last character is one of the most pleasant incidental characters around. He's funny in an impertinent sort of way, which I like.
Afterwards the little group gets to visit three Spacer Worlds: Aurora, Solaria and Melpomenia. These worlds have been out of the galactic mainstream for as long as 20,000 years. Moreover, these worlds, unlike the rest of the Galaxy, used positronic robots in their societies.
Readers of the Robot Novels remember Aurora and Solaria in their prime (Melpomenia is new to Asimov's fiction). There is also a mention of Aurora in Prelude to Foundation as the origin world of the Mycogenians now living in Trantor.
It is interesting to know what happened to each of these worlds, and Melpomenia, over the centuries. However, there isn't much detail and, int he case of Solaria, an awful lot of exposition. Interesting exposition, true, but exposition nonetheless.
I hesitate to say more for fear I'd spoil your reading. So I will just say that the destinies of these worlds are perfectly logical and not at all farfetched.
Trevize displays a lot of ingenuity during the search. He makes full use of his super-advanced ship and its computer, as well as his naval education and experience. It is a joy watching him in action.
The ending worked very well for me before I read Prelude to Foundation. Now it's just okay, but I think more than a little easy to guess. I was disappointed by Trevize's perceived solution to his problem, however. There, I think, Asimov either took an easy out or cheated us from a very interesting novel.
He never did continue the series from this point on. Instead he wrote Prelude and Forward The Foundation. Each a very good work, but I would have liked to know what the Good Doctor had in mind, if anything, for the future of the Galaxy after Foundation And Earth.
If you have any comments or questions, or just want to talk about Science Fiction, please feel free to write
