Foundation's End

Some 45 years after reading the original Foundation trilogy, I have now fished the other four books in the series.

The four books, two prequels and two sequels, came 30 years after the original trilogy and were very different in style. The original books comprised a series of fairly short episodes, each largely self contained though linked to the central theme of the Foundation, the collapsing empire and the Second Foundation. They were infused with politics and power, not to mention some memorable epigrams from Salvor Hardin; my favorite is still "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent".

Asimov's style changed completely in the 'quels. They are longer to begin with; and there is a single story in each in place of the small self-contained episodes of the original trilogy (hereafter just the "trilogy").  While he draws nicely on his robot stories, weaving them into both the pre- and se-quels, they are ultimately less satisfying.

The ideas are sparser, and that's not just because the books are longer. The big ideas, psycho-history in Foundation, the Mule in Foundation and Empire and the Second Foundation in its eponymous volume seem conspicuously absent. Gaia was not an original Asimov conception. And they lack the suspense that permeated the trilogy.

My final thought for the evening, is that Asimov couldn't decide whether to bring the series to an end.  Having woven the threads to bring the protagonists of the last volume face to face with R. Daneel Olivaw where he could easily have left things, he chose instead to hint, in the very last sentence, of a malevolent alien intelligence from another galaxy.

To my mind that was gratuitous; all the the pieces had been seemingly carefully orchestrated into the final "ah-ha" moment, providing a relatively satisfying clicking together of the last piece of the puzzle, yet he seems somehow to have balked at the last minute. Perhaps he got cold feet about bringing the series to a close, indeed bringing both streams of work to a close. We will likely never know.

But while the cliff-hanger ending (literally) to the Italian job ("Hang on a minute, lads. I've got a great idea."), this seemed contrived and out of place. A slightly sad way to end to one of the most important contributions to the science fiction genre.