Just Finished re-Reading: Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov (FP: 1953) [187pp] 

With the Foundation defeated, the genetic anomaly known as the Mule only has one fear, one thing that keeps him awake at night – the rumoured Second Foundation. The problem is that no one knows where, on what planet, the Second Foundation is based. Until he knows that, and can destroy them, the Mule is stuck. With the frontiers of his empire stalled he resolves to send a two-man team to investigate rumours of Second Foundationers and, once located, lead his all-powerful fleet to that far-off location. The members of the Second Foundation are all too aware of the search and have their own strategy in place using Seldon’s Plan, the mathematics of Psychohistory and their own heightened mental faculties. Only one side can be triumphant. Either the Mule must fall or the Plan, to save mankind from thousands of years of misery after the Fall of the Galactic Empire, will fail.  

This was the third book of the original Foundation trilogy which I first read around 40 years ago. Needless to say, I remembered hardly a thing from my earlier reading, and it was like reading it for the first time. As in the previous two books momentous events were taking place throughout the Galaxy but we, the reader, viewed them largely through people talking about them in rooms – which to be honest fells rather strange. It was almost, at times, as if I was watching a low budget movie that couldn’t afford the SFX but instead relied on people bursting into a room to exclaim that a planet hundreds of lightyears away was being bombarded from space. On this occasion though we do get to ‘see’ a space battle (at least briefly) which was a nice change of pace! It did feel more than a little ‘strange’ (probably the wrong word) that despite the scale of the narrative – Galactic in effect – the events were being driven by a very small number of people. I’ve never been a ‘fan’ of the “Great Man view of History” so this viewpoint did grate a little, but I can understand that the author needed to cut down the character list to something less than astronomic! 

The story was actually rather clever. The multiple sleights of hand around the Second Foundation were well handled, although the fall of the Mule did feel a bit anticlimactic. The characters throughout were reasonably fleshed out and I liked the young protagonist Arcadia/Arkady who was, rather surprisingly and refreshingly, a teenage female who was central to the later plot. A few things did intrigue me this time around. More than once I couldn’t help but think of the impact this series might have had on Frank Herbert and his ideas for Dune. The most obvious link is that between Seldon’s Plan in Foundation and the Golden Path in Dune, but this third book went further. The Second Foundation, unlike the First, were not technical people. They were not engineers or scientists of the hard persuasion. They were, above all else, mathematicians and primarily psychologists. They concentrated on developing the human mind that, they believed, had been neglected for far too long – not unlike the Mentats, Guild Navigators and Bene Gesserit after the ban on thinking machines. I couldn’t help wonder if Herbert took this idea from Asimov and ran with it? An interesting read and I’m looking forward to the 4th book (another re-read) next year before finishing off the series with the final 3 books I never got around to the first time. 

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