Foundation and Empire - Isaac Asimov

The reason that Foundation and Empire is a superior work to its predecessor, Foundation, is that in the latter half of this novel Asimov takes great pains to add complexities and to challenge the philosophies set up in the first book. The first half dealing with the Empire plays out as a longer "short story" of the type presented in Foundation. However Part Two, The Mule, presents some new and interesting angles. In the first place, The Mule is something of a detective story; The Mule is the greatest and most powerful figure in the galaxy but no-one has ever seen him or knows who he is. Its this detective element as well as the space operatic threat ...  Read the complete review

Foundation and Empire deals with probabally the two most serious threats to the Seldon Plan on the road to founding a new galactic empire. Recapping, In Foundation readers were introduced to Psychohistory and it's master, Hari Seldon, and the problems faced by Seldon's Foundation, a thousand year project to form the successor to an old and crumbling galactic Empire. The first of the Foundation crises in F&E deals with the last attempts of the atrophied Empire to either destroy or reestablish control over the Foundationers. Again, this boils down to almost a two man war, pitting the independant trader Lathan Devers against the brilliant ...  Read the complete review

If you followed my advice and read Foundation itself then you won't need any urging to go on and read this one. But it would be a shame not to tell you just how fantastic I thought this book was in its own right. Again we follow the fortunes of the Foundation set up by Hari Seldon to be the germ of a new Galactic Empire. This time, though, an element is introduced which couldn't be predicted by Seldon's mathematics of human behaviour, because it isn't strictly human. So the question is whether the plan will be derailed. The first book I thought was a really great yarn, full of imagination, and superbly written. It wasn't until I ...  Read the complete review

Foundation and Empire continues the saga started in Foundation. In that book one man, Hari Seldon, foresaw the beginning of the end of the great, all-encompassing Galactic Empire long before anyone else. He also foresaw, through the mathematical science of Psychohistory, which he himself developed, that the fall of the empire would lead to thirty millennia of barbarism. The decline and fall of the empire was impossible to halt, however he devised a way to drastically shorten the length of the chaos and anarchy that would inevitably follow down to a single millennium. In order for this to happen, Seldon formed two Foundations – one created in a blaze of publicity, ...  Read the complete review

Once we've started, we might as well go on. This is the second of the initial Foundation trilogy, and to be blunt it was downhill from there. It is several stories cobbled together; the last throw of the dying Empire against the Foundation; the fossilisation of the Foundation into inertia spawning the would-be rebellion of the outer parts of it - and the forestalling of this by the appearance of a Seldon Plan-defying anomaly; the search by a frantic band of heroes for something to fight him with. At the end of Foundation, Hober Mallow replaced Salvor Hardin's policy of disguising failed, betraying science as religion - wouldn't work, would it? Try ...  Read the complete review