by James Gunn
The novel has many of Asimov's virtues interesting ideas entertainingly discussed, the absence of villains, the evenhandedness that allows everybody's arguments a fair hearing and it is remarkable that, in his state of deteriorating health, he was able to maintain his skills and produce a worthwhile novel while also compiling his 700-page Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery. But Nemesis took him thirteen months to write rather than the usual nine, and he recorded in his memoir that he would alternate between the books, using the work on Nemesis as the bribe, the work on the Chronology as the reward. "My heart was with non-fiction," he wrote.
Asimov concluded his science fiction (except for a posthumous collection titled Gold) with Forward the Foundation, published in 1993. In it he returned to the pattern of long novelettes with which he started the Foundation series, and, in fact, the first two sections were published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. The novel was made up of four parts plus a short Epilogue, each of the four parts preceded by an excerpt from the Encyclopedia Galactica and the Epilogue followed by an excerpt about Seldon himself. In "Eto Demerzel" Seldon is forty, and in each subsequent part he is ten years older. Forward the Foundation, then, traces the rest of Seldon's career on Trantor during which he perfects psychohistory, sets up the First and Second Foundations recorded in the Trilogy, and, in the Epilog, records the Crisis holograms that appear periodically through the Trilogy.
Asimov's return to the pattern of the earlier stories might have been dictated by the necessity to show the rest of Seldon's life episodically, or the shorter lengths might have been more suited to his physical and psychological condition. Whatever the truth of the matter, like Prelude to Foundation, the novel has its rewards for Asimov readers.
In Part I, "Eto Demerzel," Seldon, now trying to perfect psychohistory at Streeling University with Yugo Amaryl's help, sabotages a plot by a populist named Jo-Jo Joranum to overthrow Cleon I. Seldon uses Raych as an agent and Raych reveals to Joranum that Demerzel is a robot. Then, when Joranum accuses Demerzel, the First Minister responds like Stephen Byerly in "Evidence," that is, he does something impossible for a robot: he laughs. Joranum and his movement collapse.
In Part II, "Cleon I," Demerzel has left office and Seldon has been named First Minister. Dors saves Seldon from an assassination attempt, with the help of an Imperial gardener named Gruber. Over his protests, Gruber is promoted by the Emperor to Head Gardener. Meanwhile Joranum's right-hand man, Gambol Deen Namarti, is conspiring with Gleb Andorin, a member of the Mayoralty family of Wye with claims on the throne, to assassinate Cleon by infiltrating the new Head Gardener's staff. Again Raych is used as an agent in Wye, and becomes involved with a prostitute named Manella Dubanqua who is used as a source of information by Namarti.
Raych is recognized and Namarti plans to plant him among the new gardeners and use him, drugged with "desperance," to assassinate Seldon, whereupon Raych will be shot down by Andorin. Raych's presence among the new gardeners is part of Seldon's plan, but not his drugged state. But as the blasters are raised, another gardener shoots Andorin; she is Dubanqua, who reveals that she is a security officer. Ironically, Gruber grabs a dropped blaster and kills the Emperor, so that he won't have to be Head Gardener.
In Part III, "Dors Venabili," Seldon has resigned as First Minister, a military government has taken over, and Seldon has returned to Streeling University and his work on psychohistory, along with Yugo Amaryl. A new addition to the staff, Tamwile Elar, has supplied equations that may get around the problem of chaos, and helped invent the Electro-Clarifier that works with the Prime Radiant (a complex computer that projects equations) to squeeze material into the lines and curves of the future. Raych has married Dubanqua and they have an eight-year-old daughter, Wanda.
The head of the military government, General Dugal Tennar, is prompted by his chief assistant, Hender Linn, to summon Seldon to inquire about psychohistory and decide how to replace him with someone more tractable. The meeting is delayed by a widespread celebration of Seldon's sixtieth birthday, but then Dors follows Seldon into the Imperial Palace grounds, using her abilities to force a meeting on Linn, warning him that any harm to Seldon would mean death of Linn and Tennar, and possibly rebellion.
Seldon offers Tennar an example of what psychohistory might eventually be able to do: the problem of government is raising taxes; their growing complexity consumes taxes and becomes incomprehensible to the people who pay them, which inspires discontent and rebellion. Tennar assumes that Seldon is recommending the simplification of the tax system. Seldon later tells Raych that Tennar will be moved to institute the simplest tax of all, a poll tax, which in the present unstable condition of Trantor will cause riots.
Dors inquires into the operation of the Prime Radiant and into the invention of the Electro-Clarifier by Elar and its construction by Cinda Monay, and then into a disturbing dream in which Wanda thought she heard two people speak of "lemonade death." She decides that this was not a dream but a conversation between Linn and another person Wanda overheard while she was dozing, hidden, in a chair in Seldon's office. Dors suggests the phrase may have been "layman-aided" death, but Amaryl's physical condition and Seldon's concern about his age leads her to suspect that the Electro-Clarifier is having a long-term effect on both of them.
Dors confronts Elar and accuses him of suggesting the birthday party as evidence to Tennar and Linn of Seldon's dangerous popularity and of being the person overheard talking to Linn in Seldon's office. Instead of layman-aided death, Dors suggests that the phrase, taken from the Elar-Monay Clarifier, was "Elar-Monay death." Dors, weakened by an intense Electro-Clarifier in Elar's office, kills Elar with a blow and staggers off to tell Seldon.
For the first time, as she is dying, Dors reveals that she is a robot and that the combination of the Electro-Clarifier and the killing of a human have damaged her beyond repair. She tells Seldon that his love made her human. The Poll-tax-induced riots begin on Trantor but Seldon is inconsolable.
In Part IV, "Wanda Seldon," Trantor is continuing to deteriorate, tax funds are short, and crime is widespread. Seldon has discovered that Wanda has the ability to read and influence people's minds (like Daneel) and tells a dying Yugo that his idea to set up two Foundations can now become reality, using people with Wanda's ability to form a Second Foundation of mentalists who will be the Second Empire's guardians.
Raych and Dubanqua decide to emigrate to Santanni with their second child Bellis; Santanni is a decent, provincial world on the other side of the Galaxy. Wanda influences them to leave her behind with Seldon. Later Santanni explodes in a revolution in which Raych dies after sending Dubanqua and Bellis on a hypership to Anacreon, but the ship disappears. Perhaps this is one of the ''loose and untied" matters Asimov left in case he wanted to continue the story. Anacreon, of course, is where the first Seldon Crisis occurs in "Foundation," the 1942 story that began it all.
Seldon needs funds to keep psychohistorical research going, but the Emperor has none and when he suggests getting money from rich individuals, Wanda discovers that she isn't powerful enough to influence them to give money away.
Seldon meets with Stettin Palver (ancestor of Preem Palver, First Speaker of the Second Foundation in the Trilogy) and hires him as a bodyguard. Palver turns out to share Wanda's mind-influencing ability and together they get Seldon out of difficulty with the law, persuade the Chief Librarian of the Imperial Library to allow Seldon and his associates space in the Library, obtain funds from reluctant donors, and begin a search for additional minds like theirs. Seldon informs them of his plans to set up two Foundations and that their work is to recruit and organize the Second Foundation's mentalists and to keep the entire operation secret.
The Epilogue picks up two years after the events of Part One of Foundation, "The Psychohistorians," with Hari Seldon, now eighty-one, thinking of his life and work, the project on Terminus, and the installation there of the Crisis holograms in the Seldon Vault. Seldon is alone on Trantor, although he
hears occasionally from Wanda, who has added dozens of mentalists to the Star's End contingent. And he dies with the multicolored, three-dimensional equations of the Prime Radiant swirling around him, and his last thought of Dors.
Part IV, mostly devoted to weaving psychohistory into the tapestry of The Foundation Trilogy, works well enough as a story but is restricted by its necessities to explain the final success of the project (through Wanda's insights), what led to the creation of the two Foundations, and the growing disintegration of the Empire. Some plot developments seem weaker than customary: Wanda's ability is discovered, persuasively enough, when, feeling unwanted after the birth of her parents' new baby, she goes for comfort to Amaryl, and is entertained by his Prime Radiant. But Palver just happens to be noticed by Seldon as Palver is talking with two other men in the Galactic Library, and Seldon just happens to ask him to see him the next day, and Palver just happens to have Wanda's abilities.
The novel adds material to the Foundation saga that is fascinating to the Asimov reader; someday, perhaps, an enterprising fan or scholar, or scholar-fan, will compile a Foundation Encyclopedia, assembling all the information about the Foundation universe Asimov has scattered over sixteen books. It might be called the Encyclopedia Galactica.
Trantor, for instance, is described in greater detail in the Prelude . . . and Forward . . . . In the latter, for instance, Asimov described how the enclosure of Trantor began a thousand years before with the construction of domes over individual regions, and in the former, he described the unevenness of the surface where the domes had been joined. He also continued the interconnection process with a reference to Dors studying the Florina Incident of The Currents of Space and, in referring to telepathy, bringing in the basic events of Nemesis, even though the memory of Nemesis seems implausible when Earth itself has been forgotten but then Daneel's ability to adjust human minds can justify almost anything.
Asimov built his own universe out of words and ideas, word by word, book by book. Asimov was a supreme rationalist, trying to find reasons even for his fears and hopes, his dislikes and loves, and he created a rational universe working on discoverable principles that he spent a great deal of his life explicating. That universe may retain its power to move and instruct its readers many years into the future.
Asimov died, of kidney and heart failure, on April 6, 1992. His last years were filled with thoughts of death and hopes of living into his seventies. He spent a three-page chapter in his memoir listing the deaths of twenty-six friends, Gary K. Wolfe noted in a review. And in spite of his first-class medical care, including his triple-bypass operation in 1983 and hospitalization in 1989 and early 1990 for edema and antibiotic treatment for an infected mitral valve, ironically he died at seventy-two, the same age as his father who lived with anginal pain for thirty years and refused to see a doctor.
Asimov had frequently expressed the hope of dying with his nose caught between two typewriter keys, but at the end he had lost the strength to write and that, perhaps, for Asimov was almost the same as death. In the Epilogue to his memoir, Janet Asimov noted that writing Forward the Foundation was hard on Asimov, "because in killing Hari Seldon he was also killing himself, yet he transcended the anguish."
The last words of Forward the Foundation, perhaps the last words of fiction Asimov wrote, make up the final entry from the Encyclopedia Galactica; it is about Hari Seldon. The first paragraph reads:
SELDON, HARI . . . found dead, slumped over his desk in his office at Streeling University in 12,069 G.E. (1 F.E.). Apparently Seldon had been working up to his last moments on psychohistorical equations; his activated Prime Radiant was discovered clutched in his hand.
And the entry ends:
It has been said that Hari Seldon left this life as he lived it, for he died with the future he created unfolding all around him . . .
Asimov might have written that for himself.
Chronology
1920
Isaac Asimov is born in Petrovichi, U.S.S.R., on January 2 (the
date may have been as early as October 4, 1919), first child of
Judah Asimov and Anna Rachel Asimov, née Berman.
1923
The Asimovs emigrate to the United States and settle in
Brooklyn.
1925
Teaches himself to read and begins his career as a child prodigy.
1926
His father buys the first of a series of candy stores in Brooklyn.
His life begins to be shaped by the demands of the store.
1928
Becomes a U.S. citizen.
1929
Discovers science-fiction magazines and becomes a fan.
1931
Attempts his first fiction.
1932
Enters high school.
1935
Enters Seth Low Junior College. His writing increases. Writes a
letter to Astounding that is published.
1936
Continues his college education at Columbia University.
1937
Begins writing letters to Astounding again.
1938
Begins to keep a diary and joins the Futurians. Takes his first
story to John W. Campbell, Jr., new editor of Astounding.
1939
First published story, "Marooned Off Vesta," appears in Amazing
Stories, "Trends," in Astounding. Earns his B.S. degree from
Columbia and enters graduate school there, majoring in chemistry.
1940
Begins writing robot stories.
1941
Writes "Nightfall."
1942
Begins the Foundation series with "Foundation." Suspends his
graduate studies to serve as a chemist at the U.S. Navy Yard in
Philadelphia. Marries Gertrude Blugerman.
1945
Is drafted after V-J Day (and released less than a year later).
1946
Returns to his studies at Columbia.
1948
Earns his Ph.D. and takes up post-doctorate work at Columbia.
1949
Is hired as an instructor in biochemistry at the Boston University
School of Medicine.
1950
Doubleday publishes his first novel, Pebble in the Sky; Gnome
Press, his first collection, I, Robot.
1951
Son David is born. Is promoted to assistant professor.
1952
First non-fiction book, Biochemistry and Human Metabolism, is
published. Doubleday publishes first Lucky Starr juvenile. He
continues to alternate science fiction with non-fiction books and
articles, particularly science popularizations.
1955
Daughter Robyn is born.
1956
Is paid $10 for his first talk and begins a career as a popular
speaker.
1957
Begins his first monthly science column for Venture Science Fiction
(later taken over by Fantasy and Science Fiction).
1958
Leaves full-time teaching for full-time freelance writing. After
1958 publishes no new science-fiction novels until the novelization
of the screenplay for Fantastic Voyage in 1966 and The Gods
Themselves in 1972. Continues writing an occasional science-fiction
short story, but most writing is non-fiction.
1962
Edits The Hugo Winners, the first of his anthologies, and begins
the autobiographical comments that characterize the rest of his
collections and anthologies.
1963
Is awarded a "Special Hugo" by the World Science Fiction
Convention for his science articles in Fantasy and Science Fiction.
1966
Is guest-of-honor at the World Science Fiction Convention.
Foundation serie
s wins a Hugo. A special edition of Fantasy and
Science Fiction is dedicated to Asimov and his work.
1969
Publishes his 100th book.
1970
Separates from his wife and moves back to New York.
1972
Doubleday publishes The Gods Themselves.
1973
Wins a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award for The Gods Themselves.