Prelude to Foundation

While reading I feel it was a 3/5 but the ending rephrased everything that I had to bump it to a 4/5. The fact that Hummin was Demerzel AND Daneel was crazy and changed the way you read the book. Further on, it's even crazier that Dors is a robot as well! It also explores the idea of robot-human romantic relationships and I hope Forward the Foundation continues on their relationship as well as Daneel. It's really interesting to finally get more story on what Daneel has been up to; it seems that the Zeroth Law is really hard to work with. His inability to intervene constantly and his limitations still allow for human agency in this world. Even if Trevize was guided by Daneel in the previous books, Daneel is not omnipotent and can not predict everything. It seems that the establishment of psychohistory and Gaia by Daneel were contingency plans to give him options rather than making sense out of chaos. Perhaps the idea is that the Foundation would go on to establish the Second Empire 500 years after Foundation and Earth but in the far far future Galaxia would be established. Trevize's choice was not about denouncing psychohistory but rather maintaining it as Seldon would have wanted.

Seldon was alright in this book. He was unconfident and scared throughout most of it and nothing like he was in the beginning of Foundation #1. He starts to become like that throughout the book and gets more confident, especially with the Mycogenian Aerie plan and eventually deducing that Hummin/Demerzel is Daneel, which supposedly nobody was able to figure out in 20k years. I guess it shows how smart he is.

It was interesting exploring different sectors within Trantor. It felt similar to Foundation and Earth by exploring different societies. Asimov really does a great job in exploring different cultures without having to bring in aliens; he makes very different societies out of just humans. The most interesting thing to me of course, were the Mycogenians who were the descendants of the Aurorans! So we ultimately found out what happened to the Aurorans and Solarians (from Foundation and Earth). Asimov's contention seems to be that regardless of how old a civilisation might be or how strong it is, it will eventually form a new civilisation. This might tie in with my idea that a culture is formed from both the positives and negatives of what happens to a people; losing a war is just as influential to a people as winning a war.

I hope Forward the Foundation will be a great book ending these 15 books that took me 2 or so years to get through.