Book report:

Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov, the fourth (and not final) installment of the so-called "Foundation Trilogy". Written in 1982 - about three decades after the publication of Second Foundation, the original end to the trilogy - Foundation's Edge is a cautionary tale about not letting a publisher talk you into writing an unnecessary sequel to an otherwise successful book or series. It starts out well enough, with the events of the previous novel a century in the past and the Galaxy seemingly on the track to peace, love, and happiness thanks to psychohistorian Hari Seldon and his thousand-year Plan to transition the human race from the end of their beloved Galactic Empire to a Second one, avoiding the three hundred millennia of chaos and barbarism that would have ensued without Seldon's help. Things are going well for the Foundation and its ever-expanding sphere of influence - too well, as it turns out, prompting a quest to see if the secretive mentalists of the Second Foundation are still attempting to control history despite their presumed destruction at the end of the last book.

Okay, so far so good. One of the things I found odd about the Seldon Plan is that we only get to see the first few centuries of it in the original trilogy, whereas in Foundation's Edge we begin at the halfway point between the First and Second Empires. Even better. Unfortunately the direction that the novel takes from here ultimately undermines what that has gone before by making everyone in the Galaxy- not only even the puppetmaster psychics of the Second Foundation but the ones pulling their strings as well are under his/her/its control - a puppet of a mysterious force that Asimov gamely refuses to reveal at the end of the book, leaving the door open for an unnecessary sequel to this unnecessary sequel.

The funny thing is that I remember loving this book when I read it as a kid. I also happily devoured the novels that would follow this initial sequel - Foundation and Earth, Prelude to Foundation, and Forward the Foundation. The latter two of these novels are mildly interesting, as they revisit the details of Hari Seldon's life as a psychohistorian, but as the revelations made in Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth tend to minimize the importance of Seldon in the grand scheme of things, they too end up falling flat. What a shame! I think this time around, I will call it quits with Foundation's Edge, which as it turns out is quite aptly named, though not for reasons Asimov would be pleased with: in this book, you can actually pinpoint the very page number where the Good Doctor sails right off the edge of a carefully and lovingly constructed universe and into the abyss of cliched mediocrity.

Well now I'm reading Robert Heinlein's unabashed ode to fascism, Starship Troopers. Somehow when as I was working through the Heinlein hit parade in my youth I missed this one, so I found a nice old dog-eared copy in the Widener stacks. What's surprising is how much I'm enjoying it so far, but I guess even a peacenik like me can appreciate a good cathartic shoot-'em-up every once in a while. More as I get deeper into the book...