Forward the Foundation [Mass Market Paperback]

I first became acquainted with the Foundation series when I read Foundation. Since that time, I have hungrily read the other books of the series with Forward the Foundation being the last of the books to be read. I like the Foundation series due to the problems that the characters face and the clever and seemingly easy ways in which the Foundation avoids destruction. However, I feel that Forward the Foundation just is not up to par with the other Foundation books. The writing is disjointed almost as if Asimov would pick up the manuscript after being absent from it for a while and start to write again. He starts chapters by introducing information that the reader already knows from other chapters as if it is new. Furthermore, some of what is written seems to contradict things that happen in some of the other books. The contradictions are small, but noticeable.

In all, I think that Forward the Foundation is a descent book which helps to fill in the time period before the Foundation was established. I would not say that I have found it an essential read to enjoy the Foundation series. However, as a fan of the Foundation, I would have read it nonetheless. Just be prepared for a book which is not as good as the other books in the series.

Strictly _as_ a Foundation book, I don't think this one is quite as strong as its immediate predecessor, _Prelude to Foundation_. It's good, all right -- but it's not very tightly unified, the writing is sloppy in places, and it introduces a few things that seem to contradict the original series at certain points.

What really makes this four-vignettes-plus-an-epilogue volume so engaging is that in it, Hari Seldon has clearly become a literary alter ego for Asimov himself. And Asimov was well aware as he wrote it that he hadn't long to live.

And _that_ suggests that in writing about Dors Venabili, Wanda Seldon, and psychohistory, Asimov was "really" _also_ writing about his wife Janet Jeppson Asimov, his daughter Robyn, and his own literary oeuvre. So completely aside from its value as an SF novel (or, really, a story collection), it's also of great interest for the light it sheds on Asimov himself.

Asimov is generally credited with three autobiographies: _In Memory Yet Green_, _In Joy Still Felt_, and _I. Asimov_ -- the last being my personal favorite because it's the most introspective and revealing of Asimov's character. (Excerpts from all three, plus some further surprising revelations that you've probably heard about by now, are included in Janet Jeppson Asimov's _It's Been a Good Life_.)

But there's a case to be made that he wrote a fourth volume of autobiography, and that this is it. At the very least, this work of ostensible fiction is almost as revealing of Asimov's character and end-of-life concerns as any of his nonfictional autobiographies.

For that alone, it will be of interest to every Asimov fan. May the Good Doctor rest in peace.