Foundation's Finals

The expansion of series beyond their freshness date is a common practice. One can thank the Galactic Spirit that Asimov did not have a child who co-authored with him in his dotage and then continued to dilute his (or her) literary heritage. The final duology of the Asimov-penned Foundation series, Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation, connect the Robot and the Foundation series far more ably than Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth. Although Golden Age series are not as dependent on a Future History as contemporary science fiction, it makes perfect sense that Asimov's last books would connect the characters who represent his most enduring concepts, psychohistory and the Three Laws of Robotics. The connection is far less awkward than the Future History multiverse of Heinlein where everybody sleeps with Lazarus Long! Asimov still has not learned how to write women well (although he certainly appreciates their attributes more publicly than in his classic works), and it's not entirely surprising that that the female companion of the legendary psychohistorian is a robot rather than a woman.

The nature of prequels is a loss of surprise and historical inevitability, but the very conceit of the Foundation series makes this an asset rather than a liability. It may be a bit depressing, however, when the audience knows how many people are going to fail. The tendency of fictional characters to adopt rather than breed is puzzling - in a tight timeline, such as a comic, it is an understandable shortcut, but in a fictional biography of a man who lives a full lifetime, it is puzzling. One almost imagines that there is some sort of aversion to biological granddaughters in fiction!

The revisions in the geography of Trantor are a necessary evil, although the time when Trantor was domed over appears to have been moved forward considerably from the Empire novels. Eras in the Asimovian amalgamated universe seem to be more important in terms of sequential events than absolute dates. The trio of Seldon, Daneel, and Dors Venabili suggests that Asimov would have liked to revive Susan Calvin for his final novels but could not justify a second time-travel incident like that of Joseph Schwartz, especially after the swerve from temporal to spatial research in 1932.

One of the advantage of a novel written by the creator of a series is the restraint in adding discordant elements. The robot-idolizing inhabitants of the Mycogenian Sector and the previously unmentioned rise to high office of Hari Seldon are additions rather than intrusions. Although aliens appear in other works by Asimov, the focus of the Robot-Empire-Foundation series does not allow their participation in the principal narrative; thus the spare focus of a Golden Age 'verse is preserved.