The other main characters are reasonably well-drawn but, as I say, not terribly interesting. The two female characters, the Mayor of Terminus, and Bliss, a young Gaian woman (robot?) are Asimovian stereotypes we have seen before. The characters are not all terribly interesting. On the whole, I was very pleased with it. There are a number of levels at which this book can be discussed. Between them stands the person of Golan Trevieze, who has the uncanny knack for knowing what is right at any given time-and at the end of the book, he decides for some reason not even he fathoms that Gaia is right, and that mankind’s future should be a super-Gaia, Galaxia. The Mayor of Terminus is a Susan Calvin clone the (future) First Speaker from Trantor is an overambitious fop. The less than ideal destinies of mankind are represented by the two Foundations. Gaia also represents the kind of world-organism Asimov had objected to in “ Green Patches,” here, however, made the ideal destiny of mankind. By rewriting the Mule’s past somewhat, he was able to create a planet of Mules, Gaia.

He had done this once before with ” The Mule,” forty years earlier, and he did it again. Personally, I didn’t see any need for it, but neither did it bother me much.Īt the same time, Asimov needed something to drive the action and that something was going to be yet another threat to the Seldon Plan. In some sense, in fact, it is virtually irrelevant to the plot. This first connection between the two series is fairly faint and not at all intrusive.

Nor were these the only ones-the Multivac stories of the 1950’s occupied yet a third, and there were miscellaneous others in other stories.Īsimov, however, made the decision that his two major universes should be one, and set out to begin the explanation in Foundation’s Edge of why we see no robots on Terminus.

For people like me who grew up reading the earlier books, the most natural explanation was that they were in fact separate fictional universes. Indeed, robots were conspicuously absent from the Foundation books. There had always been a certain overlap in terms of technology-blasters, neuronic whips, and hyperspacial Jumps-but never any explicit connection. The first is that Asimov decided to bring his robot and Foundation books together. In terms of the series’ conception, this is an important book as well, in two respects. It did well enough, in fact, that Doubleday was able to convince Asimov to do further continuations of the Foundation series and (at long last) the third Elijah Baley novel. Its success startled Asimov-for the first time, he had a book that made the best-seller lists-and he was delighted. Foundation’s Edge is, in fact, the first actual Foundation novel. After putting the series behind him in 1950, Asimov was finally coerced into writing a new Foundation novel by Doubleday in the mid-1980’s. In some respects, this is the most important of all the Foundation books.

Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov