I am currently re-reading the Foundation series. The notes on the other books are found below, the links will be updated as I go through the books:

If you start reading the posts from here, please note that though this book is, story-wise, the first in the chronology, it comes very late in the writing of Foundation cycle as a whole.

And it shows. Badly.

But first thing first, a note on the story. Seldon just arrived on Trantor and has just presented his initial findings regarding Psychohistory and it gathers too much attention from people with too much power which in turns make him run through the different sectors of Trantor, fleeing the always-near presence of First Minister Eto Demerzel while trying to make progress, any kind of progress on his research.

I kinda remember it to be the first book of the cycle I read and what an impact it made on younger me. But having read the rest of the books over the past months, I now wonder what I found so compelling in this particular book.

Sure, it is better written that Foundation, tries to put more meat on its characters, but that’s all the good I can say. It really reads like a Foundation version of Star Wars Episode II. Asimov tries too hard to connect his two main cycles (Robots and Foundation) and is not particularly good at it.

And doing so, it adds inconsistencies to the previous books.

One book too much.

As I write this post, I am already pretty far into Forward the Foundation and it is noticeably better but that will be a story for another day.