Oh boy, I knew I was in for a ride when even Isaac Asimov admitted he wrote this book only because of peer pressure in the introduction. The original Foundation was always a book of grand ideas where human characters even if they appeared would only give the plot a light push and promptly disappear into the history of millennia spanning epic. This book, on the other hand, is almost entirely a character piece — and a poorly written one, too, at that — that has not a hint of the greatness of its predecessors. Had it not shared the lore, I would’ve never guessed this thing was supposed to be *that* Foundation.
If you’re curious how do Asimov’s Robot, Empire, and Foundation series interconnect, just read a summary of this book, and save yourself the trouble. It’s a waste of time.
| Positive: | Negative: |
| Crisp, easy to digest prose | Underwhelming characters |
| Predictable twists | |
| Dull plot | |
| Adds nothing of importance to the Foundation lore | |
| Feels completely uninspired |
Visual novel & other stuff impressions 
Actually I never read Foundation (yeah, I will one day), but as I wanted to try something, I decided to start from THIS… Pfff… This was really bad. I mean, really. Plot is something messy, no strong points at all, it just jumps from one to another. I read it a year ago and now I cannot remember almost anything from it…
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The gap between the expectations (wow a book about Hari Seldon making psychohistory!!) and what it actually is (Seldon being a random twat breaks his old wizard image from foundation, and psychohistory’s origins are just… very uninspired) was too damn high, lol.
There are bits of interesting lore imo, but yeah it’s not a very good book.
Forward to Foundation is more of the same, btw, as you would expect.
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To tell you the truth, I stopped reading mid-way, and just read the summary of the plot later, so I might have missed some lore. But yeah, Hari Seldon is just unbelievably disappointing.
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