Second Foundation

A fourteen-year-old girl listens at a door while her father's friends plot, and she turns out to be the sharpest mind in the room.

Asimov spent two books arguing that individuals do not matter. Psychohistory worked on populations, the Seldon Plan required no heroes, and the pleasure was watching a graph come true. Then the Mule broke it, and this volume has to be about people, because a plan one man can break is a plan with a person-shaped hole in it.

The book sells a manhunt. Its reader is promised the location of an organisation whose whole competence is not being located, and she pays for that promise with the series' old pleasure, because a search cannot be run from orbit at the scale of centuries. The camera comes down. It stays down for the rest of the trilogy.

Two searches, run fifty years apart, and the later one is the better book. The Mule's hunt has the tighter machinery, an agent who has been mentally adjusted paired with one who has not, precisely so the unadjusted one can be watched. The Foundation's hunt has Arkady, which is worth more than machinery.

Everything depends on one concession. The reader either accepts a mystery in which the opposition can edit the detective, or the apparatus reads as rigged. Nothing sits between those two readings, because that power is the antagonist's defining property.

The mechanism of the trouble follows from that power. No clue is load-bearing, no deduction is safe, no conviction is certainly the character's own. So a reader who notices stops reasoning alongside them and starts waiting to be told, and Asimov's answer is to produce more disclosures rather than lower the stakes. Tension then comes from withheld information rather than from anything she could have worked out. That is a puzzle box and not a puzzle.

Arkady Darell is the liveliest thing in the trilogy and she arrives out of nowhere. A teenager who narrates her own life as romantic melodrama, deploys that melodrama on purpose, and is underestimated by men who have read her file. Asimov wrote few characters this alive and fewer of them women, which makes her a peculiar accident and a real one.

Kalgan is where the plot mechanics live. A warlord's court on a pleasure world converted into a military capital, with a Lord Stettin dangerous in the ordinary way rather than the psychic one. The war it produces is the least interesting material here, and it is doing necessary work, because the mentalist plot needs a conventional one running underneath to disguise its shape.

Trantor is the other thing worth coming for. The old capital, farmed over, its library still standing while the empire that built it has become a rumour, and Asimov writes the ruin without elegy. A world reduced to agriculture by people who are content with that. Colder than a burning city.

As a closing volume it has a structural problem it cannot solve. The trilogy's subject was inevitability, and a satisfying ending wants somebody to have chosen something. Asimov settles it by making the choice belong to an organisation rather than a person, which is consistent and emotionally flat, and the flatness is what it costs to have been right about his own premise for three books.

Asimov's prose here is functional and occasionally worse. People explain things to each other in rooms. A conversation runs eleven pages because the plot consists of conclusions, and conclusions have to be spoken when there is no other way to show a mind changing. Whoever wants sentences should look elsewhere. Whoever wants ideas will not notice.

The Second Foundation cannot be found by looking. That is the difficulty the whole book is built out of.