Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Published by Bantam Spectra
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
The title of this novel has been a source of frustration for librarians and bibliographers ever since Asimov's Foundation stories and novellas were gathered into the Foundation Trilogy. Normally, a book entitled "second X" would be expected to be the second volume in the series -- but Second Foundation is in fact the third volume of the Foundation Trilogy.
At the end of Foundation and Empire, the Mule had thrown a monkey wrench into the Seldon Plan, creating the sort of confusion that Asimov desperately needed in order to keep the Foundation stories from becoming so predictable that readers would lose interest. However, when the Mule went to Trantor, the world-spanning former capital city of the Galactic Empire, he found something that terrified him enough to abandon his plans for the former galactic capital and its surrounds. He referred to this terrifying enemy as the Second Foundation.
On the surface it could be seen as Asimov just throwing out something to set up his next novella in the series (remember, the section of the novel Foundation titled "The Psychohistorians" was written for the fix-up, not as one of Asimov's stories for John W. Campbell). However, if we go back to the original Foundation story, titled "Foundation" for its original publication in Astounding and retitled "The Encyclopedists" for the fix-up novel Foundation, the full formal name of the Foundation was "Encyclopedia Foundation Number One." In casual conversation it was referred to as just "the Foundation," as if it were the only one, but the formal nomenclature not just suggests, but actually presupposes, the existence of additional Encyclopedia Foundations out there. So in effect the foreshadowing was always there, but just didn't seem obvious at the time.
Although fear of the power of the Second Foundation may have led the Mule to leave Trantor, it didn't stop him altogether. If anything, the disastrous failure on Trantor made him all the more determined to find the Second Foundation and destroy it.
However, after the death of Ebling Mis at the end of Foundation and Empire, the Mule has only a very puzzling hint to the location of the Second Foundation. Seldon had said that he would create two foundations, one at Terminus, and the other at that other end of the galaxy, a place he called "Stars' End." Which raised the question of where exactly "Stars' End" would be.
To the Mule, the answer would seem obvious: it's on the far side of the Galaxy. So he starts looking at stars that are on the opposite side of the galactic core from Terminus, and finds one called "Tazenda," which if you squint hard enough, could be considered a worn-down form of "Stars' End." It's a minor star kingdom that probably was one of the last few worlds settled by the old Empire -- which in the Mule's mind makes it the perfect hiding place for his nemesis. So he destroys it, only to discover that Tazenda is in fact nothing but a figurehead, and the Second Foundation is in fact based on the even more obscure world of Rossem, which to all appearances is the home of a society of Space Amish, quietly living their low-tech lives.
And just when he thinks that he has the Second Foundation in his clutches and is about to destroy it, he's confronted by the leadership of the Second Foundation. No, Rossem isn't the home base of the Second Foundation. Everything here is a ruse designed specifically to draw him in, where the mentalists of the Second Foundation can deal with him. He will return to Kalgan, where he will live out the few years left to him as a benevolent despot.
This part of the Foundation trilogy, originally published as the novella "Now You See It...", has an unusual structure that was never repeated in any of Asimov's other Foundation writings. Each chapter has two parts: the first being from the point of view of the Mule and his searchers, and the second, called an "Interlude," being from the point of view of the leaders of the Second Foundation. As a result, we have from the beginning some sense that the Second Foundation is playing a very long game, that the Mule and his creatures are being led down a garden path -- and that the leadership of the Second Foundation have developed their minds to the point that they have a communications form of almost incredible subtlety, perhaps even more than Heinlein's fictional Speedtalk, It's in effect a form of telepathy, but entirely based upon their extraordinary mastery of psychology.
And anyone who has a good grounding in astronomy will recognize at once the fundamental flaw in the Mule's reasoning: the galaxy isn't a giant wheel turning as a unit on its axis. Instead, it's composed of enormous numbers of stars, all orbiting around the galactic center of mass (now known to be a gigantic black hole, a celestial body so massive that even light cannot escape its gravity). Each star system follows its own path around and around, moving at a speed determined by Newtonian mechanics. As a result, it's not really meaningful to look for a star on the opposite side of the galaxy from Terminus. Even if it was in that position when Seldon first founded his organization, it won't necessarily be in that exact same position relative to Terminus three centuries later.
However, it appears to bring the storyline to a close -- but Asimov wasn't finished writing Foundation stories yet. He followed it with one last novella, titled "...And Now You Don't", which was included in Second Foundation as "Search by the Foundation."
It takes up some sixty years after the Mule's mental defeat by the Second Foundation, and introduces us to a brand new character, Arkady Darell. When we first meet her, she's in the process of writing an essay on the future of the Seldon Plan. Just to make it clear we're looking at a future world, she's not writing it with a pen, or even a typewriter. Instead she has a device known as a Transcriber, which turns her spoken words into writing -- and has an awkward habit of picking up and transcribing everything its owner says, even if it's not supposed to be in the essay.
So we get to see the new problems of new technology as Arkady dictates her essay to this machine, which at the time the original story was written must've seemed incredibly futuristic, something that probably wouldn't come into existence for centuries, even millennia. Neither Asimov nor his original audience had foreseen the Digital Revolution, brought about by the integrated circuit and the photolithographic process. In the here and now we already have such software as Dragon Naturally Speaking, used by such sf luminaries as David Weber, which can transcribe speech into writing -- and since it does it in a file one one's computer, can be edited as needed before actually printing it up, preventing gaffes such as the one Arkady experiences (just as word-processing software made it possible to correct errors in typing without clumsy correction fluid or retyping an entire page).
This scene also gives us a big chunk of the reason why this would be Asimov's last Foundation story for a long time: it was becoming harder and harder to find ways to summarize What Had Gone Before for new readers without a blatant lump of text that would be nothing but an annoyance to his established fans. And while "introduce major protagonist in the middle of writing a school essay" is a clever one, that sort of clever works exactly once for any given author -- and soon becomes a cliche that new writers are warned against using At All.
Once we are introduced to Arkady and (re)introduced to the Foundation 'verse, we get into the meat of the story. The Mule has been dead now for five and a half decades (his mutation having significantly shortened his life, such that he got only five more years as First Citizen of the Union of Worlds after the Second Foundation agent adjusted him), but Kalgan continues to be a thorn in the Foundation's side. Worse, the Foundation is now all too aware that it is in fact only the First Foundation, and somewhere out there is the Second Foundation.
For some people, that knowledge is comforting. They like the idea of super-humans watching over them, protecting them from big nasty surprises in the Big Mean Galaxy out there. But for others, the existence of the Second Foundation is a source of continual annoyance, a reminder that someone else is running things behind their backs. And increasingly, those people want to find the Second Foundation and get rid of it, for good.
And that's how young Arkady goes from being an ordinary young woman to someone in the midst of galactic affairs, when she decides to add herself to the little group conspiring to eliminate the Second Foundation. It's a choice that will take her all the way across the spiral arm to Trantor itself, and put her in the presence of some truly extraordinary people, for all that she perceives them as just some Space Amish from the technologically regressed survivors of the infamous Sack of Trantor, which slaughtered trillions and laid waste to the heart of galactic civilization.
The Foundation has two things on their side in their search for their shadow twin. Unlike the Mule, they are well versed in science, including astronomy, and don't make the mistake of thinking of the galaxy as if it were a single physical object with two sides. They are aware that stars go around the galactic core, and thus are thinking of the galaxy in terms of going around in circles. And second, they've developed a device that produces a sort of "telepathic static," blocking the ability of Second Foundation mentalists to adjust the minds of First Foundation personnel and causing active anguish to anyone attempting to use mentalics in its presence.
It's interesting to see the various ideas offered by the characters for the location of the Second Foundation. One opines that it's not a real organization in a real place. Instead, it's like Dumbo's magic feather -- an idea that helps give confidence to the Foundation in the face of disaster. Another suggests that, given both the Mule (under the pseudonym of Magnifico) and Arkady fled Kalgan in great haste, the Second Foundation is in fact there, working under deep cover.
Yet at the end it's that notion of orbits and circles (or ellipses, if one wants to be technical) that captivates the First Foundation. They know the Mule made a mistake in thinking of the galaxy as a disc with two sides, and don't plan to repeat it. Instead, they realize that a circle (or ellipse, or orbit) has no end, that it comes right back around on itself -- and therefore the Second Foundation is hiding right there in plain sight, right among the First Foundation all along. Turn on the telepathic static generator, find out who reacts, and deal with them. Problem solved.
And then, in one final chapter, we discover that the First Foundation made its own mistake because it was designed to think in terms of the physical sciences, in this case of astronomy and astrophysics. But Hari Seldom was a social scientist, and when he talked about setting up a Second Foundation at the other end of the galaxy, he was speaking in terms of metropole and peripheries. And given that the entire Foundation series is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire recycled In Space, the whole business about Stars' End is meant to recall the old saying of "All roads lead to Rome." Yes, the Second Foundation was indeed hiding in plain sight, but not where the First Foundation was looking.
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Review posted July 17, 2021.
