I’ve finished the second prequel to Asimov’s Foundation series. (You can read my review of the first book, Prelude to Foundation, here.) This book takes place shortly after the events of the previous book, and predates the contents of the first of Asimov’s Foundation books, Foundation. Below I’ll go into a bit of detail on my thoughts on the book, but the TL;DR is: wow. Loved it. Seriously. Better than the last one.

I mentioned in the previous post that I’ve read (most of) this series before, but it’s been a while — maybe five or six years. This is long enough that I can remember the overall story, but not many of the details. I love reading books at this point, because it’s recent enough that I remember my love for it and the excitement throughout reading, but it’s also long enough that I’ve forgotten practically all of the crucial details until the author is divulging them to me anew once more. Some people don’t like rereading books, but I am certainly not one of them!

As much as I praised the previous novel for Asimov’s excellent writing style… this one is markedly better. I don’t know exactly how or why, but something about the way he writes really speaks to me and motivates me to continue reading. It’s just so… inviting. I dunno. It’s kind of hard to explain, haha.

(Warning: definite spoilers ahead!)

I think one of the most impressive things about this book is the pacing. In Prelude, we follow Hari Seldon’s race across Trantor during a time in his life which later comes to be known as “The Flight”. There are multiple climaxes throughout the story, but the entire chronicle takes place within about a year.

Forward is very different in that there are multiple major segments of the book, and each segment is separated by quite a few years. The book starts off eight years after the end of Prelude, and then each successive portion is at least a decade after the previous. Each of these portions has its own complete plot — an entire story within the story — and I think that’s incredibly impressive. At no point does it get tiresome or irritating to read a book written this way.

But as I mentioned in the previous post about Prelude, it’s really amazing to me that Asimov had the ability to see the entirety of this story from the beginning (or at least enough of it). And I know that these two prequel novels were actually written after the core Foundation trilogy, but it’s still incredible to me how Asimov was able to plan out everything so well and space out the different segments in such a way as to make it truly believable.

And I think that’s what separates his science fiction works from many others. While many of the technologies don’t exist (we certainly don’t have faster-than-light “jump” capabilities!), within the framework of Asimov’s world it is clear that everything in these books is reasonable. Practically all science fiction requires some capability on the part of the reader for suspension of disbelief, of course. But Asimov never asks any more of the reader; you are never told something which is inconsistent with previous knowledge, or which somehow requires a new “magical” explanation to justify its inclusion in the story. It’s all very natural, to a degree, and I think that’s one of the things I really like about it.

There’s not really much more for me to say here, other than: a solid five stars!

★★★★★