Free Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) by James Gunn Page A

sequel, "Search by the Mule," Asimov strikes out in a new direction. With its victory by default over the Empire, the Foundation has no clear challenges to the eventual extension of its power throughout the Galaxy and the final realization of Seldon's Plan. But what about the unexpected developments that Seldon's psychohistorical equations could not predict because they involve elements of the unique, like the genetic accident that creates the Mule and his unpredictable and Plan-destroying power? The answer: the Second Foundation.
    Asimov planted mention of the Second Foundation in the first Foundation story, not because he had anticipated the function of the Second Foundation but as a safety measure, a strategic reserve in case something developed in the plot and he needed a way out. In "The Mule," the Second Foundation emerges as a group of psychologists to whom Seldon's Plan was entrusted and who were charged with responsibility for protecting it. Finally, in "Search by the Foundation," two new questions are raised by the revelation of the Second Foundation: what will happen to the Foundation now that it knows of the existence of the Second Foundation and suspects its custody of Seldon's Plan (which destroys one of the basic requirements for the effectiveness of psychohistorical predictions), and what can the Second Foundation do to restore the previous condition and rescue Seldon's Plan? The answer is dual-purpose: the Second Foundation deceives the Foundation into believing that it has located and destroyed the Second Foundation. In "There's Nothing Like a Good Foundation,'' Asimov wrote that "in designing each new Foundation story, I found I had to work within an increasingly constricted area, with progressively fewer and fewer degrees of freedom. I was forced to seize whatever way out I could find without worrying about how difficult I might make the next story. Then when I came to the next story, those difficulties arose and beat me over the head." The difficulties are not apparent: each story seems designed to arise out of the earlier ones, and each develops with an air of inevitability appropriate to psychohistory itself. But it is critical folly to assume that the Trilogy is an organic whole, conceived before it was begun, crafted in accordance with some master plan, and produced in full consideration of the contribution of each part to the whole. External and internal evidence demonstrate that Asimov moved from story to story, solving the problems of each as they arose and discovering, on his own or with the help of Campbell, new problems on which to base the next stories. The Trilogy succeeds by its ingenuity, and it is a tribute to Asimov's ingenuity and cool rationality that it seems so complete, so well integrated.
    Foundations should be solid. They should leave no important areas uncovered. That The Foundation Trilogy is so solid may be the major reason it has survived and why so many later science-fiction stories have been built upon the "central myth" that it and earlier works pioneered.

3 Variations Upon a Robot
    Isaac Asimov's I, Robot has become one of the enduring titles in the canon of contemporary science fiction. Asimov's robot stories were the second of the two basic kinds of fiction with which he built his early reputation, the first being The Foundation Trilogy. Like the Trilogy, I, Robot, has seldom been out of print since its 1950 book publication by Gnome Press. It has sold several million copies in hardcover and paperback and has elicited persistent interest from filmmakers, most recently in the late 1970s and 1980s with a script by Harlan Ellison that suffered the usual Hollywood complications. Ellison's script was serialized in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1987 and published as a book in 1994.
    Asimov did not stop writing robot stories after the publication of I, Robot, as he did with the Foundation stories after the publication of the Trilogy. Another group of stories was