Second Foundation

I have mixed feelings about this book.

It's about the search for the hidden and secretive Second Foundation. First the Mule tries to find it, then after his death the restored First Foundation tries to find it.

It's understandable that the First Foundation should be curious, but in fact the First Foundation seeks the Second in order to destroy it. Both Foundations were established by Hari Seldon and are essential elements of his Plan. Shouldn't the First Foundation be willing to accept that?

Apparently not. It expects and receives help from the Second Foundation, but then ungratefully tries to destroy it. Perhaps this is indeed the way humans behave, but I don't like it.

So I don't really enjoy the search for the Second Foundation. Furthermore, in this book Asimov started a habit that he continued in other books, of presenting and justifying a series of wrong answers to a mystery, until eventually we get the right answer. I suppose there's a sort of cleverness to it, but as a reader I find it rather tedious and irritating.

However, there are two things I do enjoy about the book: the parts of the story told from the Second Foundation's point of view, and the creation of Arkady Darell: one of Asimov's more memorable characters, and a teenage heroine from a time when teenage heroines were unusual (and most of his characters were male). I suspect that Asimov based Arkady on a girl he met in the real world; at the time of writing he was about 29 and married, but had no children yet.

I'm impressed by the user interface of the Prime Radiant, as described in Chapter 8. It's a remarkable feat of imagination, considering that it was written in the late 1940s, at which time there were only a few very primitive computers in the world. We still couldn't implement all features of the Prime Radiant today, but I suppose that with effort and expense we could make an inferior imitation. It's much easier to imagine now than it was then.