Foundation’s Fear – Continued

It’s been three days since I finished the book. And I can’t seem to make my mind up about it….

Gregory Benford goes hardcore into Science Fiction. Not only on the mathist side of Hari’s Psychohistory but also on the sociological side. Even on the computer side he delves so deep as to virtualise persons and even alien leftovers from the past. Especially the virtualised persons seem a very poor hanger for a part of the story that just doesn’t seem to pick up speed. There were times when I thought of simply skipping those chapters to get back to the story of Hari himself again as that is, always, the main event of the book.
The “fight” for prime minister is another one of those story lines that seems rather unimportant at times and takes up rather more space then I would like.

But in the end the book does tell us a lot about Hari and his journey to the full Psychohistory. The book adds to the Foundation saga. But more importantly; Mister Benford drops a number of sociological points that fit very well into the current era in our own world. He takes Psychohistory research and projects it on modern day earth. Maybe not explicitly but implicitly enough to make the reader think twice about a number of passages in the book.

And when the story is finished the book ends with a chapter on how “the second foundation trilogy” came to pass. And suddenly a number of the cliffhangers in the book are given more meaning. Suddenly I very much want to read “Foundation and Chaos” by Greg Bear……