Not So Scary After All

This book was a disappointment. I'd looked forward to it ever since I'd discovered that Greg Benford, Greg Bear and David Brin had written three more Foundation novels to continue Isaac Asimov's classic series, begun with a trilogy in the 1950s and followed up by at least three more Asimov volumes in the 1980s and 90s.

The Asimov novels are fantastic -- when combined with his robot stories and galactic expansion novels, they cover ten to twenty thousand years of future human history, leading up to the collapse of an empire spanning the galaxy and the careful steps to speed a return to order and peace through the science of psychohistory.

But all that's for another review. This book continues the story, all right, and pulls in some interesting new ideas and story lines, but it's ponderous for long stretches, and the "simulated personalities" of Voltaire and Joan of Arc are simultaneously too well done for the supposed lack of historical knowledge of the era and too one dimensional to be interesting artificial intelligences.

Then there's that weird part of the story where Hari Seldon and his girlfriend get mentally implanted into apelike creatures to Benford can lecture us about evolutionary biology, a subject with fascinating internal logic but one that ultimately produces a closed system with no purpose or result.

But Benford still gets credit for trying. Writing the first Foundation novel after Asimov's death must have been a real challenge; not one I'd want to attempt.