“But there, just past the reaching point, was the memory of the past, still glowing in unrusted splendor, and burning with fire where the sun of Trantor caught it in gleaming highlights. She had been there once during the months since she had arrived on Trantor. She had climbed onto the smooth, unjointed pavement and ventured into the silent dust-streaked structures, where the light entered through the jags of broken walls and partions.
It had been solidified heartache. It had been blasphemy.”
And now we are done.
A small but intrepid group began 2012 with the first book in Isaac Asimov’s famed trilogy and now we are at the end. This is my second read through of the trilogy and I can honestly say that I got even more out of it this time. In fact, as I’ll discuss later, it was almost like reading an entirely new book as things were revealed in this read through that I wasn’t focused on during my first time.
It has been great fun reading through this trilogy, and at some point I look forward to continuing on with the books Asimov added to the canon years later. But for now let’s have our final discussion of this group read. Each and every one of these posts has contained spoilers for the uninitiated, and this will be no different.
1. Now that the trilogy is over, discuss your feelings on Asimov’s portrayal of female characters?
Overall I’m very pleased with them. I think I sometimes make the mistake of being too surprised when authors from a certain era manage to write compelling female characters. Some degree of surprise is to be expected, science fiction remains a largely male dominated genre and in the so called “golden age” you were more likely to find a woman either in a traditional gender role or, if the author was being “daring”, as an object of free love (sex). So when I see Asimov create a character like Bayta or Arkady, despite their minimal page time, I am impressed.
In Second Foundation I enjoyed the fact that Lady Callia was initially portrayed as a dumb bimbo character, fawning for the barest crumbs of attention, and later she turns out to be an extremely capable and adept Second Foundation agent. I enjoy the fact that in many ways Arkady is not far removed from a teenager of today and yet she is additionally portrayed as being very intelligent and resourceful and not nearly as stereotypically self-centered as she could have been written. I like that she has a strong bond with the stories of her ancestor, Bayta, and that this relationship is mentioned more than once during the book.
It was nice to see a balance of male and female characters in these last two books that had important roles in the story.
2. After all the back and forth mind control of the first part of Second Foundation, what was your state of mind reading this second section of the book? Were you suspicious of everyone? Did you figure things out? Were you just going along for the ride?
I mentioned my memory problems with this story before, so keep in mind that for the most part reading this story again was like reading it for the first time. And yes, I was highly suspicious the entire time, seeing mind control and Second Foundation bogeymen around every turn. 
I found myself wondering if this person or that person were being controlled, etc. And when those suspicions started coming true, like the revelation of Lady Callia and the assumption that she had worked on Arkady, I began to suspect folks even more.
That being said I still didn’t figure everything out. I was definitely being carried along for the ride, only it the kind of reading experience equivalent to looking over my shoulder because I felt someone was watching me.
3. Throughout the three novels we were shown a couple of versions of Trantor. Which is more appealing to you? Which would you rather visit?
I tend to lean towards the ruined Trantor. I like ruins in general. There is a melancholy atmosphere to the idea of Trantor being reclaimed for agricultural purposes while hulking ruins of what it once was are scattered all round. And of course I LOVE the idea of that enormous library just sitting there, a shrine to what once was. The quote I included in the opening of this post, which goes so well with Whelan’s cover image, really struck a cord with me and sums up how I feel about the ruined and recovering Trantor.
Of course I would also be fascinated with visiting a planet that was just all one big city. Seeing Coruscant in the Star Wars films (which appears to be modeled upon Trantor) was pretty darn amazing. I can’t imagine what it would be like to visit a place like that.
4. How have your thoughts about Hari Seldon, his plan, and either or both Foundations changed, or not, during the course of these three novels?
I think the thing I had to keep reminding myself throughout the book is that Seldon’s aims were noble. He predicted the inevitable downfall of the Empire and knew that without intervention there would be a terrible dark age that would last thousands of years. He believed that through applied psychohistory he could reduce that barbaric period to a mere thousand years and user in the new Empire. Despite those noteworthy intentions, what we see played out before us is a great deal of manipulation, unethical behavior, and mind-control. And this is from the “good guys”. Reading the Foundation Trilogy and comparing it to the state of politics and business in our lifetime made for a very interesting experience.
I don’t believe it was Seldon’s intention for anyone to get hurt in the process and yet I believe he understood that the hurt was going to come no matter what and the best thing he could do was try to keep the time allotted for that to a minimum. Does the end justify the means? I’m certainly not sure. But it made for one fantastic read.
5. What, if anything, surprised you in this last half of the book? How do you feel Second Foundation held up compared to the other two books in the trilogy?
The books relevance to current events was a tremendous surprise, and the whole gray area that the novel is painted in surprised me greatly because I just didn’t remember catching much of that mood the first time that I read it.
I was surprised the first time and then surprised all over again that Preem Palver was the First Speaker. I had remembered that this was the big reveal at the end of the story but just couldn’t recall who it was. (Speaking of Palver, did anyone else catch how Yoda-like his and mamma’s speech patterns were during that one seen back at their house? I was cracking up!).
I loved the fact that the Second Foundation was hidden in plain sight. I remember it being a big surprise to me the first time I read it. It made sense, but I just wasn’t picking up on the hints that first time.
The first time I read the trilogy, Foundation and Empire was my favorite of the three, but this time I felt just a tiny bit more taken with Second Foundation. I like Arkady so much, and I was much more fond of her dad this time. I’m sure that comes from being a father of a teenage girl (but not for too much longer). His revelations at the end of the story were a surprise for me as well. I hadn’t suspected anyone in his group like I was suspecting other people.
6. Did any themes stand out for you in this series? What are you taking away from the experience of reading the Foundation trilogy?
One thing I am taking away from this second read-through of the trilogy is a reminder that books can tell stories in such different ways. That not only is my experience of reading a book potentially different from another person’s, but that a subsequent reading of a book, or a series of books, can bring about wholly different revelations than it did the last time it was read. Much of what we talked about this time were not the things that stood out to me the first time. I think in my first reading I was so awed by how accessible the story was and how it was not at all the too-intellectual or too-scientific story I had assumed it to be when I was a young man just venturing into science fiction.
The themes of free will vs. control were very interesting to pick up on this time and mull over. Despite my feeling predisposed to like the Foundation and Second Foundation characters, it was hard to side with any of the sides that were manipulating people’s minds without their knowledge sometimes, and consent.
As I mentioned at the start, this has been so much fun to do with all of you. You have opened my eyes to many new things in the trilogy this time and it has been stimulating to the little gray cells to read all your back and forth on the various sites. I’m amazed at how much fun it is to see a book through someone else’s eyes. I do hope you’ll join me again in a group read sometime in the future. And I hope you all enjoyed the experience.
Please leave your links to your discussion posts below. Thank you all for your patience as this last discussion was delayed several days. And thanks again for taking part. You all rock!!!
If you didn’t catch the first part of this discussion and are interested, here is the link.
Hi Carl thanks so much for hosting this group read. I’ve really enjoyed the experience. I find it interesting that your second read of the series raised more questions for you. Of course, reading in a group setting helps with this I think. It is fun to see how all of us have different takes on the same story. It is like there isn’t one universal story, but our interpretations of the story.
Arkady was a fun character. I loved how he kept her as a true teenager, but still intelligent and brave.
Doing the group read has helped tremendously, not just with this book but with the others we’ve done as well. My buddy reads with Kailana do the same thing. Reading with someone else and knowing you are going to discuss it makes you read a bit differently, I think. And then there is the fact that other people always pick up on things I didn’t and that generates entirely new paths of conversation. Which makes it all so much fun.
Arkady is a really fun character, one of my favorites. My only regret is that we don’t get enough time with her. I would have liked to see her featured even more.
Arkady was a great character, but I found myself wishing that the Second Foundation hadn’t been using her, because it made me question how much of her awesomeness was really her own and how much was due to the Second Foundation engineering every little detail of her life.
Well spotted Grace – I never even considered that Arkady’s personality might be affected by the mind control thing!
Lynn
I don’t think there is much evidence to suggest Arkady was manipulated until she met Lady Callia and at that point I think all she would have done is use Arkady’s natural inclination to want to see Trantor, which she would’ve seen, as the push to get her to go there on their terms.
I think that even Arkady’s spying on her father’s meeting was evidence that she was being manipulated; I got the impression that it had been taking place since birth to get events to line up properly.
It is possible, but if I recall correctly they did do an initial scan on Arkady that didn’t show the manipulation that it showed when she got back.
Of course what is wonderful about this book is that the whole scan thing could be a plant by the Second Foundation! Ha!
But I tend to think Arkady was just being a typical kid, and listening in on parent’s conversations is pretty typical.
Hi Carl
I completely forgot about the Library on Trantor – I did put in my answer that I preferred Trantor when it was no longer the glossy planet of previous years – maybe my subconscious was thinking about the library.
I also found the conversations between Preem and his wife very funny – never put together the Yoda reference but now you mention it! Plus there seems to be so much ‘Star Wars’ elements to appear in these books – I even wondered about the guy who was called Captain Han (was it Pritcher?) – Han solo??
Lynn
Great readalong, thanks for hosting. I will definitely look out for any future readalongs that you do.
They had such weird sentence structure in that one conversation that they were having that suddenly I found myself hearing Yoda’s voice in my head. Cracked me up! Definitely a lot of stuff in these stories that make you think of Star Wars, and it is funny but I don’t remember picking up on those the first time I read the trilogy.
And it was my pleasure, thank you for joining in.
I loved the Callia twist. She was quite annoying as her “cover.”
I was suspicious of everyone because with mind-control, just about anything can happen. But because of that, the story stayed interesting. There just seemed to be so many possibilities.
I agree, the ruins would be the most captivating, but to see anything like Trantor would be amazing.
The books mostly made me think about government, and how a governing body will inherently take away some sort of freedom from the people, or else there would be anarchy. But where are we comfortable drawing the line? It’s been interesting reading different reactions to the books and seeing how we are all on a different place on that spectrum. What price are we willing to pay for stability? (I’m probably just stating some basic political theory here or something,lol, but it’s what I was thinking about anyway.)
Thanks once again Carl! The whole experience has been very entertaining and thought-provoking.
Callia was very annoying when she was playing the helpless bimbo character, but suddenly that character seemed very cool when you realize just how brilliant she actually is.
And I do believe you are right on the money. There has to be a price paid for true freedom. There have to be laws and laws mean giving up some of what we perceive as our freedoms in order for society to function in any kind of orderly fashion. These books took the concept and ran with it in very interesting ways.
You are welcome, thank you so much for participating, its been great.
Very interesting. The thing about your comments that strikes me the most is how you had expectations and assumptions about the books before you read them the first time, and again this time. When I read them long ago, all I knew was that they were considered very good. They were fairly recent, I hadn’t read any reviews of them other than blurb lines, so I went in completely cold. I think that was the very best way. The other thing is I read them at the time and in the cultural environment in which they were written, or at least just after the third book was published. That meant many things that you and many others, especially the female readers, noticed the presence or lack of, such as the strength of woman characters, went by my in-the-day sensibilities. To me they were all just characters, their gender played no part in my reading experience.
As for the larger themes, I took it all at face value. I was about 15 years old and didn’t have lot of “big picture” awareness.
Thus my reading experience was pretty, well, flat I guess, compared to the more evaluative, introspective way this group read the book.
I was pretty amazed the first time I read these how they blew away so many of my assumptions. The books were far better (for me given the style of sf I liked to read) than I expected and they were so much more accessible than I thought they would be. This time through I thought I’d have some of the same reactions and then found myself surprised that I began seeing these different layers that I never noticed the first time through. It has been a real pleasure reading them again.
I’d like to thank you as well for hosting these group reads. They’ve been a lot of fun! I don’t think I would have read Asimov if it wasn’t for these and I really enjoyed reading other’s thoughts on these books.