The novel “Foundation’s Fear” by Gregory Benford was published for the first time in 1997. It’s the first book of the so-called second Foundation trilogy.
Emperor Cleon I intends to appoint Hari Seldon as Prime Minister but the political situation is complicated. The imperial choice is due to the belief that the psychohistory that Seldon is developing can help the Galactic Empire. Betan Lamurk, a member of the Imperial Council, has his own ambitions and is ready to do anything to eliminate Seldon.
One controversy among the populace concerns artificial identities. Simulations of Voltaire and Joan of Arc are used to explore different positions on the nature of artificial identities but their activity ends up taking unexpected turns.
In the last years of his life, Isaac Asimov wrote some novels that were aimed to bring together the various cycles that he had written in the previous decades. In “Forward the Foundation” in particular, he tells how the robot R. Daneel Olivaw was important in imperial politics and in Hari Seldon’s. After Asimov’s death, other authors were allowed by his estate to write a new trilogy of novels that fill in what were considered holes in that great story. This means that one must already be familiar with the various parts of Asimov’s future history to understand the setting and the protagonists.
Gregory Benford is the author of the first novel in what was called the second Foundation trilogy. The events of “Foundation’s Fear” intertwine with those of “Forward the Foundation” focusing on the period in which Hari Seldon is appointed Prime Minister by Emperor Cleon I. This novel gave me extremely mixed feelings due to its different parts, which in my opinion, make it uneven.
I was skeptical about this type of operation because there’s always the risk that it will simply exploit the fame of a series without adding anything substantial to it. The last Foundation novels written by Isaac Asimov hadn’t convinced me much because he had wanted to unite all the parts of his future history radically changing the perspective of the original Foundation trilogy. The authors of the second Foundation trilogy are top-notch, so I decided to give it a chance anyway.
The idea of having new developments of Hari Seldon’s story and his creation of psychohistory was intriguing despite my doubts. This part of “Foundation’s Fear” is by far the one that interested me the most but the novel includes more and reasons to get bored quickly arrived for me.
The subplot centered around the simulations of Voltaire and Joan of Arc is mostly separated from the rest of the novel. The initial part concerns philosophical-religious discussions I found absolutely not interesting, so I got bored quickly. Moving forward, I could see that Gregory Benford uses this subplot to expand the entire fictional universe created by Isaac Asimov in his own way. In my opinion, it could have been an interesting idea as part of another Foundation-related story but as a subplot of “Foundation’s Fear” and developed that way it left me cold.
I found the development of the main plot about Hari Seldon’s contacts with chimpanzees more interesting. Usually, in the novel, they’re called simply pans but a reference to the classification Pan troglodytes present in ancient documents confirms that they’re chimpanzees. By examining their behaviors and the similarities to human behaviors, Seldon draws some ideas for the development of psychohistory.
Overall, “Foundation’s Fear” seemed nice to me but nothing more mainly because of the digressions with respect to Hari Seldon’s story. It’s a novel you might like if you want to read all the official stories of the Foundation and appreciate the ideas added by Gregory Benford.
