Second Foundation
WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST ALL-TIME SERIESThe Foundation series is Isaac Asimov’s iconic masterpiece. Unfolding against the backdrop of a crumbling Galactic Empire, the story of Hari Seldon’s two Foundations is a lasting testament to an extraordinary imagination, one whose unprecedented scale shaped science fiction as we know it today.The First Foundation has been defeated, crushed by the formidable mental powers of the Mule. But whispers of the mysterious Second Foundation, the only hope of defeating the Mule, are beginning to spread…Surviving members of the First Foundation also fear the secret powers of the Second Foundation, vowing to find and destroy it. However, the location of the Second Foundation remains shrouded in mystery. Finding it will lead the Foundation to the opposite end of the Galaxy, where the fate of Seldon’s two Foundations awaits.
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First published in Great Britain by Digit (Brown, Watson) 1958
Copyright © Isaac Asimov 1953
Second Foundation is based upon published material originally copyrighted by Smith & Street Publications Inc. 1948, 1949
Cover design and illustration by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Isaac Asimov asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008117511
Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780007384853
Version: 2018-09-20
to Marcia, John and Stan
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part I: Search By The Mule
Chapter 1: Two Men And The Mule
Chapter 2: Two Men Without The Mule
Chapter 3: Two Men And A Peasant
Chapter 4: Two Men And The Elders
Chapter 5: One Man And The Mule
Chapter 6: One Man, The Mule – And Another
Part II: Search By The Foundation
Chapter 7: Arcadia
Chapter 8: Seldon’s Plan
Chapter 9: The Conspirators
Chapter 10: Approaching Crisis
Chapter 11: Stowaway
Chapter 12: Lord
Chapter 13: Lady
Chapter 14: Anxiety
Chapter 15: Through The Grid
Chapter 16: Beginning Of War
Chapter 17: War
Chapter 18: Ghost Of A World
Chapter 19: End Of War
Chapter 20: ‘I Know …’
Chapter 21: The Answer That Satisfied
Chapter 22: The Answer That Was True
Footnote
About the Author
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years. It had included all the planets of the Galaxy in a centralized rule, sometimes tyrannical, sometimes benevolent, always orderly. Human beings had forgotten that any other form of existence could be.
All except Hari Seldon.
Hari Seldon was the last great scientist of the First Empire. It was he who brought the science of psycho-history to its full development. Psycho-history was the quintessence of sociology; it was the science of human behaviour reduced to mathematical equations.
The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically. The larger the mob, the greater the accuracy that could be achieved. And the size of the human masses that Seldon worked with was no less than the population of the Galaxy which in his time was numbered in the quintillions.
It was Seldon, then, who foresaw, against all common sense and popular belief, that the brilliant Empire which seemed so strong was in a state of irremediable decay and decline. He foresaw (or he solved his equations and interpreted its symbols, which amounts to the same thing) that left to itself, the Galaxy would pass through a thirty thousand year period of misery and anarchy before a unified government would rise once more.
He set about to remedy the situation, to bring about a state of affairs that would restore peace and civilization in a single thousand of years. Carefully, he set up two colonies of scientists that he called ‘Foundations.’ With deliberate intention, he set them up ‘at opposite ends of the Galaxy.’ One Foundation was set up in the full daylight of publicity. The existence of the other, the Second Foundation, was drowned in silence.
In Foundation (Gnome, 1951) and Foundation and Empire (Gnome, 1952) are told the first three centuries of the history of the First Foundation. It began as a small community of Encyclopedists lost in the emptiness of the outer periphery of the Galaxy. Periodically, it faced a crisis in which the variables of human intercourse, of the social and economic currents of the time constricted about it. Its freedom to move lay along only one certain line and when it moved in that direction, a new horizon of development opened before it. All had been planned by Hari Seldon, long dead now.
The First Foundation, with its superior science, took over the barbarized planets that surrounded it. It faced the anarchic Warlords that broke away from the dying Empire and beat them. It faced the remnant of the Empire itself under its last strong Emperor and its last strong General and beat it.
