Second Foundation

Second Foundation was published by Gnome Press in 1953 as the third volume of the Foundation trilogy. It gathers two novellas that Asimov had published in Astounding in the late 1940s, and it is the book in which the series' central mystery is answered: what the Second Foundation is for, where it is, and how it has been doing its work while the First Foundation's traders argue about politics in public. Because the answer is a piece of misdirection, the novel is the one in the trilogy most often discussed by readers who want to argue about the plan.

The first half belongs to the Mule, who is one of Asimov's most effective inventions: a mutant who is physically unimpressive and who changes people's loyalties by making them content, which makes him a threat that cannot be fought with fleets. The second half is a chase, with the Foundation's own security apparatus pursuing the Second Foundation's agents while the reader is kept deliberately uncertain about who is who. Asimov wrote the stories out of order and the chronology of the series does not follow the publication order, which the later books make explicit.

Asimov went back to the sequence decades later, adding two sequels and two prequels, and he tied the Foundation novels to his robot stories. The trilogy is still the most widely read entry point to his work, and its two cultural inheritances are the idea of a statistical science of history and the figure of a plan that is being quietly managed by people nobody in the story has heard of.

It is also the volume where his two great inventions meet: a science of mass behaviour that cannot account for one man, and a plan with a second layer that the people carrying it out were never told about.