The Foundationa Strain

I would like to share my new favorite word with everyone.

quixotic-adj.-resembling or befitting Don Quixote

That's right, he has a word (in the English dictionary) that was named after him! Plus, they apparently still know it even after they've forgotten where the human race originated! I guess it's going to become wildly popular soon.

Otherwise, I’ve finished my Gothic story, and I’m quite happy with it. I hope anyone reading this will enjoy it (and vote for it) when it’s read in class.

In Second Foundation, we start with the Mule. He has searched for the Second Foundation for 5 years; during this time period he has not expanded his empire. He sends out a man who he has not used his mutant powers on, along with one who has been artificially faithful to him for years.

The unaltered man finds the Second Foundation to a planet at the center of a much smaller empire. With the other man, he travels to a small planet in the empire to prove his conjecture.

Once there, he accuses the Mule’s man of having been altered by a Second Foundationer, who are known to have mental powers surpassing the Mule’s. Just then, the Mule appears, having traced the ship. He knows the man to be from the Second Foundation, and engages him in a battle of wills. The Mule wins, and forces him to tell the true location of the Second Foundation; the planet they are currently on.

The First Speaker, leader of the Second Foundation, then enters. He reveals that the first man had volunteered to have his mind altered into believing an incorrect location for the Second Foundation. He overpowers the Mule, and forcibly changes him into a more harmless dictator.

In the second section, we skip a bit further into the future, to join a 14-year old girl named Arkady.

We also see the new First Speaker, who knows that the Foundation is becoming dangerously close to destroying Seldon’s plan by studying to far into psychology and relying on the Second Foundation to keep them safe.

He tricks the leading psychologists there into believing they had destroyed the Second Foundation (who they knew were altering the minds of many of the Foundation’s leaders) with a psychic weapon that they had developed.

At the same time, Arkady realizes the location of the Second Foundation to be Terminus itself, as a circle (the galaxy) has no end. This is untrue, and it is later revealed that Arkady had been altered at birth, so the psychologists could detect nothing unusual in her, as being altered was her usual state.

A conversation between the First Speaker (who doesn’t actually speak; the Second Foundation has developed psychology so far that they can read minor gestures like a language) and his future successor reveals the true location of the Second Foundation to be Trantor; the opposite end of the galaxy from a psychologist’s point of view. It was the center of the greatest ever empire in Seldon’s day, while Terminus was a tiny, unpopulated planet.

The First Speaker is also revealed to have been the seemingly innocuous farmer that Arkady had been staying with when she fled the Mule’s successor (in title only) to Trantor during the war between Kalgan and the Foundation (if you want to understand that…read the book!).

So. This book rekindled my interest in the Foundation series, as it was a good bit more complicated than the other books in it. I do plan to continue reading the series, and sincerely hope that I can find the rest of the books.

The next book that I need to read, Caves of Steel, will actually jump into a different series, the Robot series, and will be set in the past in relation to Second Foundation. This seems like it will be rather annoying to me. I have also had difficulty finding it; I know it’s somewhere in this house (I’ve read it before) but it’s nowhere to be found. A quick scan of the school library recently showed there to be many Asimov book, so I hope I can find a copy there, at least.

Boy, that was rather lengthy and ineloquent, wasn’t it? That title is a pretty big stretch, too.