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Page 217
single world, Trantor, methods he can apply to the Galaxy. Even his continued work on something he considers almost impossible can be rationalized by Daneel's ability to influence his emotions. At the end Daneel promises Seldon a staff, computers, reference materials, and time. And if the time comes when Seldon can set up a device that might keep the worst from happening, Daneel urges him to think of two devices, so that if one fails, the other will carry on, and says that he himself has a second plan in case psychohistory fails. Thus Daneel (and Asimov) lay the groundwork not only for the Second Foundation but Gaia and Galaxia.
Prelude . . . also offers its readers one of the peculiar pleasures of science fiction the foregrounding of background. Asimov exemplifies that particularly in The Caves of Steel, but Prelude . . . also provides not only a tour of a planet almost completely enclosed in metal (The Caves of Steel carried to its ultimate) and its influence on the inhabitants (they, too, are afflicted with agoraphobia), but also a sense of scope and multiculturalism seldom found in novels of alien planets. In spite of their awareness that Earth is varied in climate, custom, language, religion, and social mores, SF writers tend to make alien planets all of a piece. Prelude . . . reveals only five sectors of the 800 on Trantor, but they are so different that the reader senses that difference is the norm.
Prelude . . . also updates the Foundation universe to fit the scientific knowledge, and speculation, of the 1980s. It contains a recognition of galactic structure, with Trantor nearer the uninhabitable galactic center (with its giant black hole) and Terminus near the outer edge of a spiral arm. And, in a pleasant return to the style of the earlier Foundation stories, each of its chapters is preceded by an appropriate excerpt from the Encyclopedia Galactica.
Asimov's portrait of Selden makes the founder of psychohistory more believable as well as more real. Selden's final scene with Dors includes a revelation of Selden's character: he accepts his need for Dors, and his unwillingness to go on without her, in spite of her admission that she does not, perhaps cannot, love him. Another deftly handled display of emotions occurs in Mycogen, when Raindrop Forty-Three, in a scene reminiscent of Gladia's removal of her glove and touching Baley's cheek, asks Selden to remove his skin cap and allow her to stroke his (erotic and forbidden) hair.
Just as Frank Herbert's Dune is a critique of The Foundation Trilogy, Prelude to Foundation is a response to Dune. Dune suggests that the Galaxy will not be as neat or as rational as the Trilogy portrays, that the pattern for the future will not be the Roman Empire but the Holy Roman

 
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