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have seen the world as ignorant as it was when he began, and perhaps more dangerously ignorant. Could he help but have wished for an opportunity such as that offered Trevise the chance to make the right decision for the whole galaxy?
One might speculate that, as successful as his career in teaching science and communicating a rational approach to human problems had been, his failure to make an impression on the invincible ignorance of the American public might have led him to write more science fiction rather than the science popularizations to which he had mostly dedicated himself after 1958. Whether he should do so was a question he asked his readers in the February 1983 Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine under the title "More Asimov?" He could have had little doubt about the answer, because he had already accepted a contract to write the third volume in his Robot novel series.
Although Foundation's Edge is like The Foundation Trilogy in many ways, it also departs significantly from its predecessors; what may be surprising is its similarities. Asimov, forty years older, had changed in other ways. He was no longer a student, no longer concerned about money, no longer anxious to please John Campbell. At that point in his life, the only worry about writing SF (the worry that kept him from writing SF for so long before The Gods Themselves) was that his work would not seem worthy by current standards. He could write relaxed except for the need not to disgrace himself or to reduce the significance of his earlier work. In Foundation's Edge, the reader could see Asimov enjoying himself.
Not that the novel is without flaws. On the plot level, for instance, the First Foundation's development of the "mental shield" catches the Second Foundation by surprise. Though it is described as the most secret of projects, it is the very thing following Toran Darell's invention of the Mental Static machine in "Search by the Foundation" that the Second Foundation psychologists would have kept closest watch on and would have sabotaged.
The Mule's origin on Gaia seems inconsistent both with what we know about the Mule and what we know about Gaia. His sterility, for instance, which was revealed so dramatically at the conclusion of "The Mule," is a logical outgrowth of his origin as a natural mutation. But there is nothing about origin on Gaia that would make sterility anything more than accidental, unless it was the reason for the Mule's becoming a renegade. But surely in a planetary gestalt dissident feelings and thought are impossible to conceal, and why would sterility disturb a member of the gestalt, who is survived by the entire planet? An elderly

 
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