Hank G (BookWyrm) reviewed Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov
My Favorite Book In Empire/Foundation Series So Far
5 stars
Content warning Major Spoilers
This has been my favorite of the books I've read so far. I did enjoy other ones too but this was the first one that didn't feel like a detective novel. Early on I thought that's the direction we were going to go but we didn't. There was some nonsensical behaviors of characters, especially in the beginning, and some fantastical abilities of people but that ended up getting explained by Demerzel being R. Daneel from the Robots book. In fact this was the first time I could see why Asimov recommended the reading order that he did. A big part of this was the Seldon character, the developer of psychohistory, running across people trying to tell him prehistory stuff which apparently dropped out of mainstream history but was preserved in legends. There was the whole "Earth vs. Aurora" thing. There was the discussion of robots, which were no longer a thing. Having the full back story of these things made the discovery and misdirections much more riveting. From the TV show I figured Demerzel was a robot. I didn't realize he, not she as in the show, was R. Daneel until the reveal. I also didn't connect that Hummin was Demerzel, I just assumed he was working for Empire. Explaining away some of the fantastical and nonsensical behaviors with Daneel's mental telepathy powers was a good way to tie everything together. It may be a bit of a Deus ex Machina but I thought it worked. Since there was a gender swap on Demerzel my initial visualization of the actress from the show got swapped in for Alexander Skarsgard before I knew Demerzel was Daneel. My visualization didn't flip to what I pictured Daneel being like from when I was reading the previous books though. I don't imagine it will. Seldon is a lot younger here than in the show but I still picture Jared Harris as Seldon. That makes some of his hamhandedness in things more nonsensical but not too bad. It does make the sexual dynamic with Dors a little more cringy to me, middle aged man with younger woman trope versus two contemporaries of similar ages. It's not too much of a distraction though. I'm looking forward to the next book in the series.
