Being summer, I've been digging into sci-fi like a duck who heads south for the winter - it's second nature. And having dug the first entry to the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, I expected this second installment to continue the good speculative fiction that I found in the first. I'm glad that some of that was there, but sadly not enough.

Asimov started each chapter with a narrative about place so as to set up the scenes that followed. Often times when I ran into these set-ups I waned him to get on with the story. I wouldn't have minded the narration if it had been interesting, but alas the intros read like lectures. Next!

So the story revolves around the now powerful Foundation, which goes through a transformation at the hands of a mutant! Eek! What's great about it the story is that there's a couple of twists that make the ending unexpected. So I'm not as cynical as I appear above after all.

I like Asimov's stories. I-Robot is one of my favorites because of the universal theme of how we humans surround ourselves with pet companions and protectors (our cats and dogs and other pets). That story was great and demo'd Asimov's genius.

Foundation and Empire has hints of the genius that Asimov would develop over the years and it was fun to read them.