** spoiler alert ** This was, like its predecessors, an enjoyable story. I enjoyed the premise for it, the pacing, and even the characterization is very much improved over the earlier Foundation novels (however little that may be saying).

But I cannot review this book without spoiling it. So read no further if that bothers you.

The real shortcoming is that Asimov abandons (at the very end) the first two foundations to have yet a third organization secretly pull strings from behind a curtain. I get that they're benevolent, that's fine, but Asimov spent the first three books building up the predictive powers of psychohistory as thoroughly grounded in scientific fact and experimentation, and vetted and improved upon by the Second Foundation, only to tear it down in this book and say -- without a bit of explanation -- that it wasn't good enough to account for the growth rate of technology, despite the fact that that's a big part of what it had been designed specifically to do and had done just fine at thus far.

But now we end up with yet a *third* organization working to construct a new second empire. This one, like the second, also operates in secrecy in order to achieve its goals, and so *again* Asimov comes back to ignorance as a key to solving problems created by knowledge, and that just seems like a huge betrayal of the principles he seems to be trying to embrace. He seems to have this split desire to deify science and the pursuit of knowledge in general most of the time, while embracing ignorance at other times. It's just too incongruent, in that regard.