When a favourite author writes in a favourite universe, you hope the results will be awesome. Unfortunately it was just "meh". Asimov's Hari Seldon molded the future of the galaxy and mankind as he knew it into his own vision of perfection. Brin's Seldon refuses to do the same. The situations, backgrounds and major players keep setting up to be special and repeatedly fall short.
Don't get me wrong, Brin doesn't slight Asimov's work, he just takes it in a direction that doesn't work for me. Maybe if I'd read the other two books in the Second Foundation trilogy by Benford and Bear I would have been more in tune with this one.
Foundation lovers likely can't resist another book in the same universe they love so well, just don't expect another Asimov Foundation novel and you won't be setting yourself up for disappointment. ( )

Un anciano Hari Seldon empieza a descubrir que tal vez ni la Primera ni la Segunda Fundación pueden ser la solución definitiva ante la amenaza del Caos y el grave peligro que se cierne sobre la civilización humana. Sheldon se embarca en su última aventura, un viaje en busca de los factores que le sirvan para completar su amplio conocimiento del futuro. Le acompañan diferentes facciones de robots -Calvinistas, Lodovik Trema…-, seres humanos y entidades híbridas -un chimpancé asesino de robots, los ubicuos Voltaire y Juana…-. Entre otros factores, Sheldon necesita conocer la última manipulación de Daneel a la humanidad. Desea ver como será ese futuro en el que un tal Golan Trevize aceptará el ofrecimiento de una mente planetaria frente a las -según Daneel- caóticas sociedades de la Fundación.

SPOILERS AHEAD; SKIP IF YOU'RE PLANNING TO READ THIS AND DON'T WANT TO KNOW. This is the third book in the new Foundation trilogy, and it's quite an interesting addition. Hari Seldon, now old, isolated from what's left of his family by the exigencies of the Plan, and no longer a major object of suspicion for the Imperial security forces, decides to pursue a minor mystery brought to him by a minor bureaucrat who has been working at the mathematics of psychohistory as a hobby. The mystery concerns "tilling", the fact that nearly every human-inhabited planet was subjected to a major churning and grinding of the soil, making it suitable for agriculture, before humans arrived--in an expanding wave just ahead of the wave of human colonial expansion, in fact. There are exceptions, though, worlds where the process didn't happen, and substantial amounts of life unlike the life on most human worlds still survives. What do these anomalies mean? Why do they appear to track so well with the distribution of "chaos worlds", the worlds that experience a runaway outbreak of advancing science, art, and technology, before collapsing into equally runaway disaster?

Hari quickly discovers he's on the trail of something very important to psycohistory and the Plan, and Daneel, the Calvinian robots, imperial security, and several other forces are in hot pursuit of him. All fairly standard, except for where Brin takes this. Put simply, not only is psychohistory wrong, in the sense of inaccurate and inadequate to the job Hari's trying to do with it, but the goal is wrong. Hari's Plan rests on certain assumptions about human nature and human capacity that are not correct, based on facts which are incomplete and which have been subjected to seriously flawed analysis by Daneel and Giskard, which have never been checked against the wishes and opinions of humans. And Daneel has deliberately deceived Hari Seldon about these facts. He has done it from the best of motives, but he's wrong. He's concerned only with taking the safest path for the human species, not the best path; because of the Three Laws, and the Zeroth Law, he can't really distinguish between the two. Hari's plan is really Daneel's plan, and it's a mistake. At the end, it appears that Daneel's plan is triumphant; the hope for a genuinely human future--and perhaps a future where humans may finally be able to run the risk of meeting intelligent aliens--is that Hari's Foundation will be more robust than Hari or Daneel have believed, and prevent Daneel's rather horrifying, but very safe, Gaia plan from coming to fruition.

Altogether, a rather darker and more interesting book than I expected. ( )

I am a fan of most of David Brin's books but guess this trilogy too deep/profound for me or something -- not a good story. Too much philosophy and not enough story (or even a good job carrying the what-if theme of everything in Asimov's original vision). Take away name of title, places and characters and I would never have suspected this had anything to do with Foundation novels. ( )

This is the final book in the Foundation trilogy filling in the bits of Hari Seldon's life undocumented by Asimov himself. Like the earlier books in the series, it takes a deeper look at the background consipracies that had kept the Empire stable for 12 millennia and even attempts to look at possible explanations for the great metal Cities of Earth and the mysongenist Spacer worlds. Brin references work throughout Asimov's Foundation and Empire series whether or not they were particularly relevant but it has been interesting to see them as I'm sure I didn't catch them when I first read the book :-) ( )