Product Description
After years of struggle, the Foundation lies in ruins—destroyed by the mutant mind power of the Mule. But it is rumored that there is a Second Foundation hidden somewhere at the end of the Galaxy, established to preserve the knowledge of mankind through the long centuries of barbarism. The Mule failed to find it the first time—but now he is certain he knows where it lies.
The fate of the Foundation rests on young Arcadia Darell, only fourteen years old and burdened with a terrible secret. As its scientists gird for a final showdown with the Mule, the survivors of the First Foundation begin their desperate search. They too want the Second Foundation destroyed…before it destroys them.
From the Paperback edition.
From the Back Cover
SECOND FOUNDATION
One man understood the shifting patterns of the inhabited cosmos. This was Hari Seldon, the last great scientist of the First Empire. The mathematics of psychohistory enabled Seldon to predict the collapse of the Empire and the onset of civilisation in the shortest possible time, Seldon set up two Foundations.
The First was established on Terminus in the full daylight of publicity. But the Second, ‘at the other end of the galaxy’, took shape behind a veil of total silence. Because the Second Foundation guards the laws of psychohistory, which are valid only so long as they remain secret.
When the First Foundation was conquered by a force Seldon had not foreseen – the overwhelming power of a single individual, a mutant called the Mule – the Second Foundation was forced to reveal its existence and, infinitely worse, a portion of its power. But so far its location, its most closely guarded secret of all, has been kept hidden. So far. The Mule and the remnants of the First Foundation will do anything to discover it.
This is the story of the Second Foundation.
“One of the most staggering achievements in modern SF”
THE TIMES
