This is without a doubt my least favorite of the Foundation books, and one of the very few books by Asimov I don’t particularly like.

There is also no doubt as to the reason I don’t particularly like it—it activates all of my "golden age" red flags. Asimov had been inching the Foundation and robot books together ever since Prelude to Foundation, and here he makes the connection final, solid, explicit and in a way that really bothered me, by introducing R. Daneel Olivaw as an actual character in the Foundation series.

So much for the last ten pages.

My general reaction to the rest of the book is that it is overly long and frightfully padded. Asimov himself was rather proud of the fact that he built up suspense by having Trevieze and Gaia (in the person of Bliss) argue for most of the book about the virtue of Trevieze’s decision at the end of Foundation’s Edge. It didn’t work for me; it simply made the book tedious. And having two of the main characters harp at each other for the bulk of the story simply left me disliking both.

And the fact that our heroes manage to find the Earth at all seems pretty coincidence-driven, almost as much as a Charles Dickens novel. This is not necessarily bad—Dickens, after all, got away with it—but it needs a book which is otherwise very solid to make it work. I did not find Foundation and Earth sufficiently solid.

As with other late Foundation books, the plot is largely a travelogue (with an unusual amount of sex thrown in for Asimov). And as with other late Foundation books, Asimov shows increased ability to portray different cultures—and yet, again as elsewhere, they are more interesting than the characters, which seems a weakness.

Still, they are the book’s saving grace. Even more than Foundation’s Edge, we get a solid sense of the real complexity of the Foundation’s galaxy—dead planets that nobody knows about anymore (plus what happened on each), hidden planets that aren’t part of any government. The fate of the Solarians is particularly well-handled, I think, and Fallom is a reasonable extension of that. He/she is also a rare Asimovian manifestation of a "non-human", and, indeed, of that good old 30’s stereotype, the out-evolved human who feels nothing but contempt for his unevolved cousins—and Asimov does it well.

On the whole, then, this would be for me a much better book if it were tightened by about a third, lost most of the bickering between Trevieze and Bliss—and ended very, very differently.