After the completion of Foundation and Earth, Asimov was at loggerheads as to how to proceed. A fan suggested that he should write a book about the early life of Hari Seldon, and Asimov seized on the suggestion as a means of delaying figuring how what happens after Foundation and Earth.

Prelude to Foundation is the story of Hari Seldon’s arrival on Trantor. He gives a paper describing the (still theoretical) science of psychohistory and is surprised to find that the Emperor and his First Minister, Eto Demerzel, are interested. When a journalist meets Seldon and suggests that Imperial interest means personal danger, Seldon finds himself in a pell-mell flight across Trantor trying to hide from sight and figure out of psychohistory can be made a practical science.

In some sense, since the novel provides details of Seldon’s early life (which I never found myself anxious to discover and which, in the end, seem to contradict the mental picture of Seldon’s early life I had built up based on material in Foundation), and since the novel continues the explicit tying together of the Foundation and robot books—in the end, it is revealed that Demerzel is none other than our old friend R. Daneel Olivaw—I am prejudiced against the story.

That aside, there is little to say about it. It is good and competent, but not brilliant. I can’t say that I dislike reading it, but I can’t say that I found it wonderfully exciting, either.

The characters seem unusually shallow, even for Asimov, but Asimov continues to show greater ability to describe cultures. (As with Foundation and Earth, the main plot of the story has our heroes encountering culture after culture as they progress along their quest.) Although this is a "page-turner", it seems less compelling than most Asimov novels and less memorable. A distinct improvement after Foundation and Earth, but not one of the best of the Foundation books.