Point of View

The narrator of Forward the Foundation is anonymous but entirely sympathetic and empathetic to the final decades in the life of Hari Seldon, inventor of psychohistory, as he strives to turn his impractical theory into a tool that will shorten the dark age that is coming upon the Galactic Empire. The novel is told in the third-person narrrative and the past tense, largely through narrative connecting extensive dialogue, without delving into the characters' inner thought processes.

Isaac Asimov continues the story begun in Prelude to Foundation and assumes that the reader is familiar with the adventures of Hari and his beautiful bodyguard, historian Dors Venabili, as they flee the Emperor's supposedly evil and manipulative chief of staff, Eto Demerzel. It is critical to realize that Eto, in this novel risen to the rank of First Minister, is in fact a robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, Hari's consistent...