Foundation's Edge

'''Asimov, Isaac. Foundation's Edge'''. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982.

Fourth novel of what has become the Foundation series. FE's climax explicitly raises questions of free will and the retention of humanity in a Galaxy to be run by the technological First Foundation, the "mentalic" Second Foundation, or Gaia (a planet-wide mentality comprising all the human individuals on that world, plus everything else down to rabbits and rocks). The novel's immediate resolution has Gaia pulling the strings in both the novel and the Galaxy; the Conclusion goes on to hint strongly that a small number of robots supervise the action of Gaia, and finally to suggest that some other force may be acting on the Galaxy. See under Literary Criticism the entry for J. L. Grisby.