Foundation's Edge

After a long break, Asimov was persuaded to return to the Foundation series and tell some more stories. The initial result was this volume, followed by three more the expanded the story. By now, instead of short stories or novellas, as the previous stories were, Asimov is writing novels, so this is one single novel. The basic idea starts out with a troublesome young man named Golan Trevize, who manages to piss off the ruler of The Foundation, the Mayor of Terminus, Harla Branno. Trevize believes that the Second Foundation still exists, but his attempts to force the issue in the Council get him exiled and sent to look for it, a convenient way to get him out of the way. Simultaneously, another plot thread involves the Second Foundation. This is the weakest part of the novel, in my view, since people with supposedly advanced mentality should not be acting like insecure teenagers. Then a third actor is revealed, a planetary gestalt called Gaia, and it turns out they have been manipulating everything. They think making the Galaxy a larger version of their planetary gestalt would be a far better thing than the Seldon plan, but they refuse to make this decision themselves. They have selected Trevize to make the decision because he has the gift of making the right decision somehow. That is why they got him exiled from The Foundation and brought him to Gaia. In the climax, the Foundation, the Second Foundation, and Gaia, wait to see which way he will go.

I now have this as part of a 7-book set of all of Asimov's Foundation novels in e-book form.