This is the last of Asimov's Foundation series, and was published posthumously. One suspects Asimov was feeling the effects of his age, since this novel (more a group of novellas, really) show Seldon growing older and gradually losing everyone in his life he cares about His "wife", Dors Venabili, is destroyed, his adopted son Raych is killed, his collaborator Yugo Amaryl dies in middle age from overwork...all in all pretty bleak. But it brings everything around again. In the first book, Foundation, we see Seldon as a very old and feeble man confined to a wheelchair, and in this volume we see how he got to that point. But this novel does show how they set up the Foundation, and the Second Foundation, with the idea that the Foundation would focus on the physical sciences, and the Second Foundation would focus on the mental sciences.

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