I’m so grateful to be done with this book and this trilogy! I can’t think of any trilogy where my feelings about it have changed so dramatically over the course of the series. I really enjoyed the first book! There were so many cool ideas and I was excited to see where Asimov would go. After finishing this series, I am convinced that Asimov just didn’t have the writing chops to support his great ideas! This book was almost identical to the second in terms of overarching narrative structure and I barely could get through the previous one. At least the “twist” in the last book was somewhat surprising? In this book, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes every time there was a twist it was so uninteresting.

The plot of this book basically consisted of a bunch of men (because it’s always men in these books) pointing fingers at each other and going “Ah-ha, I’ve outsmarted you!” Only for the their opponent to turn around and go “Actually, due to ~science~, you are the one who’s been outsmarted!” Which is inevitably rebutted with an even newer cooler science that was miraculously not accounted for or thought about by anyone but our protagonist, allowing them to win and be the very smart man who outsmarted everyone. This game of 4D chess was so boring and was maybe one of the worst ways one could explore the cool idea of the Second Foundation which was the only reason I kept reading this series after the just okay second book!

The only remotely interesting part of this book was Arcadia, who is a 14 year old teenage girl that had more personality than all the other characters in this series combined. I’m glad I read these books because they’re such a cornerstone of Sci Fi and I’m grateful to Asimov for his contributions to the genre, but man am I excited to read something that’s actually well written next.