Rating: 
Summary: Highly NOT recomended
Review: Even though Mr. Benford tried to shred a new light to birth of Foundation, his efforts are useless. Boring dialogs, a lot of fantasy, a lot of empty words... The plot is "watered" with unecessary descriptions, long dialogs that lead nowhere (the begining is not to bad but it gets worse reading to the end).
Good highlight is Eto Demerzel's character - his comeback. The writing style is quite acceptable.
Rating: 
Summary: So bad its unreadable
Review: This book is so bad it absolutely unreadable. Anyone failiar with The Foundation series would not recognize this book.An utter waste of money and time spend grinding through each page of innane dialog. thats all I have stength for this book is a POS.
(if I could give it a lower rating I would)
Rating:
Summary: Yuck
Review: The title of my review may not be creative, but it's accurate. Not only is this a work of "fantasy" rather than "science fiction," it's a really bad work of any kind. Apart from being poorly written in general, it reads as though Benford never actually read the original Foundation series - more like the Cliff Notes version - he has the basic outlines of characterization and story line, but that's about it. If I had read this one first, instead of the second one first, I wouldn't have bought the others in this series. At least Bear and Brin wrote readable books, though I wasn't impressed with them as a "continuation" of Asimov's series, either. It's sad that Asimov's estate is desperate enough to be authorizing books like this.
Rating:
Summary: Boring!
Review: I'm sure glad I got this book at the library instead of paying money for it. The characters are one-dimentional, and too much time is wasted on pointless dialogue and lenthy descriptions, as well as pointless details. The end gets confusing. The worst part are the 'sims' of Voltairre and Joan of Arc, they just stand around debating philosophy which is not even interesting. No, wait, actually the worst part is that this book has the word Foundation in it, I bet Asimov would be rolling in his grave.
Rating: 
Summary: Okay, but NOT a Foundation Novel
Review: This is the first Benford novel I've read, and read it because I've read all of Asimov's Foundation and Robot novels. I was looking forward to new stories. I got new stories, but hardly about the Hari & Co. I'm used to. This book is really 3 stories. First is the story of Hari trying not to get killed. Yay. Later (and I list these out of order) is the story of Hari (predictably) trying not to get killed while he's a primitive monkey-man. The "immersion" concept is a cool one, but Benford jumps between thought-provoking and unbelievable way too often. Last and least is the "sim story" of synthetic personalities constructed from historical knowledge of Voltaire and Joan of Arc. (They know who Voltaire is, but don't remember were Earth went....riiiiight) This story (along with later interaction with the Foggy Memes) is interesting enough to read like a madman near the end of the book only to get the payoff. Nothing satisfying. Basically, this book is hard to get into, is eventually engrossing, and then leaves you wanting more for your 7 bucks. It's as if Benford had a few stories lying around and he stuck them together. I don't have a problem with seemingly unrelated stories that converge at the end, but this never converges. After reading the Afterword, I figured that the loose ends that I hung from would be tied in the next volume. However, I'm 50 pages into the next book in the trilogy, and there are no sims, memes, pans, and it's starting to feel like a Foundation book again.
Rating:
Summary: Just read so you can say you did
Review: Before reading this entry into the foundation universe, i had just finished reading "Forward the Foundation" and "Prelude to the Foundation" and found the very different writing styles to be a shock. It was hard for me to plod through the unnecessary converstaion and flat characters of the story.
It is also possible that the story was that much worse because it described a piece of the foundation story I had just finished reading, eventhough it was more in depth. Whatever the reason I finished reading it because I had already bought the other two installments and I did not want to miss anything. The book did contain a couple of parts that were very interesting save for tedious description and dialogue.
Rating:
Summary: An uninspiring mish-mash of one-dimensional characters
Review: Perhaps my memory escapes me -- I read the original Foundation series years ago -- but were Asimov's characters as dry and one-dimensional as Benford's? I plodded through this disappointing novel hoping to find interesting inner conflict leading to great epiphanies. Instead, I was bored to tears by the whining Voltair (whose Candide far outshines this work), the faithful-to-a-fault Joan, Dors the bodyguard-concubine and Daneel the savior. The situations shaping these characters seemed particularly contrived to bring about quick and easy profundities. Unlike some reviewers, I enjoyed the immersion into the pan. Here, Hari actually had to work for his epiphany instead of having it handed to him. For once, I started to empathize with Hari, and felt his predicament offered many potent lessons. Having recently read the Dune series again (for the third time) I am reminded of how rare it is to find writers who can combine philosophy, possible futures for humanity, and complex, interesting characters into one outstanding novel. Where are these writers today? Do they come only once in a lifetime?
Rating:
Summary: An insult to Foundation fans!
Review: As another reviewer said, I wish that I could give it a zero. I also wish I had read the other reviews before wasting my money on this. I had already purchased Foundation & Chaos before starting Fear. I pray that it's better. I'm afraid to start it now. Anyway, it can't possibly be any worse. The writing is flat and confusing, and as pointed out, the parts with Joan d'Arc and Voltaire are irrelevant and little more than filler. The same with the pan episode. It's like when you had to do a 5000 word essay in school and could come up with only 3000. I wasn't concerned about a story paralleling Forward, but it seems that the only thing Benford did was use the names we all love, without the scope, feeling or sweep of Asimov.
Rating:
Summary: tedious at best
Review: Like most other reviewers, I found this book to be quite tedious and difficult to get through. The Joan/Voltaire stuff seemed out of place and distracting (and long!) while the various assassination attempts, Seldon's dislike of the premiereship and other political events seemed to lack all logic. All that aside however, I have to wonder mainly about the editor(s) of this series. Right off the bat, you are treated to a mis-spelling of Dors Venabili as "Vanabili" - not once, but several times. I have to wonder if the author himself has read the original Foundation novels...! It would explain a lot.
Rating: 
Summary: Science-fiction at its best
Review: A discussion between the highly religious Jeanne d'Arc and the rationalist Voltaire, an excursion into the psychobiology of the ape, a discussion about the forecastability of socio-political events and about the question wether a collective body can act on its own or only as a sum of individually acting components: Bedford's book is science-fiction at its best. The book uses the resources only science-fiction can offer. By introducing two story lines that are intertwingling the joy of reading remains. Of course, the aliens that apear may not be very much in the Asmovian sense. But, correctly, Benford does not want to re-write the Bible. For everybody who looks for human science "brain food" an absolute must.
| 
