Rating: 
Summary: Sigh - was this prequel needed?
Review: Just having Foundation in the title can send chills down my spine in anticipation. Unfortunately, Benford seems constrained when writing in Asimov's universe. His strengths are when he moves away from the Trantor created universe. His weaknesses are trying to work with The Empire. Sometimes I enjoy Benford's hard science -- but in a Foundation novel? It just doesn't work, and isn't comfortable to read. Thank goodness the reviews for the next 2 prequels are much stronger -- its the only thing motivating me to continue this series...
Rating: 
Summary: BORING!!!
Review: This is easily one of the most boring SF books I've read. Don't expect an Asimov-like story. It is not. Benford doesn't come close to the clear, understandable and entertaining way Asimov wrote. Even if you judge it on it's own, it is still boring. Read it only if you are a true fan of foundation and would like to read the other 2 books in this series.
Rating:
Summary: Boring - does no justice to Asimov's memory
Review: This book is one of the most boring sci-fi novels I have ever read. I read to the end just to see if there were any interesting bits - but in vain. It has none of the suspense, intrigue and clever plot twists that were the hallmarks of Asimov's storytelling.
Rating: 
Summary: QUITE A FINE JOB
Review: I think this superior novel is a fine job, a truly mature exploration of ideas Asimov would have ENJOYED seeing extended in an intelligent way.
Rating: 
Summary: those who pan this book wouldnt know good sci-fi if it .....
Review: to those who expected this to be "like asimov" give me a break! First of all Isaac was more conceptual genius then a great writer, his prose style was pretty basic stuff, his use of characterization was also primitive. Lots of sci fi writers of his generation wrote rings around him albeit with weaker concepts. Second much of the foundation series was based on incorrect or obsolete science, which had to be updated. Finally, Asimov left several important questions unanswered. These answers were the primary mission the Killer B's attempt to fullfill in this series. So those readers expecting Asimov like writing are clearly barking up the wrong tree! This book is excellent, those readers who don't like it simply don't appreciate good hard scf-fi. He fleshes out Asimovs universe and adds modern hard sci-fi concepts to it. A master of the genre has contributed a fine piece of work here.
Rating:
Summary: Not Asimov. Definitely not. Not too bad either.
Review: I don't agree with many of the other reviewers that this book is a waste of time. I agree that it could have been written better, and that it certainly is not written in Asimov-style. The characters are described far too detailed to be Asimov-style, too much thoughts, pondering, talk talk talk. I really hated the parts in which the sims go on forever. I really like the Foundation series, so I had to force myself to finish this book, to be able to read the next one properly. Benford writes a story in which psychohistory is almost fully developed. I guess since it is good enough to predict the past, it should enable Seldon to make small extrapolations to predict the future. In Asimov's Foundation books, this was not the case, so why did Benford predict the past with it? Major contradiction. I hate the wordprocessor disease. Just like Asimov and Clarke, people who use a wordprocessor create lengthy stories. Look at "Foundation" itself, it is short and energetic (I guess I am getting old: "they don't write stories like that nowadays"). Hari Seldon becomes Prime Minister of the Empire. This is utterly ridiculous. Thousands of pages have been written about the Foundation and it was never mentioned before. Hari Schwarzenegger was very able to prevent being assasinated over and over again. Hari is a super hero. He is a stud as well, a sexual superman. His genes should be preserved for the Galactic Gene Pool. In all stories related to the Foundation traveling is done with hyperships. Benford is too much a scientist to let go of his own ideas and introduces worm holes. I think he is showing no respect for the story. The worm holes just don;t fit. Where the hell do the tiktoks come from. And to be able to make strange twists and turns in the story, he introduces sims, memes and alien civilations. Why didn't Asimov think of that? Maybe because such things are used only by people who want to want to use far-fetched SF-items to create a real SF-story. The Foundation series was not exciting enough, and hey look what the cat dragged in. I don't like it. Asimov didn't need it, Benford does. The next Mister Fantastic item is dragged in by the cats: immersion in pans and raboons and even in Hari's own formulas and the Mesh. How convenient. Gee, foundations, what a nice word, just drop it in somewhere, who cares. The word 'Foundation' has to be used somewhere in the book, so why not use it in the last chapters. Seldon is rambling away and suddenly there it is, the magic word. I look forward to reading "Foundation and Chaos". My partner read both "Foundation's Fear" and it's follow-up, "Foundation and Chaos", and she told me the second is much much better. I guess I don't dislike it as much as I dislike "Foundation's fear". If you like the Foundation series, please read this book. Don't let all the criticism bother you. This book still contains some nice SF-ideas and plot changes and philosophical development (I wished Benford would have used that for another book, and not for a book in the Foundation series).
Rating:
Summary: I wanted to like it, but it snoozes and loses
Review: The prequel concept is interesting, and Benford is generally a reasonably capable author, but this book is tedious. It sprinkles an unengaging plot line with bad interpretive philosophy and a Reader's Digest-like helping of intelligent agent technology. How did Hari develop psychohistory? What a fun concept. Halfway through the inane interactions between Joan of Arc and Voltaire I started to lose interest in the plot, and the introduction of the Ewoks (oops, sorry, the Pan) in a scene that works like it borrowed from Total Recall was too much.
Rating:
Summary: Keep away, else spoil your interest dead.
Review: After reading the foundation saga and taking great pleasure from it, my attention was drawn, whilst in a book shop, to this further trilogy promising yet more insight to Asimov's tale. What a load of guff. The book lacked the gripping story line that Asimov created, fixing you to the book for hours. Whilst the characters showed deep progression along philosophical lines, the whole thing was just very dull and killed off my want for further foundation titles. Be warned, this is not Asimov material and will not live up to any expectations.
Rating:
Summary: Storyline unrelated to foundation series
Review: I've read the original series over several times, both in timeline and published sequence and I found myself asking the question 'What has this story got to do with the whole thing?'. For large portions of the book, it seemed like the author had a completely different story for a completely different book and was trying to shoehorn it into the foundation series - particularly the large part dedicated to Joan of Arc and Voltaire and also the alien intelligences. I found I was reading it not because I liked what was going on, but because I felt compelled to finish something I had started. I had a similar feeling about much of the 'Foundations Friends' book some time ago.
Rating: 
Summary: The start of a new trilogy.
Review: Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin had been commissioned to write a new trilogy based on Isaac Asimov's noted Foundation series. "Foundation's Fear" is the first of these. The events in this novel take place between the events described in the first two stories of Asimov's "Forward the Foundation" (Greg Bear's "Foundation and Chaos" and David Brin's "Foundation's Triumph" also use Hari Seldon as a main character). Here the mathematician and developer of psychohistory, Hari Seldon, has to deal with all the political infighting, intrigue, and fear of assassination in order to be the new First Minister of the dying Galactic Empire. In fact, to avoid assassination, Seldon and his wife escape temporarily to a planet where they participate in a project which enables observers to participate in the experiences of primates on the planet by melding with their consciousness (this turns out to help provide Seldon with insights for his psychohistory). All this while trying to identify equations and factors that are missing from his theory of psychohistory. In addition, two computer simulations of two ancient figures, Voltaire (François Marie Arouet) and Joan of Arc have been found and are set up to present a debate between the forces of faith and of science. In addition, alien entities are found to be hidden in the electronic circuitry of the planet-sized computer system, and they threaten to bring down the empire. Seldon has to deal with all of these. There appear to be two main types of reviews by readers: those that hate the book because it appears to fail to follow the style and entertainment of the original Asimov series and those that judge the book on its own, disassociated somewhat from the original series. I personally fall in the midpoint: I found sections reather tedious while I found other discussions fascinating. This is a different type of book than what one may expect (as Benford mentions in his afterword; in fact, it might be useful to read the afterword first). And, it does add to the series. It allows future authors considerable flexibility in adding to the Foundation stories. As for those of you who are upset with the addition of "wormholes" to the novel, remember that Benford is a physics professor. He had to include them!
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