Asimov

I recently listened to a Modern Scholar audiobook on science fiction literature (From Here to Infinity by Michael Drout, which I HIGHLY recommend), which prompted me to think about or even re-read a lot of authors I read years ago.  Among these was Asimov, of whose later works I was not really a big fan for reasons I couldn't elucidate well.  This morning I ran across a review by J. Hunter Johnson that expresses my general impression quite insightfully.

Foundation's Edge is the first step in his disowning the Foundation trilogy. The entire basis of the character of the Mule is destroyed. The Seldon plan is disowned as being ultimately worthless, and a cheap-jack psionic mysticism is offered in its place.

Having returned to the worlds of his youth, Asimov determined to unite his two grand universes. There are no robots in the Foundation universe so it was necessary to eliminate them. He did this in The Robots of Dawn and Empire and Robots, in which he disowns the thesis of the human/robot cooperative culture. The Spacers are discounted as not being viable; Daneel, on the other hand, is promoted into a mind-controlling demi-god. He followed these two with Foundation and Earth, in which it is ultimately revealed that Daneel is the master mind behind human history.  This was the capstone of his of his campaign to disown the work of his youth by rewriting the juice out of it. The value of the Seldon plan had been discounted; the Mule had been emasculated; and Daneel had been destroyed by deification. He wasn't done.

Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation are farragos of implausible melodrama.  Concealed within them however is the final discounting - the revelation that the Seldon plan was never feasible in the first place.

Mr Johnson mentions the authorized trilogy by Benford, Bear and Brin, but I will not discuss those books.  They are to Asimov's work as the Herbert/Anderson books are to Frank Herbert's Dune.