Foundation and Earth picks up where Foundation's Edge left off: Councilman Golan Trevize with his uncanny ability to always make the right choice decided that Gaia -- a superorganism planet where all things are part of a group consciousness on some level -- should be the eventual future of the galaxy instead of the First or Second Foundation. Gaia removed the memories of the planet's existence from the Foundation people involved in the stand-off at the end of the novel and everyone went back to their lives except for Golan and his historian friend Janov Pelorat.
A lot of the novel is taken up by Golan arguing with Bliss if Gaia is a good thing or not. I felt that Golan even took a devil's advocate's role at times -- he knows he chose right, does he need to argue about Galaxia with such conviction? It doesn't lead anywhere and is just annoying since on their small ship Golan and Bliss can barely avoid each other. Then again, Golan doesn't need to like the idea of Galaxia and he even won't get to experience it: presumably whatever way Gaia is going to expand will take centuries at the very least.
Foundation and Earth does indeed tie together the Foundation and Robot series. As the search continues, the protagonists encounter planets that are more and more similar to the ones in the Robot books. I think I have read only The Naked Sun of those myself but this novel seemed to go through the arcing plot of the series so it didn't matter that much.
All the clues how the Sol System and Earth should look are amusing; you can always instantly tell from the descriptions if Golan had found the planet or not. One legend, already told in the previous book, is that Earth is radioactive, presumably due to a nuclear war. I wonder if that happened in the Robot series or if that's commentary on nuclear weapons. Or maybe both. The characters react to such a possibility with disbelief -- why would anyone bomb their own planet to a state of being inhabitable? Earth actually turns out to be radioactive when it is found, although the reason for that wasn't detailed. Golan gets his answers in the end too: Galaxia is the best defense for humanity against a possible threat from outside the Milky Way.
After Isaac Asimov's death, his widow Janet Asimov wrote in Isaac's biography that he didn't know how to continue the series after Foundation and Earth and instead wrote two prequels. And I mean, where would you even go after this? Foundations hardly matter if they are just part of the Galaxia plan. I personally think that all this tying-in undermined the Foundation series, making Seldon plan seem meaningless. Maybe Asimov should've kept his series separated.
The book unexpectedly had an author's foreword in which Asimov tells what led to him continuing the series after the original trilogy -- reasons I already mentioned in my previous post. I wasn't aware though that the urging for sequels became a thing only after a bigger publisher acquired the rights to the originals. The initial publisher who had first printed the stories in three hardcover volumes hadn't had the means to advertise the series properly for it to gain popularity. Asimov also appeared to have been entertained by the idea of writing sequels 30 years later to people who hadn't even born when he wrote the original stories.
I guess next I will be borrowing Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. They both appear to be available in a nearby city library unlike Foundation and Earth which I had to request to be fetched from farther away where some library still had a copy. Maybe wear and tear had caused it become unavailable locally -- this is a pretty old series of books after all.
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