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wrote a Foundation story I didn't spend too much time thinking about what the next ones would be, but on the other hand, I didn't want to write anything that would make it impossible to write any more, because I was interested in keeping the series going.
Gunn: Even though you were determined to end it with Second Foundation.
A.: Nevertheless, in case I ever wanted to continue, I needed sufficient ambiguity so that I could write more stories. I honestly wasn't sure as I wrote Second Foundation how the Second Foundation was going to be different from the Mule; the Mule was ruling, so to speak, by mental science, and the Second Foundation would be ruled by mental science. Wouldn't the Second Foundation be sort of Mule by committee?
Gunn: There is this element in it, I think, and I suppose there was a possibility of writing a sequel in which some kind of more democratic force overcomes the coercive and elitist Second Foundation.
A.: Well, that was exactly the sort of dim thought I had that in the end, by God, it was going to be the First Foundation that would triumph even over the Second Foundation.
Gunn: Well (laughter).
A.: I hadn't the faintest idea how that would work, but I was sure that was what was going to happen.
Gunn: Some criticism attempts to deal with The Foundation Trilogy as if it were conceived and written in one flash of inspiration or one continuous effort. It seems to me that this is misguided, that one has to assume that this was written piece by piece and the only reasonable criticism is one which assumes that you solve this problem and then later you come back and you say, now where do I go, and put another problem on top of that which I can solve, and so rather than dealing with the Trilogy as a kind of total mental exercise, it represents a kind of exercise in ingenuity.
A.: You're perfectly right. In fact I've been planning to write, under extreme pressure, another Foundation novel and I even wrote eight pages, and this time it is going to be a novel and not a series of short pieces it's going to be a full-length novel, unitary, and I was going to have my characters searching for the Second Foundation. Now the people in the First Foundation do not know it was the Second Foundation which saved them. The whole purpose of the Second Foundation was to remain undercover, to not let people know as soon as people know the Second Foundation is taking care of them, the very equations the Second Foundation uses lose their validity. And yet we have one character who is convinced that the Second Foundation does exist and

 
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