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Erythro. Later that is explained as the shaping of her desire by the prokaryote mind. Her mother is driven by science but influenced by ambition, by her love and later dislike for Crile, and by her love for Marlene. Siever Genaro, the head of the project on Erythro and perhaps Asimov's representative in the novel, is the only one who doesn't fear Marlene's gift for deciphering people's secrets from their body language; he is rational except in his love for Insignia. Crile is moved to insist on a place on Superluminal and then to insist on certain procedures in their search by his obsession about the daughter he hasn't seen since she was ten months old, and by his memory of his sister's untimely death as well as her resemblance to Marlene. And so on.
The novel has many of Asimov's virtues interesting ideas entertainingly discussed, the absence of villains, the evenhandedness that allows everybody's arguments a fair hearing and it is remarkable that, in his state of deteriorating health, he was able to maintain his skills and produce a worthwhile novel while also compiling his 700-page Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery. But Nemesis took him thirteen months to write rather than the usual nine, and he recorded in his memoir that he would alternate between the books, using the work on Nemesis as the bribe, the work on the Chronology as the reward. "My heart was with non-fiction," he wrote.
Asimov concluded his science fiction (except for a posthumous collection titled Gold) with Forward the Foundation, published in 1993. In it he returned to the pattern of long novelettes with which he started the Foundation series, and, in fact, the first two sections were published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. The novel was made up of four parts plus a short Epilogue, each of the four parts preceded by an excerpt from the Encyclopedia Galactica and the Epilogue followed by an excerpt about Seldon himself. In "Eto Demerzel" Seldon is forty, and in each subsequent part he is ten years older. Forward the Foundation, then, traces the rest of Seldon's career on Trantor during which he perfects psychohistory, sets up the First and Second Foundations recorded in the Trilogy, and, in the Epilog, records the Crisis holograms that appear periodically through the Trilogy.
Asimov's return to the pattern of the earlier stories might have been dictated by the necessity to show the rest of Seldon's life episodically, or the shorter lengths might have been more suited to his physical and psychological condition. Whatever the truth of the matter, like Prelude to Foundation, the novel has its rewards for Asimov readers.
In Part I, "Eto Demerzel," Seldon, now trying to perfect psychohis-

 
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