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Page 192
All this had shifted the evolutionary development of science fiction from the magazine to the book. Approximately the same number of magazines (half a dozen) were being published, and with the same average circulation (50,000-100,000 or so) but books had proliferated. More books were being published than magazine stories and for far greater financial return, and experienced authors were spending their time writing novels rather than stories. Magazine editors like John Campbell and H.L. Gold and Tony Boucher no longer shaped stories and careers, and in the process, science fiction itself; now power was in the hands of book editors such as Donald Wollheim, Pat LoBrutto, David Hartwell, and particularly the marketing genius Judy-Lynn Benjamin del Rey, and they were interested not in realizing a consistent generic vision for a group of identifiable subscribers but in selling diverse books to a difficult-to-define general audience.
Foundation's Edge, then, was published in the expectation that it would become a best seller (and that expectation was reflected in the financial incentives of the contract); that, too, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Copies were printed by the tens of thousands; press releases flowed; advertisements appeared in general as well as specialized media; and, most of all, salesmen persuaded booksellers to stock the book in large quantities, and therefore to display the book prominently where casual shoppers as well as knowledgeable SF readers would notice and perhaps even buy it.
What was the excitement about? In Foundation's Edge, 48 F.E., the First Foundation has consolidated its position in the Galaxy: through the Foundation Federation it controls approximately one-third of the inhabited planets and influences what it doesn't control. A young Councilman, Golan Trevise, is stirring up controversy with statements that the Second Foundation hasn't been destroyed. His reason, he says privately, is that Seldon's Plan is too closely on course, and some external agency must be controlling events. Trevise is betrayed by fellow Councilman Munn Li Compor, a seeming friend, to Mayor Harlo Branno. Branno arrests Trevise and later exiles him into space in a powerful new computerized pocket-cruiser in the company of Janov Pelorat, an aging historian who wants to locate Earth, the legendary birthplace of humanity. Branno then sends Compor to follow them.
After various intrigues and doublethinks (Asimov's "reversals of ideas"), Trevise and Pelorat arrive at a planet called Gaia, which might be but isn't Earth, whose parts, organic and inorganic, form a telepathic gestalt. Also gathering in spaceships near Gaia are Branno, who has hoped to trap the Second Foundation into revealing itself, and then to

 
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