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Page 225
the information about the Foundation universe Asimov has scattered over sixteen books. It might be called the Encyclopedia Galactica.
Trantor, for instance, is described in greater detail in the Prelude . . . and Forward . . . . In the latter, for instance, Asimov described how the enclosure of Trantor began a thousand years before with the construction of domes over individual regions, and in the former, he described the unevenness of the surface where the domes had been joined. He also continued the interconnection process with a reference to Dors studying the Florina Incident of The Currents of Space and, in referring to telepathy, bringing in the basic events of Nemesis, even though the memory of Nemesis seems implausible when Earth itself has been forgotten but then Daneel's ability to adjust human minds can justify almost anything.
Asimov built his own universe out of words and ideas, word by word, book by book. Asimov was a supreme rationalist, trying to find reasons even for his fears and hopes, his dislikes and loves, and he created a rational universe working on discoverable principles that he spent a great deal of his life explicating. That universe may retain its power to move and instruct its readers many years into the future.
Asimov died, of kidney and heart failure, on April 6, 1992. His last years were filled with thoughts of death and hopes of living into his seventies. He spent a three-page chapter in his memoir listing the deaths of twenty-six friends, Gary K. Wolfe noted in a review. And in spite of his first-class medical care, including his triple-bypass operation in 1983 and hospitalization in 1989 and early 1990 for edema and antibiotic treatment for an infected mitral valve, ironically he died at seventy-two, the same age as his father who lived with anginal pain for thirty years and refused to see a doctor.
Asimov had frequently expressed the hope of dying with his nose caught between two typewriter keys, but at the end he had lost the strength to write and that, perhaps, for Asimov was almost the same as death. In the Epilogue to his memoir, Janet Asimov noted that writing Forward the Foundation was hard on Asimov, "because in killing Hari Seldon he was also killing himself, yet he transcended the anguish."
The last words of Forward the Foundation, perhaps the last words of fiction Asimov wrote, make up the final entry from the Encyclopedia Galactica; it is about Hari Seldon. The first paragraph reads:
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SELDON, HARI . . . found dead, slumped over his desk in his office at Streeling University in 12,069 G.E. (1 F.E.). Apparently Seldon had been

 
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