You're looking for Psychohistorical Crisis by Donald Kingsbury. It takes place after the second galactic empire came into being, dealing with a crisis that is both a logical consequence of psychohistory and its achilles' heel, and you won't find any wormholes (or robots) in the book. PS - I see the recommendation has already been made. Twice! Well, now it's 3 times.
By complete coincidence, I am reading Psychohistorical Crisis right now, and it is magnificent. Takes the Foundation concept more seriously than Asimov himself ever did, I think. (For Asimov, it was never anything more than a premise for a puzzle story.) The only thing I don't like is some of Kingsbury's substitutions: Lakgan for Kalgan? Really?
Yeah, some of the name changes are a little odd and sometimes they're not so obvious as to who or what they are. I think it would have made a better official story than the second trilogy. The creation of the personal familiar device is very Asimovian and feels like something he would have come up with himself.
Over the last couple of days, I read "The End of Eternity" - it's a very interesting story and has a far more em.. human (?) dynamic than a lot of his work.
Yeah, that's one of my favorite Asimovs. Have you read The God Themselves? It's another one that has some scale, but very different ideas, and more grounded characters than we often get.
^As I recall, The Gods Themselves was written partly in response to the criticisms that Asimov couldn't write about relationships and sex.
That is indeed what he claimed, yes. He also said that of all his science fiction novels, The Gods Themselves was his favorite. This is probably why.
Love love The End of Eternity!!! That one is my favorite, too. I had missed a few pages in this thread and I wondered if anyone had talked about it. Sweet. Have to catch up now!
I think I'm going to choose End of Eternity as my next book, I've not read it in decades... Gods Themselves is a cool one as well, and a nice commentary on the workings of science. It also has his only alien race [as opposed to the collective intelligences of Gaia and Erythro] and a pretty neat one I think. It might have been interesting if he'd done more with aliens, but even with his output there wasn't time for more than humans and robots!
There are many other alien races in Asimov, though admittedly only in his short stories. The excellent "Blind Alley" and the awful ones about the aliens on... Jupiter I think spring to mind.
Don't remember those at all lol, must have been too long since I've read them... There might even have been some in the Lucky Starr books, I read those in 7th grade.
There was also the collective intelligence of the Erythrocytes, or whatever they were called, in Nemesis.
IMDb lists a bunch of films named Nemesis, but none of them are based on the Asimov novel -- it's a common enough word, after all. There have been film or TV adaptations of a number of Asimov's works, notably Bicentennial Man, I, Robot, and two very bad versions of Nightfall, but no Nemesis.
Yeah, I just researched it too, and came up with what you did. I also didn't know about the Nightfall films til now. Bad, huh? Well, maybe I'll take a look at them anyway.
I've heard that the Nightfall one was a candidate for Worst. Film. Ever. Just looking at the sub-Power Rangers costumes on the VHS cover made me toss it back on the rental rack way back when.