Psychohistorical Crisis by Donald Kingsbury is an unofficial Foundation book. Kingsbury goes out of his way to make sure you know that he’s talking about Foundation without ever explicitly mentioning it. The novel is set later in the thousand year interregnum and a knowledge of the Foundation books s critical to enjoying the book.

The book starts with Eron Osa losing his fam. The fam is a brain augmentation device that is connected to the user and helps offload processing and memories. Removing a fam is similar to a lobotomy to the people in this century. The book moves back and forth between the future, where Eron is trying to figure out why he lost his fam (which is related to his psychohistory research), and the past, where Eron’s early life as a math prodigy is shown.

The focus of the book, as you can tell by the title, is psychohistory and the Second Foundation in particular. One of the basic premises of Asimov’s psychohistory is that the people can’t know what the the future holds for them or it would disrupt the plan. Kingsbury challenges that premise and has a battle of scenarios at the end to show why his ideas are better.

This is one of the best non-Asimov Asimov stories that I’ve read. It does a good job of capturing the flavor of Asimov’s ideas and storytelling. And the challenge to Asimov is on the plane of ideas, not action. Highly recommended.