So, I'll cut right to the meat of it, the first 50% of this book was confusing, boring and soul sucking, with little sprinkles of interesting character work and moments.
But really, majority of the first 50% was sending me into a reading slump and depressing me.

The premise was really interesting:
A science man has discovered that an important planet and all it's inhabitants will be destroyed. Said planet is the only pure source of the most valuable and versatile material in the known universe and a barbaric civilisation controls it and is so powerful due to its possession, harvesting and trading of this material.
Said man has his memory wiped and thrown on the dangerous planet and made to work as a slave, essentially. Man starts to remember, all sorts of politics come into play with different people and factions all trying to find said man as they're all looking for some edge in the bid for control of the valuable planet and to gain majority power in the galaxy.
Doesn't sound half bad at all, does it?
It actually sounds like it could be pretty epic, filled with tense moments and juicy political intrigue.
But no, it wasn't like that, it was badly executed and Asimov managed to make a brilliant setup, shite.

I've come to realise that Asimov writes like a historian trying his arm at writing science fiction novels. He writes so inconsistently, and this goes for his other books too, the quality of writing never ever stays consistent and he eventually has a streak of brilliant and engaging writing, and then breaks the flow somehow and goes back to writing boring and clinical writing.
Its really annoying at this point, the man writes the best when he's writing his best, and writes some of the worst when he's at his worst.

So, back to the book.
The second half of the book was a massive improvement, with characters meeting, certain hidden details, such as people and actions, coming to light and just overall better writing, pacing and engaging situations.
It finally got interesting and things were making sense.

The quality of the Second half was so good that it saved this review being between a 1 and 2 stars, which was definitely heading that direction.

But, again, while the robots series and this are connected and aren't outright told to us that is the case, that's fine, because they're seperate series and I feel that is acceptable.
But, book 1 and book 2 of a series should not feel like they're not even part of the same series, which happened BAD here.
Suddenly we're talking about Sark and Trantor in this book and Trantor has hundreds of worlds part of their republic, where did that come from?
There's no mention of any of the planets or factions from the first book, such as Tyrann, Rhodia or Lingane. I can only assume the Rhodians evolved into Trantorians over the years as they had the US constitution as the basis of a Galactic Republic?

But, yes, again, this did not feel like the second book in a series, but a standalone set in the same universe as Robots and Foundation.

Please, for fuck sake Asimov, be consistent in book 3, PLEASE?! It has an amazing premise going by the description, please be good! 🙏