I wanted to like this better than I did - and I did like it - but it seems to me it suffers from series-itis. Which is a completely made up word for a phenomenon I see all the time in speculative fiction. There's a book with a fantastic idea, or strong characters, or something really and truly compelling, and then the author doesn't leave it alone. They go back to the well, and they keep going back, and keep going back, and in every subsequent installment the interest and vivacity and punch of the original seeps further away. That's what happened here. I love the idea of psychohistory, but the more I read the Foundation books the more that idea is whittled away.

Foundation and Empire consists of what are essentially two novellas. The first, The General is just not that interesting. I feel as if I've read all this before, and it was done better then - primarily it suffers from not having a single interesting character to stand out amidst all that repetition. If I'd read it on its own I'd have given it two stars. The second novella, The Mule, is (after an admittedly very slow first half) significantly better. There's an interesting idea there to supplement that waning attraction of psychohistory, and it's that the predicted future of populations can be disturbed by the birth of a mutant individual. Psychohistory, of course, doesn't deal with individuals, because they effectively cannot change the course of galactic history sufficiently to counteract the psychological weight of billions. Except this particular mutant can, and he's an interesting character as well as an interesting concept, which improves the thing immensely. Even more interesting as a character, however, is Bayta, and together she and Mule make the second novella genuinely entertaining. On its own, I'd give it four stars, and so the rating for the book averages out at three.