The novel is the second part of The Second Foundation Trilogy and takes place almost entirely in the same time frame as the "The Psychohistorians", which is the first part of the novel Foundation. In addition to telling a more expanded version of Hari Seldon's confrontation with the Commission of Public Safety it also interweaves R. Daneel Olivaw's struggle against a sect of robots who oppose his plans for humanity.
The language of CDS and Chaos Theory is now revealing a point-of-view, or metamodel, which provides a universal language for psychology which is competent to deal with the complexities of interactive change and yet is relatively easy to communicate.
Chaos holds infinite possibilities of new form, and these forms are eventually revealed and emerge from chaos as new structure.
Chaos theory is still very much in its infancy but it is sweeping throughout the scientific world, rapidly finding application not only in hard sciences, such as physics and chemical engineering, but also in economics, psychology, biology, astronomy, demographics, business management,.
The Foundation Series started as a series of nine short stories, eight of which were published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine (between May 1942 and January 1950) and a ninth, which was written a few years later to serve as an introduction when the series was first published in book form.
For example, the Foundation slides gradually into oligarchy and dictatorship prior to the appearance of the Mule, but, for the most part, the book treats that change as being necessary in Hari Seldon's plan, rather than mulling over whether it is on the whole positive or negative.
Ultimately, the revised, retconned historical timeline implemented by Asimov during the 1980s is considered to be the canonical one, with the previous references serving as quaint anachronistic gaffes by the characters (perhaps due to in-universe reasons, such as the inevitable distortion of accurate historical recordkeeping over the vast gulf of tens of thousands of years).
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