A good book overall, but drags in places. ~300 pages, some of the text was a bit hard to parse in places (could have just been my printing edition ungraceful formatting). That said I breezed through it fairly quickly and finished it in a afternoon.
Two short stories in this book
thoughts on The General
On its own this felt like much ado about nothing, with the mystic leavers of psychohistory making the entire book moot. In the context of the fall of the republic of rome this story makes much more sense, power itself is dangerous and a crime worthy of punishment, success in itself failure.
thoughts on The Mule
This fucking court jester Magnifico, a character deliberately created to be out of place jarring grating and annoying. The twist at the very end logically explains it but doesn't change the fact I was reading 200 pages annoyed.
Psychohistory as a unreliable narrator, we have already established in the lore that selective omission of truth, and outright lying, are acceptable tools in Hari's toolbox... so is his crisis pep talk in error or is it exactly what they needed to see to do what he wanted? The lack of rigor in a "science" like psychohistory leads to a civilization with slave like mysticism
Regarding psionic programming as a human mutation: This is such a blunt narrative weapon that its reasonable it wasn't accounted for, but also in a galactic empire spanning thousands of years humanity will drift and become different genetically incompatible species, especially in the context of being isolated from each other.
On the other hand why does psychohistory care about humans evolving? Why does it have any opinion on genetic drift? While we are at it, in the context of foundation comparing back to the fall of the roman empire... the prediction is about another empire rising... we have no comparable empire in the world to rome, so we are still in the dark patch...