My thoughts
Finished
[Spoilers] I read through and loved the foundation series; I wanted to read through the empire series as an origin story for the foundation's "empire" sounded interesting. I was expecting foundation-esque stories across generations providing peaks into the flawed rise of a ubiquitous empire. Unfortunately, the book is mostly a 1950s dry romance between a plastic space princess and an entitled college kid. The story lacks the scale and philosophical-scifi magic of the foundation series and all that's left is wordy dialogue, wooden characters, and some Sci-fi babble about the logistics of spacecraft and how planets are distributed in solar systems (this comes up a lot for some reason). I was left really disappointed. I usually love asimov's writing, but this is the first book I've read by him where I see its flaws. I might still read the second book in the series out of morbid curiosity, but if you're looking for more foundation, I would skip this one.