Preem Palver

Who He Is

Preem Palver is the First Speaker of the Second Foundation in "Search by the Foundation," the second half of Second Foundation (1953). For almost the whole story, though, the reader does not know that. He appears as a cheerful, talkative Trantorian farmer and grain trader who happens to be on Kalgan with his wife when the teenage Arkady Darell needs help getting away.

It is one of Asimov's best disguises: the most powerful person in the galaxy hides in plain sight as someone nobody would look at twice.

His Role in the Story

The story is set about sixty years after the Mule's search, and roughly fifty-five years after his death. The Second Foundation has spent that time repairing the damage he did to the Seldon Plan. Now it faces a new problem: the First Foundation knows the Second Foundation exists, resents the idea of being manipulated, and is trying to find and destroy it. If that knowledge persists, the First Foundation's behavior will stop matching Seldon's predictions.

Palver's answer is a large, patient deception. He helps Arkady escape Kalgan and reach Trantor, and her information leads her father's group of scientists to a group of fifty Second Foundationers hidden on Terminus. The Terminus group captures them and believes the Second Foundation is gone. In fact, the fifty were volunteers, sacrificed so that the real Second Foundation, on Trantor, could vanish again. The novel's last pages reveal the farmer as the First Speaker, satisfied that the Plan is back on course.

What He Represents

Palver is the Second Foundation at its most effective and its most unsettling. He is warm, funny, and genuinely kind to Arkady, and he also arranges the sacrifice of fifty of his own people and the adjustment of a child's mind. The novel does not settle whether that is wisdom or arrogance. The later books, especially Foundation's Edge, come back to that question and are much less sure the Second Foundation should be trusted.

He is also a reminder that the First Speaker who stopped the Mule, in the first half of Second Foundation, is a different, unnamed person. Palver belongs to the next generation.

In the Apple TV+ Series

Troy Kotsur plays Preem Palver in Season 3. The show makes him the leader of the Second Foundation on the planet Ignis, where mentalics have trained in secret under Gaal Dornick and Hari Seldon for more than a century. He helps Han Pritcher understand that the Mule has read his mind, and in the finale he welcomes Ambassador Quent into a Second Foundation that has moved into hiding on Trantor, a nod to the novel's famous ending.