Wanda Seldon

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Wanda Seldon is a fictional character in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The daughter of Raych Seldon and Manella Dubanqua, Wanda played a key role in creating the two Foundations.

Wanda was born when Hari Seldon was 52. Right before Seldon's sixtieth birthday party, a sleeping Wanda overheard Tamwile Elar talking to the military junta that served as a government. She told Dors Venabili, Seldon's wife and bodyguard, that in her dream she heard the phrase "lemonade death", which Venabili investigated and discovered was a garbled version of "Layman-aided death", a phrase which meant a death helped by a non-mathematician.

When Wanda was 14, she asked Yugo Amaryl about how psychohistory was going, and Yugo showed her the Prime Radiant, a device that displayed all the psychohistoric equations. Wanda pointed to a certain set of equations and said it didn't look right. Yugo examined it and found it was indeed wrong. Yugo told Seldon about the incident, and Seldon deduced that Wanda had somehow read Yugo's mind and sensed his uneasiness about those equations. At that moment, Seldon conceived of a Second Foundation whose power would lie in its telepathic power and invisibility.

Wanda continued to develop her mentalic abilities during her life. When Seldon was 76, Raych had gone to Santanni and he needed a new bodyguard, so he hired someone named Stettin Palver. When Seldon was put on trial for attacking someone "without provocation" (according to a lying witness), Wanda used her powers to persuade the witness to tell the truth. What she didn't find out for another few years was that Palver was also using his mind there. When they happened to meet, they discovered that Palver was mentalic as well, and Seldon sent them to find others with those abilities. They would eventually form the Second Foundation.