Foundation

The Foundation Series is an epic science fiction series written over a span of forty-nine years by Isaac Asimov. It consists of ten volumes (about one million words), which, although they can be read separately, are closely linked to one another. more...

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The term 'Foundation Series' is often used more generally to include the Robot Series and Empire Series, which are set in the same fictional universe. They have a combined length of fourteen novels and dozens of short stories written by Asimov, and six novels written by other authors after his death. It is widely considered the best, or at least the most influential, science fiction series ever.

The premise of the series is that Hari Seldon has spent his life developing a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory, a concept devised by Asimov and his editor John W. Campbell. Using the law of mass action, it can predict the future, but only on a large scale; it is error-prone for anything smaller than a planet or an empire. Using these techniques, Seldon foresees the fall of the Galactic Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a dark age lasting thirty thousand years before a second great empire arises. To shorten the period of barbarism, he decides to create the Foundation, a small secluded haven of technology on the planet Terminus, to preserve knowledge of the physical sciences after the collapse. The Foundation's location is chosen so that it acts as the focal point for the next empire in another thousand years.

The trilogy

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. The stories vary in length from about 7,000 words to about 50,000 words. These were then collected and published as Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation in the early 1950s by Gnome Press. These three books are thus known collectively as The Foundation Trilogy.

The early stories are derived from Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Asimov said he did \"a little bit of cribbin' from the works of Edward Gibbon\" when describing the influence of that work on the Trilogy).

In many ways, the Foundation series is unique as a science fiction novel. The focus of the books are certainly the trends through which a civilization might progress, specifically seeking to analyze how they might progress over time using history as a precedent. Although many science fiction novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four or Fahrenheit 451 do this, they typically do so by how current trends in society might come to fruition, and act as a moral allegory on the modern world. The Foundation series, on the other hand, typically looks at the trends in a wider scope, not necessarily looking at what the societies change into, but how they change and adapt. Furthermore, the concept of psychohistory, which gives the events in the story a sense of rational fatalism, leaves little room for moralization, as events are often treated as inevitable and necessary rather than deviations from the greater good. 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.

Read more at Wikipedia.org