Seldon is given the go-ahead, and the books tells how, for a time, his detailed predictions are borne out by events and then how, out of the blue, they get thrown for a loop by a mutant known as the Mule. Seldon tells the powers-that-be that, through psychohistory - the science of studying the actions and decisions of large groups of humans - he is able to see that the rot is irreversible and that the Galaxy faces 30,000 years of chaos before the rise of a Second Empire.īut he has a plan that would cut that to just 1,000 years, and it involves setting up a Foundation on Terminus at the far edge of the Periphery where scientists can preserve humankind’s knowledge and skills relatively undisturbed, and a second one at the opposite end of the Galaxy, at “star’s end.” (At this point, humans have no cultural memory of the name or location of the planet from which the species started.) The story told in three books - Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953) - first saw the light of day in a string of short stories and novelettes published between 19.Īs the first book opens, the entire Galaxy is under the control of the Empire, headquartered on Trantor, but the brilliant mathematician Hari Seldon, creator of the field of psychohistory, has determined that, even at this moment of the Empire’s greatness, it is rotten with decay. Isaac Asmiov’s Foundation Trilogy is something else again. Both describe a post-apocalyptic world a relative short time after the bombs dropped. (1952), originally titled Star Man’s Son. Miller Jr.’s elliptical, transcendent A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960) and Andre Norton’s coming-into-manhood adventure Daybreak: 2250 A.D. When it comes to books, I can point to some I read in my teens and early twenties that still resonate with me today.įor example, in science fiction, there are Walter M.

S ome of the enthusiasms of youth travel well.

Asimov empire novels