The Galactic Empire has ruled twelve million worlds for twelve thousand years, and to almost everyone it looks eternal. Only Hari Seldon, master of the predictive science of psychohistory, can read the figures that say otherwise: the Empire will fall, and thirty thousand years of barbarism will follow.

Seldon cannot prevent the collapse, but he can shorten the dark age to a single millennium. To do it he founds an outpost of scientists and scholars at the very edge of the galaxy, on the barren world of Terminus, charged on the surface with compiling a great Encyclopedia. As the Empire's authority recedes, the young Foundation must survive a series of "Seldon Crises," turning points at which its only weapons are knowledge, trade, and nerve against the warlords and neighboring kingdoms rising in the vacuum of imperial power.

Assembled from Asimov's 1940s magazine stories, Foundation is a landmark of idea-driven science fiction, less about heroes than about the long arc of history and whether it can be steered.

Prose complexity: 7/10

Collected in

The Foundation Trilogy

Reflective Adventurous

Fantasy Science Fiction Literary Fiction Social Sci-Fi Space Opera Classics

I

Isaac Asimov

Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers. Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2. His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old. He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of...