Prelude to Foundation

Hari Seldon, a mathematician from the provincial world of Helicon, arrives on Trantor, the domed capital of the Galactic Empire, to deliver a paper. His argument is that the future might be predicted with mathematics. The year is 12,020 G.E.

Emperor Cleon I sits uneasily on his throne, and his First Minister, Eto Demerzel, wants to know exactly what Seldon knows. Seldon cannot simply go home. The journalist Chetter Hummin and the historian Dors Venabili help him disappear into the city.

The hiding takes him through Trantor's walled-off sectors, each with its own customs. He passes through Mycogen, a secretive religious enclave, and then Dahl, a hot, hard-living district. In both places he gathers scraps of a lost history of humanity.

The book is a chase and a mystery confined to one planet-city, and it reads without any prior knowledge of the series.

It is the earliest entry in the Foundation chronology, written in 1988 as a prequel, thirty years after the original stories. It also links the Foundation universe to Asimov's Robot and Empire novels. The open question is whether Seldon's idea can survive the people who want to own it.