Foundation

Foundation is a science fiction novel by the American writer Isaac Asimov, first published in 1951, assembled from a series of short stories that had appeared in Astounding Science Fiction magazine beginning in 1942, and the opening volume of his Foundation series. Set in a vast, declining Galactic Empire, the novel introduces the mathematician Hari Seldon, developer of the fictional science of psychohistory, which uses statistical laws of mass human behavior to predict the broad course of future history, and whose calculations reveal that the Empire is doomed to collapse into thirty thousand years of barbarism. To shorten that dark age to a single millennium, Seldon establishes two Foundations of scientists and scholars at opposite ends of the galaxy, ostensibly to compile a great Encyclopedia Galactica preserving human knowledge, though the true, hidden purpose of the first Foundation, settled on the remote world of Terminus, is to become the seed of a second, more benevolent galactic civilization according to a hidden master plan Seldon leaves behind. The novel follows the Foundation across several generations and crises, most memorably under its early leader Salvor Hardin, as it navigates the political and military threats of the collapsing Empire's fragmenting periphery, using its monopoly on advanced science, and increasingly a manipulated form of religious authority over neighboring, less advanced worlds, to secure its own survival and influence exactly as Seldon's psychohistorical calculations predicted. Widely regarded as one of the most influential works in the history of science fiction, the novel won a one-time Hugo Award in 1966 for Best All-Time Series and has been credited with shaping generations of later galactic-scale science fiction.