The books of the Foundation
series are among Isaac Asimov’s most famous works. The first, called simply Foundation, is actually a fix-up of five short stories/novellas and
introduces the highly original concept of ‘psychohistory’, defined on Wikipedia
as “a field of science and psychology that equates all possibilities in large
societies to mathematics, allowing for the prediction of future events”. Asimov’s prose pedestrian and his characters
cardboard cut-outs of each other, the book is nevertheless a quality example of
Golden Age science fiction which scratches at something deeper in the evolution
and behavior of humanity.
Set innumerable years in the future with mankind
inhabiting the stars, the premise of Foundation is that intergalactic
government has grown internally weak without its knowledge and faces a Dark Age
of 30,000 years, that is, if the ramblings of the professor Harry Seldon are to
be believed. A psychohistorian, Seldon
seeks to create an Encyclopaedia Galactica to preserve knowledge and
thus significantly reduce the number of “dark” years to come. After unsuccessfully defending himself at
trial, Seldon goes into exile on the distant planet Terminus where he and other
Encyclopedists are left free to put his ideas into action. How civilization in the galaxy evolves from
there is anybody’s guess—or is it?
