Foundation
Isaac Asimov (1951)
“A mathematician predicts the fall of civilization — and spends his life building the library that will survive it.”
Short Summary
Mathematician Hari Seldon uses psychohistory — a science of predicting mass human behavior — to foresee the fall of the Galactic Empire and a thirty-thousand-year dark age. To shorten the dark age to a thousand years, he establishes two Foundations at opposite ends of the galaxy. The novel follows the first Foundation on Terminus over a century as it navigates four crises, each time using Seldon's predictions to survive by deploying knowledge, trade, and diplomacy against brute force.
Detailed Summary
The Galactic Empire has ruled a million worlds for twelve thousand years, but mathematician Hari Seldon has calculated that it will collapse within three centuries. Using psychohistory — a statistical science that predicts the behavior of large populations — Seldon determines that the resulting barb...