The Foundation Series

The Foundation Series originally was a series of short stories written by Isaac Asimov in the 1940's and published in book form in the early 1950's. This trilogy stood alone until the 1980's when Asimov wrote two sequels and two prequels. In these additions to the series, especially the sequels, Asimov tied the whole Foundation series into two other series that he had worked on, the Robot Series and the Galactic Empire Series, making all three series exist all in one continuous universe.

Since Asimov passed away, other writers have extended the canon of the Foundation series again. Greg Bear, David Brin and Gregory Benford have each written a book which collectively are known as the Second Foundation Trilogy. There is also a collection of short stories by various authors called Foundations Friends, and some of those stories are actually pretty good.

Asimov himself has a very unique writing style that lends itself to imaginative interpretation. Other writers have a tendency to over-emphasize detail in their writing style, and some books that I have read could honestly be said to be more detail than story. Other stories are event driven and some books hardly seem to progress the story at all. Asimov's style of progressing the story through dialog is possibly unique; I've certainly never seen anyone else have a story unfold through conversation.

For the story it self, it is based upon a new field of science developed by Hari Seldon called psychohistory. The premise stated basically is that although it is almost impossible to predict the actions of any one individual, predicting the actions of large groups of people gets easier the larger the group is. This is very similar to Kinetic theory, which deals with the ability to predict the macroscopic movements of gases.

Geeky stuff aside, Hari Seldon uses psychohistory to predict the future. He sees that the Galactic Empire will collapse within 300 years, and there's nothing he can do to stop it. So he develops a plan to shorten the period of time between the first and second empires from 30,000 years to only 1,000 years. The whole story has two distinct phases: setting up the plan and following the plan. Since the plan has to be followed for at least 1000 years, it takes generations of followers that are unwittingly making sure that the plan is followed.

There's a lot more to this story, telepathy plays a big part as does atomics and technology. The whole project is a good picture of humanity sprawling across the galaxy. It's amazing just how easy it is to read all these books. You can pick them up just about anywhere.