Foundation

Foundation is a science fiction novel by the American writer Isaac Asimov, first published as a book by Gnome Press in 1951. Five linked short stories, gathered from the magazines where they appeared, make up the book, and it is the first in what became the Foundation series. In 1966 the Hugo for Best All-Time Series, awarded once only, went to the three volumes published between 1951 and 1953.

The Galactic Empire has ruled for twelve thousand years and is dying. Hari Seldon can prove it, because he invented a branch of mathematics that predicts what large populations will do while saying nothing useful about any single person in them. His forecast is a dark age of thirty thousand years, and his answer is to gather scientists and scholars on a remote world at the edge of the galaxy so that they can shorten it.

The Foundation's history is told as a series of crises, each arriving roughly a generation after the last, and each dealt with by people who have very little time to work out what Seldon intended. Asimov wrote the stories as separate episodes, so the book reads as a sequence of linked problems rather than a single continuous plot. The colony also sits at the edge of the galaxy for reasons that are not explained to its founders.

The series continued with Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation and later books, and the wider setting connects to Asimov's robot novels. The first book establishes psychohistory, Seldon's plan and the Foundation itself.