After this 1,000 years, a new galactic Empire will be founded, one that is more stable and more just than the one that preceded it.įoundation tells the story of the first 150 years of what becomes known as Seldon’s Plan. Seldon can, however, predict what actions can be done to nudge history, eventually, in a more favorable direction, and it is for this reason that he established the Foundation: to shorten the Dark Age, and its associated human suffering, from 30,000 years to a mere 1,000 years. The collapse of the Empire is inevitable - the actions of quintillions of humans in the Empire possess a momentum that cannot be overturned in time to avoid disaster. Some 12,000 years into the existence of a powerful galactic Empire, a mathematician named Hari Seldon predicts, using a new and advanced mathematical science known as psychohistory, the collapse of the Empire within 300 years and a galaxy-wide Dark Age to follow lasting some 30,000 years. The Foundation trilogy tells an epic, galaxy-spanning story over the course of some 400 years, telling the early history of what is known simply as, well, the Foundation. … and, as of today, I’ve started reading the fifth of the Foundation novels.Īs the first three books, Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953), form the original trilogy, and I thought it would be worthwhile to blog my thoughts on the trilogy as a whole. A few weeks ago, I read Asimov’s Foundation (1951), and blogged my thoughts about it.Īsimov has written seven books set in the Foundation setting I figured that I would be content reading the first one, to get a feel for it, and then move on to other authors and other series… A natural and obvious place to place some emphasis is on classic works from the golden age of science fiction, and a natural and obvious place to start there is with the work of Isaac Asimov.

I’ve recently been trying to become more acquainted with science fiction as a genre, as most of my life I’ve been focused primarily on horror fiction.

The second foundation trilogy