The foundation

Chapter One
HARI SELDON-. . . born in the 11,988th year of the Galactic Era; died 12,069. The dates are more commonly given in terms of the current Foundational Era as -79 to the year 1 F.E. Born to middle-class parents on Helicon, Arcturus sector (where his father, in a legend of doubtful authenticity, was a tobacco grower in the hydroponic plants of the planet), he early showed amazing ability in mathematics. Anecdotes concerning his ability are innumerable, and some are contradictory. At the age of two, he is said to have . . . 

. . . Undoubtedly his greatest contributions were in the field of psychohistory. Seldon found the field little more than a set of vague axioms; he left it a profound statistical science. . . . 

. . . The best existing authority we have for the details of his life is the biography written by Gaal Dornick who, as a young man, met Seldon two years before the great mathematician's death. The story of the meeting . . .


ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA* 

Author- Isaac Asimov
Publisher- New York: Bantam Books 2004.

From one of the titans of science fiction comes the millennia-spanning foundation. the first of the expansive trilogy that has some of the most ambitious world-building since Tolkien and most thought-provoking work since Tolstoy.

After a band of psychologists (the science of predicting the future) come to the realisation that the galactic empire is in decline and will fall apart in the near future leading to thousands of years of war and regression, they set out with psychohistorian Hari Seldon as their leader to create a colony and preserve the accumulated knowledge of humankind.

find out more
goodread
authors website