Foundation series

Written from secondary sources (the publisher’s and reference descriptions of the series), not from the novels themselves.

Seven novels about the fall of a galactic empire. The mathematician Hari Seldon invents psychohistory, a statistical science of how very large populations behave, and foresees a dark age of thirty thousand years. He cannot stop the fall, but he sets up a Foundation meant to cut the dark age to a thousand, and the books follow his plan across centuries through the crises it predicted.

The idea underneath is that masses are predictable even when individuals are not. The plan steers history by nudging it at a few forecast turning points, and for a while it works. Then comes the Mule, a mutant who can control minds, the one thing the statistics could not see. He beats the Foundation, and the plan survives only because a hidden Second Foundation exists to protect it.

The first three novels (1951 to 1953) grew out of eight magazine stories published between 1942 and 1950, modelled on Gibbon’s history of the decline and fall of Rome. Asimov returned to the series thirty years later with two sequels, which widen the question past both Foundations and tie the series to his robot novels, and two prequels about Seldon. The original trilogy won a one-off Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series in 1966.