"You are a planet suddenly cut off from the still-civilized centers of the Galaxy, and threatened by your stronger neighbors. You are a small world of scientists surrounded by vast and rapidly expanding reaches of barbarism. You are an island of nuclear power in a growing ocean of more primitive energy; but are helpless despite that, because of your lack of metals. You see, then, that you are faced by hard necessity, and that action is forced on you. The nature of that action — that is, the solution to your dilemma — is, of course, obvious!"
— Hari Seldon, "The Encyclopedists"
These three books, published individually as well as in Boxed Set and Omnibus volumes, form the core of Isaac Asimov's famous Space Opera. The Foundation Trilogy is an Epic Narrative that was first told in Pulp Magazines during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. It describes the rise of Terminus as the Second Galactic Empire, the obstacles presented by the schisms along the Periphery, the remnants of the first Galactic Empire, and the Mule. Additional stories taking place in this setting have been written, forming the Foundation series.
Dr Asimov wrote a Self-Parody about the trilogy, titled "The Foundation of S.F. Success", and other adaptations include a 1970s radio dramatisation by BBC Radio, accessible from Audible and Internet Archive. To see more, visit the multimedia franchise page.
Works published as The Foundation Trilogy:
- Foundation (1951):
- Foundation and Empire:
- Prologue
- "The General (Foundation)"
- "The Mule"
- Second Foundation:
- Prologue
- "Search by the Mule"
- "Search by the Foundation"
The Foundation Trilogy provides examples of:
- Agri World: During the time between "The Psychohistorians" and "The General (Foundation)", the Imperial Capital of Trantor is a City Planet that requires the combined output of 20 agricultural worlds to feed its population of 40 billion people. Ironically, between the events of "The General (Foundation)" and "The Mule", Trantor is sacked. After the Galactic Empire's fall cuts off its supply lines and it ceases to be the center of the galaxy, it starts to turn into a purely agrarian society, except for the Imperial Library where the Second Foundation is ruling the First Foundation from behind the scenes.
- All According to Plan: Despite having died decades to centuries ago, Hari Seldon planned the events of each chapter. Appearing in the "Time Vault", he announces the primary conflict of the story and reassures the people of Terminus that it will be resolved in their favour. His predictions become known as the Seldon Plan.
- Batman Gambit: Hari Seldon sets up centuries worth of plans in advance, using statistics. The actions taken by his Foundation on Terminus are dictated by the starting conditions (conditions that he arranged). Every so often, a "Seldon Crisis" occurs, where there is only one possible action that the Foundation can take, because any other action would result in their destruction. Subverted when it turns out that the Second Foundation he keeps talking about is a secret organisation he began with the purpose of constantly tweaking details of The Plan to force Terminus back onto his predictions if they began to deviate."You see, then, that you are faced by hard necessity, and that action is forced on you. The nature of that action — that is, the solution to your dilemma — is, of course, obvious!" — Hari Seldon, The Encyclopedists"
- Benevolent Conspiracy: The Second Foundation is the opposite of the Foundation on Terminus in many ways; established at "the opposite end of the galaxy", a secret cabal of mentalists rather than a public presence of scientists and engineers, but both are present to prevent thirty thousand years of anarchy that would occur without following the Seldon Plan.
- Billed Above the Title:
- The 1963 Science Fiction Book Club copy of The Foundation Trilogy Omnibus printed his name above the title, with "Isaac" in roughly the same size as the title, but with "Asimov" about 50% larger. The full name is underlined and coloured green.
- The Avon and Equinox cover for The Foundation Trilogy Omnibus from 1974 printed Dr Asimov's name above the title, but at the same size.
- Bastei Lubbe's 1983 German translation of The Foundation Trilogy (changed to Die Psychohistoriker) places Dr Asimov's name in slightly smaller font above the title.
- Boxed Set:
- Gnome Press published a slipcase to fit the original hardcover for all three books to celebrate the printing of Second Foundation. The box uses the art of Foundation's dust jacket for the sides.
- Avon published a box set of their editions in the 1970s, using a minimized version of each cover for the slipcase art.
- Clarke's Third Law: When Foundation begins, the Galactic Empire's civilization and technology has already begun to crumble; local systems are losing the scientific expertise necessary for an interstellar society to function and control of the Periphery is quickly lost. Starting from the end of "The Encyclopedists", the people of Terminus begin educating people from the Four Kingdoms in technology, such as nuclear power, radioactive synthetics, and hyperwave relays. However, in order to explain the technology in a way they could understand, Terminus has to couch everything in religious terms, effectively saying The Galactic Spirit Did It to convince the local barbarians that it was safe for human use. When a better educated man is trying to piece through the veil of mysticism created by the gulf of distance, he protests that a personal shield is impossible. To which the person he's interrogating drolly points out that their status as "magicians" is not wholly unearned.
- Deconstruction: Instead of dashing heroics and swashbuckling, as featured in most Space Opera stories, the protagonists use their wits and intelligence to escape their problems. Indeed, in most stories, the individuals themselves are unable to do anything to save the day, but historical forces, beyond the protagonists' control, resolve the conflicts in their favour anyway.
- Doorstopper:
- The 1963 Omnibus by Doubleday is over 650 pages long. Most omnibus editions are similarly lengthy.
- The 1966 Omnibus by Sidgwick And Jackson condensed the page count to about 550 pages without losing any of the story.
- The largest copies are the 939 page German Omnibus translations by Heyne in 1991 and 1994.
- Double-Sided Book: Ace Books double novel series has D-110; No World Of Their Own by Poul Anderson on the front and The 1,000 Year Plan'’ by Isaac Asimov (the first novel of The Foundation Trilogy'') on the back.
- Double Meaning: A deliberate In-Universe version is when Hari Seldon admits during Foundation (1951) that he created two Foundations at 'opposite ends of the galaxy'; one at a remote backwater planet at the edge of the galactic arms called Terminus, and the other at Star's End. During Foundation and Empire, characters start trying to discover the location of the Second Foundation that Hari Seldon keeps mentioning. In Second Foundation, characters use 'the other end of the galaxy' as a clue. Some are doing it spatially (i.e. a planet on the opposite edge of the galaxy), others temporally (i.e. Terminus was the last planet to be settled by that point; by that logic, the Second Foundation must be on the first planet — Earth That Was). Some of these suggestions were deliberately misleading ideas by the Second Foundation in order to maintain their secrecy. Hari Seldon meant Trantor, whose archaic nickname was Star's End, was at the galactic core (in a spiral, the opposite ends are the centre and the far arms), and was the sociological opposite of Terminus (the centre of galactic business/government versus a remote backwater).
- Enigmatic Institute: The eponymous Foundation becomes more and more enigmatic and secretive as time goes on, partially because the neighboring worlds have lost nearly all their technical know-how so the technology the Foundation retains might as well be magic to them.
- Epigraph: When these stories were collected into a Novel format, segments from the Encyclopedia Galactica were included at the start of each chapter to give the setting more depth.
- Hologram: Hari Seldon, near the end of his life, recorded messages for the future. These messages are built into what the people of Terminus call a "Time Vault", and a three-dimensional recording of Seldon shows up within the cube. These are simple recordings, and Seldon cannot respond to any visual or auditory cues from the audience. He uses these messages to comment on current events.
- Idiosyncratic Cover Art: Panther's 1962 covers were illustrated by Chris Foss and they designed a 3-part joiner cover, where laying the books side-to-side form one continuous artwork (link)
◊. - Long Game: The first story in this Trilogy, "The Psychohistorians", has Hari Seldon on trial, where he explains his belief that the Galactic Empire will dissolve within the next few centuries, leading to thirty thousand years of anarchy. The conclusion of the trial allows him to establish a project writing the Encyclopedia Galactica on Terminus, a planet at the furthest edge of the galaxy. Fifty years later, in "The Encyclopedists", the long-dead Hari Seldon appears as a recording to announce that the project is a sham, concocted to establish them as the nucleus of a second Galactic Empire. It will take nine hundred fifty more years until they reclaim the entire galaxy, but even now, they face the first of several Crises that will shape their destiny. Also, there's a second Foundation at the opposite end of the galaxy, which comes into play when someone tries to disrupt his Plan.
- Low Culture, High Tech: One of the factors causing the collapse of the Galactic Empire is, having long become used to complacent peace and prosperity, its scientists have become content to simply preserve and pass down received wisdom rather than creating new inventions or making new discoveries. At the same time, the divide between theoretical and applied science grows to the point that nearly everyone (except for the Foundation itself) loses the ability to maintain their own infrastructure, much less expand it. As early as 25 years after Hari Seldon predicted the fall of the Empire, a nuclear reactor experiences a Chernobyl-like disaster due to lack of understanding, so the Empire's response is to restrict the use of nuclear power. The neighboring Four Kingdoms are fighting in spaceships with oil and coal powering them.
- Market-Based Title:
- Sidgwick And Jackson published a version of The Foundation Trilogy with the name An Isaac Asimov Omnibus in 1966.
- Bastei Lubbe's 1983 German translation of The Foundation Trilogy based the title of their volume on the first chapter; Die Psychohistoriker.
- Naming Your Colony World: Since Foundation (1951), Terminus has been the capital panet of the (First) Foundation. It is given this name because it is the furthest habitable planet from the galactic core, the 'terminus' of the galaxy. It also shares its name with the Roman god of boundary stones and property disputes.
- Omnibus:
- Multiple publishers have printed this Trilogy as a single volume, which usually forms a Doorstopper hardcover book.
- Isaac Asimov is the title for a six-book compilation; The Stars, Like Dust; The Naked Sun; I, Robot: and the three books of The Foundation Trilogy.
- Patchwork Story: This trilogy is made from nine short fiction stories (eight of which were previously published in Pulp Magazines), set decades to centuries apart, all patched together into three volumes.
- The Plan: The Seldon Plan is a very very very long-term plan. The Seldon Plan involves the entire Milky Way galaxy, populated by a few quadrillion people at least, over a period of a millennium, with a dash of Xanatos Speed Chess (The Second Foundation) thrown in to keep the whole thing from going off the rails.
- The Prophecy: Hari Seldon predicts the future of the galaxy using psychohistory, a set of mathematical formulas that can predict human behaviour (developed by Seldon). He anticipates that the Galactic Empire will collapse and leave the Milky Way in anarchy for thirty thousand years. To avoid this, he designs the Seldon Plan to shorten this interval to about one thousand years instead. It becomes popular knowledge in the galaxy that Seldon's Plan makes the Foundation of Terminus undefeatable.
- Recycled In Space: Isaac Asimov was open about his efforts to write a Science Fiction saga that was effectively The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire IN SPACE! Trantor is the capital of Rome, and the primary perspective is from a planet at the outer edges of the empire, watching as they grow to supplant Trantor as the capital of a galactic empire. Several aspects of the collapse are recycled to fit the new setting, such as the Byzantine Empire (Cleon II is Justinian I and Bel Riose is Bellisarius) and the sacking of Rome (Trantor's City Planet is torn apart and the capital is moved to Neotrantor).
- Scry vs. Scry: Using psychohistory, the actions of a population and large-scale events that will happen in their future can be predicted with near-perfect precision, barring never-before-seen events that throw the entire game out of whack. However, the mathematics underpinning psychohistory depend on the population being unaware of the predictions, which means conflicts between factions capable of psychohistory need to be resolved with what amounts to old-fashioned plotting and scheming.
- Seers: Everyone who learns psychohistory, a system of mathematics to predict human behaviour, is capable of analyzing the future and guessing (with a high degree of accuracy) what will happen. Hari Seldon, the one who designed the science, was decried as "Raven Seldon". It's not until decades after his death that the Scam Religion established by Terminus starts spreading the message of him as a prophet and the Foundation's destiny to rule the galaxy.
- Serial Novel: Each book in this Trilogy is comprised of several stories that began as short fiction in Astounding Science Fiction.
- Strong Empire, Shriveled Emperor: The Mule is a mutant with enough skill and power to build a huge empire and the ability to brainwash his enemies into being fanatically loyal servants, but with a frail build and enough health problems to die before he's fifty.
- Tagline:
- "Three Classics of Science Fiction" — Doubleday edition of The Foundation Trilogy from 1963
- "Winner of The Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series" — Avon's Boxed Set from the 1970s
- "Hugo award for best all-time series" and "The classic read by millions" — Avon and Equinox cover for The Foundation Trilogy Omnibus from 1974
- "Die beruhmte Foundation-Trilogie" — Bastei Lubbe's cover for the German translation of The Foundation Trilogy from 1983
- "The Million-copy Bestseller" — Del Rey's cover from 1983
- Title Drop Chapter: The 1983 German Omnibus translation of the trilogy by Bastei Lubbe chose to name the volume Die Psychohistoriker, matching the first chapter, "The Psychohistorians".
- Unbuilt Trope: This trilogy codified The Federation, under the name of the "Galactic Empire". The main plot describes the inherent weakness of interstellar democracy, and its decay into a corrupted Empire. While it is one of the formative works of the Golden Age of science fiction, Hari Seldon is neither the archetypal Action Hero or Science Hero character, but instead a Guile Hero who uses social and political tools against the Foundation's enemies... he dies of old age before the plot begins in earnest, not that it stops him from guiding the development of the next Hegemonic Empire.
- Video Wills: Hari Seldon, near the end of his life, recorded several holographic messages to be viewed at specific dates in the future, anniversaries of the founding of Terminus. Unusually for this trope, these messages are not about the distribution of his assets, but rather opportunities for him to comment on current events.
- Zeerust: Society seems to be stuck in The '50s despite the setting being tens of thousands of years in The Future. Everybody Smokes, mobile communication devices don't exist, everything runs on nuclear power, the newspaper print industry is still around, and computer data is stored on microfilm.
