City
Winner of the International Fantasy Award (1953) and a cornerstone of pastoral SF; Jenkins is the genre's most touching robot this side of Asimov.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Foundation about?
Mathematician Hari Seldon's new science of psychohistory predicts the Galactic Empire's fall and thirty thousand years of barbarism — unless a Foundation of encyclopaedists, planted on the rim-world Terminus, can compress the dark age to a single millennium. The linked stories (from 1940s Astounding) skip decades at a time as Terminus survives successive 'Seldon crises' through trade, religion-as-marketing and the iron rule that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. History as chess problem, and compulsively readable seventy years on.
Why it matters
Cornerstone of the future-history tradition; Hugo for Best All-Time Series (1966). Inspired readers from Paul Krugman (economics) to Elon Musk, and an Apple TV+ adaptation from 2021.
Where does it sit in the series?
The fall and engineered rebirth of a Galactic Empire, guided by Hari Seldon's predictive science of psychohistory. The genre's definitive future-history epic, Hugo-crowned Best All-Time Series in 1966.
In the Guide from Foundation series:
- Foundation (1951)
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