The five short stories collected in volume one of the trilogy, Foundation, each zeroes in on a particular moment of crisis, when the Foundation faced a threat to its existence, and each one showed how key protagonists used the Seldon Principles of Psychohistory to a) understand how the crisis would play out and b) take advantage of the crisis to enable the Foundation to triumph and evolve. He arranged for the establishment of the Foundation and ensured it was based right at the periphery of the Galaxy on a remote planet named Terminus, in such a way that it could rise from the ashes of the ruined Empire, and restore civilisation in a much shorter period of time, hopefully – if his plans went right – only one thousand years. Seldon had predicted that the Galactic Empire, then at its peak, was in fact destined to collapse over the following 500 years, a collapse which would lead to a dark age which would last for 30,000 years. The two stories continue the narrative of the Foundation, established 12,000 years into the era of the Galactic Empire by the leading psychohistorian of the day, Hari Seldon. It consists of two long short stories, The General (75 pages) and The Mule (149 pages).Īnd although they were brought out in book form in 1952, they had both been published much earlier, The General in the April 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under the title Dead Hand, and The Mule in two parts in the November and December 1945 issues. Thus this, the second book in the original Foundation trilogy, is not a novel at all.

Originally there were three Foundation novels, each one a packaging-up of some of the eight linked short stories which Asimov wrote for John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction magazine from 1941 to 1948.

Asimov empire novels