Naturally, the Galactic Empire, which has lasted for millennia, isn't thrilled by Seldon's prediction and he and the Foundation are banished from the planet of Trantor, the 'eye of the empire', to Terminus, an almost inhospitable planet light years away.

Gaal Dornick, a gifted young mathematician and possibly the only person in the galaxy capable of fully understanding Seldon's work, is crucial to his plan.

In that case, the Dark Ages might last a mere 1,000 years and the Foundation can build back better. A consequent period of barbarism will last for 30,000 years unless Seldon's plan, which involves setting up a Foundation to act as a repository of crucial, civilisation-preserving knowledge, is embraced. It uses maths to foresee broad historical trends, and Seldon predicts the collapse of the Galactic Empire. In the original series, Hari Seldon, a mathematician and psychologist, develops the science of 'psychohistory' which is 'a predictive model designed to forecast the behaviour of very large populations'. He died in 1992 but other authors have, with the blessing of the Asimov estate, written works set in the Foundation universe. Then in the 1980s, Asimov started adding books to the sequence – two prequels and two sequels. A professor of biochemistry at Boston University and the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he had been inspired by Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as well as Arnold Toynbee's theories about cycles of history. With them, Asimov wanted to portray the fall of some great future civilisation.

But now the 'unfilmable' has finally been filmed and this week an adaptation of Foundation starring Jared Harris and Lee Pace premieres on Apple TV+.įoundation began as a series of short stories in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in the 1940s and eventually became a trilogy of books published in the 1950s. Indeed, the writing of it spanned half a century. There have been several attempts to bring Foundation to the screen, but the series of books was long held to be unfilmable because the saga weaves together so many plotlines and spans centuries.

Foundation trilogy