Foundation Trilogy

A landmark of science fiction`s "Golden Age," Isaac Asimov`s Foundation Trilogy--which comprises the novels Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation - has long been regarded a visionary masterpiece whose astonishing historical scope perfectly conveys science fiction`s sense of wonder. First published as a cycle of stories in the 1940s and `50s, Asimov`s iconic trilogy has endured to become, like the author himself, a legend of science fiction.Set in the far future, Foundation envisions a Galactic Empire that has thrived for 12,000 years, but whose decline into an age of barbarism lasting some thirty millennia is imminent - if the predictions of renegade psycho-historian Hari Seldon are accurate. Hoping to shorten the interval of this impending new Dark Age, Seldon convinces the Empire`s Commission of Public Safety to allow him enact a diversionary plan - one full of surprising subterfuges and intrigues intended to create and protect a Foundation on which the future Empire will be erected.Foundation and Empire advances the story farther into the future, in which a technologically advanced Foundation triumphs over attacking forces of the collapsing Empire. Yet even as the Foundation emerges valiantly, in fulfillment of Hari Seldon`s scheme, at the far corners of the Empire a powerful mutant, whose existence was never accounted for in Seldon`s projections, emerges to overwhelm the Foundation and establish his own tyrannical version of the Empire. In Second Foundation, a new Second Foundation, whose whereabouts have been kept secret from the original Foundation for safety`s sake, asserts itself as the true fulfillment of Hari Seldon`s plans for the Empire--and thereby pits itself against a Foundation resentful of its usurped authority.