Foundation

The Foundation, created by Hari Seldon to protect civilization’s scientific knowledge, makes its home on the planet Terminus near the edge of the galaxy. There, scientists and politicians work on the Foundation’s interconnected projects, together called the Plan, which seek to minimize the worst effects of the anarchic dark ages that follow the collapse of the Galactic Empire. Among the Plan’s tasks are the assembling of a massive Encyclopedia Galactica that contains and preserves all human knowledge. The Plan also calls for the training of maintenance engineers as high priests in a religion that protects technology from superstition, and the manipulation of nearby planets into accepting technology under the guise of religion.

Seldon assembles a second Foundation at a distant location called Star’s End, where it will later coordinate with the first Foundation. How this second Foundation operates, and what its specific purposes are, remain hidden for some time from the first Foundation. The second Foundation serves as a “gun on the wall” motif, to be fired off later in the book series. Both Foundations symbolize the secular human urge to protect civilizations from disasters caused by human folly, and how people might organize such a project in the future.

Surrounding the Foundation’s planet Terminus on the outer edge of the galaxy are four groups of planets, each controlled by a royal household determined to conquer the other fiefdoms. Strongest among them is the Kingdom of Anacreon, once the greatest and most sophisticated of the remote planets and now clinging to its faded glory with dreams of conquest. The Foundation keeps these fiefdoms in check by offering them its superior technology, administered through a priesthood of maintenance engineers under a religion soon adopted by the planets’ citizenry. No single kingdom can attack and steal the Foundation for itself because the other three realms will join to overpower the aggressor. After a failed attempt by Anacreon to launch a surprise invasion of Terminus, all the kingdoms sign peace treaties that cede much of their power to the Foundation. The Kingdoms’ desire for nuclear technology suggests an allusion to the concept of mutually assured destruction, the theory that a nuclear attack by any superpower on another would incite nuclear counter-attack.

In later stories, the Four Kingdoms serve as islands of high technology in a sea of galactic anarchy; they showcase the nonviolent political genius of the Foundation’s leaders. They also serve as examples of how the Foundation will function over time, and how any technically strong but politically weak institution might deal with threats.

Psychologist and mathematician Hari Seldon develops a new science, psychohistory, that makes predictions about the future based on equations that quantify politics, history, and human psychology. The main discovery of psychohistory is that the Galactic Empire will collapse within 500 years, followed by a 30,000-year dark age.

Psychohistory can’t foresee individual futures but can predict what masses of people will do. Seldon realizes that it is possible to alter humanity’s future by manipulating history through the activities of an organization that foresees and guides large social trends. He creates the Foundation to do so, specifically for preserving technology during the interregnum of anarchy. He also realizes that if too many people know about psychohistory, they’ll use it to change history in some other direction, so he keeps his plans largely to himself. He has the Foundation institute a new religion that explains technology as divine miracles and keeps societies ignorant of psychohistory.

Psychohistory creates the inciting incident of the plot and thereafter hovers in the background; as a motif, it is Asimov’s suggestion that human history is both predictable and cyclical over millennia.