The Galactic Empire has existed for thousands of years and seems to be powerful with a bright future. But not to psychohistorian Hari Seldon.

Using advanced mathematics and his newly-created science of "psychohistory", Seldon predicts that the Empire will soon collapse and be followed by a dark period lasting 30,000 years, until a new Empire will finally rise again to restore technology and culture to the galaxy. The collapse is inevitable, but Seldon has a plan to reduce the dark period to 1,000 years. That plan involves the Foundation - a colony of scientists placed on a remote planet at the edge of the galaxy and a set of crises that must be overcome over the next centuries.

This is the universe of Foundation by Isaac Asimov.

Long after Seldon's death, he continues to influence the society he founded. He periodically appears in a recorded holovision to announce the arrival and resolution of a "crisis" - crises that he predicted would occur and for which he accurately predicted the resolution.

Foundation is told in a collection of short stories, set many thousands of years in the future. Each story takes place a few decades after the one before it, so we have little time to get to know the characters - only how they influence their society. The characters are less interesting than Seldon's master plan and his application of psychohistory to each crisis. The forces that motivate society, such as politics, military force, religion, and commerce take center stage in these stories. Seldon knew he could not predict the behaviors of individuals not yet born, so he combined sociology, mathematics, and statistics to look at the behaviors of populations in aggregate and predict what how entire societies would react to the forces around them. Of course, this idea is applied today - both in the real world and in speculative fiction.

Three quarters of a century after its publication, Foundation remains a strong novel. It was published as part of a trilogy in the early 1950s, and Asimov later released many sequels and prequels. Eventually, he tied together these stories with his popular Robot novels, setting the Foundation, Empire, and Robot series all in the same universe.

Science fiction has been heavily influenced by Asimov and his Foundation series. Other writers have written about mankind's colonization of space and a galactic empire. Certainly, George Lucas was aware of this series when he created the Star Wars universe. And in 1966, the prestigious Hugo Award declared the Foundation trilogy to be the Best All-Time Science Fiction Series.

And it all began in the 1940s, when a 22-year-old Asimov published a short story that would later be compiled into a book that would be volume 1 of a trilogy that would launch a universe that would influence the world.