Foundation

1957

This is the starting point of the original Foundation trilogy.

The parts making up Foundation are:

|Part I: The Psychohistorians. Unlike the rest of the parts in the trilogy, this section was actually written for the book in order to add background.

The Galactic Empire has stood for almost twelve thousand years bringing an era of peace and prosperity previously unimagined. To the average citizen the Empire still retains it's strength and glamour, but a researcher by the name of Hari Seldon has developed a science that claims to foresee the future of the Galaxy for the next thirty thousand years, foreseeing an era of barbarism equally unparalleled in human history.

The answer? The Foundation - a repository of knowledge to hold and disseminate the accumulated knowledge of the Galaxy. This would reverse the damage after a 'mere' thousand years.

After a show trial of Hari 'Raven' Seldon, and his new colleague Gaal Dornick, those involved in the Foundation Institute are exiled to a barren planet at the far end of the Galaxy called Terminus...


| Part II: The Encyclopedists. This part details the efforts of the early colony to survive against the barbarianism of the newly independent kingdoms surrounding them, headed by the most devious of it's Mayors, Salvor Hardin, who usurped authority from the Board of Trustees when they proved incapable of handling the affairs of the colony and it's non-encyclopedist population.


|Part III: The Mayors. Terminus has an uneasy peace binding together the kingdoms making up the former Imperial Province of Anacreon based on the Religion of Science. The rulers of Anacreon reckon that they could use the power of god-hood this gives the king to start a Holy War against Terminus itself. Unfortunately, they had not counted on the fact that the Religion of Science has one massive advantage: when it puts a planet under Interdict, that planet will suffer in quite real ways.


|Part IV:The Traders. Once the Foundation had established itself amongst the barbarian kingdoms it has to try and stop the rest of the periphery banding together and attacking it in concert, for the religion in which it wraps up it's scientific presents demanded a degree of central control that the barbarian rulers feared. The only way that the Foundation had of getting it's wares into a kingdom are the traders in their little ships acting as agents for the priests of Science who would take control of the benefits flowing to a world.

When Limmar Ponyets gets sent to Askone it is as a trader, but really he's an agent of the priests sent to break the power of the local ruler.


|Part V: The Merchant Princes. After the fall of Askone, all decent kings and dictators barred all representatives of Terminus, either bona fide traders or mendicant priests.

When Hober Mallow is sent to Korrell to investigate the presence of nuclear weapons, he knows he is being sent into a trap, but little does he fully realise it's nature. He ends up fighting a two front 'war', and it's not the Korrellians who are the most dangerous. Mallow does not believe in the power of Religion, seeing it as a hide-bound, and as binding against the Foundation as those they hope to bind. Those wedded to the power of Religion see him as a traitor to the safety of The Cause, which gets him arrested and put on trial for treason.

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