Foundation and Empire. Айзек Азимов
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First published in Great Britain by Panther (Granada Publishing) 1962
Copyright © Isaac Asimov 1952
Foundation and Empire is based upon published material originally copyrighted by Smith & Street Publications Inc.
Cover design and illustration by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Isaac Asimov asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008117504
Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780007381142
Version: 2018-04-18
To Mary and Henry for patience and endurance
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part I: The General
Chapter 1: Search for Magicians
Chapter 2: The Magicians
Chapter 3: The Dead Hand
Chapter 4: The Emperor
Chapter 5: The War Begins
Chapter 6: The Favourite
Chapter 7: Bribery
Chapter 8: To Trantor
Chapter 9: On Trantor
Chapter 10: The War Ends
Chapter 11: Bride and Groom
Chapter 12: Captain and Mayor
Chapter 13: Lieutenant and Clown
Chapter 14: The Mutant
Chapter 15: The Psychologist
Chapter 16: Conference
Chapter 17: The Visi-Sonor
Chapter 18: Fall of the Foundation
Chapter 19: Start of the Search
Chapter 20: Conspirator
Chapter 21: Interlude in Space
Chapter 22: Death on Neotrantor
Chapter 23: The Ruins of Trantor
Chapter 24: Convert
Chapter 25: Death of A Psychologist
Chapter 26: End of the Search
Footnote
About the Author
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
The Galactic Empire was falling.
It was a colossal Empire, stretching across millions of worlds from arm-end to arm-end of the mighty double-spiral that was the Milky Way. Its fall was colossal, too – and a long one, for it had a long way to go.
It had been falling for centuries before one man became really aware of that fall. That man was Hari Seldon, the man who represented the one spark of creative effort left among the gathering decay. He developed and brought to its highest pitch the science of psycho-history.
Psycho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of are bound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.
Hari Seldon plotted the social and economic trends of the time, sighted along the curves and foresaw the continuing and accelerating fall of civilization and the gap of thirty thousand years that must elapse before a struggling new Empire could emerge from the ruins.
It was too late to stop that fall, but not too late to close the gap of barbarism. Seldon established two Foundations at ‘opposite ends of the Galaxy’ and their location was so designed that in one short millennium events would knit and mesh so as to force out of them a stronger, more permanent, more quickly appearing Second Empire.
Foundation (Gnome Press, 1951) has told the story of one of those Foundations during the first two centuries of life.
It began as a settlement of physical scientists on Terminus, a planet at the extreme end of one of the spiral arms of the Galaxy. Separated from the turmoil of the Empire, they worked as compilers of a universal compendium of knowledge, the Encyclopedia Galactica, unaware of the deeper role planned for them by the already-dead Seldon.
As the Empire rotted, the outer regions fell into the hands of independent ‘kings’. The Foundation was threatened by them. However, by playing one petty ruler against another, under the leadership of their first mayor, Salvor Hardin, they maintained a precarious independence. As sole possessors of atomic power among worlds which were losing their sciences and falling back on coal and oil, they even established an ascendancy. The Foundation became the ‘religious’ centre of the neighbouring kingdoms.