Foundation's Edge - Isaac Asimov [1]
"The Foundation series is one of the masterpieces of science fiction. If you've never read these novels, then you're in for a treat, and even if you've already read them, then you owe it to yourself to reread them, because they're still great."--Allen M. Steele
"Quite simply, Asimov got me started."--Liz Williams
"Isaac was still in his teens when I met him, a fan of mine before I was a fan of his. Writing for John W. Campbell back in the famous 'golden age of science fiction,' he became one of the founders of our field. With the robot stories and the Foundation stories, he helped to shape science fiction as we know it."--Jack Williamson
Bantam Spectra Books
by Isaac Asimov
THE FOUNDATION NOVELS
Prelude to Foundation
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
Foundation's Edge
Forward the Foundation
THE ROBOT NOVELS
I, Robot
The Caves of Steel
The Naked Sun
The Robots of Dawn
Nemesis
The Gods Themselves
Fantastic Voyage
With Robert Silverberg
Nightfall
The Positronic Man
FOUNDATION'S EDGE
A Bantam Spectra Book / published by arrangement with Doubleday
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Doubleday hardcover edition published 2002
Bantam mass market edition / November 1981
Bantam mass market reissue / September 2004
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright (c) 1982 by Nightfall, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-21182
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90093-4
v3.1
To the memory of Judy-Lynn del Rey
(1943-1986,
a giant in mind and spirit)
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
1. Councilman
2. Mayor
3. Historian
4. Space
5. Speaker
6. Earth
7. Farmer
8. Farmwoman
9. Hyperspace
10. Table
11. Sayshell
12. Agent
13. University
14. Forward!
15. Gaia-S
16. Convergence
17. Gaia
18. Collision
19. Decision
20. Conclusion
Afterword by the Author
About the Author
PROLOGUE
THE FIRST GALACTIC EMPIRE WAS FALLING. IT HAD been decaying and breaking down for centuries and only one man fully realized that fact.
He was Hari Seldon, the last great scientist of the First Empire, and it was he who perfected psychohistory--the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations.
The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically. The larger the mob, the greater the accuracy that could be achieved. And the size of the human masses that Seldon worked with was no less than the population of all the inhabited millions of worlds of the Galaxy.
Seldon's equations told him that, left to itself, the Empire would fall and that thirty thousand years of human misery and agony would elapse before a Second Empire would arise from the ruins. And yet, if one could adjust some of the conditions that existed, that Interregnum could be decreased to a single millennium--just one thousand years.
It was to insure this that Seldon set up two colonies of scientists that he called "Foundations." With deliberate intention, he set them up "at opposite ends of the Galaxy." The First Foundation, which centered on physical science, was set up in the full daylight of publicity. The existence of the other, the Second Foundation, a world of psychohistorical and "mentalic" scientists, was drowned in silence.
In The Foundation Trilogy, the story of the first four centuries of the Interregnum is told. The First Foundation (commonly known as simply "The Foundation," since the existence