Foundation

Imagine a giant space empire with a zillion planets that's about to fall apart, like a huge old castle crumbling. Super-smart Hari Seldon uses math magic called psychohistory to see this coming and starts a team called the Foundation on a faraway rock planet to save all the books and smarts, so the dark times after the fall are short instead of super long. Cool leaders like Salvor Hardin trick bad guys with fake religion and gadgets, and Hober Mallow uses money and trade to win, but then a weird mutant called the Mule messes up the plan with his mind powers—it's like a big chess game across space and time!

Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation' launches his seminal series with mathematician Hari Seldon, who pioneers psychohistory—a mathematical science predicting the behavior of vast human populations. Foreseeing the collapse of the 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire and a subsequent 30,000-year dark age, Seldon devises the Seldon Plan: establishing the Encyclopedia Foundation on the isolated planet Terminus. Disguised as a scholarly project to preserve knowledge, it secretly serves as the nucleus for a new empire, guiding humanity through pre-recorded holographic crises over centuries. As imperial decay accelerates, Foundation leaders confront Seldon's predicted Seldon Crises. Mayor Salvor Hardin weaponizes a contrived religion around advanced technology to dominate barbaric neighboring kingdoms. Later, merchant prince Hober Mallow shifts to economic imperialism, prioritizing trade over faith. The narrative culminates in disruption by the Mule, a mutant conqueror with mind-control powers, who defies psychohistory's statistical assumptions by emphasizing individual agency, foreshadowing chaos in the galaxy-spanning saga.