Foundation

Isaac Asimov's Foundation books follow the fall of a galactic empire and the plan of the mathematician Hari Seldon, whose science of psychohistory predicts thirty thousand years of chaos and sets out to shorten them to one thousand. The first three books grew out of stories from the 1940s and appeared as novels from 1951 to 1953. Asimov returned three decades later with two sequels, which tie the series to his Robot and Empire novels, and two prequels about Seldon himself. Most readers start with Foundation and read in publication order, though the prequels also work first, in story order.