Foundation
by Isaac Asimov
CompleteAll books have been published
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.
Chronological Order
The seven Foundation novels in the order the story happens, starting with Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993). Isaac Asimov wrote these two prequels decades after the original books, to tell Hari Seldon's own story before the Foundation begins. Reading them first gives you the whole history in sequence, but some of the original trilogy's mysteries about Seldon's plan lose a little of their force.
