Asimov modelled Foundation on the fall of Rome, and it nudged Krugman into economics
Isaac Asimov said the idea for Foundation came to him on the way to see his editor, drawn from Edward Gibbon's history of Rome's decline and fall. The result, a mathematician forecasting a galactic empire's collapse, inspired Nobel economist Paul Krugman, who saw economics as the nearest real science to its psychohistory.
In the stories, Hari Seldon develops psychohistory, a mathematics of sociology that uses statistical laws of mass behaviour to predict the future of huge populations. He foresees the fall of an empire spanning the entire Milky Way. The original tales, eight stories and novellas, ran in Astounding Science-Fiction between May 1942 and January 1950, and Gnome Press gathered them into three books from 1951 to 1953, long known as the Foundation Trilogy.
Asimov tried to stop there, but Seldon's plan called for a thousand years until a new empire and only a few hundred had passed, so fans kept pushing. After a 30-year gap he produced Foundation's Edge in 1982, which stayed on bestseller lists for nearly twelve months and took the 1983 Hugo for Best Novel. Foundation and Earth followed in 1986, then two prequels, the second appearing in 1993, after his death in 1992.
Along the way Asimov fused Foundation with his robot stories into a single universe, set nearly 50,000 years ahead, with Seldon born in 47,000 CE. He admitted the internal chronology was improvised and said he would not be surprised if careful readers found it inconsistent. After his death the estate authorised a second prequel trilogy by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear and David Brin.
In 1966 the trilogy won a one-off Hugo for Best All-Time Series, beating contenders including The Lord of the Rings. Its reach went well beyond fiction: psychologist Martin Seligman counted it among the biggest influences on his career, Newt Gingrich read it in high school, and Carl Sagan praised it in 1978 for capturing some of the dynamics of imperial Rome.
Source: Foundation (novel series)
