Trivia / Foundation

• Outlived Its Creator: Three novels were added to Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series by other authors and with permission from the Good Doctor's estate after he passed on to the Great Typewriter in the Sky. They are called the Second Foundation Trilogy.
• Science Marches On: Many of the "mistakes" in Foundation and Earth are based on the incomplete 1980s understanding of galactic astronomy. For example, twenty years after the book was published, we now know that Saturn's rings aren't nearly as unique as Dr Asimov had assumed because many extrasolar planets with even larger rings have been found.
• Sequel Gap:
  • The fourth book in his Foundation series, Foundation's Edge, was published in 1982, 29 years after the original trilogy.
  • The seventh book in his Foundation series, Forward the Foundation, was published in 1993, five years after Prelude to Foundation (Dr Asimov had been ill for these past several years, and had died in 1992).
• Technology Marches On:
  • There's a U-turn on this because in the first volume, two psychohistorians have palmtop computers capable of the massively complex math used by psychohistory, but in the last volume (centuries later), the protagonists are using slide-rules — futuristic slide-rules with lots of whizzy sliders, but still... This is because the first story of the original trilogy was the last to be written; the others originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction as short stories, but "The Psychohistorians" was written specifically for the book collection when it was first published.
  • The first stage of Hari Seldon's plan involves publishing an encyclopedia, with updates every ten years, which seems a little quaint from a post-Internet point of view. Later books in publication order catch on to the idea of Wikis just before the invention of the internet.
• Working Title:
  • We know Foundation's Edge used the titles Lighting Rod and "Foundation at Bay" while in the draft process because editions of The Foundation Trilogy since the eighties have included this fact in "The Story Behind the Foundation".
  • The Afterword of Foundation's Fear establishes that the drafted titles of the next two books in the trilogy were currently Foundation And Chaos (which it kept for publication) and Third Foundation (which is published under the title Foundations Triumph).

---