- This is the first novel in Isaac Asimov"s Foundation Trilogy, a three-part masterwork that was later expanded to a seven-part series. It won the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Novel Series - a special award created to recognize this central work of science fiction. The book describes a far future in which humanity numbers in the quadrillions, spread across millions of worlds, governed by the vast and presumably eternal Empire. But mathematician Hari Seldon, who has developed the study of psychohistory, or the dynamics of very large numbers of humans, has predicted the Empire"s certain downfall. In order to forestall the chaos that would follow, he proposes a Foundation of all human knowledge at the edge of the galaxy.