The Foundation Trilogy draws upon the space opera tradition developed in the science-fiction pulps of the 1930s. Outstanding examples include E. E. Smith's Skylark series beginning with Skylark of Space (1928), Jack Williamson's The Legion of Space (1934), and John W. Campbell's The Mightiest Machine (1934). These are primarily adventure stories set in a distant future that boasts galaxy-spanning empires or federations, spaceships that travel faster than the speed of light, and massive space battles fought with atomic weaponry. Asimov transformed this tradition by toning down the wildly adventurous plots and adding an intellectual dimension.

Asimov's original idea for The oundation Trilogy was to retell Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) as science fiction.

Just as Gibbon, a man of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, introduced a skeptical, rationalistic approach to history, so Asimov championed the cause of Enlightenment values in science fiction. Even his lucid, unemotional...