The Foundation Trilogy is one of the first series in science fiction to be set within a historical framework of future events, a concept used by many later writers, including Larry Niven, James Blish, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Each story is set in a different period of Galactic Empire history during which the Foundation faces and solves some crisis that threatens civilization. Each story's plot centers on solving a problem by a combination of deductive reasoning and knowledge of the historical process. This plot focus enables Asimov to introduce a greater intellectual content into the space opera format of pulp magazine science fiction. Before the publication of The Foundation Trilogy, many sciencefiction works had used galactic empires or federations simply as a backdrop for stories of heroic adventure. In the trilogy, Asimov excludes sex and violence almost entirely, concentrating on intellectual activity and using each story's political...