As a writer, Isaac Asimov’s reputation rests solidly on his ambitious Foundation Trilogy, which was awarded a special Hugo Award in 1966 as best science fiction series of all time. And although he would bow to fan pressure and resume the franchise nearly thirty years after publishing its initial installments, the seminal impact of Asimov’s imaginative enterprise relies on the original three books composed in the 1940s and early 1950s: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. First published in bits and pieces in John W. Campbell’s Astounding magazine, the premier showcase of its era, the Foundation stories chronicled “the decline and fall of Rome, writ large,” using Edward Gibbon’s classic books on that subject as a template, as Asimov himself confessed. But the interstellar scope and temporal span of this history of the future, the intense melancholy engendered for the failure of an era yet unborn, the quiet heroism and intellectual byplay, the elements of mystery and detection—all of these components unite to create a sense that the writer (and the reader) is not anticipating things to come. Instead, we look back with providential omniscience from a vantage point even further forward in the stream of time.