Foundation

The book that launched one of science fiction’s most influential sagas. Mathematician Hari Seldon develops psychohistory, a science that can forecast the behavior of populations across millennia, and foresees the fall of a galactic empire followed by thirty thousand years of barbarism. To shorten that dark age to a single millennium, he sets up the Foundation, a colony to preserve and rebuild human knowledge. Its ideas about civilization, decline, and the long view shaped a generation of thinkers, Elon Musk among them, who has called it worth reading and pointed to it as an inspiration for SpaceX.