Second Foundation Prologue

The First Galactic empire had endured for tens of thousands of years. It had included completely the planets of the extragalactic nebula in a centralized rule, sometimes tyrannical, sometimes benevolent, everlastingly orderly. Human beings had forgotten that any other form of existence could be. entirely except Hari Seldon.Hari Seldon was the last great scientist of the First Empire. It was he who brought the science of psycho-history to its adequate outgrowth. Psycho-history was the quintessence of sociology, it was the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations.The private human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistic in ally. The large the mob, the greater the accuracy that could be achieved. And the size of the human masses that Seldon worked with was no less than the population of the Galaxy which in his time was numbered in the quintillions. It was Seldon, then, who foresaw, against all common sen se and popular belief, that the brilliant Empire which seemed so unfaltering was in a separate of irremediable decay and decline. He foresaw (or he solved his equations and interpreted its symbols, which amounts to the same thing) that left to itself, the Galaxy would pass done a thirty thousand year period of misery and lawlessness before a unified government would rise once more.He set slightly to remedy the situation, to bring about a state of affairs that would restore peace and civilization in a angiotensin-converting enzyme thousand of years. Carefully, he set up two colonies of scientists that he called metrical units. With consider intention, he set them up at opposite ends of the Galaxy. One Foundation was set up in the full daylight of publicity. The existence of the other, the consequence Foundation, was drowned in silence.In Foundation (Gnome, 1951) and Foundation and Empire (Gnome, 1952) are told the offshoot three centuries of the history of the First Foundati on. It began as a small fraternity of Encyclopedists lost in the emptiness of the outer periphery of the Galaxy. Periodically, it faced a crisis in which the variables of human intercourse, of the social and economic currents of the time constricted about it. Its freedom to move stick along only one certain(a) line and when it moved in that direction, a new horizon of development opened before it. All had been planned by Hari Seldon, long numb(p) now.The First Foundation, with its superior science, took over the barbarized planets that surrounded it. It faced the anarchic Warlords that broke away from the dying Empire and beat them. It faced the remnant of the Empire itself under its last strong Emperor and its last strong popular and beat it.Then it faced something which Hari Seldon could not foresee, the overwhelming power of a single human being, a Mutant. The creature known as the mule was born with the ability to mold mens emotions and to shape their minds. His bitterest opponents were made into his devoted(p) servants. Armies could not, would not fight him. Before him, the First Foundation fell and Seldons schemes lay partly in ruins.There was left the mysterious sustain Foundation, the intent of all searches. The Mule must find it to make his conquest of the Galaxy complete. The faithful of what was left of the First Foundation must find it for quite another reason. But where was it? That no one knew.This, then, is the story of the search for the Second Foundation