Isaac Asimov

"For 12,000 years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future - to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save humankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire - both scientists and scholars - and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the galaxy to serve...

Describes the significant events of science from 4,000,000 B.C. to the present and how science, cultural, social, and political events have affected each other.

Fearing a violent confrontation between Earthmen and Spacers, Detective Baley and his new partner, a robot, investigate the murder of a Spacetown scientist. A millennium into the future two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. "The Caves of Steel" is the first title in AIsaac Asimov's Robot series, which chronicles the unlikely partnership between a New...

One moment Joseph Schwartz is a happily retired tailor in 1949 Chicago. The next he's a helpless stranger on Earth during the heyday of the first Galactic Empire. Earth, he soon learns, is a backwater, just a pebble in the sky, despised by all the other 200 million planets of the Empire because its people dare to claim it's the original home of man. And Earth is poor, with great areas of radioactivity ruining much of its soil--so poor that everyone...

The fifth novel in Asimov's popular Foundation series opens with second thoughts. Councilman Golan Trevize is wondering if he was right to choose a collective mind as the best possible future for humanity over the anarchy of contentious individuals, nations and planets. To test his conclusion, he decides he must know the past and goes in search of legendary Earth, all references to which have been erased from galactic libraries. The societies encountered...

An up-to-the minute examination of the methods used by ancient astronomers to study the sky and some of their most exciting discoveries.