Born in Russia in 1920, Isaac Asimov moved to New York at the age of three. A self-proclaimed child prodigy, he began to write science fiction as a teenager and by 1950 had become a successful writer, published mostly by Doubleday. His repertoire by then included eight interconnected science fiction magazine stories. In 1951 he organized this 200,000- word beginning into a science fiction trilogy- which the Doubleday publishing company promptly rejected, as did the house of Little, Brown. An obscure press, Gnome, published the three books-Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). Not until approached by a Portuguese publisher for rights to these books did Doubleday acquire the trilogy and republish it in 1961. The series marked Asimov as one of the premier science fiction writers of this century. Eventually the stories of the Foundation were expanded to three additional volumes: Foundation's Edge (1982), Foundation and Earth (1986), and Forward the Foundation (1993).
Shifting powers. The stories in Foundation were written in the midst of the turmoil of World War II and the subsequent Cold War, or competition for world leadership between the Soviet Union and the United States.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 3,137 words (approx. 10 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Foundation Access Pass.
