In the late 1940s, Asimov began a series of novellas about the Foundation, a far future project intended to save humanity from thirty thousand years of barbarism. John Campbell, editor of Astounding magazine urged Asimov to add to the series, with each new novella a testament to Asimov's inventiveness. These novellas were eventually gathered together and published as the Foundation Trilogy in the early 1950s. These books became and remain among the most popular science fiction ever published. In the 1980s, Asimov returned to the fictional world he created in the Foundation novellas. He tied his imaginary Foundation universe into his imaginary robot universe, which featured fully sentient mechanical beings with "positronic brains," a term that shows up frequently in the fiction of other writers, and which is used to describe the brain of the character Data on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation.

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