Author Isaac Asimov

The "Academy" cycle tells the story of the heyday and decline of a huge galactic empire ruled by the deterministic laws of "psychohistory." The great Plan of Gary Seldon foreshadowed the decline of the empire in five hundred years. This is an inevitability. This is an inert process involving the entire population of the galaxy, the actions of individuals in which it is not even comparable to a mosquito bite for an elephant. Gary Seldon founded the Academy, which was supposed to be the center of the Empire's renaissance. The period of decline at the same time decreased from the predicted thirty millennia to one. For a long time, Seldon's plan was indestructible. People from birth were instilled the idea that the history of the future has already been written by the hand of the great genius of psychohistory. So how could it be that one person was able to destroy the Plan, for a paltry period, subduing the entire galaxy? Even Seldon could not have foreseen this...