In February, the spaceflight company founded by Elon Musk conducted a test launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket, which successfully sent its payload into orbit around the sun. Its cargo included a Tesla Roadster — which now looks like a sign of Musk’s midlife crisis — and a digital copy of the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. Two months later, Apple announced that it was developing a television version of the classic science-fiction saga for its new streaming service. Previous attempts to adapt the series have failed, which might not have surprised Asimov, who, after rereading it, confessed, “I couldn’t help noticing, of course, that there was not very much action in it.”

If the Foundation trilogy still appeals to a wide audience — as well as to corporations hoping to associate themselves with its vision of tomorrow — this has less to do with the plots or characters than with the books’ fictional science of psychohistory, a system for predicting future events even thousands of years from the present. The notion captivated fans like the economist Paul Krugman, who recalled of the mathematician and psychologist portrayed by Asimov as the creator of psychohistory: “I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon.” The books made an equally profound impression on a teenage Newt Gingrich, who later wrote, “For a high school student who loved history, Asimov’s most exhilarating invention was the ‘psychohistorian’ Hari Seldon.”

Image The November 1945 cover of Astounding Science Fiction, featuring Asimov’s story “The Mule.” Credit... Penny Publications/Dell Magazines

The historical moment that inspired Asimov has striking parallels to our own. On Aug. 1, 1941, Asimov, then a 21-year-old writer and graduate student at Columbia University, was riding the subway in New York. He was headed to his monthly meeting with John W. Campbell Jr., the editor of the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction, whom Asimov later praised as an intellectual mentor and “the most powerful force in science fiction ever.” On the train, Asimov came up with the premise for a story about the decline of a galactic empire, and when he described it in the meeting that afternoon, he remembered, “Campbell blazed up as I had never seen him do.”