The Foundation series has an even more audacious premise than I, Robot, positing that the future itself is a solvable equation. The original trilogy, a series of eight linked short stories and novellas written in the 1940s, introduces psychohistory, a radical science for predicting the behavior of the masses. Psychohistory suggests that statistics can foretell the actions of large groups of people with such precision that one can plot the course of an entire civilization for thousands of years. Hari Seldon, the fictional father of psychohistory, establishes two planetary colonies, or Foundations, at opposite ends of the galaxy to create a new and gentler galactic empire that will replace the dying one. Because psychohistory predicts that the so-called Seldon Plan will not fail, Asimov’s characters cling to the plan with a belief that borders on religious. In the words of Hober Mallow, one of the Foundation’s mayors: “What business of mine is the future? No doubt Seldon has foreseen it and prepared against it.”

Psychohistory may seem more magic than science, and implicit in Foundation is an anthropocentrism that’s hard to swallow today. According to the series, humans will rule the galaxy. Humans can predict the future. The people of the elusive Second Foundation can control others’ minds. Even Seldon’s predictions tend to assume that heroes will arise at the right place and time to see the Foundation through each new crisis. Such bold confidence in humankind’s ability to manipulate history runs through several of Asimov’s works. In his novel The End of Eternity—often considered his best, featuring a protagonist with real conflicts and agency—humans have mastered time travel, and they defuse the tinderbox of history by preventing the development of the nuclear bomb. And with stunningly paradoxical hubris, Asimov’s short story “The Last Question” (his personal favorite) suggests that, really, it might have been man who created himself in his own image.

Readers nowadays probably think that human beings will sooner lapse into the repressive totalitarianism of George Orwell’s 1984—written in 1949, just as Asimov was wrapping up the original Foundation stories—or resign themselves to the smothering utopia suggested in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic, Brave New World, than create a benevolent empire. Asimov belongs to what is called the golden age of science fiction, which was spearheaded by people such as John W. Campbell, the Astounding Science Fiction magazine editor who wanted his contributors to write about human heroes and glorify scientific progress.

But by the 1960s, a new generation of science-fiction writers had tired of these tales of outer-space excess. One such New Wave figure, Michael Moorcock, said in 1963 that golden-age science fiction lacked “passion, subtlety, irony, original characterization … and, on the whole, real feeling from the writer.” Algis Budrys, in 1965, was skeptical of the golden age “implication that sheer technological accomplishment would solve all the problems, hooray.”