ISAAC ASIMOV

THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY - AND MORE...

Isaac Asimov was born near Smolensk, Russia in 1920 but his parents moved and brought him to the United States three years later. He then grew up in Brooklyn where he went to grammar school.

His remarkable memory helped him finish high school before he was 16. He went on to Columbia University and resolved to become a chemist rather than follow the medical career his father had in mind for him. After a short spell in the army he gained his doctorate in 1949, qualifying as an instructor in biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine where he became an associate professor in 1955.

But the pressures of chemical research soon began to conflict with his aspirations in the literary field and he 'retired' to full-time authorship in 1958.

Asimov's career as a science fiction writer began in 1939 with the publication of a short story 'Marooned off Vesta' in Amazing Stories. After that he became a regular contributor to the leading SF magazines of the day including Astounding, Astonishing Stories, Super Science Stories and Galaxy.

He has won the Hugo Award four times and the Nebula Award once. With over 300 books and several hundred articles to his credit Asimov's output was prolific by any standards.

Asimov wrote in 1988:

"When I wrote Foundation, which appeared in the May 1942 edition of Astounding Science Fiction, I had no idea that I had begun a series of stories that would eventually grow into six volumes and a total of 650,000 words. Nor did I have any idea that it would be unified with my series of short stories and novels involving robots and my novels involving the Galactic Empire for a grand total (so far) of fourteen volumes and a total of about 1,450,000 words.

"You will see, if you study the publication dates of these books that there was a twenty-five year hiatus between 1957 and 1982, during which I did not add to this series. This was not because I had stopped writing. Indeed, I wrote full speed throughout the quarter-century, but I wrote other things. That I returned to the series in 1982 was not my own notion but was the result of a combination of pressures from readers and publishers that eventually became overwhelming.

"In any case, the situation has become sufficiently complicated for me to to feel that the readers might welcome a kind of guide to the series, since they were not written in the order in which (perhaps) they should be read.

"The fourteen books offer a kind of history of the future, which is. perhaps, not completely consistent, since I did not plan consistency to begin with."

The chronological order of the books in terms of future history (and not of publication date) is as follows:

For the 25 years before he added to the series, his first three Foundation novels were known, obviously enough, as 'The Foundation Trilogy'. In 1973 the BBC Radiophonic Workshop under their producer David Cain produced a dramatised version of the entire three book series for BBC Radio 3. Production techniques were simplistic by the standards of today's radio dramas but the feat has never been attempted again, but as the series was recorded for Radio 3 at least it is in stereo and it has also been commercially released on cassette. The series had only its second broadcast repeat as part of the first month's programming on the the BBC's new digital service, BBC7.

Compiled, in part, from information included in Prelude to Foundation, published in the UK by Grafton (ISBN 0-586-07111-3)

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