Book Name : Foundation
6 - Prelude to Foundation
Author
: Asimov, Isaac
No. of Pages
:492
Summary : (Taken from Wikipedia)
Prelude to Foundation opens on the planet Trantor, the empire's capital planet, the day after Hari Seldon has given a speech at a conference. Several parties become aware of the contents of his speech—that using mathematical formulas, it may be possible to predict the future course of human history. Seldon is hounded by the Emperor and various employed thugs (working surreptitiously) and is forced into exile. Over the course of the book, Seldon and Dors Venabili, a female companion, are taken from location to location by an aide, Chetter Hummin, who introduces them to various walks of life in his attempts to keep Seldon hidden from the Emperor.
Throughout their adventures all over Trantor, Seldon continuously denies that psychohistory is a realistic science and that, even if it were feasible, it may take several decades even to develop. Hummin, however, is convinced that Seldon knows something and, as a result, continuously presses him to work out a starting point to develop psychohistory.
Eventually, after much traveling and introductions to various, diverse cultures on Trantor, Seldon realizes that using the entire known Galaxy as a starting point is too overwhelming to try to accomplish and decides to use Trantor as a model to work out the science, with a goal of using the applied knowledge on the rest of the galaxy.
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