The series of novels and short stories that would become the Foundation series, Isaac Asimov's magnum opus spanning 50 millennia of human civilization, had an innocuous and humble start. As Asimov told it, the idea came to him when flipping through Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during a cab ride to the offices of editor John W. Campbell of Astounding Magazine. Asimov -- still green behind the ears as a young sci-fi writer -- thought the tale of an intergalactic civilization's decline into the dark ages would make a great quick pitch... an intriguing enough idea to secure him a few months work. Little could Asimov have guessed that a simple pitch for a short story would keep him with more work than he knew how to complete for the next half a century.

A series as pantagruelian as Foundation is hard to summarize (the universe in which Foundation takes place is collected into no less than 25 different books) but the gist is this:

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