The correct order is:
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
Foundation's Edge
Foundation and Earth
Prelude to Foundation
Forward the Foundation
You can find them all online for free via internet archive.
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As we witness the fall of the American empire, it's the perfect time to read the Foundation series (by Isaac Asimov)
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talk about books or smth idk
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!historychads !neolibs Thoughts on Hari Seldon?
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If there was anything to the concept of psychohistory, Asimov would have actually invented it instead of writing a novel where somebody else does.
"I knew what you were going to do" x1000
History only seems sensible in retrospect, but it's full of black swan moments.
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Yeah, that's the whole point of the second and third books.Seldon's math couldn't predict an extraordinary individual like the Mule, but he knew psychohistory was just a numbers game and playing the odds wouldn't be enough to make it through a thousand years. So he set up the Second Foundation to keep things on track. Are you r-slurred? Because this was not a subtle concept. It's explicitly spelled out multiple times. 
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As I said in the other comment, I only read the first book. I don't recall the book (composed of multiple stories originally released over time) really interrogating the concept of psychohistory at all (um a crisis will happen in fifty years because it just will, all right?). I appreciate if things get more complicated in the later books, but Asimov quite possibly wrote that to address people's criticisms or his own views of the setting's failings. I don't think I'm an r-slur for critiquing the first book as a standalone.
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Not every aspect of every concept needs to be fully interrogated at every moment. Especially since psychohistory is essentially taking the idea of "social history" or "history from below", and applying the law of large numbers to create something predictive, but only over a sufficiently massive population. I'm pretty sure that was actually mentioned in the first book. That the only reason psychohistory was able to work at all is because it was averaging the actions of the entirety of the Galactic Empire, complete with population of one quintillion.
The obvious counterpoint to that is the same as the counterpoint to "history from below" in general, "great man theory". So after a few stories of the Foundation doing their thing,in comes a sufficiently "great man" to frick things up. And to make clear that that's what's happened, Asimov uses a recurring element that I'm pretty sure was established in the stories in the first book, where a recording of Seldon is played from time to time, and always includes the percentage chance that the Plan is on track, with the number decreasing every time. So yeah, the fact that psychohistory was just a numbers game is pretty well established in the first book alone. The bit about the Second Foundation existing and operating behind the scenes to keep the Plan on track wasn't established until the second book, but like I said, not every aspect of every concept needs to be fully explained, front and center, right off the bat. 
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The hole in my view is that the 2F would stay on track. They're a small group, so keeping them motivated to keep things on track can't rely on psycohistory. I'm surprised they didn't go rogue or split in a power struggle. Didn't they have some level of mind control or am I misremembering? I guess you could do that to all new members to make them perfectly committed to the organization's goals. Also people generally like civilization surviving.
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Jesse what the frick are you talking about??
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Psychohistory makes a lot of sense in the early '40s. Look at ww2 in Europe. If somebody in 1940 knew the population, steel production, electricity output, military efficiency, etc. of all the major powers they could have pretty well guessed how the war would end even if they had no idea what battles would be fought.
Note that while nuclear weapons are mentioned in Foundation, they have nothing to do with real life nuclear weapons because they didn't exist yet so Asimov had no idea how they would work. Nukes create a huge amount of uncertainty because the choices made by an individual person in an instant suddenly really do matter.
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Seeing as op is either too lazy to mention this or hasn't actually read the books, Prelude and Forward are actually set before Foundation but contain plot elements which only make sense if you know what happens at the end of Foundation and Earth.
Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth connect several other works into the Foundation series' chronology, these are:
The End of Eternity
I, Robot
The Caves of Steel
The Naked Sun
The Robots of Dawn
Robots and Empire
Pebble in the Sky
There is also The Stars Like Dust, Currents of Space and the short story Blind Alley which are set in the same universe.
Bye, no need to thank me.
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Yeah that's why I said to read them at the end. I know they "chronologically" come first, but reading Forward the Foundation at the end of the series is incredibly cathartic and is obviously a meditation on old age and Asimov looking back on his own life.
Yeah they """connect""" still not gonna recommend someone read those all before reading foundation. Ppl should treat them as the stand alones they were meant to be.
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Have you read Foundation's Edge and Foundation & Earth?
The spacer worlds, the legends of robots, Bander and Fallom the enby Solarians and the big (and rather silly IMO) reveal at the end make no sense unless you've read the Elijah Bailey Robot novels.
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I have read them and I understood it fine with only a vague recollection of the robot series. You can just read the wiki summary about Solarians although even that isn't necessary imo. The tie ins are not that interesting imo, and you can get the gist without having to know what exactly the lore of the planets are. I would recommend reading I,Robot but mostly for fun.
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How many Asimov have you read
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I've read his boring science essays in old copies of Fantasy & Science Fiction from the 60s.
I've read one of his detective novels.
I don't know why I put myself through that.
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In what world does chronology take precedent over intended reading order in a list of what order to read them?
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I didn't write this and if your reading comprehension is this shit, you probably shouldn't be trying to get through whole books.
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Isn't this you saying that he is lazy or has not read the books because he did not list them chronologically?
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I said he did not provide all information on the preferred reading order either because he is lazy or because he has not read the books.
Like I said: your reading comprehension is garbage and, furthermore, your opinions are shit... absolute shit.
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The vast majority of people don't read books in the chronological order they read them in the intended order, so why would he include unnecessary information on the timeline of the books. You even say in your original post that reading Prelude and Forward before the others wouldn't make sense. Also what opinions did I give? Even if everything I said was wrong they still wouldn't have been opinions they would have been incorrect statements of fact. You seem pretty aggressive about this whole deal, you might wanna chill out.
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I only read the first book. I thought the reasons for the collapse were basically passed over and taking place off screen, which was kind of annoying, and I think Asimov was relying too heavily on an outdated "Christian dark ages" chart type view of history. But it's still more accurate than "progress" views where history is literally one dimensional.
It was definitely refreshing to see a sci-fi with focus on persuasion, manipulation, and the arc of history instead of big shooty time. Maybe it walked so Dune could run
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He kinda expands on it in Prelude but yeah, still handwavey. But that's kinda the point, collapse of an empire that big doesn't have 1 definite collapse moment, it's a slow degradation that becomes an unstoppable snowball effect. Just like the US!
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I read the first book after watching the show. It was really interesting but the plots seemed very disjointed and the characters were very dated, like watching a movie from the 40s. Not exactly timeless literature but I respect what he was going for
It was way more of a dialogue driven political thriller type story with high level ideas than a traditional sci-fi story I was used to
I give it a 7/10
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This is partly because it originally started as a bunch of a short stories which he later made into a novel.
My favorite part was when the resolution of one of the crises was to literally do nothing. That's when I knew I was reading something special.
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The correct order is Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. Don't bother reading the shit he came up with thirty years later to connect two series that didn't need connecting.
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Yeah, that's what I read too. I think it really should ideally end on the creation of an order which will not fall, which as I recall, the second foundation does not, only a greatly restored and progressing empire. As the wikipedia synopsis tells me, the world mind type stuff in the latter stuff is hinting at this important 'fixing human nature itself', which is an admirable attempt, even if the reviews aren't great.
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Foundation and Earth, Edge had interesting points about the long-term future of humanity beyond the original 3 that I think make it worth it.
The 2 prequels are just sentimental and reflect Asimov's own life, so that's why I put them at the end, only someone who rly likes Asimov will get to them and I personally think it's worth it. Watching Seldon age was pretty powerful
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The correct order is to start with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
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my dad has the foundation series. the problem is the books are old and smell like mold
if anyone has any de-molding tactics i would love to hear it.
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I'll just watch
the movies instead
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we need !merchants NOW
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Hello fellow merchant
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I did not like this series unfortunately
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Asimov writes like a Redditor
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I never
read it 
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You and your little "drama" buddies are too busy staring at men's bussies to know an attractive woman if she swam up to you in anthropomorphic-shark form and let you frick her on a cold, windy cape cod beach.
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