List of Foundation series characters
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The premise of the stories is that in the waning days of a future Galactic Empire, the mathematician Hari Seldon spends his life developing a theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematics of sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a Dark Age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Although the momentum of the Empire's fall is too great to stop, Seldon devises a plan by which "the onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little" to eventually limit this interregnum to just one thousand years.
The plot of the ''Foundation'' series spans centuries, and its various characters each appear in one or two of its nine installments. Charles Elkins described its characters as "undifferentiated and one-dimensional" speaking with an "impoverished vocabulary". He wrote that their consciousness "shows absolutely no historical development and hence fails to evoke in the reader any feeling for the future universe they inhabit". Elkins argued that characterization in general is subordinated to the overall conception of Asimov's project. James E. Gunn wrote that though the series of lead characters Lathan Devers, Salvor Hardin, Limmar Ponyets and Hober Mallow "may seem interchangeable", they are "as differentiated as the personages in most histories."
Through the eyes of the characters the inevitability of the forces of history, made manifest in the Seldon Plan, is demonstrated to the reader repeatedly. Elkins sees the characters in ''Foundation'' not as "tragic heroes. They are nondescript pawns, unable to take their destiny into their own hands." Only those elite few characters who understand the Plan can be considered free, with the Mule through his non-human psychic powers as the only exception. But while Elkins attributes the ''Foundation'' series a sense of "pervading fatalism", Gunn and Nicolas David Gevers point out that the obstacles presented in Asimov's galactic history are overcome by active individual characters "through the initiative and competence which the Foundations nurture in their citizens". Donald E. Palumbo asserts that it is exactly the "flatness of character and setting" which permit the series "to be a masterpiece". The heroism and depth of individual characters is consciously taken back by Asimov for the true hero of the series to stand out: "the sublime history of humankind itself".
An eight-part radio adaptation of the original three novels, called ''The Foundation Trilogy'', was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1973.
In 2021, Apple TV+ premiered a television series adaptation of the novels, ''Foundation'', created by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman. In 2023, Asimov's daughter Robyn Asimov, an executive producer for the series, said: }} Provided by Wikipedia
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