historical stories of the future…

Back in the 1940s I decided to write a series of historical stories of the future, a tale of the fall of the galactic empire and the interregnum that came before the rise of the second galactic empire, and I’ll tell you frankly, I got the idea from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. So I wrote story after story for about eight years, then got tired and quit. They put them together into three books, Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation in the early 50s, and I felt that was it. I went on to other work. But little by little the pressure has built enormously and Doubleday, my publisher, insisted I write another one. So, in 1981, I wrote another Foundation novel, the fourth, and it was a huge success – and after that I was sunk because Doubleday insisted I keep on going.

Isaac Asimov
Great voices of science fiction