Seldon Plan

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The Seldon Plan is the central theme of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series of stories and novels.

Hari Seldon devised the Seldon Plan using psychohistory. It consisted of a planned path of historical development for a newly created nation called the Foundation. Periodically, the Foundation would face a Seldon Crisis, a threat to its existence which would constrain it to follow a single, pre-determined path. The plan almost got completely thrown off course in Foundation and Empire because of the mutant called The Mule.

The nature of the Seldon plan is never fully revealed in any of the Foundation novels. When the reader first learns of the Plan, it seems to simply be a guide for the development of the First Foundation alone. As the novels progress, the reader learns of a Second Foundation, comprised of mental rather than physical scientists. These Second Foundationers have the power to manipulate minds, to shape the course of the development of the First Foundation (often referred to simply as the Foundation). This leads to strife between the two Foundations, as seen in Second Foundation.

In Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth, the reader, as well as certain characters in the novels, learns of another world called Gaia, a planet comprised of humans who all share a collective consciousness. Strangely, they seem to be fostering the Seldon Plan similarly to the Second Foundation. However, they seem to have a much more subtle, and complex, understanding of the final nature of the Seldon Plan. If this is true, it would seem that Hari Seldon hid some of the true nature of the plan even from the Second Foundation.

It should be noted that finding a complete canonical reference for the Plan is difficult. Asimov admitted that he wrote the last two novels due to reader demand, not entirely of his own volition. Thus, he may have made significant changes to his original vision, as set forth in the Foundation trilogy. He also made efforts in Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth to tie the books into his Robot and Empire series. This can, at least somewhat, account for some of the discrepancies that the reader finds in the literary development of the plan. Eventually the Seldon plan was abandoned in favor of the giant super organism Galaxia. However, later works by other authors suggest that the great second empire could be a powerful combination of the two possibilities.