FOUNDATION HOSPITAL
Foundation Hospital
You are in the Hari Seldon ward of StarBase1's Foundation Hospital. All around is the machinery for reviving cloned patients.
This is a reference to the Foundation series of books by Isaac Asimov - probably the most prolific SF author ever, with an enormous string of books to his name.
The original Foundation trilogy tells of the fall of the Galactic Empire. Hari Seldon devises a plan to prevent the thirty thousand years of anarchy and barbarism he predicts will follow the fall. He develops a new science - psychohistory - which can predict the future based on the actions of large numbers of people. Using psychohistory his plan will shorten this long dark period to just one thousand years.
The three books cover events in the first couple of hundred years of the working of the plan:
Asimov returned to the Foundation universe later in his life and wrote two more books that follow on from the original trilogy:
Foundation and Earth - currently out of print although Amazon.com do list it and may be able to find a second-hand copy.
He then backtracked and wrote about Hari Seldon's early years in:
After his death, other writers (with the authorization of his estate) have continued to write about Hari Seldon's life and the setting up of the Federation:
Gregory Benford - Foundation's Fear
Greg Bear - Foundation and Chaos
Asimov is also famous for books about robots - he invented the Three Laws of Robotics which prevent robots from harming humans (thus dealing with technofear). His numerous robot short stories are available in various different collections and anthologies.
He wrote several novels dealing with robots and starring a human detective, Lije Bailey, and a robot, R. Daneel Olivaw. The first two are futuristic detective mysteries and are very good indeed:
The later books in this series link into the later Foundation books:
