Talk:Foundation universe

An earlier reference to "psychohistory"

I am just in the middle of rereading "Robots and Empire" for the second time. On page 186 of the Doubleday hardcover edition, a conversation is occurring between robots Daneel and Giskard, just after Gladia's speech to the people of Baleyworld. In this conversation, Giskard discusses his observations while mentally adjusting some of the people, then says that this observation "might itself be the First Law of Psychohistory". Since Giskard dies at the end of this book (year 4970 of the Galactic Era (GE)), it must be Daneel who (somehow) gets psychohistory into the mind of Hari Seldon (born: 11,988 GE). Not sure whether to add this note here, or the "Robots and Empire" article, or both. Neilrieck (talk) 11:46, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

failed tests via current A.I. apps

So this final week of 2024, I dropped the following question into both ChatGPT4 and MS-copilot: "when is the first time we see the phrase "psychohistory" in Asimov's robot novels?". Both prototype A.I.s returned an answer saying that "psychohistory" is never mentioned in Asimov's robot novels, when clearly it is mentioned numerous times in "Robots and Empire" and is associated with Giskard. I kind of get the feeling that anyone who read the Foundation Trilogy, but did not read "Robots and Empire" (which was published in 1985) may not know that Asimov might have changed things. Neilrieck (talk) 14:58, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

Selected awards

Hi, let me try to provide a human explanation, beyond the edit summaries, of why I think the table of awards here makes sense. It is true that there is another table in Foundation (series), however, neither table fully contains the other. The latter table is indeed more robust in that it includes all awards and nominations, but only for the stories dealing with Foundation proper, so excluding the Galactic Empire series and excluding the Robot series. Admittedly there are no awards for the Galactic Empire, but both Robot and Foundation had significant numbers of awards each, as listed on their respective pages. The table here combines the two, while simultaneously omitting less significant awards, to avoid making the list too long. That was the rationale behind the tables.

Separately, I apologize for erasing the prose description of selected awards at first: I simply did not notice it. I have restored it and updated the numbers to include not only Foundation awards but also Robot awards, some of which are quite illustrious. For instance, "The Bicentennial Man" has collected the trifecta of Hugo, Nebula, and Locus. I believe both the prose and the table are useful for the readers, and I would propose to keep both. If the table still looks too long, my proposal would be to tighten the definition of "significant award" used to populate it, rather than to summarily delete the whole table. HugoNebula (talk) 14:47, 8 December 2025 (UTC)