Foundation · Encyclopaedia
Encyclopedia Galactica
also known as Encyclopaedia Galactica
The Encyclopedists of Terminus; later, many hands
A compendium of all Galactic knowledge, compiled on a resource-poor planet at the edge of the spiral as a hedge against a coming dark age — and, it turns out, as a pretext for something else.
The Guide on this shelf is funnier. This is the book it is making fun of, and it is the more ambitious object.
Asimov needed a way to write a future history that already knew it was history. The solution is bibliographic. Each section of Foundation opens with a calm extract from a reference work compiled a thousand years after the events, on the planet where the events began. You are told, before anyone in the chapter knows it, who mattered and how the crisis resolved. The suspense moves from whether to how, which is the same trick Herbert later uses with Irulan, in a hotter climate.
Then the conceit folds. The Encyclopedia was never the point. Seldon used it as a recruiting poster and a place to put a colony. The scholars are deposed; Terminus becomes a state. And still, centuries on, there is a 116th edition, revised daily, published by the Encyclopedia Galactica Publishing Co., Terminus. The fraud completed itself. A book that was a cover story became, by being worked on in the meantime, the thing it had pretended to be.
Adams’ joke that it is slightly more expensive than the Guide and has no friendly letters on the cover is, as a piece of criticism, not wrong.
On the readability rating. Dozens of entries, a paragraph or two at a time, across the original trilogy. Enough to staff a small encyclopaedia. Not the thing itself.
From the book
TERMINUS—… Located on the very fringe of the Galactic spiral, an only planet of an isolated sun, poor in resources and negligible in economic value, it was never settled in the five centuries after its discovery, until the landing of the Encyclopedists. Encyclopedia Galactica, quoted as the epigraph to "The Encyclopedists" in Foundation, 1951
In-world history
Founded under Imperial charter as the Encyclopedia Foundation. The first generation of Encyclopedists are still at work when Salvor Hardin takes power and the Seldon recording reveals the real plan. Compilation continues anyway. By the far side of the millennium the 116th edition is being issued on Terminus, which is the edition the epigraphs claim to quote.
Why it matters
The Encyclopedia is both a literary device and a plot. Asimov opens chapters with its entries so that the future has already filed the story you are about to read. Then Hari Seldon explains that the project itself was a lie, designed to park scientists on Terminus. Both things remain true: the lie produced the book.
Appearances
- Foundation (1951) — Isaac Asimov Fix-up of stories begun in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1942; chapter epigraphs are extracted from the Encyclopedia
- Foundation and Empire (1952) — Isaac Asimov
- Second Foundation (1953) — Isaac Asimov
Connected volumes
- Related to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy · The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Related to The Dynamics of an Asteroid · Sherlock Holmes
- Related to The Files of the Palace of Dreams · The Palace of Dreams
- Related to The Glass Bead Game · Castalia
- Related to The Key to All Mythologies · Middlemarch
Catalogue record
- Category
- Encyclopaedia
- World
- Foundation
- Imagined by
- Isaac Asimov
- First appearance
- Foundation (Gnome Press, 1951); the Encyclopedia Foundation is the cover story of the 1942 novella
- Readability
- Extensive excerpts
Sources
- Isaac Asimov, Foundation (Gnome Press, 1951), especially the opening epigraphs and "The Encyclopedists".
- Isaac Asimov, "Foundation", Astounding Science Fiction, May 1942, for the original cover story of the Encyclopedia project.
Added by house · last checked 2026-09-01