Foundation Timeline
"The Portable Star" was accompanied in the Winter 1955 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories with a timeline of the Foundation series which included the story, along with a number of others. A notable detail of the timeline is that it does not include any of the stories from I, Robot or The Caves of Steel, since at this time Asimov considered the Robot series separate from the Foundation series.
Asimov's Thrilling Wonder Timeline
| Year | Story | Events |
|---|---|---|
| A. Exploration of the Solar System | ||
| 1975 | Trends | First man-carrying flight to the Moon, against social resistance. |
| 1985 | The Singing Bell | Settlement of the Moon proceeds; mining operations set up. |
| 2000 | The Martian Way | Mars settled. Much of humanity still rebels against settlement of other planets. This is finally overcome. |
| 2020 | Ring Around the Sun | Venus settled. Mail service between planets established. |
| 2050 | Marooned Off Vesta | Passage across asteroid belt no longer a matter of exploration. Commercial flights across the belt begin. |
| 2100 | Heredity, The Callistan Menace, Christmas on Ganymede | The moons of Jupiter are settled. Human eyes turn toward intergalactic space. |
| B. Exploration of the Galaxy | ||
| 5000 | The hyperspatial drive is discovered. | |
| 5500 | The Portable Star | Flights to other stars become feasible in small space cruisers. Very little of the Galaxy explored. |
| 6500 | Misbegotten Missionary | Organized space exploitation begins. Mankind begins spreading outward. |
| 8500 | Sucker Bait | Population has increased to the point where the inner regions of the Galaxy are overcrowded. Government-sponsored emigration to the outer reaches are begun. Most of the Galaxy now mapped and well-known. The old political structure is now incapable of handling the vast number of worlds. |
| 10000 | Earth’s last atomic wars render its crust largely radioactive and that is the last straw. The Galaxy breaks up into numerous political organizations. | |
| C. Galactic Empire | ||
| 30000 | The Stars, Like Dust | The star-regions begin to agglomerate into larger groupings. The empire of Tyrann grows and declines. Trantor grows less spectacularly, but more solidly. |
| 34500 | The Currents of Space | Trantor has grown until half the Galaxy is under its sway. The Squires of Sark, with their control of the kyrt-rich Florina, are the last independent group to seriously contest Trantor’s hegemony. |
| 35000 | Trantor becomes the Galactic Empire officially. Earth is all but forgotten. | |
| 36500 | Pebble in the Sky | Galactic Empire is at its height. Earth completely forgotten as origin of humanity. Slowly the Empire grows static and decadent. Hari Seldon is born about 47,000. |
| 47000 to 47500 | The Foundation Trilogy | The Galactic Empire settles into final decay. Its last battle with the rising Foundation dates at 47,200. The Mule rises and falls somewhere around 47,300. The Second Galactic Empire is established at 48,000. |
Read more about this topic: The Portable Star
Famous quotes containing the word foundation:
“A full belly to the labourer was, in my opinion, the foundation of public morals and the only source of real public peace.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)