The Republic (Star Wars) resembles The Scientist Community in Terminus.Ships jumps into hyperspace for shortening traveling time.There are outer provinces whose inhabitants are mainly smugglers and scavengers.There's a Galactic Empire with a bureaucratic capital world (Trantor / Coruscant).The Mankind is spread over the entire Galaxy (The Milky Way?).I will try to resume those similarities in the following points: Though different, I have found some 'traces' in Star Wars that somehow resemble Asimov's Foundation saga. So how far back do you want to go? That's the way things work.

But what the heck, a certain amount of my Foundation books came from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I borrowed freely from Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in planning the Foundation series, and I believe that the motion picture Star Wars did not hesitate, in turn, to borrow from the Foundation series.Īs a matter of fact, if you see these pictures, Star Wars and its sequels, there's a certain amount of stuff that came from my Foundation books. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I certainly imitated Edward Gibbon, so I can scarcely object if someone imitates me.)Įmpires (1983), collected in The Tyrannosaurus Prescription (1989) In fact, in the late 1970s the Galactic Empire reached the movies in the enormously popular Star Wars, which, here and there, offered rather more than a whiff of the Foundation. Ever since then, other science fiction writers have been following the fashion, and have written series of their own after the fashion of the Foundation series. I modeled my “Galactic Empire” (a phrase I think I was the first to use) quite consciously on the Roman Empire. and so on.Īsimov did indeed believe that Star Wars was influenced by Foundation, and has said so several times in an introduction in 1983: Not direct mind-control per se, it is a subtle influence of the subconscious individuals under the Mule's influence behave otherwise normally - logic, memories, and personality intact.'Ĭan explain for example, one the Jedi/Sith main talents. One of the greatest conquerors the galaxy has ever seen, he is a mentalic who has the ability to reach into the minds of others and 'adjust' their emotions, individually or en masse, using this capability to conscript individuals to his cause. Here's a fragment of the mule description:

Is there any evidence that Foundation series - especially the Mule - influenced Star Wars ideas of Jedi and Sith, given the multitude of acknowledged and unacknowledged-but-obvious influences that Lucas had? Reading this book give me the sensation that George Lucas based his ideas of the Jedi and Sith orders around the influence of the Asimov tale. In the second book of the Foundation trilogy, Foundation and Empire, written in 1953, the Mule appears, an amazing and intriguing character.

Foundation novels