title: The Empire Novels
author:  Isaac Asimov 
description: 3 in 1 Novels
  Includes The Stars, Like Dust, The Currents of Space and Pebble in the 
  Sky. 
  
  Description: In the 1950s, after penning his Future History 
  stories-what would become his most famous series, Robots and 
  Foundation-Isaac Asimov published his first three novels, the classic 
  works that make up this exclusive SFBC omnibus. Set thousands of years 
  after a nuclear holocaust ravaged the Earth, the Empire novels trace 
  the Grand Master's vision of mankind's first halting steps toward 
  galactic civilization and the birth of the first Galactic Empire. 
  
  The Stars, Like Dust: A native of one of the backward planets conquered 
  by the cruel Tyranni Empire, Biron Farrill is only days away from 
  graduating from the University of Earth when someone tries to murder 
  him in his sleep. The attack is part of a Tyranni plot to eliminate all 
  resistance leaders, one of whom had been his own father. Now Biron has 
  been chosen to step into his father's shoes and rally the rebellion. 
  But once he casts his lot with the freedom fighters, he will find 
  himself guarding against treachery on every side and facing the most 
  difficult choice of his young life: to betray either the woman he loves 
  or the revolution his father died to protect. 
  
  The Currents of Space: Thousands of years after the events of The 
  Stars, Like Dust, a man named Rik is wiped of his mind and deposited on 
  the planet Florina-a wimpering, thumb-sucking half-child. Valona, a 
  lonely peasant girl, adopts and takes care of him, and slowly his 
  memory returns. But what he remembers entangles the pair in a web of 
  interplanetary intrigue, in which they're hunted by high-ranking 
  officials and spies. For what Rik knows about the future could topple 
  an empire.
zlib_text: ISAAC ASIMOV
  Foundation Series 24: Foundation's
  Edge
  Copyright © 1982
  Dedicated to Betty Prasker, who insisted,
  and to Lester del Rey, who nagged.
  PROLOGUE 
  THE FIRST GALACTIC EMPIRE WAS FALLING. IT HAD BEEN DECAYING and breaking down
  for centuries and only one man fully realized that fact.
  He was Hari Seldom the last great scientist of the First Empire, and it was he
  who perfected psychohistory-the science of human behavior reduced to
  mathematical equations.
  The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs,
  Seldon found, could be treated statistically. The larger the mob, the greater
  the accuracy that could be achieved. And the size of the human masses that
  Seldon worked with was no less than the population of all the inhabited
  millions of worlds of the Galaxy.
  Seldon's equations told him that, left to itself, the Empire would fall and
  that. thirty thousand years of human misery and agony would elapse before a
  Second Empire would arise from the ruins. And y