Foundation (1951)

Salvor Hardin, the first mayor of Terminus, holds that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, and the book shares his conviction. The Galactic Empire is dying, and the mathematician Hari Seldon's psychohistory, a statistics of whole populations, predicts thirty thousand years of barbarism to follow. His Foundation, a colony of scholars on a remote planet, exists to cut that to one thousand, and each crisis it meets is settled by mayors, priests and traders rather than fleets. Most of the book first appeared as stories in Astounding between 1942 and 1944, so the cast changes every generation or so and nobody has much of an inner life. Read it for the schemes.