Foundation is all talk and I love that about it

If you want space battles, you've picked up the wrong book. Nearly every problem here gets solved by people sitting in rooms and being clever at each other. A mathematician predicts the fall of an empire, and each section jumps ahead by decades as new people deal with the next crisis.

The characters barely exist and there's hardly a woman in it, which shows its age. But the idea at its centre, that you could predict history in bulk, is still great fun to think about.