Well, he used to say that only a lie that wasn't ashamed of itself could possibly succeed. He also said that nothing had to be true, but everything h… - Isaac Asimov

At any rate, without quite knowing what dissatisfied me about the robot stories I read, I waited for something better, and I found it in the December 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. That issue contained "Helen O'Loy" by Lester del Rey, a story in which a robot was portrayed sympathetically. It was, I believe, only his second story, but I was a del Rey fan forever after.

We have still a society which would resent a ruling class of psychologists, and which would fear its development and fight against it.

The Foundation, as he says, was established as a scientific refuge – the means by which the science and culture of the dying Empire was to be preserved through the centuries of barbarism that have begun, to be rekindled in the end into a second Empire.