This series was once voted the greatest series of all time. Yes, this was a real Hugo award given out in 1966. Foundation beat out the likes of The Lord of the Rings, and Hugo stopped giving a best series award out until 2017. I guess Foundation just broke system.
So is it? The best series of all time?
In short, it's good. The story is of the search for the elusive Second Foundation and its rippling effects on the shattered remains of the former galactic empire. And Asimov does a masterful job of balancing the many plot lines only to bring them all back together into a clean and unexpected conclusion. Maybe it's too clean really, but it's the beauty of seeing a master plan come to fruition.
The story certainly shows its age at time. Nuclear technology isn't the magic wand that it probably appeared to be coming out of the second world war. And why do these people use so much paper!?
I'm going go to go out on a limb and say that it is not the greatest series of all time. But it is a timeless story. The Foundation series are stories from the dawn of the genre that still carry their weight almost 70 years later. Hard to argue that its status was not well earned.
Down—down—the results can be followed; and all the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy, until Hari Seldon, and very few men thereafter, could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located—so that each might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation—there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man.