The Encyclopedia Galactica Publishing Company is a organization in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.
Description[]
The Encyclopedia Galactica Publishing Company is the corporate and administrative entity responsible for compiling, publishing, and disseminating the Encyclopedia Galactica, a foundational institution.
Established as the public-facing vehicle for Hari Seldon's plan to preserve knowledge and shorten the impending period of galactic dark age, the Company's creation was the central pretext for the exile of Seldon's project to the planet Terminus. Funded initially by a combination of Seldon's personal fortune and a grudging Imperial grant orchestrated by First Minister Eto Demerzel, its stated, grandiosely naive mission was to compile all human knowledge into a definitive work. This public goal successfully masked its true psychohistorical purpose: to gather a critical mass of intellectual talent on a remote world, ensuring the survival of scientific knowledge and providing the seed from which the First Foundation would grow.
For its first fifty years, the Company was governed by a Board of Trustees composed of the original Encyclopedist scholars. They focused solely on the scholarly endeavor, willfully ignoring the political realities of Terminus's position. This era ended with the First Seldon Crisis, when the opening of the Seldon Vault revealed the Encyclopedia to be a sham and the Company's true function was to ensure survival. Following this, executive control was seized by Mayor Salvor Hardin, and the Company was effectively absorbed into the governing apparatus of the Foundation. While it continued its publishing operations, its primary function shifted to producing technical manuals, proselytizing texts for the "Religion of Science," and ultimately serving as a potent tool of "soft power" and cultural imperialism, helping to peacefully bring neighboring worlds under Foundation influence.
In later centuries, the Company's legacy evolved. The Encyclopedia Galactica itself became a symbol of the Foundation's cultural supremacy, a multi-million-volume work cited as the ultimate academic authority. The Publishing Company, though no longer a separate political entity, remained the official publisher of this monumental work. Its outputs, ranging from historical records to scientific journals, were considered the definitive texts of the Foundation era, meticulously chronicling the rise of the Foundation and the fall of the Galactic Empire. Its very existence is a testament to Seldon's genius, a benign-sounding institution that, through the inexorable forces of psychohistory, became a cornerstone of a new galactic empire.