The Foundation Trilogy

The Foundation Trilogy was written by Issac Asimov and is a collection of three books: Foundation (1951,) Foundation and Empire (1952,) and Second Foundation (1953.)  It is a classic in the Science Fiction genre, and is a look at what happens in the corridors of power over a thousand year span of galactic struggle.  Though it did heavily influence "Star Wars," (The planer Trantor looks like the Death Star, for example) it's mostly a story told by dialogues between politicians, and it's a remarkable study of leverage moves, power plays, straw men, deceptions, red herrings, and the things people do to get and maintain power through generations.  There are some unforgettable characters like Hari Seldon (the Good Guy) and the Mule (the Evil Mutant,) both master psychologists who "work by indirection, through the mind.  They would never destroy or remove when they could achieve their ends by creating a state of mind."  This sci-fi mind control stuff is precisely what makes The Foundation Trilogy relevant to today, as states of mind are easy to create; you don't have to be an evil mutant, all you have to do is publish something like this:

In The Foundation Trilogy, Asimov has got some great words of wisdom:  "Violence," came the retort, "is the last refuge of the incompetent."   He describes the development of a new science that will save humanity:

     "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."
     "Psychohistory had been the development of mental science, the final mathematicization thereof, rather, which had finally succeeded.  Through the development of the mathematics necessary to understand the facts of neural physiology and the electro-chemistry of the nervous system, which themselves had to be, had to be, traced down to nuclear forces, it first became possible to truly develop psychology.  And through the generalization of psychological knowledge from the individual to the group, sociology was also mathmaticized.
     The larger groups; the billions that occupied planets; the trillions that occupied Sectors; the quadrillions that occupied the whole Galaxy, became, not simply human beings, but gigantic forces amenable to statistical treatment-so that to Hari Seldon, the future became clear and inevitable, and the Plan could be set up."

The Foundation Trilogy is a timely and timeless masterpiece, and a solid introduction to the genius type.