In the Winter 1955 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Isaac Asimov published a timeline for his Foundation stories and tied together a bunch of his other stories as well, some of which were set in the timeline of the Galactic Empire and some of which had been written with no thought of being in the same timeline as the Foundation stories. Some of them were written well before the Foundation stories had even been conceived.

Still it was a timeline, and presumably it satisfied the handful of fans who still were reading Thrilling Wonder Stories, which soon went out of business. Which probably explains why the timeline isn’t very well known.

Note that the Foundation stories don’t begin until year 47,000 with “Foundation” and the list doesn’t contain all of the stories. Notably absent are “The Wedge” and “The Mule”. And, of course, the stories were given different names when they were collected into three “novels” which formed the Foundation Trilogy.

Many years later Asimov tried, with only partial success, to combine the Foundation series with his Robot series. He had probably long since forgotten about this timeline, as I don’t recall seeing him refer to it anywhere.

My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that the magazine’s editor asked Asimov to do a timeline for him, and Asimov dashed it off as a favor without taking it too seriously. Or possibly Asimov had tinkered with it earlier in an attempt to replicate Heinlein’s Future History timeline, and the editor had somehow learned about it.

When he wrote his autobiography he did not to even mention it.

Should anyone reading this come across anything that Asimov mentioned about this timeline, I’d appreciate it if you would bring it to my attention. Thank you in advance!