Asimov's vision of psychohistory: using mathematics to predict the future of civilizations.
The premise is irresistible. Hari Seldon creates a science that can forecast the behavior of large populations over millennia and uses it to shorten the coming dark age from 30,000 years to 1,000.
The episodic structure shows different crises being resolved through cleverness rather than violence. Each solution feels inevitable in retrospect but surprising in the moment. A foundational text for thinking about civilizational scale.