Foundation and Empire

First: William Hope is a brilliant narrator for this audiobook version. His classical US accent lines really well with the, well, classical US characters in the book.

Asimov published Foundation and Empire in 1952, 7 years after the end of World War 2. Earth at the time had about two dozen computers, one per each major country. That is, electronic computers - and they weren't even called that yet. A "computer" at the time still meant a human who performs calculations in an office, often with the use of a mechanical calculator device - the world still employed hundreds of thousands of them.

This is significant for the book. Once you realise it is chronologically much closer to the XIX century than to today, you can better appreciate how imaginative it truly is. But you can also much more easily understand why everything feels so feudal (including the progressive Foundation). If Asimov didn't include Bayta, a woman from the Foundation, as one of the main characters, the book might have aged much worse.