Not that you'd notice when you go shopping

Well, he did read Edward Gibbons "Decline and Fall" before he pitched his idea for Foundation, if I remember correctly. The "foundation" of Foundation is therefore not rooted in fictional prose but in history, both in writing and philosophy. The changing characters are vehicles for exploring various forces that propel history like technology, trade and religion. The first book especially is a step by step description of how europe got through the very early medieval period after the fall of the western roman empire.

The narrative is more stringent and less episodic in the other two but the various philosophies of Historiography stay at the core of Foundation, for the most part. That's where the trilogy draws it's strength from and got it's accolades

It's wonderful that they managed to get everything in order in the end but I swear sometimes Germany can be inexplicably, frustratingly, excruciatingly ... German. Berlin truly is a failed state for many reasons but, hands down, this shit could have happened in my small backwater town just the same, step by step. And you wouldn't even need a destroyed tank for that.

And so it was that the myconid began to evolve

If the Hitchhiker is not for you, that's understandable. But you really, really should give "Last chance to see" a, uhm, chance, as it were. It really is a wonderful book.