Prelude to Foundation, by Issac Asimov

Fun and creative, but I had picked it up with the hope that it would be profound, and it didn't affect me that much. Two quotes of interest:

They are down in a control room for sewage treatment: "The light was dim and Seldon wondered why the Trantorians didn't keep it dark altogether. But then it occurred to him that he had never encountered true darkness in any public area. It was probably a habit in an energy-rich society. Strange that a world of forty billion should be energy-rich, but with the internal heat of the planet to draw upon, to say nothing of solar energy and nuclear fusion plants in space, it was. In fact, come to think of it, there was no energy-poor planet in the Empire. Was there a time when technology had been so primitive that energy poverty was possible?"

"You're naive, Hari. Or not a historian, which is the same thing."