Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
The sci fi book that supposedly inspired half of the famous modern economists.
Look: I found the premise of this book impossibly dumb. There is a discipline called "psychohistory" which can precisely predict the future of galactic events, down to fairly minute (planet-level) details, with very high probability. One guy figured it out, but has to hide it from his descendents because if they knew the future that would add too many variables and potentially change things.
So we have a situation where:
1) the future is so predictable that it can be shaped/nudged hundreds of years ahead by this one guy who has calculated it all out, but
2) that wouldn't be true if anyone else figured it out at all, but
3) nobody else ever figures it out, but
4) it was possible for the first guy to figure it out, and
5) still it's SO precise that he can calculate down to the month when certain forces will engulf/affect his descendents on a very distant planet, etc
This is so indescribably dumb. It's dumb to imagine that the future is perfectly predictable; if one guy can figure it out, in a universe where there are (iirc) billions of planets and trillions of people, someone else would eventually figure it out too; regardless, if the future is fragile enough that anyone knowing the Prophecied Path of the Future would change it, then other things will obviously change it too. The one time they actually put numbers on a probability they talk about something happening with 98.15% probability, but the @£$@£ing point is that if you're stacking up billions of events then your 98.15% probability is worth 0, you can predict 0, you just don't know what will happen in the future, as (indeed) we don't.
The series is like 7 books long, and something tells me that further in the series he will somehow retrofit some plot reason that completely negates the psychohistory thing, explains how it was always something entirely different all along, as long sci-fi series inevitably seems to do. But at least in this first book, it's taken as gospel and it's incredibly dumb.
The other notable thing about this book is that there are truly 0 meaningful female characters. If I'm not mistaken there are actually zero female characters in the first 3/4 of the book, then in the last story there's 1 brief appearance of a young waif and 1 longer appearance of a harpy shrew.
This is all particularly noticable because these characters living thousands of years into the human future are constantly smoking cigars. So in his book about the utter predictability of the future (to a man of Great Genius and Precision), Asimov failed to predict that, even 50 years ahead of him, smoking would be out of style, and taking women seriously as human beings would be in.