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I think it was a horrible ending really, another case of an author himself sabotaging the grand ideas of his own old works (another case I dislike is Frank Herbert and the ever weakening successors to Dune and the eventual discredition of many of the central themes in Dune) and I'm also not really a supporter of group minds nor Asimov's late attempt of uniting his Foundation and robot -series. Series which both I liked when I was a kid, I used to read Foundation trilogy couple of times each year.

One of my favourite series because of several individual novels and short stories in it is Ursula K. LeGuin's work in her Hainish Cycle. It had several forgettable novels in the beginning, and the last novel, The Telling, is average at best, but The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and the short story collection Four Ways to Forgiveness are great ones in my opinion. The Dispossessed was also one of the novels I read again pretty much every year when I was younger.

I liked the original trilogy very much, still consider it to be a great series, I just don't like what Asimov did when he returned to the series in his later years. The Second Foundation was at it's time a neat turn of events, but in the end he pretty much abandoned his original vision altogether in favour of a different, perhaps in the end more succesful and lasting, option, but still it reduced the importance of Hari Seldon and his plan. Instead of being the great hope of revival for galactic civilization, they in the end seemed more like the last gasps of a failed style of government and failed way of life. And perhaps because of this I liked the two late Hari Seldon novels far more than the sequels of the Foundation trilogy.

Hainish Cycle is an overall term to a loose series of novels, novellas and short stories she has been writing since the early 60's. In it humanity is one ancient colony out of many, established by the inhabitants of the planet Hain who have sent numerous waves of colonisation around the near neighbourhood in our part of the galaxy during few millions of years. Occasionally they have withdrawn from exploits in space and the colonies have become isolated, forgotting how they came to be, and their cultures have developed to different directions. There isn't any faster than light travel in her universe until some short stories in 90s, which helps this.

Hain is the only planet where intelligent life seems to have arisen in our part of the galaxy at least. Well, biologically it is of course a theory that can't stand, but Le Guin uses it as a way of creating different kind of human cultures and exploring (in the best works in the cycle) different political models, gender, ecology, racial issues etc, usually through the eyes of an outsider. Leaving aside the early, weaker novels, collected in Worlds of Exile and Illusion(1996), the major works are:

The Dispossessed(1974) is the major political novel in the series, important work of anarchist science fiction, and gave name for faster than light transmitter ansible, the main character being an exile from the anarchist ruled moon Anarres to a capitalist state on the planet Urras, where this capitalist and it's apparently totalitarian socialist opponent state are engaged in a kind of Cold War for supremacy; The Left Hand of Darkness(1969) explores gender issues - it's main character is an envoy of the Ekumen (name for the Hainish worlds that have more or less united) from Earth, a man, on a planet where the people have no fixed gender for most of the time - The Word for World is Forest(1976) explores ecology and is seen as also having undercurrent from the Vietnam war; Four Ways to Forgiveness(1995) and one short story connected to it explore racial issues where the old slave society of black southerners owning white northerners is collapsing, after this society (which itself has achieved interplanetary flight and colonisation of planets in it's own solar system) is met by the Ekumen; The Telling(2000) tells of another Earth envoy, from a religiously fundamentalist Earth that has gone through environmental disaster, and her mission to a planet where a fanatically secular government is trying to destroy all signs of their planet's old, pre-contact native religion and culture tied to it in the name of progress. There are also several good Hainish short stories in the collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea(1994).

What comes to Foundation, Heinlein and Burroughs, my own experience is that there is a "correct" time for reading them. And it's when you are a kid, I read Asimov, Heinlein, Burroughs, Clarke etc a lot in when I was something like 9-14 -years old, and they seemed so great and have left nice memories, but later I have found myself incapable of finishing almost all novels by Heinlein, even those which I read again and again as a child. But one thing why their work, especially Foundation, should be read, is that then one can see how much the current science fiction still owes to these books.

My own favourites from Asimov are the Foundation novels, but from Heinlein I think his best and most humane novel is The Double Star(1956). It shows his original political roots in the left, unlike the bible of rightwing libertarian rebellion (and succesful terrorism on a planetary scope), The Moon is a Harsh Mistress(1966), which is one of those novels whose reading shows where the piles of similar novels in current science fiction have gotten their basic ideas. (I liked this novel until I came to understand what it's protagonists really stood for.) From Clarke's novels The Fountains of Paradise(1979) is the one that has stood the test of time best when it comes to my opinion of them. Not Space Opera as such, but beyond being among the first in making the idea of a space elevator popular, a very moving story mixing the history of Ceylon and future together.

Double post, but I might as well use it for something useful. Ray Bradbury turned 89 and, to connect this to space opera through Dune, seems to be a proponent of the Butlerian Jihad:

Ray Bradbury's interview in the summer Strand opened with a touch of Fahrenheit 451, or Fahrenheit Silicon 'The Internet should be destroyed! I hate the Internet! I hate computers!' And, warming further to the computer theme: 'We should get rid of them, yeah!'

(From Ansible 266 by David Langford.)

(For some is added by Yuku, I don't know where it comes from and can't get rid of it through editing. )