There are a lot of people really hating on the TV show here, so I’ll offer a slightly contrarian take:
I would say the biggest problem is the marketing that implies they faithfully are telling the books, when they’re not. The TV show is not faithful to the books.
That said: the books are fascinating, but they are almost more like historical documentaries then narrative fiction. It works well because they are _short_ stories, and following the span of history, frequently jumping ahead a generation, is cool. But it would’ve been very difficult to render that as-is for television and have much of an audience. Also, the original stories were written in the 1940s and some parts feel quite dated (everyone is smoking all the time, the hyper focus on nuclear power, the relative role of women). So whoever picked the stories up, they were going to make a lot of changes.
If you think of the series merely as “inspired by” them not “based on them,” then the show isn’t bad. It has some corny flaws like most TV (the combat, just terrible), but they’ve developed a few good characters, added some new mysteries, and the order in which they’re unfolding events over time is interesting.
So, is it a classic? No. Is it faithful to the books? Not at all. But IMO it’s decent sci-fi, and interesting enough to watch if you’re bored :)
I agree with you. It took me a while to get my head around the approach they were taking (I re-read the whole series prior to it airing) but what struck me most on re-reading was how completely boring it would be to be faithful to it. Even just getting rid of the 1950s stereotype gender roles - which is the obvious place to start - doesn’t change the long arcs of obvious dialogue.
It’s a really grand scope for a universe - but I’m enjoying the series so far and it will be interesting to see where they go with it. Basically I’m just hungry for more space and since it’s visually very appealing and the universe is compelling, I think it deserves a chance.
>what struck me most on re-reading was how completely boring it would be to be faithful to it
Agreed.
The inspiration behind the Foundation series, setting out to shorten the Dark Ages after the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is great.
However, if you try reading those short stories again today, you're quickly reminded that early in his career, Asimov was already great at world building, but terrible with characters and dialog.
Add in the mismatch between the cultural norms of the 1940's (when the early Foundation stories were written) and the cultural norms today, and a rewrite was always going to be required.
Asimov's first real published story was in 1939 (his high school "published" a story earlier).
The Foundation stories were written in 1941-1950. In 1951 Asimov stopped writing fiction for thirty years.
So it's not "early Asimov" by any means.
When he came back to write Foundation sequels his characters and dialog hadn't improved.
Asimov was always an author only of ideas. His best dialog was the terrible and deliberately corny dialog in the Azazel fantasy-comedy stories, very much done in imitation of P.G. Wodehouse's cleverer banter.
Excerpt from one of the 80's foundation books:
“Is not all this an extraordinary concatenation of coincidence ?” Pelorat said, “If you list it like that.”
“List it any way you please,” said Trevize. “I don’t believe in extraordinary concatenations of coincidence.”
I agree that Asimov, late or early, lives or dies on his ideas, and never was a great writer - he doesn't do lovely prose, naturalistic dialog, or vivid, multi-dimensional characters. But I don't see anything particularly bad about the dialog you've quoted.
> When he came back to write Foundation sequels his characters and dialog hadn't improved.
OK, great, it's not just me. I was about to respond, "wait, did he ever get good at characters and dialog? I've read a lot of Asimov, and at no point have those ever not been distractingly bad."
I think the OP would agree that it was "early Asimov" but you can't blame the writing on that. The OP was making the point that his writing never improved.
Having said that there were cringeworthy aspects of the first Foundation book that improved over the subsequent books. I recently reread the series and came to the shocking conclusion that he must have been a virgin (or at least not exposed to women) in the first book.
"Search by the Second Foundation" (the second half of the book "Second Foundation") was one of the very last science fiction stories he wrote, apart from the spate of novels in the 80's.
It gets confusing because once he was famous, magazines would call him up asking for a story and he'd give them one that he'd written between 1939-1951 that had been rejected. They'd accept it because he was now a legend.
So Second Foundation, at least, is not early Asimov. It's arguably late Asimov. And it's exactly as wooden as the other parts of the original trilogy.
That said, I've read every bit of fiction he ever wrote and loved most of it, so...
I read the first 5ish foundation books fairly recently and they were great, especially the odd numbered ones. Asimov never did become a genius of dialogue and character, but the characters and dialogue in foundation 1 are both very good and I don’t understand why some people in this thread dismiss it. The first foundation book is one of the best
Look, Foundation has great concepts, but if you think it has even good characters and dialogue, you...need to read fiction with good characters and dialogue.
Literally anything? Never let me go? The wizard of Earthsea? I have a hard time seeing how can anyone not agree with the parent's assessment. Foundation is interesting because of the idea/plot it presents. But the characters themselves bring little to the table. In a way the Foundation series is a good piece of conceptual art, but sci-fi novels.
I would argue that 1Q84 (don't read it!, it sucks) is the exact opposite. Interesting characters but lacking an overarching setting/plot.
I just couldn't find myself to care about any of the actual characters.
I felt the only actual 'character' you where supposed to care about was Civilization itself. Everybody and everything else where bit players and side characters who's fates only mattered to the extend they helped or hindered Civilization.
> I think the same story, but where at least some of the characters are truly immortal (reasonable for far future sci-fi), would be better.
The Empire changes/storyline in the show are potentially setting up Demerzel at least to overtly be in some interesting places across the timeline. [1] They've also taken a fun path to play Lee Pace across most of the Fall, though not directly as an immortal.
[1] Plus, lots of fun debate to be had over which Robot Demerzel "really is" and/or how much in communication Demerzel is in with any/all of the rest of Asimov's most famous Robots that we know survived to (and were observing) the Foundation era.
I agree; it really could make a surpassingly excellent show.
All the possession contagion dovetails with our COVID concerns, yet is so different as to allow exploration by metaphor.
The instagramish phenomenon Kiera Nightly convinces youths to travel to a remote place where they are tortured until they yield to possession: Reminds me of fyrefest.
The large amount of hilarious dark humor should translate very well. For example, the sadistic edenist who overcomes possession by being the mentally strongest edenist. And the plain sadist who re-possesses his body from his possessor by being more screwed-up than a soul that had endured what amounts to hell.
I just finished this recently after dropping it halfway through because my eyes were in danger of rolling out of the back of my head due to the Capone stuff.
Re-characterising Al leaves quite the role to complete. You can't leave us hanging without suggesting what other /newly/ historical figure could replace them.
It's been a while, but I remember Asimov leaving a lot out of the books. i.e. Stories would start after the violence or some clever twist would side step it altogether. He left a lot for a visual medium to add-in. The core is there so far: psychohistory, robots, huge Trantor, planning to 'save' a galaxy amount of culture and info for a galactic reboot, etc.
It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's the first live action adaptation beyond the robot movie. Kind of always have to be forgiving with a first attempt. Even Star Trek TNG didn't get into a grove until 2nd or 3rd season.
Arguably, the departure of Gene Roddenberry was what made TNG what it was after the 2nd season. Giving more spotlight to Klingons and Romulans, violating the prime directive, made for a more interesting show. Later DS9 improved on these concepts, by showing a Federation that is willing to bend the rules when desperate times, using deception (forging evidence to disrupt the Dominion-Romulan alliance), covert operations (Section 31) and even planning a genocide (infecting Odo with a disease to spread the disease to other Founders, also Hugh in Star Trek TNG).
Kubrik made the film Lolita based on the screenplay Nabokov wrote in adaption from his novel.
The narrative frame and structure for the screenplay is quite different than the novel, but more suitable for a visual medium. I'll leave it to you to decide if it is a great movie, but the proposition that slavishly transliterating a novel into a movie is usually a bad idea seems reasonable to me.
The Expanse has its own problems, though. Namely, that a lot of the acting is terrible. Foundation at least, to me, has some strong acting and interesting character relationships.
I’m watching The Expanse now for the first time and I love it. Some characters are 2-dimensional and have childish motivations sure.
But there was a scene in which Chrisjen Avasarala gives an “imminent war” speech extremely sarcastically, like Homer to Marge in the bedroom.
I figured they’d address in the episode what her secret plan was for that speech.
Turns out: no plan, the actress wasn’t being sarcastic. She was going for strength and gravitas.
It makes no sense to me how an otherwise high quality show has those scenes. Surely the director could have gotten a non-sarcastic take. And if not, they’d have to minimize the actress’s role.
As it is, every scene with her in it breaks the fourth wall and reminds me I’m watching actors acting in front of cameras, rather than a visual narrative.
I enjoyed the realpolitik of Expanse but hated the trite interpersonal conflicts which seems to be a mainstay of modern drama. I find the main characters to be rather childish.
They are written in a childish manner: the white knight, the highly assertive love interest, the sociopath who wishes he could be a good guy, and the cowboy. Their personalities are unrealistic in ways that I would attribute to a young teenager. That said, the quirks of these trope-like characters is sometimes amusing. I enjoy the series mainly for the protomolecule plot, despite the characters.
I think the acting gets much better over the seasons. And when I rewatched seasons 1-3 recently, I didn't notice it. But maybe I'm so into the characters and stories that it just doesn't register anymore. And the Expanse certainly does have interesting character relations as the story progresses.
To be fair, I never made it past Season 1 so you may be right. It was just so distracting that I couldn't force myself to continue. More and more people recommend it, though, so I may have to just suffer through those early seasons to get to the good stuff.
The Expanse is one of only five science fiction productions on TV I could seriously recommend to someone. It deals with big themes in a coherent manner. And the characters get incredible depth as the seasons continue. And thematic/political elements get way more interesting. Almost every other science fiction series turns out to be mostly fluff (admittedly, very entertaining fluff) when viewed through the lens of The Expanse.
o Firefly - no brainer. Brilliant.
o Battlestar Galactica - Has some issues mid-late course, but still pretty end-end enthralling.
o Dark (I keep re-watching this over and over every few months. I have many notebook pages full of analysis. Seriously good SciFi for the most part.)
o Altered Carbon (mostly Season 1 - but Season 2 was okay)
Big Recommendation:
Not really science fiction (even bigger themes explored) but far superior in terms of overall quality of work/screen writing, and has a similar "concept" that a lot of supposed science fiction shows have - "The Leftovers" - Which I put on my list of the 5 most brilliant things on Television (Sopranos/The Wire/Deadwood/Breaking Bad being the other 4).
I'll give a honorable mention to stuff I loved but I can't totally recommends:
o Travelers - I'm a sucker for a good Time Travel Show.
o Foundation - Pretty - I watch it, but I totally would never recommend it.
o Fringe - Wow - was totally into this. Definitely an acquired taste though.
o Raised By Wolves - Interested in where it's going. Could entirely suck eventually I guess.
o Black Mirror - Hit and miss, though hits often enough that I keep coming back to it.
o WestWorld - I mean, we all watched it. Season 1 was *awesome* if you watched it in realtime and didn't read all the internet commentary when the aha moment hit you. Season 2 was pretty good as well IMHO. Season 3 was just dreck where the screen writing tanked *but* it paid an *awesome* homage to the very last of the Foundation Novels to bring it all home.
I did want to quit around episode 6 of season 1 on my first watch. Part of the problem is that it takes most of season 1 to cement the main characters and establish the story. I stuck it out and was hooked by season 2. Season 3 was fantastic. The story just keeps evolving, all the way up to book 9 and various novellas (season 6 is coming out in December).
LOTR and Harry Potter are easy to translate to the big screen because both follow the Hero's Journey formula. The same can be said with Dune. The only difficulty with Dune is that all of its content is hard to fit in two hour snippets.
As far as "faithful to the literary work", while the first one did a pretty fine job, it would bee an understatement to say that it didn't stay the distance especially past Azkaban. (Azkaban which is ironicaly form me is still a great movie on his own as the screenplay is in my eye a sweet wink at back to the future II)
And it still was a much more faithful adaptation than Foundation. Foundation is like a boomerang that was thrown three episodes ago, and hasn't come back yet to its source.
Not really. It feels very different from the book. It's more psychological and less supernatural even though there are elements of it from the book. If Kubrick was too faithful, it would not have been as scary.
> what struck me most on re-reading was how completely boring it would be to be faithful to it.
For God's sake.
It's screenplay writers work to adapt. One did a good job if they create a nice screen play. If that work is simplified by a solid foundation (pun intended), we'd expect at least not worse off from starting from scratch.
Look at what we get in this visual carnage of garbage.
It's very good visually, but mediocre plot-wise. The last few episodes look relatively low budget, so my guess is that they're preparing to end the season with more fistfights, a elaborate space war and the Invictus exploding like a Death Star.
If they had forgo the Foundation name and made their own universe, the fanbase would be more or less the same.
Few people are criticizing the show from deviating from books per se. It isn’t good on its own merits.
Of course they had to make some changes and flesh out some characters to adapt it for TV. They just made poor choices. Instead of going with chosen ones, heroes, and battles, they should have gone for politics in space.
Something like the political manouvering in A Song of Ice and Fire but in space.
You can make a lot of changes without pissing on its main themes. E.g. there are a lot of characters and scenes which were just sketched and the show could have filled them in instead of inventing whole new plots out of cloth. Also Hardin being a Chosen One and the producer insisting on reddit that "it's not really so, you'll see" but he could have just not made it look like it is so. Another thing would have been to compress everything until Bel Riose in the 1st season, since it's only afterwards that Asimov really matures as a writer.
It's not like I don't enjoy anything (the Empire plot is solid even though it's not at all from the books, proof that I'm not a purist or anything), but everything just shows a lack of interest in being faithful to the main ideas of the books.
> Also Hardin being a Chosen One and the producer insisting on reddit that "it's not really so
Almost all modern TV in the Scifi & Fantasy tropes relies on the the Hero's Journey. It is very hard not to use it especially if you want a large audience. To faithfully recreate Foundation for TV, you'd have to make a fake documentary and that just doesn't draw enough people to make the budget work
Arguably, framing Hardin as a "Hero's Journey" is the show taking chances versus the relatively much more dry source material. As Seldon says time and again, psychohistory can only predict the actions of large enough groups of people, it cannot predict the actions of individuals. From that perspective alone, I've found so far I mostly appreciate the twists the show is taking on the source material. Most of them seem to me to be individual actions within the overall predictions of psychohistory (treating the books as one prediction versus reality/timeline and the show as another).
Particularly since one of the two characters on the hero's journey for a majority of fans turned evil in the last two episodes. And that the one who ended up in the seat of power at the end had a different kind of journey.
Ignoring the lack of faith to the source material:
It's bad.. the dialogue, conflict, etc., are far below the levels we've come to expect in sci-fi shows like Expanse.
This is a complete waste of Jared Harris' talents. In the last episode, the resolution of his incomplete download was dramatized by a bit more screaming, then he was all good.
It doesn't feel elevated or sophisticated at all... it does look very pretty.
But it's not even representative of itself -- they keep talking about "trillions" of people here and there, and the new Book of Boba Fett does a better job of selling large population centers than Foundation ever does.
Also, my son made a point about the "unfilmable" books, which are a lot of dialogue: aren't most cop and lawyer shows mostly a lot of talk, usually in just a few common settings?
I don't care about the books and stopped watching mid season. The production impressed me for the first episode and then it was very bland and boring. There is no drama, nothing that caught my attention. It feels like watching a boring documentary.
> Also, my son made a point about the "unfilmable" books, which are a lot of dialogue: aren't most cop and lawyer shows mostly a lot of talk, usually in just a few common settings?
Nah, consisting mostly of dialogue doesn't make something unfilmable. That description applies to tons of good movies. "Unfilmable" becomes a possibility when there's little way to show anything, other than having characters speak infodumps at the audience. Even dialog-heavy movies need to show you things, even if it's just the physical movement and reactions of characters during the dialogue, or items about the room.
> just the physical movement and reactions of characters during the dialogue
I love how old Spike Lee films would have people talk while "walking" down a street but they wouldn't really walk, just stand there and talk as the background moves by just like the way it feels to have a good conversation while walking.
Not sure what we're disagreeing about -- shows like Suits and Billions are very much two people talking, one of those people talking to someone else, first two people talking again, expand...
Mandalorian has shown how little of a set is required to keep actors busy.
Ah, I misread that your son had claimed dialog-heavy things might be unfilmable and that you'd disagreed based on all the successful dialog-heavy filmed media the exists. The "nah" was a result of that misunderstanding, but was still intended to agree with you, if that makes sense. Sorry about that.
> my son made a point about the "unfilmable" books, which are a lot of dialogue
I'm still surprised about how slow they can make an hour-long episode. Between fistfights, face closeups and gratuitous sex scenes and drama, barely anything advances. It's following the Star Trek Discovery formula but in slow motion.
I don't even remember the original books, other than that I liked them.
I do not like the show. It's a decent scifi environment, but the actual storytelling is pretty awful, IMO.
The only thing I like is the mysteries. I'm not very far in, but they're few and far between, and wading through all the crap to learn about them is tiring. I keep trying to force myself to watch the next episode, but it doesn't happen.
The books at least advanced at a constant pace. Foundation seems stuck since three episodes ago. I'm surprised how an hour-long show can consist of mostly stalling. It will need a few seasons per book at that pace.
> So, is it a classic? No. Is it faithful to the books? Not at all. But IMO it’s decent sci-fi, and interesting enough to watch if you’re bored :)
If you want to make an action-y television series, then choose action-y source material. There's so much good sci-fi (and fantasy) out there that can be used for that type of style. The Vorkosigan Saga for one:
I don't get the problem with Foundation. Like why can't they take the source material and create their own interpretation? What's so wrong with that? Maybe someone will go on and create a Vorkosigan Saga interpretation too?
I read the books. Loved them. Really enjoying the show too.
If my memory serves me right, Foundation was never about individuals but collectives. That's what psychohistory math was about. The show fails completely to transmit this idea which for me, is the core of the books. So if they don't even get that right, what's the point of making a show about it?
It’s fun and interesting. What other reason do they need? You’re latching on to the premise that a show or movie based on a book must strictly adhere to that book or else it’s not good. It doesn’t. It can be loosely coupled or tightly coupled.
You’re disappointed because you have set expectations on what they should do. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad. I got over the “it must follow strictly” mindset a long time ago.
It's bad for other reasons. What I'm criticizing is clamming to be an adaptation of the books when it doesn't even get the most fundamental thing of the book right.
> You’re disappointed because you have set expectations
They created those expectations by clamming it is an adaption of the books. Imagine if I claim that my show called "The lord of the rings" is based on the novels but the only thing in common is that the main character is named Frodo.
The characters keep avoiding explosions and evading terrorists, mostly uninterested and unaffected by them, focused only on their eventual meeting with their CIA contact who is code named Godot.
Occasionally an unusually big action sequence will trigger an extended reflection on the banality of it all.
Excellent point. I'd definitely would watch that. And seriously, I think your larger point is that if you're going mess about with some legendary original source material, doing it in a self-referential way that says, "Yes, we know the original isn't what we're doing here, and here's how we are different on purpose" is probably something you want to think about.
The entire subgenre of military scifi or military space opera is full of stories that would translate well into a visual medium, with plenty of action. I've read many but haven't seen any adapted yet.
Agreed. The show may not follow the book, but it’s entertaining in its own right. Star Wars was essentially a “dumbed down” version of this, the show maintains some complexity - it can get corny at times but you still have to follow what’s going on or you could lose track of the story.
And the Brothers’ are some of the most intriguing sci fi characters that I’ve watched.
I have read the books. The entire series a few times now actually. I enjoyed them immensely both for the story and some of the ideas that are played with throughout.
They'd make terrible, boring TV.
I'm glad they've not attempted a shot-for-shot remake of the books as a TV show, and instead chosen to adapt by taking some of the core ideas and (thusfar) general gist of of the stories and turn them into something. I'm glad I get to explore those ideas further and put my head in that world a bit more. I like that they've added some other interesting ideas to play with.
I think the moaning is just the same general thing that comes up any time anything is adapted to screen. There's a huge contingent of people that, for some reason, seem to treat the source material as some holy text that's never to be changed instead of just being happy that some of the good and interesting elements are being carried over into a new story.
Counterpoint: maybe people are getting jaded by the constant nostalgia baits Hollywood keeps producing. Personally, I'd prefer less remakes/prequels/lazy adaptations and more epics like LOTR, for example. LOTR also had adaptations, but they were well-thought and respectful to the source material.
If they had named the show anything but "Foundation", I think it would be a decent lure for Apple TV. Loosely basing it on the Foundation series, and naming it "Foundation" was more to generate hype than a love letter to fans of Asimov's work.
I read the books so long ago that I remember zero about them. So "lack of fidelity to the books" is hardly my issue.
The issue is: they're high-glitz Hollywood garbage: "We can't think of any new ideas, so we'll just make the actors more 'modern' and relatable, and spend a lot on the CGI."
It's interesting that I don't watch much sci-fi, but AppleTV is also running Invasion which I do find watchable. Even though those characters are also kinda cliched.
I'm really enjoying it, and I read the books so long ago that I almost don't remember much from them, so I don't have any problem with the story not being faithful to them.
I considered a re-read when I learned this was coming out, but now I'm glad I have three decades' distance from the books. I may re-read after the show concludes, but at this pace that could be some time yet...
I think they're really trying, but just slightly missing the mark. They're raising a lot of ideas that aren't in the book, but are actually relevant to the concept of psychohistory. Things like the group think exhibited in various factions, many of the characters grapple with the way society constrains their freedom of action. The identical genetics of the emperor/s raises the question of the relevance and nature of individual identity.
I think they actually do quite a good job of integrating all these themes of freedom, social constraint and inertia, personhood and destiny. The first book doesn't really do any of that, so in doing so the show is diverging dramatically from the story of the first book. Nevertheless given psychohistory they're all interesting questions. Later books do explore various implications of psychohistory, but I don't think it's viable for a show to wait x-many seasons before bringing in these themes.
The problem is the actual story is a bit sluggish, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because I can see what they are trying to do.
I would offer an even more contrarian take: the show actually is being relatively faithful to the books. At least of the most recent episode.
More concretely, while obviously there are important changes (the Cleons, how Seldon dies, the Anacreons invading rather than making diplomatic threats, nobody smoking, etc.) none of these are terribly unfaithful to the story. Most are small bits of harmless dramatic license. Others explore parts of history that the books simply panned away from (e.g., happenings on Trantor during the first Seldon crisis.)
What really worries me is that, as of the most recent episode, they seem to be introducing characters with some kind of superpower wherein they can see or alter the future. This is going to screw the story up completely.
The most recent episode lost me. I think the biggest problem with filming the books is that the cast turns over every chapter. The genetic dynasty, Hari's hologram, Gaal going into extended hibernation are perfectly viable plot devices to keep the audience interested. So is jazzing up the action Making Gaal psychic really lost me. And so is the portrayal of Hari's forecasts as being a plan that hinges on specific people. That's really contrary to the book. The whole point of psychohistory is that cultural and society trends are nearly unavoidable and the individuals and their actions are nearly irrelevant except at the crisis moments where he would pop in to give relevant advice to whoever was around to listen. Magic people whose destiny is woven into the universe is completely anathema to that theme. That's just boring Star Wars.
Big but: Foundation never had clairvoyants, not even Gaia. This is a huge deviation from the books, since now we have people predicting the future on their own, without psychohistory.
It's a critical deviation, which shouldn't have been done on a whim.
Seldon's psycohistory predicted the path of the whole empire with great accuracy, but knowing their destiny would make people act differently, so Terminus didn't have psycohistorians, just a vault that would open at crucial events and give information. It would have worked well until the Mule threw a wrench with its mental ability to tune other minds. He wasn't a clairvoyant, he just altered people's feelings. The Second Foundation put the plan back on track thanks to their own mental abilities, but they also weren't clairvoyants. So far only psychohistory could predict the future. Later we have Golan Trevize, who also couldn't see the future, but had a gift for choosing right with incomplete information. Even Gaia had to rely on Trevize for its final decision.
Foundation's Gaal can see the future, and this is a world breaking ability. Hari Seldon and his psycohistory become obsolete since she can do that on her own, any action against the Foundation is moot, any deviation from the plan can be predicted, etc.
The only way to write Gaal out of that corner is making her clairvoyance work as reliable or unreliable as the plot needs (lazy writing), and judging from how she can predict and block micrometeorites now (which can puncture a ship's shield and hull, but not a tablet), it seems that's the route they will take. There was no need to introduce clairvoyance in the Foundation's universe.
I think there's a wide gulf between predicting the entire course of the collapse of a galactic empire centuries out into the future, and being able to anticipate a meteorite impact fractions of a second into the future. At most, Gaal has had a vague, bad feeling about something minutes before it happened. While they may have the second foundation refine this ability and be able to predict things out over longer time frames, as of yet there is no one who can make predictions in any way comparable to psychohistory. Whether or not there is a need for this really depends on where the story is going, which is at this point unclear but definitely not the direction of the original books.
The show seems to be heavily leaning towards the idea that this capability is going very important to the plot. A significant portion of the last episode consists of Hari Seldon explaining to Gaal how significant her powers are, and demonstrating that they can clearly predict complicated near-future events. I hope you’re right that the show will place tight restrictions on this macguffin, but I’m definitely worried.
Nothing that's happened in the show thusfar undermines the premise of psychohistory. Psychohistory is about using mathematics to predict the large scale and long term behaviour of society, it has nothing to do with someone having essentially heightened reflexes.
I'd agree that they needed a lot of reworking to make a TV series out of it, but some of it feels slightly gratuitous; the clone emperor thing feels like a pointless overcomplication, and I'm pretty sure they're going for some sort of Dune-esque guild navigator thing with the imperial starships.
I'm mostly quite enjoying it, but I think they could have been a _bit_ more restrained with their rewriting and lost nothing.
> everyone is smoking all the time, the hyper focus on nuclear power, the relative role of women
Also, newspapers! The original novels had paper newspapers, transmitted across the stars. At a certain age, science fiction tends to become accidentally a bit steampunk.
That's interesting to me because the brothers are one of my favorite parts of the show because of the new ideas they bring up in relation to the Empire. It gives the writers some really clever and interesting ways to discuss the problems with a long-standing continuity of ideas while giving those internal inconsistencies human faces to stand-in for something that would be much more nebulous and vague otherwise.
I feel like it kind of misses the point, though. Societies like that don't collapse because the leader is immortal, they do so because the _society_ is ossified.
I don't even think that's the point, though. I think it's more of a criticism of strict stubbornness. It's not the fact that he's immortal that's the problem, it's the fact that he/they continue to "lead" in the exact same manner, attempting to ossify a society that, on its insides, is changing. The only thing consistent is change, especially in society. Isn't the point of Foundation that, despite spectacular individuals, societies move on and change?
I feel it's the point they are trying to make with the cloned leader (I wouldn't exactly say immortal). They are saying the fall is faster because of an ossified leader, but nonetheless the fall will happen anyway, because it's not just the leader that is ossified, but the whole society.
> the clone emperor thing feels like a pointless overcomplication
This and other adaptations were made to keep the same actors for the thousand years of chaos. Some were ludicrous, like Gaal being forcefully put in hibernation for 30+ years, but the Cleon clones idea was well done in my opinion. It transmits that Cleon is the Empire. If only their interactions took less screen time...
If you proceed from the assumption that they had to adapt the Foundation novels into a serialized streaming show, then I guess I agree with you. Is there some new law that says you can't make up your own story anymore? You can even steal the things you like about Foundation, that's fine. It's not like all adaptations succeed, and all original IP fails, so I have no idea why they keep pretending that step 1 must be to buy the rights to something that already exists, even if it is structurally unfeasible to adapt.
> I would say the biggest problem is the marketing that implies they faithfully are telling the books, when they’re not. The TV show is not faithful to the books.
I will have to disagree here. While I don't mind deviating from the books, I do mind incredibly bad story telling, pandering, shitty acting, and just about everything else wrong with Apple's Foundation.
Its only redeeming qualities are certain aspects of the aesthetics and cinematography. Everything else makes it completely unwatchable, and not because it's unfaithful to the books.
Not really... most television needs to clear the bar of being something that you watch when you're bored and then get hooked into. Otherwise, you'd only have viewers that are familiar with the source and that's not a great way to grow viewership. It's how Game of Thrones grew so quickly for HBO. That show was a confusing mess with tons of characters but it was interesting to watch if you're bored because there was enough that you could pick up just from the costumes, locations, and acting.
Maybe this is just because of where I am in life, but between work, children, and hobbies, I don't have time to be bored. If I'm watching TV it's because I'm choosing to do it instead of something else I should be doing or want to do. I will only even try shows that receive high praise from people I trust or from a lot of reviewers. If a show's only function is to kill time it has negative value to me.
Sorry... to clarify, I'm not suggesting that that's the function of the show. I'm just saying that shows, nowadays, need to be simultaneously easy to get into to start but also in depth enough to keep people hooked. We're still early into the show so I think we're still in that "simple" stage.
It reminds me a lot about Star Trek Discovery, another high budget flagship meant to carry CBS's streaming service. Top of the line CGI, written like a soap opera Star Wars.
I could handle a reinterpreted Foundation story for TV. Easily.
The problem is that this is sooo bad. Dull, pretentions stories where nothing makes sense, and characters that are dull speaking boxes walking around saying script lines.
That's what I saw until falling asleep halfway through Episode 3. Perhaps it got better. Perhaps it's not "for me". But that's what I saw.
> That's what I saw until falling asleep halfway through Episode 3. Perhaps it got better. Perhaps it's not "for me". But that's what I saw.
I have to skip some scenes because they become too boring: flirting, romance, sex? skip. Emotional scene that adds nothing to the plot? skip. Maybe I lost some important bit among that, but seeing the sluggish pace, I doubt it.
I was wondering if there is an explanation on why the political systems in American's science fictions are just so unimaginative? I mean, a civilization could predict the future, could destroy a planet, could travel across galaxies, and could rule trillions of people, yet they had an empire just like ancient Rome? Change of technologies and productivity and economy will not lead to change of political systems?
> Change of technologies and productivity and economy will not lead to change of political systems?
It did, which is why their political system wasn't one of the ones popular at the time it was written. The system echoed with past ones because the combined effect of the economic and tech changes (particularly notably the relationship between travel and communications speed) echoed the past.
> If you think of the series merely as “inspired by” them not “based on them,” then the show isn’t bad.
Then what is the point of using a license if you're just "inspired by"? The producers could just say it's inspired by sci-fi classics and do whatever they want, including not respecting the spirit of the original work, which should the primary goal in an adaptation.
It has some brilliant adaptations, like the Cleon clones, and some abysmal ones like the psychic supergenius self-taught mathematician from a backwards anti-intellectual hyper-religious civilization, that is destined to lead the Foundation. Way to pile on plot devices and clichés on a single character, a clear sign of weak writing.
I had the same idea of LOTR, with all their songs and heavy narrative, yet the Peter Jackson's adaptation was great, a love letter to Tolkien. He did show, not tell.
Apple made a ton of buzz around the TV show, and it took _because_ they use the Asimov work.
Apple did the Apple thing, they overhyped a product that they then designed according to their own rules, expecting everybody to just eat their crap and smile as usual.
But it turns out people liking classic SF books are not your average fanboy, and they don't like being lied to.
It's not just about marketing, it's about trust. It's about taking a dump on a legendary art piece to make money with a the Apple smug confidence. While Dune was a masterful yet humble demonstration of respect and love to the book.
Sure, it's was impossible to adapt the book as a show. By nature. Any reader would have told you that.
They didn't care. They wanted their poney.
It was never about making something for us.
Well, for once, I'm happy it back fired. They don't get to hear "no" often enough.
> Apple did the Apple thing, they overhyped a product that they then designed according to their own rules, expecting everybody to just eat their crap and smile as usual.
> But it turns out people liking classic SF books are not your average fanboy, and they don't like being lied to.
It’s a bit silly to imply that the intended market was people who like or have even heard of SF classics like the Foundation series. The intended audience is pretty clearly everyone who watches stuff. It’s one of many shows trying to spend their way into cultural ubiquity after the immense success of Game of Thrones. Even if previous Asimov fans were disappointed it would have been totally fine if the show took off (this was the case for many George R. R. Martin fans and the Game of Thrones TV series).
Right, and that’s precisely what I’m saying: that it’s silly to claim that Apple’s plan was to make a mediocre show and rely on generating hype with nothing more than the name recognition of Asimov and the Foundation series.
> Otherwise, why chose the book at all ? After all, as you said, it's almost impossible to adapt, so they didn't buy the rights for the writing.
I mean, Apple bought the show from a production company that was able to get adaptation rights from the Asimov estate, and presumably that production company had creative people who liked the series and were motivated to adapt it. It's not like there was some white label series already in development and Apple went searching for some famous book series brand to attach to it.
The series has generally positive reviews (70% on Rotten Tomatoes). It was recently renewed for a second season already. I think it's a success for them.
For God's sake, Apple didn't "design [the Foundation TV show] according to their own rules". Apple bought the rights to a TV show created, developed, produced, and run by people who do not work for Apple. Yes, Apple is signing checks, yes, that I get that means they have some influence -- but that doesn't make the show into an "Apple product" the way an iPhone or a MacBook is. It just doesn't. There is no one at Apple saying "I think this show should be 'designed' this way" for this or any of their shows. Apple TV+ is developing a reputation for being relatively hands-off and creator friendly, largely thanks to the staff they hired to actually run things, which includes former top executives at Sony and HBO. The main thing that Apple brings to the table is money. Lots and lots of money.
If you don't like the Foundation show, that's fine, but this "oh, this is the hubris of Apple and I am glad they failed and everything they do is terrible and Tim Cook personally beat my cat to death" narrative isn't just tired, it's utterly irrelevant. What you don't like is David S. Goyer's take on Foundation. If you really don't like that take, then you wouldn't like it if it were running on Netflix or Amazon Prime or HBO Max, either, and it would have been just the same on one of those services -- albeit probably with a smaller special effects budget.
And the thing is, a "faithful translation" of the first books would be deathly boring. It's full of great ideas, but also full of flat characters, stilted dialogue, droning monologues, and very little in the way of actual plot. It's a story that hinges on the fall of a giant galactic empire yet lets that fall happen entirely off camera. One reviewer in 1982 described it this way:
> I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All three volumes, nearly a quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and conversation. No action. No physical suspense.
That "reviewer" was Isaac Asimov, when he re-read his own work before commencing the fourth book. Foundation started as a series of short stories patched together, then became a novel series full of retcons: it was all predicted by math! Wait, it was really the Second Foundation and Mentalics! Something something The Mule(tm)! Hold on, it was the robot from this other series entirely what the hell, Isaac!
Goyer has the disadvantage of trying to take what starts out as basically a future history sourcebook and turning it into a story, but the advantage of not having to retcon anything. There are already references to Foundation and Earth in the show.
Do I love the show? No, but I like the show. Is it turning a cerebral almost action-free book series into an action epic? Yes, but so far it's been a smart action epic, and I'm okay with that. Is it arguably Foundation fanfic? Maybe, but fanfic is usually "what if we shipped these two characters"; Foundation is fanfic of its source material in the sense of asking "what if Asimov created characters anyone would ever consider shipping in the first place."
"Unfilmable" just means impossible to translate into a sequence of scenes, with characters and a coherent story. For example, long internal monologues about the design of space ships, etc.
You could try, but it wouldn't be entertaining in a classical sense without deviating strongly from the source material. Animated shows would have the same problem.
You have to see this from the big picture view as a way to draw mainstream audiences for a paid streaming service. Without major drastic changes, a faithful translation of Foundation would be unwatchable for most people (most people are not into documentaries let alone fake ones), and it doesn't serve Apple's goal of getting more subscribers.
In the span of ten minutes they restore the artificial gravity on a derelict spacecraft then they walk into a room on that same ship that has large open vats of some dangerous liquid that people fall into and die.
Or Salvor's boyfriend who says his propulsor doesn't work and gently floats away, feet away from several people equipped with functioning propulsors, including Salvor.
The lava floor strongly reminded me of Galaxy Quest's chompers. Come on, Apple.
Feels way too fantasy to me. Though only the first book didn't have fantasy parts (imo. and I don't feel like it was required). And possibly, most of the fantasy parts will be explained in the tv show, and we'll end very small fantasy elements, but I'm expecting to be disappointed there.
i completely agree. it isn't bad sci-fi tv. nowhere near the expanse, but that doesn't say much, since for me nothing really comes close to the expanse.
The economist Paul Krugman of all people wrote a 'review' of Foundation versus Dune:
> “Foundation” might seem unfilmable. It mostly involves people talking, and its narrative inverts the hero-saves-the-universe theme that burns many acres of CGI every year. The story spans centuries; in each episode everything appears to be on the brink, and it seems as if only desperate efforts by the protagonists can save the day. But after each crisis, Seldon’s prerecorded hologram appears to explain to everyone what just happened and why the successful resolution was inevitable given the laws of history.
> So how does the Apple TV series turn this into a visually compelling tale? It doesn’t. What it does instead is remake “Star Wars” under another name. There are indispensable heroes, mystical powers, even a Death Star. These aren’t necessarily bad things to include in a TV series, but they’re completely antithetical to the spirit of Asimov’s writing. Pretending that this series has anything to do with the “Foundation” novels is fraudulent marketing, and I’ve stopped watching.
Krugman is just too emotionally invested in the book, so nothing comparable to the book. If the show is not called foundation, he will probably enjoy it.
> If the show is not called foundation, he will probably enjoy it.
It wasn't about Foundation, then why call it "Foundation"?
It's like that Will Smith movie called I, Robot: why did they bother calling it that?
You can create a new sci-fi show or movie without the 'false marketing' of referencing previous source material: that's what the original Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars did in the 1970s. Or you can try to faithfully use the source material as much as possible as The Expanse show has done, and what Villeneuve has generally done with his Dune.
There are plenty of both sci-fi and fantasy works available for adaptation into shows and movies. And if (general) audiences expect action-y stuff in their sci-fi/fantasy, then pick one in which the source material is more action-y.
Don't try adapting Waiting for Godot into the next Die Hard.
I, Robot is significantly harder to adapt than Foundation. The former is like a book of little logic mysteries. The film turned the setting concept into one big murder mystery to appeal to modern audiences. It was a drastic tonal change, but preserves some of the concepts of Asimov, even including the Zeroth Law at the end.
The movie was an already written script paired with the title and some characters renamed. It was not made (the script) with the intention of adapting the book (which is a series of short stories with a common framing story). I, Robot, like World War Z, needs an anthology or serial format to be properly presented as a show or film.
Saying Krugman is too emotionally invested in the book is an understatement. This is the man who claims to have wanted to bring about psychohistory itself as the natural evolution of economics.
He may be the only neoclassical economist to admit that, but most of them have the hubris to think it. I almost suspect Asimov intended a satire: "Humanity is complicated, but fear not! I have numbers, and those allow me to completely ignore humanity!"
I don’t think it is unreasonable for someone watching an adaptation of a book to expect that the central themes of that book to be central to the adaptation, or at least not have the main themes of the adaptation be a direct contradiction to the source material.
The central themes of the original series are certainly present in the series. I think people -- including Krugman -- are occasionally missing the forest for the trees, because the show is radically restructuring and revising the story in order to make it more compelling as TV drama (at least in the eyes of the showrunners). I'm not sure I like all of the changes, but I just don't agree with critics who say that the show is missing the thematic point of the books.
> If the show is not called foundation, he will probably enjoy it
I don't think so. If it wasn't called Foundation, or if I, Robot wasn't referencing Asimov's stories, or if Brave New World was called something different, they would all be lost in the quagmire of new 'blockbuster' TV shows that all the streaming networks are pushing hard. Because they're all very formulaic, optimized things where they took inspiration from endless A/B testing online, doing everything by the book, as in, there's probably a book / guide out there on how to make a TV show.
Without the name, they are bland and anonymous shows.
Meanwhile there are plenty of shows that stand on their own - this year there was Queen's Gambit, the book on which it was based on never showed up on my radar so (anecdotally) it's not carried by having a Name / Reputation. That one has been nearly 20 years in the making, too.
> So how does the Apple TV series turn this into a visually compelling tale? It doesn’t. What it does instead is remake “Star Wars” under another name. There are indispensable heroes, mystical powers, even a Death Star. These aren’t necessarily bad things to include in a TV series, but they’re completely antithetical to the spirit of Asimov’s writing. Pretending that this series has anything to do with the “Foundation” novels is fraudulent marketing, and I’ve stopped watching.
This translates to an assessment of too emotionally invested?
Name calling and gas lighting seem to be the natural way of some people's narrative approach of discredit the person without offering counter point to the statement (or rather, not able to).
You're allowed to feel pissed at being tricked. I also almost closed the laptop when I saw Daniel. But in the end I abandoned it because the story was just not compelling, except the emperrors subplot.
I am wondering if SyFy's The Expanse succeeded completely in their adaptation of novels that were written in contemporary times. Apple's Foundation is awkward at times and its writers seem to believe that they needed to correct and reinvigorate books that were outmoded, but, apparently, the production itself is said to lack real faults. It's really easy to kill a franchise these days because you want it to speak to your audience, but it is seen as much less aspirational with its mixed messages. Of course, that's just my general impression, and I could be talking about any franchise that starts with "Star".
> I am wondering if SyFy's The Expanse succeeded completely in their adaptation of novels that were written in contemporary times.
As per a sibling comment: the original authors were involved. But:
It depends on style of the show material and the style of the new medium. If the original is cerebral and low-action, can you make a commercially successful adaptation with the same qualities?
There's also the fact that one of the authors of the Expanse series is closely involved with the creation of the show (and the reworking of characters/arcs to fit the medium better).
The Expanse, like virtually all sci-fi and fantasy narratives, follows the Hero's Journey. It's a pattern that is familiar to virtually everyone and it's already proven commercially successful.
As Krugman himself writes, "[Foundation] mostly involves people talking, and its narrative inverts the hero-saves-the-universe theme that burns many acres of CGI every year."
It is hard to film faithfully while attracting and preserving a large audience.
Krugman has stated in the past that the entire reason he became an economist is because it was the closest real world profession to being a psychohistorian.
In the ad for his MasterClass, Paul Krugman says (~25s):
> Doing economics requires stepping back from all of the details to say "What is the essential here? What is the story?". It's about people. It's not about money. It's ends up about what people do.
I love that Paul Krugman implies that Foundation copied Star Wars.
(Ie Foundation was the original Empire Space Opera from which many Sci Fi authors cribbed including George Lucas)
I read it completely differently. To me it seems he’s saying the show Foundation is copying Star Wars, which in his opinion is completely antithetical to the novel and so therefore he’s stopped watching the show.
That is indeed what Krugman is saying. It's pretty clear:
> "How does the Apple TV series (of Foundation) turn this (the novel, Foundation) into a visually compelling tale? It doesn’t. What it does instead is remake "Star Wars"
And having seen the Foundation show, having read the Foundation book and seen the Star Wars movie, I think he (Krugman) has a point.
Nope. Foundation was first published in 1942, and is something of an alternate take on the Space Opera w Evil Empire genre, which came earlier, with the first prominent example being E.E. "Doc" Smith's Galactic Patrol in 1934. Smith previously wrote the Skylark series of space opera stories, first published in 1928.
And while not identical, Smith's Lensmen and Lucas' Jedi Knights have a great deal in common.
Is it? There was a lot of space opera and space adventure and space imperialism in the 1940s and 50s. Claiming to be the original is a big claim.
Mind you, Lucas cribbed from everything in sight; samurai movies (Hidden Fortress), Westerns, war films (the trench run is from 633 Squadron). Partly why it was so successful.
The show was absolutely amazing when it could follow the books. The definitive show everyone talked about. The moment the books ran out it started to go downhill. And when they couldn't easily extrapolate from the books the show fell apart completely. The showrunners and writes for the show weren't good enough to make Game of Thrones on their own. No offence, but that takes a lot of skill and luck. They were good enough to adapt it though.
There's a reason why people love the Foundation. Why we read the books almost 80 years later. And it's not because of the title or character names (which is all the Apple show keeps).
The creators of this show are extremely arrogant. They think they could have done better than Asimov given the setting. So they threw away the thing people loved and replaced Asimov's work with their own. Well, clearly they couldn't do better. The show is a boring disjointed mess of random scifi tropes.
Hardin is now a "warden"!? Literally, the character with one of the most memorable sayings in all of literature "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" is now all about violence. That's nothing less than a betrayal of the source material.
>> The show was absolutely amazing when it could follow the books. The definitive show everyone talked about. The moment the books ran out it started to go downhill. And when they couldn't easily extrapolate from the books the show fell apart completely. The showrunners and writes for the show weren't good enough to make Game of Thrones on their own. No offence, but that takes a lot of skill and luck. They were good enough to adapt it though.
George R.R. Martin is still underrated, even given his success. He wrote for television for a long time and structured his novels more like seasons of TV, with each chapter serving as an episode. This is part of the reason for their popularity. Martin is also a once-in-a-generation genius of character, structure, and plot - a self-evident truth that is rarely spoken aloud because genre fiction is "not literature."
The creators of the GOT show really never even realized that they were adapting something carefully, painstakingly honed by a genius craftsman. They really figured they could just keep throwing in dramatic, violent twists and we wouldn't know the difference. In that light, it's shocking that they even made the first seasons as competently as they did.
> George R.R. Martin is still underrated, even given his success. He wrote for television for a long time and structured his novels more like seasons of TV, with each chapter serving as an episode.
It was never intended for film or TV. It was almost intentionally unfilmable.
“I had worked in Hollywood myself for about 10 years, from the late ’80s to the ’90s. I’d been on the staff of The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. All of my first drafts tended to be too big or too expensive. I always hated the process of having to cut.” When he took up novel-writing afterward, he recalls: “I said, ‘I’m sick of this, I’m going to write something that’s as big as I want it to be, and it’s going to have a cast of characters that go into the thousands, and I’m going to have huge castles, and battles, and dragons.”
Sure. He structured it the way TV shows are structured, in ways that novels are not usually structured. But that doesn't mean he was imagining it would be made into TV.
So glad I wasn't the only one to catch the contradiction with Hardin.
Also we seem to be saying that Hardin and other individuals (e.g. the woman who was tossed off the colony ship who narrates sometimes) are very special, which is also totally counter to the most important themes of the book.
Now I've only watched to the 2nd episode. But there are _some_ very special people in Asimov's universe. I'm withholding judgement on who that pregnant woman might be, or who her child might become... it's a detail left mostly unsketched in Foundation & Empire, and might turn into an interesting tale.
> Hardin is now a "warden"!? Literally, the character with one of the most memorable sayings in all of literature "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" is now all about violence. That's nothing less than a betrayal of the source material.
They even pissed on the source material by having Hardin's father remind her of the saying and have her explicitly dismiss it.
GoT isn't like Foundation at all, though. Game of Thrones had plenty of action and tense character moments that all happen within a relatively short period of time (within the character's lifetimes/generations). Foundation is about decades of time so adapting it directly like they could with GoT isn't really possible, imo.
Also, we don't know yet but, for all we know, Hardin might learn what the meaning of that saying is by making the very mistake it's cautioning against. After all, in the show, the line was given to her father who then follows through on his plotline (trying to be vague, here). So maybe it's not a betrayal of the source material as much as it is going a bit further back to establish why Hardin keeps that saying. Considering Goyer was involved with Man of Steel and felt like it was pivotal to establish Superman's "no-kill" rule as a result of being forced to kill, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a similar beat of character growth here.
I actually find GoT later and dumber episodes most re-watchable. I imagine it is hard as hell to film shows that are both smart and cinematic. Nolan seems to be the only one who can consistently accomplish this
My greatest gripe with the show is that none of the writers seem to have any understanding of science, technology and have only a vague understanding of sociology, pretty much all of the main themes of the books. I actually liked the imperial cloning elements, as they fleshed out well an ossified society, but every other plotline seems to just happen because of pseudo-magic.
I can only wish that the writer's room of Futurama could have had a go at this. Writers today seem to not understand anymore how reality works, so they aren't able to extrapolate from it.
> Writers today seem to not understand anymore how reality works, so they aren't able to extrapolate from it.
That's a quite accurate observation. Even for the largest budgets people tasked with story telling are almost always the weakest element. Who makes them? What kind of education do they undergo to be this wrong about reality and storytelling? Are they such small and in-bred group that they are all so wrong in such similar ways?
This reminds me of another weird thing. In games, various NPCs often say the same dialog line just in different voices. So the bottleneck is writing few words? Not hiring voice talent, not recording it in the studio and postprocessing it? But writing few unique words less is where you get your savings?
True, it might be that the bubble writers live in nowadays is stronger than it's ever been, and it's a guild that rejects all non-aligned newcomers. It might also be that people that understand reality go into more stable domains, to make a sure income.
Whatever the reason, we're surely becoming culturally poorer.
Because writers don't fund movies and tv shows, and are almost always left out of the decision making process for what elements need to appear in the story.
So the problem is that writers don't write the scripts? I know directors don't actually direct them since there often is director's cut, that is supposed to reflect better the intentions of the director.
Screenwriters would seem to be critically important, but writing is hard, often slow and converts much less recognition than other roles in the industry. Further, there are innumerable points in the production chain in which the (necessary!) decisions of other crew members can alter/dilute/confuse the intentions of the screenwriter.
> Screenwriters would seem to be critically important, but writing is hard, often slow and converts much less recognition than other roles in the industry
I can name Levinson and Link. Ronald D. Moore also seemed pretty great. Some writers are talented enough that they can transcend the obscurity granted by their profession, and achieve "cult status" within a small niche who cares about these things.
But frankly, it seems many writers are simply not good. Most TV show nowadays consist of central characters doing dumb things, and needing an episode or two to dig themselves out, acting as filler. Episodic formats tend to promote lazy writing and overreliance on tropes. And it seems to me that most writers watch more TV shows than they read books, given how homogeneous the average popular TV show can be.
Recently I'm learning a lot of names of screenwriters exactly because they tank show after show but they are given yet another chance by producers because one of the things they wrote was mediocre.
I can usually forgive some tech contradiction details, but its really annoying when there is faster than light travel... But to create contrived suspense because no technology exists to make a flashlight strong enough to illuminate a cave for 10m ??!?!
The humble flashlight must be one of the most abused pieces of modern technology in fiction. According to video games, it doesn't matter what century you're in, it is impossible to create a flashlight that lasts for more than a few minutes, and only provides a feeble cone of barely-light for that time. According to science fiction, despite the fact ~98%+ of the people reading this literally have a flashlight in their pocket or equally available right now, they are rare things that you have to remember to take with you, and even if you do remember, they'd often be outshone by a 1970s campground flashlight.
Back here in the real world we have more light than we know what to do with. We have things that seem to light up the world accidentally, like the screen of our phones, better than flashlights can do the job in the future.
There's some other tropes where super-futuristic, sci-fi technology is noticeably worse than our real-world technology (weaponry in particular, most "ray guns" are noticeably inferior to real-world guns in almost every way except perhaps ammo capacity), but none I can think of where the every day experience of everybody now is so readily at-hand to know better.
> a flashlight that lasts for more than a few minutes (...) despite the fact ~98%+ of the people reading this literally have a flashlight in their pocket or equally available right now
A tangent: it dawned on me only a few years ago just how little power LED lights use compared to most other things we do with energy. I never had a good intuition for this, so I was surprised when I noticed that keeping my smartphone's flashlight active at full power doesn't noticeably drain its battery - in stark contrast to even keeping the screen on (and thus the phone's CPU awake).
Even when LED flashlights were first popularized (more than a decade ago), it was believable that batteries always seemed to be on their last legs, especially in the wilderness. It's probably not supposed to be a thing on Terminus unless there's a missing plot point that explains why they couldn't use or were preserving their pocket nuclear reactors / batteries that can power force fields among other things.
In the book it took them eighty years of being metal-starved on Terminus to develop pocket reactors, with everyone else in the galaxy incredulous that it was possible.
Bulky power sources at this point in the timeline are entirely consistent with the book. What's wildly inconsistent is that Cleon has a personal force field that's supposed to be invented a hundred years later, on Terminus, isolated from the Empire.
> weaponry in particular, most "ray guns" are noticeably inferior to real-world guns in almost every way except perhaps ammo capacity
I was thinking about this watching Foundation. In thousands of years will humans really be _shooting projectiles_ at each other to disrupt vital organs? Why wouldn't it be some kind of device that interacts on a deeper level, I'm thinking like setting off a mini-nuclear-chain-reaction when coming into contact with a single cell that just causes their body to instantly vaporize.
Guns in general seem like something that should already be antiquated.
The Foundation book series, IIRC, has "disintegrators", which are invisible beams that disrupt the charges of the target atoms and cause the target to lose all chemical cohesion. However, "invisible beams" work poorly for video. As a result, most sci-fi video weapons have the huge disadvantage of forming an arrow pointing directly at where you are. Real firearms have muzzle flash but that has nothing on a huge finger pointing right at you.
Additionally, since the audience needs to "see" the beam, most sci-fi weapons have miserably slow firing rates, enough that on the modern battlefield they would be useless.
"Guns in general seem like something that should already be antiquated."
This comes from a mindset that technology is "tiered" and that later technologies are "better" than earlier ones in all ways. This is caused by watching too much science fiction and/or playing too many video games. It is not how the real universe works. In reality, throwing things really hard at your opponent is likely to be a viable strategy indefinitely. The science fiction technologies that would invalidate this, like Dune's shields, do not seem to be things that exist in the real universe.
> This comes from a mindset that technology is "tiered" and that later technologies are "better" than earlier ones in all ways.
That wasn't really what I was going for. What I was thinking was actually efficiency. Of course projectiles will always be effective, but they are not the most efficient. Technology tends towards an increase in efficiency, and inefficient technologies are often supplanted by new ones (swords being largely displaced by guns, muzzle loading weapons being largely replaced by automatic, etc).
If the point is to eliminate an adversary's existence, I can imagine that in thousands of years more efficient means will have been invented. But you're probably right that it doesn't make for exciting television.
>> but its really annoying when there is faster than light travel.
Almost all space scifi has FTL, wormholes, warp drive or jump drive out of necessity, otherwise you're rather limited in travel. Even the Expanse allows for it at some point, after allowing for the super high efficiency fusion drive just to make travel around the Solar System reasonably fast enough. It's a necessary plot device, unless you're doing a generational ship or staying close to home.
I am totally fine with FTL. My point is, if you have FTL travel, but the tech at the time cant invent a flashlight to illuminate a cave for more than 10m, or even have tech that allow them to see every imaginable detail etc... Dont create lazy tension points that are built on fumbling around in the dark due to inadequate lighting.
Speaker for the Dead and the ensuing novels in the Ender's Game series managed to tell multi-stellar stories with sub-light travel and relativistic effects.
Also most of the Three-Body Problem trilogy, there is no FTL until the very end when they jump forward by aeons.
I forgive it much less now than in the past. Everyone has a direct portal to the sum total knowledge of humanity in their pocket and the internet is full of knowledgeable communities who can answer questions. Not leveraging this as a writer is lazy and arrogant.
There is a definite sliding scale. Make your Sci-Fi too hard and you just have science and no fiction. But its not that hard to stick to the "One Big Lie" rule. If the expanse and the Martian can do it then so can everyone else.
> My greatest gripe with the show is that none of the writers seem to have any understanding of science, technology and have only a vague understanding of sociology
> but every other plotline seems to just happen because of pseudo-magic.
I mean, you could say the same of the original books! Asimov obviously did have a good understanding of science, but it is not meaningfully on display in Foundation; psychohistory is _nonsense_, and that's before you get to the 'atomics'. Foundation wasn't (and wasn't intended to be) rock-hard sci-fi, and that's okay.
The first reaction I got watching genetic dynasty stuff is Elon Musk probably has something like that planned. The technology is more or less ready. And he is that reckless
Given some of the podcast interviews, it appears the show-runners don’t actually care about the consistency of the scope of the world they’ve made. They have multi-orders-of-magnitude inconsistencies about the size of the empire in both number of people, number of worlds, and distances. Which can really crash the sense of conflict back into a pure fantasy-land, Star Wars style. Which, generally, Asimov really avoided. And which can undercut the themes that are driven by the grand scope.
The show feels like the creators read the back of the book and nothing else. Adaptation is never a one-to-one translation but you need to keep the spirit of the show. Also the whole emperor lineage stuff feels like an attempt to add a Game of Thrones type plot to the show.
I'm not far into the show, so perhaps they address this, but I'd love a more modern commentary on how the whole ideology of the Foundation is basically colonialism and manifest destiny. Having a civilization that is predestined to be the chosen holy empire is a common justification for invading and oppressing other civilizations. It'd be an interesting twist to argue against the Second Empire, in line with the modern re-evaluation of the so-called Dark Ages as not being so dark necessarily.
I also don't get why the stories are intertwined and so stretched out. Well, I guess I do know why in that Apple probably wanted a prestige TV show that'd last 5-6 seasons. The adaptation would work better with 1 hour to 1.5 hour episodes, each adapting one section of the book.
Foundations series as a whole was relatively lite. Characters aren't that sophisticated as what you get in GoT, Dune, or Tolkiens. Screen adaptations are mostly to target a different kind of audience. People who loves the original books aren't the intended target. The mass who have heard of Asimov but didn't bother to read or just read the back of the book would be the main audience for this Foundations. It is currently way better than the finale of GoT.
Strong disagree. This is one of the worst shows I've ever watched. Lots of magical story elements that just poof out of nowhere at just the right time. On top of that there's ton of useless scenes where literally nothing important to anything is on screen for over a minute.
The show-runner helped make Batman vs Superman and I see LOTS of that awful movie in Foundation.
> The show feels like the creators read the back of the book and nothing else.
To me it looks like the creators have a pretty deep understanding of the book. I have a good memory of the book and there are a lot of subtle references. What is frustrating is the choices and twist they make. Like presenting everything as pseudo magical and religious. My hope is that they are bold in the narration and mixing elements from much later in the books, setting things up for big reveals in future seasons (e.g hard to tell without spoiling but like Gaal setting things up for things that only are revealed in the third book that could explain the pseudo magic).
> Like presenting everything as pseudo magical and religious
I'm not sure they're so wrong with that. In the books, Hari Seldon understands his math and so does Gaal, but nobody else can. Same in the show.
His line in the colony ship in the show, something about "following me on what's little more than a prayer", is spot on. I think the show has done a fairly good job of playing with the discomfort I felt reading Foundation: that so much has to be taken on faith by so many people. It doesn't really matter whether your prophet got his revelation through a dream, pulling some rocks from a bag, or a few nights of multidimensional calculus; it's all opaque to the followers who just have to believe.
The rest of the additions and changes seem to make sense given the medium. Clone emperors: super great, and helped by the best acting in the show. I'd bet Asimov had something similar in mind (he named them "Cleon" in the books too, surely a clue in that anagram.) Even the time-jump with the cryo pod helps to ameliorate one of the issues I had with the books, which was the brief time we got to hang out with some interesting characters before a few centuries passed. The plot with Dornick's boyfriend on the colony ship was a good addition too, albeit quite well telegraphed. Space 9/11 was totally necessary for a TV adaptation, you can't show a couple of potholes in the highway roads and expect anyone to get "society collapses" from it.
I'm with the consensus on Hardin though. Space marine chosen one was not where I thought that character would end up. The actor playing her mom would've been better as Salvor, with her daughter being a destabilizing influence for her to try and keep leashed up (and maybe ultimately use, reluctantly, as her "last resort.")
> Like presenting everything as pseudo magical and religious.
That doesn't seem all that inconsistent with the source material; Seldon _is_ effectively treated as a religious figure almost from the start (and of course the psychohistory _is_ on the face of it more magic than science).
Yes, but why? I'm familiar with the concept and it can work well (see Robert Altman films), but why was it necessary for this show? I think the straightforward single story single episode would allow for continuity, narrative depth and emphasize the theme that these books span centuries and multiple lifetimes. One of the better aspects of the book is seeing Salvor Hardin go from young upstart to elder statesman to mythic legend.
They can serve as a sort of self-narrating story, where a past arc provides context for the present or future.
Rotating arcs also add complexity that excuses weakness in character or plot writing- the viewer's effort to keep arcs organized makes it easier to overlook those faults.
Man, reading through this thread, I feel like such an odd man out. I'm enjoying Foundation. Sure, it's not amazingly intellectually stimulating, and it's not really based on the books, but I find it fun to watch. As it's own thing, it's entertaining to me.
I also really enjoyed The Flash (up until season 6 or so when it just got too repetitive). It seems like there's a lot of people that can't seem to enjoy things "just for the fun" that I don't get.
I’m enjoying it like I enjoyed Black Mirror. Science fiction is very hard to worldbuild right, so often the science minded audience has to turn a blind eye to a few things and think in terms of metaphors.
Humanity traveling faster than light? Check. Woman using stupid bras? Check. Radar that maps entire cave? Check. It doesn’t flag a creature 5m ahead? Check.
For many, these details are unbearable plot holes. Watching science fiction require you to be able to skip these and focus on the story (girl in love, sucking at survival sim).
>As it's own thing, it's entertaining to me...It seems like there's a lot of people that can't seem to enjoy things "just for the fun" that I don't get.
That is the main issue for most people. If they wanted to do their own thing for a new show, it would have been fine. Maybe you check it out, maybe you don’t. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. But they didn’t do their own thing. They made an adaptation of an iconic sci-fi series by one of the most famous classic sci-fi writers. They sold a bag of goods that had “Asimov’s Foundation” printed on the bag. So it can’t be too surprising when people open the bag, find it is a sprinkle of “Foundation” and mostly “generic sci-fi” sawdust filler, that they feel tricked. Bait and switch comes to mind.
I agree. I haven't read the original so I can't speak to the accuracy but it's a pretty good bit of sci-fi that I look forward to every week. I get the feeling that a lot of people have a lot of emotional attachment to the original and it's upsetting that it doesn't live up to their expectations. However, that doesn't mean that it isn't good.
If the show was called "Empire" and hadn't been hyped as an adaptation, but as inspired by SciFi classics, I would have no trouble with it, even if it wasn't as compelling. I'd even be happy to find references here and there.
Naming and marketing as Foundation is like pretending the I Robot movie was an honest adaptation of Asimov's I Robot. Foundation started well, but it's becoming a standard space opera template with Asimovian names.
Asimov wasn't the greatest writer, but he had innovative ideas and central themes that should be the core of any adaptation.
I've been rather impressed with Villeneuve's Dune. It's not perfect, I feel that there's not enough backstory and context for those not familiar with the novel (not explaining CHOAM and the landsraad makes the emperor's actions confusing), Jessica is a bit too wimpy for a Bene Geserit who is supposed to be in control and I reserve judgement about the changes with Lyet Kynes. That said as someone who loved the books, it feels mostly faithful and was very enjoyable.
Not so for Foundation, there are some interesting ideas, I actually like the idea of the Cleon's genetic dynasty but overall it feels like a second rate star trek show where regularly I have to suspense my disbelief at how unbelievably stupid some of the plot points or character decisions are. It's nice eye candy and not awful. I'll watch it while doing something else and try to ignore the fact that it carries and betray the name of novels I revered in my childhood. But it's not a great show and it doesn't even compare to The Expanse, For all mankind and any number of nice Sci Fi shows.
I love science fiction and I’m usually fairly forgiving of it’s worst tropes. However, while I mostly liked the first couple of seasons of Discovery (if you don’t consider them as proper Star Trek) but hard bailed with S3. Picard immediately pissed me off as tone deaf.
There were just too many moments with these shows where I rolled my eyes. Their inability to understand the legacy they inherit, the stereotypes, the lazy magical technology. The endless out of focus wailing of characters emoting doesn’t help either. I get they want to show grief and emotion but this is feels like filler.
I was excited for Foundation and it’s mostly fine but it’s not something I’m looking forward to new episodes of. It also suffers from the out of focus crying stuff but the new stuff they’ve added such as the clone emperor is interesting. The switch to some special chosen one is frustrating however.
All of these aforementioned shows suffer from a complete lack of scale, or an appreciation for it. An empire in the scale of the galaxy shouldn’t feel so empty. The day to day activities of the clones shouldn’t feel so bland and parochial. The Foundation shouldn’t even register as anything other than a minor whisper. Yet it seems all that matters to them along with some political squabbles. It all makes the world feel tiny.
With Dune on the other hand I never once rolled my eyes. It’s not perfect, it skips too quickly over characters and subplots, but it does an astounding job of building a believable and cohesive world.
I felt that Dune didn't leave enough time to actually think about what was going on. Concepts from the book like the Missionaria Protectiva and Butlerian Jihad were given minimal lip service or not mentioned at all. But these are the best bits of Dune for me. These are what make it science-fiction rather than space opera. As a space opera Dune is good. As science-fiction it's great.
I haven't seen Foundation (and won't), but it sounds like a similar story.
Dune in its full glory is simply unfilmable. Between the exposition that can be naturally woven into a novel that simply can not be naturally woven into a movie and the amount of the book that takes place as character's thoughts, to even the little things like the chapter headings being used for flavor text from a future encyclopedia, there's just no way to capture the whole thing on film.
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I liked the sci-fi miniseries well enough. (As I've said before on HN, watch it as a very well-produced theater production and not a somewhat poorly-funded movie and it's really quite good.) So I'm not saying it's impossible to film something Dune and for it to at least be good. But it'll never be able to stand in for the novels.
I would be amused to see some series get far enough to try to film Chapterhouse Dune, though, which in my opinion is even more complicated than the original Dune in the ways that would matter for a film. Books 2 and 3 would be generally simpler, you can tell they didn't get as much love. God Emperor of Dune I believe holds up better than 2 & 3, but it is still narratively simpler than the original Dune. The final truncated trilogy is quite complex, though.
I would say that Dune would be better as a limited serie vs being a movie. It would give more time to expand on the background information and yes I agree as it is, I feel that it's a movie that just works better for people who have read the book but at least it's accurate. I can feel watching it that the director actually cares for the books.
Foundation is more like David Lynch's Dune. It calls itself Foundation but it doesn't even give lip service to the material, it actively betrays a lot of the story. While overall TNG was good, there were a few terrible and mediocre episodes. I feel that the Foundation TV show is more akin to those mediocre episodes but with very good production value and a passing resemblance only in name to the book. It doesn't feel like the writers actually cared for the books at all.
The biggest problem with the 1984 Dune is that the film becomes overburdened with clunky exposition. I think there was a deliberate decision to avoid that mistake with this adaptation.
While, as a fan of the novel, I'd have liked to see these elements given more explanation, I think on reflection that they did a commendable job deciding which elements needed exposition for audiences to follow the plot and which ones could be left as background details and texture for the world to avoid overwhelming the viewer and letting the film breathe more as a film.
I mostly agree with that, but I don't recall seeing any explanation for the necessity of Mentats and the lack of robots/AIs/computer screens 10,000+ years into the future, or that the date wasn't actually our calendar date, but from the start of the current empire. And it would have still been interesting to show a Guild Navigator plotting a path. The Guild are barely mentioned. It's easy to overlook exactly why the spice is so important. It seems like they could have taken 5 minutes to fit those two in there.
And also the dinner scene with the Emperor and his daughter, since they are important to the story. I saw one YT reviewer confuse the Baron for the Emperor, because they never show him.
Is the fact that the story is set 20,000 years into the future instead of 10,000 really "necessary"? After discussing the film with friends who have no exposure to the books, I think the constrained scope helped make the film easier to digest. We still have a ~3 hour Part Two to introduce the Emperor and The Guild.
"Asimov's Vision". The guy himself has said in interviews that it was entirely inspired by gas/fluid dynamics theory, where you could predict the motion of the whole but individual molecules would be random, and then "what if that could be applied to people". Everything else is just exploring and extrapolating.
It's far from perfect but I feel that if it was a new IP work the reaction to it would be very different.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, both Foundation and Dune are almost impossible to translate to screen faithfully and still appeal to enough people to have a decent budget. Why should we judge the show by the book at all, if that's going to be the case?
Alternatively, if "Foundation and Dune are almost impossible to translate to screen faithfully," why are we translating them to screen, instead of writing a new work for which screen is the natural medium? With these adaptations, the two options are "That sucks!" and "That's not Foundation!"
I would reject faithfulness as a measure of success. I'd much rather have "That's not Foundation!"
I already have Foundation. I can read it whenever I make the time. It's kind of cool to see a book translated to the screen... but if it doesn't really survive the translation? That's ok too! It can just be a movie with a ton of similarities to an existing story.
Blade Runner, The Shining, Starship Troopers, or hell, Adaptation. They all have varying relationships to the source material. None are especially faithful, but they're all still good movies.
Starship troopers in particular has a very curious relationship between movie and book. Where the book manages to glorify the military the movie deliberately chooses an ironic treatment of the characters and plot elements to form the book’s antithesis. The movie is best enjoyed by not trying to fit it into the mold of the book, and vice versa.
I agree. The majority of the reactions here to Foundation seem exactly the way I felt so many years ago to the Starship Troopers movie. I hated seeing it in the theater with a passion and it was because I was one of the people that read and enjoyed the book. Even today when the ST movie is talked about as a cult classic I bristle a little bit - but I can see now it is good as a movie unrelated to the book and a disappointment to a fan.
Some adaptation is appropriate, as a lot of the pulp fiction scifi from that area has characters doing ridiculous things like using tape drives. On the other hand, setting up a scene and doing a shoot are not the same skills used for telling a story. Many directors have absolutely terrible taste when it comes to story telling, as we can see from Game of Thrones and the other Dune adaptation.
Annihilation did that rather well, I think—the source material is about imperfect clones, that had the same structure as the original but weren't the same inside. And then they released a movie that had the structure of the book, but wasn't the same inside. I thought that was quite clever.
The three books of the southern reach trilogy were the most creepy read I’ve ever had. Because of the dense and meandering writing style I felt like I was slowly losing my sanity together with the main characters of the books, trying to hold onto details and losing the fight.
The movie was ok to watch if taken by itself, but indeed not the same thing.
The IP... I really don't understand why having some relatively well known name is so important when it ends up being something entirely different. I think culturally that really shouldn't fly. Why not at that point just come up with new IP? If you want take the elements needed from existing work as influences...
Instead, they hand picked 'oh, neat!' things they were told about, then just filled in all the missing bits with weird, unrelated, drama.
EG, non-story related character confict.
That's not content, but filler, designed to extend screen time.
To actors, drama is the only important part of the role, and thus to many in hollywood.
(One can have plot twists, action, suspense, without teenage drama...)
So it isn't new IP, that would require original thought, and 99% of modern hollywood is rehash. All the marvel/dc stuff, remakes of older movies, series, cartoons, the best stuff is old, but new.
Modern Hollywood can't do new.
Modern Hollywood can't even do remakes without bombs!
So it'd be hard to get buy in for new, and as this series sold loads of books...
Well, pick the juice IP bits, lather teen style drama (eg, noise), and...
Think about Why do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, an amazing sci-fi novel, and Bladerunner, an amazing sci-fi movie loosely based on it. Now, granted, maybe the book title was rejected for the movie based on marketing concerns, but it also established distinct identities for the two.
They should be brave enough to do their own take on the concept without using the title and clout of the original author. It would allow them more freedom in rewriting the parts that they need to and would transform the whiplash felt by readers of the previous work into possible delight at seeing a new story with new characters riffing on the original concept.
I've not seen many front page discussions of modern movies or TV shows here, no. Sometimes a retrospective on older art, but I don't remember any of those either for the visual media.
Actually the sci-fi channel mini series of dune and children of dune is not bad considering the limitations of budget and 90s technology. Sticks pretty close to the books and gives more background for people to understand what is going on. Definitively worth a look.
Because a story can be re-imagined for a different medium and enjoyed by people? Who may in turn check out the original story and enjoy that, as well?
Others are just as entitled to enjoy an adaptation as you are to not enjoy it.
Some people enjoy seeing how a writer, director, cinematographer, cast, set and costume designers, etc present a written work.
Lots of people watch an adaptation and find bits they enjoy and bits they don't.
If you go through life only demanding or expecting experiences you will enjoy, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
I ended up reading The Expanse series because I loved the pilot TV episode so much. I've never read Foundation and I think I likely will in the near future.
> With these adaptations, the two options are "That sucks!" and "That's not Foundation!"
Others are entitled to opinions other than your own...
Having read both, I don’t think Dune is impossible to bring to the screen. I think it needs to be a TV show because as a film it will need to be super long (and will be exposition heavy and/or kinda boring.)
But Foundation is like the Silmarillion. It’s supposed to be detailed over centuries/millennia and definitely is hard or impossible to get right on the screen.
> like the Silmarillion. It’s supposed to be detailed over centuries/millennia
Well, the last books of the original series of Dune take place over thousands of years when Leto II becomes the worm via symbiosis with the sandtrout. There is so much that happens in these millenia, sometimes told in flashback through the everlasting Duncan Idaho, or through the narrative of the religious texts.
The wars and the scheming and the plans and the plots... I mean just the sisterhood's rise and attempts to undermine leto could be its own series. Heck there are more subplots in Dune than fables in the Silmarillion. In fact, I think that the flaw with the Silmarillion is that everything becomes so much of the same after a while that I stopped caring about all of the one-off stories: it got repetitive and, frankly, boring.
Dune did suffer a Jon Galt moment with all of the exposition in God Emperor of Dune, but there was a lot of storytelling in those meetings between the Duncans and Leto.
Dune jumps in time basically once, between book 3 and 4, from Children to God Emperor. 1-3 is set in Paul's time, 4-6 is set 4000 years later, but within a few years. (We don't talk about 7-8.)
No, Dune is not like Silmarillion or Foundation, they both jump times more regularly, with things and episodes happening in those times.
Just my guess, the folks creating the show probably do not care too much. The vast majority of people are going to be happy with the production while the hardcore fans, or those with fond memories who've spent a lifetime waiting, are going to be disappointed a la Star Wars sequels.
If you had afsked me a year ago if “Good Omens” could be adapted to the screen I would have told you it was impossible. Heck if you asked me back in the day of A Song of Fire and Ice could, I would have told you it was impossible, but in reality it’s just the case that it’s only possible if you start from a place of respecting the source material and building everything around that. If you start by defining that it has to be a 8 season high budget series. It has to be a 2.5hour movie and try to shoehorn the material into that, then you get rubbish and it looks impossible.
The format of Foundation is rather terse and spare encyclopaedic entries alternating with stories of the characters meeting each other, conversing and so on.
One of the reason it fires the imagination I think is that the encyclopaedia portions leave plenty of gaps for one's imagination to fill. Paradoxically this makes it seem all the more real.
The characters (with one exception) are of course ephemeral, changing from one story to the next.
Today, you could train such a "Physics Model" simply by having it crunch on FB or Google Data annonymized User Data. One could even apply social engineering models to that simulation and watch the outcome ahead of time.
Sell it to politicians and 3 letter agencies and get yourselves a catchy name - like palantir and you are the future.
The TV show is actually better than I expected, although after watching the trailers I had low expectations. I was totally prepared for the major surgery required to adapt a work like Foundation to the screen. However, I think my biggest problem with the show is a complete lack of subtlety that was present in the books.
In the books, the significance of the Vault is purely about ideas -- what its revelations mean for civilization. Whereas the showrunners needed to exaggerate its spectacle -- "You dumb TV watchers aren't going to get how important this is, so we have to shove it in your face. See? Giant floaty alien-looking thing? Must be important, right?"
Another example is how the decline of civilization isn't supposed to be obvious to the people living through it. At the time of the events of the first episode, the decline is supposed to be manifesting itself in extremely minor ways -- an extremely subtle "atmosphere of decay". Expressways aren't being maintained as well as they once were, and deployment of new elevator technology is held back by pessimism. People wouldn't have noticed these things any more than a Roman in 200 AD would have seen a crumbling road and caught a glimpse of the fall of Rome. But instead of showing the elevator industry resting on their laurels, the showrunners have to show a spectacular terrorist attack on a space elevator that kills 100 million people. "See! The empire is falling apart. Get it?"
The showrunners are trying to paint a picture with a paint sprayer instead of using fine brush strokes.
This sums up my feelings about the show pretty well. Loved the books, hated the show. It gets rid of everything that was interesting about the books - the high level narrative about civilization and power projection mechanisms and replaces it with generic Hollywood sci-fi tropes, with cringy romance subplots thrown in. The second episode was so bad I stopped watching.
The only books he wrote in the 80s i did not like are "prelude to Foundation" and "Forward the Foundation", and "Foundation and Earth" was pretty disappointing too.
And having re-read the originals (and not the translation) recently, with my new outlook and all the books i've read since, i'd say that even those are written better than the two first Foundation books (that i love). I'd say the "Cave of steel" was the best written of his books from the 50s, a bit better than "Naked Sun" and "Second Foundation", or at least better paced. But his best books are either "Foundation's edge" or "Robots and Empire", at least to me.
But I completely understand why went with the current direction. I believe they are not replacing the high level narrative, but they are slowing down for making something that resonates emotionally. When producing television, you work with actors, screenplay, and a story. I believe you cannot make good TV with replacing actors at the speed of Asimov. I also believe that Asimov books allow for romance subplots, but they were 'skipped'.
A slowed down narrative to fit into the greater Foundation narrative is exactly how Foundation should be adapted.
Unfortunately the show's narrative is completely ridiculous. Nothing makes rationale sense. It seems that no character can even walk down a hallway without something going awfully wrong and things get resolved by never-before-mentioned magical plot elements falling in place.
Did you consider that with such a complex story and large cast the show might take more than one and a half episodes to show you everything?
The show has indeed been about power projection mechanisms, once it set up the universe and cast enough.
It's one thing to watch an episode and a half and say "eh, not for me." It's another entirely to declare you know "the show" and speak authoritatively about it as a whole when you haven't seen four fifths of the material.
Those two (not sure where you're getting 1.5 from) episodes have been completely incompatible with the source material already. There's no reason to go any further, in the same way you don't need to see the derailed train come to a complete stop to know it's not gonna make it to the station.
You said you didn't even finish the second episode. If that's not what you meant, chose your words more carefully.
Tortured analogies ignored: you declared the series to be absent something that has been present in spades in the latter episodes and you still don't realize how that makes you look.
OP deserves credit. They accurately classified this show after less than 2 episodes. I'm resigned to watching all of season 1, despite how awful it is. The worst thing is that they already renewed this crap, so we'll have to wait even longer for a potentially good Foundation.
Your comment reminds me of a friends recommendation to watch The Arrow. “The first two seasons are really bad, but if you stick through it they become ok”
It’s ok to not want to watch a show that sucks originally. We don’t need to watch it to completion in order to pass judgement on something that just didn’t hit the mark.
I love this guide to the key Buffy episodes. There's no way I could re-watch the whole show, but this looks achievable. I wish there were more guides like this.
I watched the first season of Arrow but it was a bit of a slog towards the end, and never got anywhere with season 2. It showed a lot of promise it almost delivered on. Maybe I should give it another go, but a guide like this would be invaluable.
Unpopular opinion: Foundation, as written, would probably be very niche TV. A straightforward adaptation would be terrible, albeit interesting if seasons were launched in the order of the books the way Asimov fused his Robots, Empire, and Foundation series. Even then, you can get away with a lot less detail in a book than you can with a TV series - you need to flesh out cultures and characters that, in a book, you can leave shallow.
I’d say this is Foundation, but for TV. It’s a different beast and I’m curious how much it will deviate from the books big picture (which, in total, span a couple dozen millennia.
I think this is a very outdated view of the way series and streaming platform have evolved. There’s no “slot” to fill. There’s no need for universal appeal.
“The Crown” is a good example. This would never have been made into a show before streaming.
The Foundation could have been a intellectually stimulating sci-fi show that appealed a lot to a smaller audience and it still would have been successful.
As opposed to the traditional networks the time you have to build that "large" audience is insanely higher. Who knows how long streaming services will be around for.
I think Prelude to Foundation would work on TV, and I'm slightly surprised they didn't attempt that first, cos presumably you either do it now or never. But that probably would have been a weird thing for fans of the original book.
You're right though, Foundation has an odd structure that doesn't at all match modern prestige TV templates, you'd do better with a sort of anthology series of some sort.
I completely agree. The robot novels would be much easier stories to adapt with little deviation from the novels. It's been decades since I've read the whole canon of Asimov robot and Foundation novels, but I recall the Foundation novels being very dry and academic - I loved them, but they're just not high adventure action stories that translate well to the screen.
You can start with the robots, and then move to the Foundation story with the robots from the beginning, because that's how Asimov revised his own Foundation story.
I think the show does plenty of focusing on “power and precarity.” It obvious to me that it works with a very different definition of psychohistory, one which is more accessible to viewers but is, in my opinion, much less neat.
Beyond that, though, the differences between the books and the show seem to be done with the intention of coming up with a new and interesting narrative. I don’t have a problem with that.
Also, I think it’s important to note that the show is produced by his daughter and that she wanted to take things in a different direction. Most of these changes were made with deep knowledge of the books and the authors vision.
> Also, I think it’s important to note that the show is produced by his daughter and that she wanted to take things in a different direction. Most of these changes were made with deep knowledge of the books and the authors vision.
Just look at Dune. Brian Herbert's books are an abomination. They completely butcher the story and betray its core themes. Just like with this show.
Someone's child being involved doesn't mean anything.
If they wanted to take the show in a different direction, they shouldn't have called it the Foundation series. This show has nothing to do with the books at all, aside from stealing a few ides about the basic setting and some character names.
On the other hand, A Scanner Darkly was a remarkably faithful adaptation of the book, and because of PKD's daughters involvement (they recognized the book's importance to him and it weighed heavily in the creation of the movie).
He was, until he passed away. I don't know if he had any say-so in the Hobbit trilogy, though. I suspect not. He was in his 90s at the time and might not have been actively working. Now that he's gone, all bets appear to be off.
They lost me in the trailer. Foundation is a story across centuries about elderly and ossified leadership structures, not attractive young people in spandex. It is about one faction rebelling against another, not kids trying to get out from under their parents. And I really don't mind changing the genders of characters but please don't do so just to create eye candy.
Dune did this too. I think making Kynes female was interesting, although it certainly changes the male/female dynamics that are the core of the story. But making the character young and attractive is just pandering to male gaze.
Yeah. Dune can be (but I don’t think has been) done right as it’s still the story of one character and his ascension to the throne. Foundation can’t be done as a typical show due to the time span in which it takes place.
I'm not so sure about Dune. I think it calls for (at least) a limited series, rather than a film. However, it's about far more than Paul. There are lots of complex themes and the most important setting in the story isn't on Arrakis; it's in peoples' heads. I think you can make a good show. I'm not sure it'll be Dune.
I'd say that Dune, as a single book, is a metaphor for a local Arab community rising up to overthrow a pair of colonial powers (Brits/Harkonnen and American/Atreidis) to take control of their own oil reserves (spice). It is a story about Jihad, a word that is used many times in the books but is notably absent in the latest film. Start changing too many characters and the metaphors to our real world fall apart.
It's about a marginalised community's manipulation by a cynical religious cult, which indoctrinates them to await a messiah, then provides them with that messiah in order to usurp power over their entire society for the cult's own nefarious ends.
That and breeding a super being into existence, which makes the Golden Path necessary. Although, the Bene Gesserit may have thought they were doing all this for the good of human kind. Considering the kind of ossified, medieval structure in place for thousands of years they had to work with.
The army combat sequences are inconceivably stupid. Dozens of soldiers firing sci-fi machine guns at unprotected opponents at close range and everyone magically avoids injury. It makes one wonder if Apple applied some sort of violence limiting clause to the production with absurd results.
It’s strange, like everything on Terminus was from a different show. Feels like 90’s sci-fi, the Anacreons are about as believable as a random Star Trek species. And the combat is truly awful.
I don't think that's the way art I value would ever work. It sounds more like algorithmic factory production with no intention. "The algorithm thinks this will be like that other thing people like" is not a way to make novel and valuable new things, to me.
I don't think that's what 01100011 is saying though.. he's saying he'd love to see a movie that didn't adapt the material in any way, it just completely faithfully translated every line of dialogue and action to the screen.
Presumably that would lead to a 42 hour Lord of the Rings movie with horrendous pacing issues etc. Which would make it a terrible business proposition for the movie industry now (literally: why?) but if an AI could spit it out cheaply a whole lot of LoTR fans would watch it avidly.
I think you're 100% correct that it would not be work of value. On the other hand, "The algorithm thinks this will be like that other thing people like" sounds like the exact model used for the majority of film and television today. Not least, this terrible rendition of Foundation.
The most valuable thing would be the hilarious errors. When Gandalf shows up in Star Wars or darth vader is replaced with a ring wraith kind of thing. I’m sure this fanfiction exists somewhere already though.
The Hobbit films on the other hand fell rather flat.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy seems like quite an achievement these days; I don't recall seeing the same amount of passion and dedication in any of the more recent film adaptations. But I think I might also be biased due to my age when it came out. I'm in my forties now, and I rarely bother with film and television now, preferring books instead.
Those movies are outstanding on multiple axes, but in terms of story I hate what they did to the source. Yes you need to mess with it to make a movie that works as a movie, no that doesn't mean your Aragorn can murder an emissary on a parley. These changes aren't just unfaithful, they're standard modern Hollywood tropes, subtracting rather than adding interest.
I’m not sure Jordan’s books can be ruined, if anything I’d hope a TV series can correct a lot of his fatal flaws like truly awful writing of female characters. Sanderson tried to fix some of that after Jordan’s death, but when did he come in, book 12 or so?
Honestly, the only books that can be ruined from the Wheel of Time are Sanderson's. I've started with the translations, which are the worst, and told myself that it can't be worst than Shanarra, so i ordered the english books (it was roughly ten years ago), and discovered that yes, it was indeed worst than Shanarra. I'd say even those 80's fantasy books that are obviously loosely based on a dnd campaign are better.
> It makes one wonder if Apple applied some sort of violence limiting clause to the production with absurd results.
Sounds like The A-Team. My favorite sequence was when a helicopter flew into a rock cliff, exploding in flames. Cut away to the A-Team van. Cut back to the helicopter: the bad guys are emerging from the wreckage. Hear the standard A-Team dialog: "Are you okay?" "Yeah I'm okay." The most violent nonviolent scene I've ever seen.
I'm sticking with the show but as a huge Foundation fan, it's bitterly disappointing so far. For me the reason comes clear in the accompanying (official) podcasts. The writers are so enamored with their own smarts, that the story takes second place to literary navel gazing. Rock bottom for me was when Brother Day - a supposedly omnipotent figure - travels across the galaxy to quell a religious uprising but just stands silent as a new leader takes up the mantle with an overwrought speech, one of many in the show. The taking of terminus was another example of characters that speak with great intelligence and then act dumb. Ugh. I'm only hoping the writers take the feedback from Season 1 and change course.
This is also what happens when you re-write the core story to match a Political Correctness agenda. The producers should’ve taken a note from Denis Villeneuve’s treatment of Dune, the source book should be the Bible and you don’t mess with it.
Foundation, as written, does not lend itself to any medium other than text. Dune had already been adapted to films, TV shows, and games multiple times before Villeneuve's film. Yet, despite its popularity, Foundation had never been adapted into another medium before the current TV show. I agree that the Apple TV series does not capture the essence of the books, but no series or film possibly can. Best we can hope is a loose adaptation, which is what we have gotten now.
I don't know if it is documented or not but I would swear Asimov had aphantasia. When I was younger reading him was a revelation after getting bogged down in long winded books full of visual description which just felt like needless baggage to me.
There isn't a lot of imagery described in his books (not that I would see it anyway) but that doesn't mean it couldn't be presented visually while keeping to the spirit, just that Asimov probably couldn't have done it. Good writers and directors could.
If given the Villeneuve or Kubrick treatment it might be very different.
I still think "The Mule", AKA the second half of "Foundation and Empire", could make an excellent standalone - still one of the best sci-fi thrillers IMHO, and much more interesting characters than most of Asimov. But otherwise, there are so many better choices for translating to screen...
It doesn't matter that Dune was previously adapted and Foundation wasn't. Prior adaptations could have been terrible, and this iteration of Foundation will be seen in 2042 the way 70s Lord of the Rings animation, or 1984 Dune, is seen today. I reject the premise you put in another post that there is some "test of time", some arbitrary number of years, that a book passes that deems it unfit for adaptation.
It's one thing to acknowledge the flexibility required in converting a story from novel to film. It is another to change the entire message, character motives and morals while merely retaining the surface plotlines.
For what it's worth, having read ten chapters of Dune after watching the amazing 2021 film, I can say they did a fantastic job capturing the spirit and the core storyline of the book.
But Foundation is the one that had never been adapted. It had passed the test of time for being unfilmable, unlike Dune that has been adapted multiple times to multiple media.
I think it’s comical that a group of techies make broad assertions about what’s film able and not film-able. It’s like because we’re smart in one domain then we are smart in other domains and can just make baseless claims not grounded with experience.
If an experienced film creator made such claims then it’s worth listening. Otherwise these sorts of comments are just noise.
My point is that something is only unfilmable up until the point at which someone makes a good film about it.
There's lots of literary attributes which may make a series easier or harder to adapt, but, just like Dune used to be called unfilmable for the heavy monologue, length, and nonverbal components, a director with a vision can overcome them.
Dune wasn't exactly untouched by Hollywood politics. They completely eliminated the themes of European/Arabic cultural conflict (replacing everyone except the bad guys with a generic box-ticking multi-ethnic cast) and they completely nuked Kynes' character to replace him with a forgettable "generic strong woman" character.
While Dune (The Movie) is not exactly a treatise on colonialism with a specific focus on European/Arabic cultural conflict, it has several sections in which characters from both Fremen and Atreides camps describe and discuss colonialism directly and indirectly.
If the portrayal of Kynes was "a forgetabble "generic strong woman"", didn't that apply to (at the very least) both Gurney and Duncan also?
It seems that you wanted to see a different film than the one Villeneuve wanted to make.
> didn't that apply to (at the very least) both Gurney and Duncan also?
Yes, although to a lesser degree for Duncan.
> It seems that you wanted to see a different film than the one Villeneuve wanted to make.
I’m not talking about how the film did or didn’t match what I wanted, I’m simply refuting that “the source book should be the Bible and you don’t mess with it” applies to Villeneuve’s Dune.
> they completely nuked Kynes' character to replace him with a forgettable "generic strong woman" character
Kynes was perhaps a critical but yet very minor character in the novel and arguably was a forgettable character. The reason it may seem otherwise is that Kynes was first portrayed by that notorious show-stealer Max von Sydow.
Casting a Black female actor instead in the role of Kynes is merely license as opposed to and starkly contrasted with the sacrilege of Liv Tyler stealing all of Glorfindel's thunder.
I always envisioned each planet / great house / ethnic group to be ethnically homogeneous, although different from each other.
I don't think it's very likely there would be some black Fremen and some mediterranean looking ones in the same sietch. Even if the planet was colonized with a diverse population, it would have been blended out by the time the events Dune take place.
But also it's soft sci fi so tons of things already aren't realistic. Ethnicities are a weird one to get hung up on.
But they trace their line to the ancient greek Adreides which fought in the siege of Troy. So their origin would be Greek, whatever mixed in over the millenia.
Genetically it doesn't make sense to privilege one ancestor or ancestral line as 'their origin', over others that are merely 'mixed in'. They're all just ancestors. Take Paul for example, is his ancestry Atreides, or whatever Jessica's background is*? He's just as much her son as he is Leto's.
That is of course correct. Isn't it even so that every 4th man in Asia can name Genghis Khan as his ancestor?
I think in general, making large assumptions how humanity looks even very few generations in the future is pure speculation with the current speed of globalization and mobility.
Dune explicitly was adapted to satisfy PC morality. Villneuve said so (using other words of course).
They made Jessica into a physical fighter, converted Liet Kynes into a black lady, excised the distinctive word 'jihad' to refer to Paul's vision of war. They removed the Baron's homosexuality and sexual perversion and changed his servant boys into (bald) servant girls, etc.
The damage wasn't too bad all things considered, but in Dune 2021's case the source book was not the Bible and it was definitely messed with.
One can make the case you can get away with more deviancy in tv shows than in movies. The changes you listed to Dune did not felt to me like they fundamentaly altered the story.
I don't agree with this take that it was modified to satisfy PC morality. There were a lot of criticism that Dune is white mesiah for arabs in space. Imagine a change where black Paula together with her partner Chani and Fremen overthrow the male dominated Landsraad.
The movie is basically in line with the books in terms of story: it's not about a hero saving the world; Paul is not an-Aragorn like figure, he is manipulating and taking advantage of prophecies put in place in the collective mind by the Bene Gesserit, in order to further his own goals.
> They removed the Baron's homosexuality and sexual perversion
Probably because at the time Dune was written, people conflated those things in a way that caused a lot of harm to people not interested in harming children. Seems highly reasonable not to feed a trope like that.
He is saying that homosexuality and pedophilia are two different things. Homosexuality is specifically not being considered perversion anymore. And the adults abusing pre-pubescent boys are not necessary homosexuals.
I understood that distinction perfectly. And as OC wrote "at the time Dune was written", it is absolutely true the distinction was generaly not made.
However this movie has been made in 2021. People who fail to make the distinction today are few and far between, except maybe in the extreme Christian Right or Fundamentalist Islam. Somehow, I don't think those are the target groups for the movie or book.
IMHO the filmmakers wanted to "protect" (if you allow me such an expression) the "cause" of homosexuality by using preventative narrative censorship. However, a trope cannot be fed if next to nobody understands it in that way, under that specific context. Most of the audience would completely gloss over his homosexuality. Even homophobes are "used to it" now.
This is precisely why I think they did a disservice to the work to pander to modern virtues and little gain. The audience/readers are supposed to find the Baron to be the most execrable human-adjacent being they have ever heard about.
The author wanted to drive us to despise him. In only watching the show, you are robbed of the necessary substrate for that emotion to arise. His evil was abstracted.
The Liet Kynes gender swap was obviously for PC reasons but the other things you point out have plausible other justifications. For the lack of "jihad", consider that the connotations of the word are very different for 2021 audiences that lived through the War on Terror, as compared to 1965 readers who might only have been vaguely familiar with the word. Also, Jessica (and the other Bene Gesserit) are clearly strong physical fighters in the books.
Literally nowhere does the book say what Kynes' skin color is. You might have imagined the character as white, but that's on you. It's not a "change" made for "PC" reasons. And if it was, well, that would be awesome!
It is kind of hilarious to argue about the skin color of people millennia from now as if they would be static. Considering the amount of globalization, I would expect humanity to look quite different in a couple of hundred years already. If there are major visible differences between people 10k years in the future, they probably are along planet boundaries, and in which way they express is difficult to estimate. UV radiation might still play a huge role in skin coloring, but there could be many other differentiators being common.
One the one side yes, the current differences are getting mixed up, but with a multi planetary species, complete different traits could appear and show differentiation. May be larger differences in tallness, depending on gravity for example.
I can understand some of it. I read Dune earlier this year and some components notably stuck out of their time, like the book's reference to the Jihad. While I can understand it in the context of a book from 1965, a modern cinematic release doesn't get the same leeway from audiences I'd imagine.
> excised the distinctive word 'jihad' to refer to Paul's vision of war.
That's probably for the best, because that term would have quite different baggage for the average viewer in the 2020s than it would have for the average reader in the 1960s.
IIRC the foreword to Asimov’s unproduced “I, Robot” script (vastly different from the released movie) was a recollection of his grievances in getting the movie made. He made mention of “eye-fi”, where the science and the social effects of the theoretical science take a backseat to the effects. I left feeling that he wasn’t a fan of modern Hollywood.
That said, I’m guessing the estate knows that public interest in Asimov is dwindling by the year and that either something gets made now or nothing gets made ever. Recall that 2001 LOTR was originally supposed to be Foundation before things fell through - it’s that difficult to produce.
The writing and directing are at times very sloppy. To the point that you lose the illusion that you are in a movie and you can clearly see the actors acting. Cannot exactly pinpoint why though.
That's because there are so many examples it's hard to choose one. The population of planets shift by orders of magnitude between episodes; the spaceship apparently has a 'fifth quadrant [1]; the zephyr acts too melodramatically, even when she is supposed to be having an honest conversation in private, she sounds like she is speaking to the cameras at a political rally; etc. etc.
It feels like they spent their entire budget on special effects and had to hire interns and volunteers for story and directing.
[1] If it were fifth third, it could have been a nudge to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but fifth quadrant has to be an error.
I agree, especially the directing, and the over-reliance on end of episode cliffhangers, which are often not revisited until 2, 3 episodes later.
I do like how the story is developing though, and I know that often it takes a show one season, one and a half, to really get into its groove.
3 more episodes to go before I can have a more full opinion...
All in all so far though it really does seem like just one long drawn-out introduction, with the juicy stuff really starts in season 2 (as teased by Goyer in a reddit AMA - Hober Mallow, Church of the Galactic Spirit, a strong general and a weak emperor)
I've sat through some bad film translations of books before, but Foundation is worse than any Stephen King treadmill. I think maybe Lawnmower Man was probably a bigger delta between book and movie than Foundation (a short story about a satyr who eats grass naked vs. virtual reality!)
I actually enjoyed Battlefield Earth. I enjoyed the movie because I immensely enjoyed the book. I almost always like SF that in large part written from the point of view of aliens. And some scenes in the movie were quite additionally surprising in showing the character of alien protagonist.
I know native speakers can't not cringe on this movie. And there's an issue with who the author of the book was and what he did. And people can't get out of human perspective while watching this movie and can't believe how aliens can be this stupid to underestimate humans. In the book it's way better shown that aliens have as little respect for and interest in humans as workers do for the monkeys when the go out to clear the jungle with bulldozers and quibble between themselves over pay and job security.
Book have many detailes way more flashed out, so knowing stuff from the book, movie looked way less stupid to me than to average viewer.
Explanation that they are adapting it as a feature film instead of a limited series because they want to provide more breadth feels disingenuous. Limited series should provide more screentime than a movie.
Also I feel that a tv show would work better - with all the flashbacks you need to have.
I had high hopes for a limited series. A feature film sounds simply awful for the structured narrative style in Hyperion. Warner Bros will not make a Pasolini style Cantebury Tales. This movie will probably be lifeless.
If this feature film idea fails they can make a series.
If they’re adapting neofeudal space dark ages sci-fi now, it’s time for someone to dip into games inspired by these works. Fading Suns and Traveller, and once the studio suits get the gumption for it, Warhammer 40,000…
Foundation is the most confusing show for me. Somehow it's telling a story which is completely unrelated to the books, while also faithfully recreating certain key moments from the books pretty much exactly as I imagined them; it manages to completely ignore all of the themes and indeed the core thesis of the books, but somehow still feels respectful in how it presents the universe; I feel bad that some of my favorite parts of the original story are all but certainly written out, but I love that I have no idea where this is going.
It feels a lot like the 1997 Starship Troopers movie where it was initially supposed to be an original work, but the studio said "hmm that's kinda like this classic story, can you turn this into an adaptation?" and the writer said yes but their fingers were crossed.
It was a great disappointment for someone who spent hours during my teenage years reading and re-reading it.
Not to mention the terrible, terrible acting.
I've read the books and watched the show as far as it's aired. I agree, but I almost think it's good that Asimov's vision is getting smoothed out a bit. After "second foundation" in the book series, the books go in a very different, unscientific "woo" direction. The end of the entire series is bizarre and controversial. I'm not all that convinced I want the original ending to be preserved - it wasn't that good anyway.
The powerful bit about foundation was always the ability to predict larger events better than smaller ones, as well as criticism of empire and overdependence on interconnectedness. In that, the TV show preserves the themes very well.
> The powerful bit about foundation was always the ability to predict larger events better than smaller ones, as well as criticism of empire and overdependence on interconnectedness. In that, the TV show preserves the themes very well.
I can't see how you'd think this, with respect to the show. Seldon literally tells another character that that character's decision (on that day, apparently) will shape the fate of the galaxy. It loses the plot about psychohistory being about prediction of populations and turns it into predictions about individuals (and that's just the most overt example). Maybe they'll find a way to redeem it by the end of the first season, but so far several characters are presented as Chosen Ones, selected by Seldon to get through a specific crisis (or crises).
"presented as Chosen Ones" -- from the Goyer AMA, he said the show explores when believe think they are Chosen Ones, but that there are no Chosen Ones.
In fact, the whole thing about Salvor believing she's a Chosen One is falling apart, as every one of her schemes (involving violence as well) are falling apart.. and it seems like she's where Gaal was supposed to be, therefore she's being mistaken as the leader that Gaal was supposed to be, and things are going off the rails as a result...
What's sad is it took an AMA to fully understand this, rather than being understood via watching the show, at least in the first 7 episodes...
But the whole point of Psychohistory (as it’s presented in the books) is that there aren’t any “Chosen Ones” at all. Sure Salvor isn’t one, but Gaal isn’t either; no one is. That’s the entire point.
Under Psychohistory, it shouldn’t matter who the leader is; what matters is the forces on the population as a whole and that populations respond to those forces in predictable ways. Individual leaders come and go and really don’t matter very much on the big-scale stuff that Psycho-History is making predictions about.
It’s the whole basis of the first several books that this “large forces acting across whole populations” model is the ‘true’ way that civilisation-scale history works and why the future history is so predictable (before stuff starts going a bit off the rails later on in ways that I’m not going to spoil).
To me, if you’re not using that concept as the bedrock of the story you’re telling, then you’re not telling a Foundation story. (It might be a quite good science fiction story of course, just not Foundation)
Just like in the books, one person close to Hari went to the Foundation to nudge it in the right direction at the start, I'm assuming that this is the role Gaal was to play, but didn't get a chance to do..
Either way, in the absolute this is correct that this isn't following the book's model, but, they aren't completely invalidating it. I hope
I'll grant you, Salvor is definitely turning into a false Chosen One (also, this would be the first Seldon Crisis which they weren't even supposed to know of until after the first one, and she's already name dropped the term). She's got an idiot ball grafted onto her somewhere that she just can't shed.
However, Seldon, to Raych, tells him that his decision with respect to Gaal will determine the fate of the galaxy. That's way too much weight for Seldon to place on one person in the context of the series, especially at this point unless he already knows about people like The Mule (which would be unfortunate, that'd be something best explored as it throws a wrench in your plans, not from the beginning of the series).
I agree, it was a stark reversal from "The Plan does not account for the actions of any one individual" but was just revealed that it somehow hinged on the actions of...one individual. I think they fell into a trap with that and hope that they don't dig that hole any deeper. I'm a very casual viewer and even I picked up on that.
Disclaimer: though I think they _would_ be something I’d enjoy, I’ve for some reason never read the books.
I’m pretty sure Seldon being wrong about the smaller things is going to be a recurring thing in the series. People just _think_ he can predict them. He seems to too, despite knowing rationally that he cannot (he’s stated that numerous times).
The theme of the Seldon plot seems to be: is Seldon predicting things, or causing them? Are his actions choices that are driving events, is he being forced into his role by fate (or math), or is everything he does irrelevant? Is the very fact that he, and we, are confused about this proof that the questions don’t even make sense? Can some of all these contradicting things be true at the same time?
Might it be true that he is _both_ predicting events and driving them? Wouldn’t that mean that one of these ideas is false?
All of those themes are in the books, it's why he sets the Foundation up to make an encyclopedia. They aren't supposed to know, because (too much) knowledge of the future leads to potentially massive change (a variation on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). So they can't know their real purpose (or one of their purposes) without changing the results.
And the series subverts that from the start, why? What does it do to make it better?
That last question is the key for me. A show or movie is never the same as the book (or very rarely). There are a lot of things that can or should be changed for adaptation. But why would you subvert one of the key themes that defined the book series?
I only read "Foundation and Earth" before the show began (that's what was on hand where I was, I had little choice, as much as I hate starting in the middle of a series), and that book is VERY different from what I'm reading in the first book and what's in the TV series, and would indeed make for a pretty interesting show or at least a movie.
It's literally about three people's journey across the cosmos to discover the origin of humanity and really, very little of the original story re: Seldon comes into it. It makes me wonder what happens in between.
It's not just "starting in the middle of a series", it's starting almost at the end...after the best part of the story is well in the rear-view mirror.
IIRC, Foundation and Earth not only benefits from reading all of the Foundation books that came prior, but also all of Asimov's Robot books.
Fair point, I wasn't being precise in my language. I look forward to finishing the books before it at any rate. For what it's worth, I'm sure it does benefit from reading them first but you can definitely piece together the major plot points established in the preceding novels from the dialogue in the book, but they are certainly enhanced by knowing the full background.
Maybe relatively, but it was what was on-hand (in jail) and by itself it was more than interesting enough to get me to begin reading the series in order when I got the chance.
That was Clark, not Asimov. But on the topic of Rama, what a disappointing conclusion those sequels produced. I'm not sure which was worse, the Rama sequels or Crystal Skull. Either way, best to pretend they don't exist when recommending Rendezvous with Rama to people.
My #1 gripe with foundation has been the "lost" style of storytelling. A non coherent time line with multiple flashbacks and cutaway whenever anything interesting happens.
Most the darn episodes feel like the who is cartmans mom part 2 episode.
While the first episode had me hooked, I've found it very hard to sit through the subsequent episodes. I find them dragging, future-past bouncing isn't congruent, and I'm often distracted while the show is running, coming back to it 20 or so minutes later feeling like I haven't missed anything important.
I read the books when I was in my late teens and thought they were interesting, they kept my attention at the least. The show is, unfortunately, not something I'll clamor to watch, but rather something I'll likely keep on for background noise after the entire season airs.
I don't know why people keep saying that, since the books were narrated as a documentary, it's impossible to do a decent show about it. That's lack of imagination in my opinion. It would have been easily adapted with mini stories that develop based on previous stories. Yes, you won't have a main character for people to feel attached to, but you'll have the option to tell different stories by different directors like Dr. Who and create something more unique.
While lots of people are disappointed (to say the least) in the rendering of the books into a TV show, citing unfaithfulness to the source material and the spirit of the books, there are also a number of people who praise the representation of gender, approach to things like smoking, race relations, and other modern ideals.
I see it differently. The Fallout video games put an interesting spin on the "future" by showing that what was once considered fashionable can become distasteful due to catastrophic events. With Foundation, it would have been more interesting to show how different events lead to the current state of society. The Battlestar Galactica TV series made a point to showing how society turned decidedly against digital communications because of how vulnerable it was to AI.
Much like with A Handmaid's Tale, I wish they would have tried a little harder to bridge the gap between how we see things today, and how we could see them under different circumstances. 12,000+ years from now could be quite different from now in a lot of ways.
I’m a big fan of the books. Probably the most well written sci-fi I’ve encountered.
The TV series is, of course, quite different. It had to be really as viewers expect continuity of characters and an obligatory love-scene. It’s a reflection of our current TV viewing.
I’m hoping they’ll take it new directions where the book doesn’t go and, after the first season, it’ll pick up like many other series have done over the years.
> viewers expect continuity of characters and an obligatory love-scene
I mean, I am not in the target audience as I am committed to remain outside the Apple ecosystem but, if there was a Foundation series somewhere where I might consider watching it, pretty high on my list of things that would interest me in it as opposed to any random dime-a-dozen indistinguishable brain rot available in every streaming service is that it would not feature those things.
Having read foundation and seen the show so far they are two very different stories and the show is mostly just off hand references to the ideas of the books. That doesn't necessarily make it a bad show though, because there's a lot of potential of cool stories to be told in the foundation universe.
What does make it a bad show is that they writers fell into the Star Trek Discovery Trap of making it about not one but two diverse female space jesuses that save everyone. Arguably their depiction of woman in the show is just as superficial as asimovs depiction of them in the books, just the flipside of the coin.
However, they sometimes have hints of the really interesting parts of foundation, which, in my opinion, is the thinking and planning on large time scales. Only the Empire Storyline has that kind of thinking truly ingrained and subsequently is the only interesting part about the show. I can't even remember diverse female space jesus 1&2s names.
I like it, mostly, though it's probably because I didn't like the only one Foundation book I managed to finish some 30 years back. At that time I had already consumed a lot of SF books by well known authors and although I loved Asimov in his short novels, non sci fi novels and science books, found his longer works very hard to digest.
My approach to this series is therefore sort of clean, I didn't even remember what the main plot was about, so to me is just a new series, and producers doing the usual Hollywood treatment by rewriting characters with gender, sexual orientation and ethnic differences in mind looks pretty normal to me; I don't expect studios to produce in the future anything inspired by old novels without this treatment.
So why is that surprising? There are few or no quality scifi/fantasy movies if you actually read scifi/fantasy books.
Villeneuve did something competent-ish with Dune. Altered Carbon season one was decent. I couldn't watch the second season because they really went off the rails with it. That's about all lately.
Funny enough, I think the best sf movies are the one that ignore the source material and do ... something else. Blade Runner for example. Or Tarkovski's Stalker. Note that they aren't named as the books that inspired them.
As for Foundation, I haven't seen it and don't intend to. But judging by people's opinions it looks to me that not only it has no connection with the book. It's also a bad movie taken as a standalone movie?
That doesn't count because the books read like a film script (the authors are professional script writers). And yes, I've read them. Before they were made into a movie even.
> Blade Runner did not call itself Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Contrast that with the Will Smith movie I, Robot.
"Note that they aren't named as the books that inspired them." i said :)
I'm now glad Amazon decided not to do a show based on the Culture series by Iain Banks. I can only imagine how horrible that'd be, since they have even less taste than Apple or Netflix. Sci-fi is better for it, just read the books, they're excellent.
Iain Banks was famous for (tongue-in-cheek I think) saying he'd wouldn't mind changes Hollywood wanted in order to get a movie made.[1]
The machine-machine conversations, virtual hell, etc. parts of his books would probably not translate well no matter who was directing.
Otherwise, the material seems as well suited for adaptation as anything else. Consider Phlebas could be fantastic in a ~2hr movie with special effects worthy of the images he paints, a tone weighed towards realism, and an Aphex Twin / Caustic Window -like soundtrack.
"How would you like to see your science fiction books filmed, if at all?"
"With a very, very, very big budget indeed. The one I'd most like to see done is Consider Phlebas; if they kept in the sequence where the megaship hits the giant tabular icceberg, the fist-fight under the giant hovercraft, the bit where the Clear Air Turbulence escapes from the GSV, and the final train wreck, I wouldn't even mind if they changed it to a happy ending!"
I’d like to Consider Phlebas adapted as well but I think it’s be tricky. A lot of Culture fans don’t like it because the main character is scum and about 1/4 of the way through the book you start realizing that the antagonist machine empire he’s fighting (the culture) are actually the good guys. I think that makes it great, though.
If readers believe Bora Horza Gobuchul is "scum" they haven't read the book very well.
Next I'll be reading that Cheradenine Zakalwe in "Use of Weapons" is a good guy.
I don't want to go full Rick-and-Morty copypasta, but Banks' SF is a bit more mature and complex than most others. If you've only read US writers you might miss a lot.
The only director I'd let anywhere near the Culture series (or broader far-future sci-fi in general) is Neill Blomkamp. That dude just _knows_ how to do it, better than anyone else, aliens, robots, everything. And Sharlto Copley would be quite welcome as well in the main roles. His Agent Krueger in Elysium should demonstrate what I'm talking about.
Yeah but the fifth season wasn’t all that good (despite being based on one of the better books) and they aren’t adapting the last three books which are high fantasy. On a side note I felt the whole first 7 books were kind of just filler getting to Tiamats Wrath and Leviathan Falls (which comes out this month!)
Culture would actually be cool, though it’d either have to be an anthology or an original story taking place in that universe. I’d love to see Player of Games adapted as an 8 episode season.
It’s an approach that would have appealed to Asimov’s Lord Dorwin, a dilettantish dignitary obsessed with identifying humanity’s original solar system. Rather than search for it himself, though, Dorwin relies on the findings of long-dead archeologists. When Salvor suggests that he do his own field work, Dorwin is incredulous: Why blunder about in far-flung solar systems when the old masters have covered the ground so much better than we could ever hope to?
In this case, surely Asimov better fills the role of "old master" than the anonymous screenwriters of various lasers-and-robots movies? Thus this conclusion somewhat undercuts the ostensible thesis of TFA.
I dunno about anybody else but what really kills me is the combination of very poor scripting with very poor acting, and a total lack of perspective on the empire (1 trillion people, you basically never see anything about the empire).
Renewed my Apple TV+ subscription specifically for this show and waited for a whole year -- I'm in the camp that thinks no series or film is ever going to be better than the actual books, but in terms of what's playing and in production these days, I've been immersed in the series from the start as well as the Foundation podcast that dives deeper into every episode with some of the shows producers, it's similar to hearing the director's cut of a film.
If you're interested in the original works, IO9 did a deep dive into the Foundation series.
>The books that came to be called the original Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation) were not written as novels; they're the collected Foundation stories Asimov wrote between 1941 and 1950.
Asimov wrote the first Foundation story when he was 21.
There are many good sci-fi books that transfer into good TV-series. Only reason Foudation was used was because you can use famous name to trick people into watching it. It's a dark patter of entertainment industry.
Another problem is that the ideas in the book are completely opposite to what the mainstream viewers want to see and are used to consume. The writers killed those ideas and tell the more familiar story of a prophet and chosen ones, where individuals are making the difference.
They're scraping the barrel now for literature to adapt. The studios desperately want another Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. I feel like Foundation and even Dune are just not fit for being adapted. Foundation is so easy to read that people should really just read it.
It's such a shame that His Dark Materials failed as that would make an excellent adaptation and the source material is far superior to Harry Potter.
I love the show but apart from the premise of long term mathematical predictions of civilization it has no relation to the book. Shouldn’t be called Foundation.
I don't think Apple would have gotten as much traction if they just dubbed it "Set in the Foundation universe", or "Fanfic with modern FX" but that's kind of how I view it. I agree it's (so far) decent, though.
Anyone else struggle to read Foundation? I'm a massive scifi reader, but have never made it through 50% of Foundation (1st book). I don't know if it's the style of the writing, or the lack of action, but it sends me to sleep.
I had very low expectations for this TV show, so when I saw the first episode I felt it was better than what I had expected. But when I tried to watch the second episode, it was so bad that I couldn't even bring myself to finish it (I saw less than half of the episode).
I just don't understand why the screenwriters thought they could create a better story than Asimov. And why is it so important to have a side story about some people's boring feeling towards each other?
What's wrong with simply telling the story as told by Asimov?
There's a fundamental problem with the Foundation series - it's based on obsolete scientific thinking about predictability. The concept of 'engineers of history' that the Foundation series is based on - i.e. that these white-robed geniuses could steer the course of future events, hundreds or thousands of years later, by making small key changes to the present - relies on a lack of knowledge of chaos and sensitive dependence on initial conditions (which to be fair only really came with the widespread use of computers, i.e. Lorenz 1963):
> Poincaré, 1903:
“A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance. If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of that same universe at a succeeding moment. But even if it were the case that the natural laws had no longer any secret for us, we could still only know the initial situation approximately. If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon.”
Thus 'Seldon's equations of psychohistory' would almost certainly be subject to sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and would be no more useful than algorithms claiming to predict future financial market behavior, or the specific weather at a certain location on a year from now.
It's not really Asimov's fault - this was also an era when people believed they could learn how to steer hurricanes with minor energy inputs, another topic where chaos demonstrated why that would be impossible to do with any confidence.
However, it's also kind of hilarious that Seldon failed to predict fundamental changes in society (like women in leading academic or political positions), Asimov's vision is basically 1950s society projected into the future. I suppose some people have wistful longings for that era, but not me.
At least he got some of the reflexivity stuff right, but chaos theory was not very well developed at the time. If it was written in the '90s he could have put in some handwaving about strange attractors, but it's still not fluid dynamics...
I'm all for changing the "Vision", for the book is not easily amenable to a show adaptation. But this new version is just turning out to be trite lately.
The show is just plain bad. It looks like a collection of tropes with thick layers of social justice agenda between.
I am unpleasantly surprised that the idea of STEM = good can be discredited. I always assumed that in any movie / book I will sympathize with pro-science guys but Jesus this tv series demonstrated you can ruin anything if you lean onto it enough
I read the first Foundation book years ago. Some good ideas but meh on it overall.
I haven't seen the latest episode of the tv show but the best parts of the show by far as the parts about the empire and the most boring are the parts about the foundation.
I would say the biggest problem is the marketing that implies they faithfully are telling the books, when they’re not. The TV show is not faithful to the books.
That said: the books are fascinating, but they are almost more like historical documentaries then narrative fiction. It works well because they are _short_ stories, and following the span of history, frequently jumping ahead a generation, is cool. But it would’ve been very difficult to render that as-is for television and have much of an audience. Also, the original stories were written in the 1940s and some parts feel quite dated (everyone is smoking all the time, the hyper focus on nuclear power, the relative role of women). So whoever picked the stories up, they were going to make a lot of changes.
If you think of the series merely as “inspired by” them not “based on them,” then the show isn’t bad. It has some corny flaws like most TV (the combat, just terrible), but they’ve developed a few good characters, added some new mysteries, and the order in which they’re unfolding events over time is interesting.
So, is it a classic? No. Is it faithful to the books? Not at all. But IMO it’s decent sci-fi, and interesting enough to watch if you’re bored :)