Foundation (Apple TV+ series)

First trailer for the adaption of Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

It will be released in 2021.

Think they can actually adapt it and not look really bad?

It looks...interesting. I'm not sure, but it honestly looks like the focus is on the tiny portion of the first book about Seldon himself. It might be because production was halted extremely early on, but a show where at least the first season is effectively about the tiny chunk the books basically gloss over right at the start is an interesting approach.

It also looks extremely Denis Villeneuve.

One of my first science fiction loves! It does look interesting. I'm not convinced of it's veracity to the books by this, but I'm willing to give it a chance to show it has the spirit of the thing.

True this seems to focus on Seldon. It could be original story, but there are also later-written prequel books (Forward the Foundation is the relevant one that discusses the time period shown here, I think).

I could imagine a season where they focus on Seldon, Psychohistory, and the founding of the Foundation, and then after a season move on to the meat of the original Foundation trilogy.

Well, it is true that the books barely touch on how Hari Seldon got permission to set up the Foundation and how they got possession of Terminus. I guess it's one of the few gaps in the setup of the premise.

Getting a grant to set up an academic research foundation: what all thrilling stories are built around!

It's been a while since I read them, but that's exactly the sort of stuff I meant when I mentioned the Forward the Foundation prequel.

What, that's not your dream?

Well the books do have the whole "Galactic empire falls" as basically the starting premise. We never get much of an insight into why, exactly, the galactic empire is worth saving.

So a TV series could focus much more on that

The drive to save it seems to be straightforward: in the absence of the Empire, the galaxy will split apart into a bunch of small kingdoms, who'll spend the next 30,000 years fighting wars with each other. Under a single Galactic Empire, no war.

There's also a massive loss of knowledge in the process. It sounds like a lot of planets barely manage to maintain space travel and some even lose that completely. The Empire facilitates trade and travel and without the empire, a lot of worlds just collapse in on themselves.

Yeah, I don't think it's so much saving the Empire itself (IIRC, even with psychohistory they don't see a way to do that with the time/resources they have), but saving the knowledge of the empire so a new civilization can take up where they left off much faster.

Of course, the Encyclopedia Galactica was make-work in a way, but in a sense I don't personally think it was entirely make-work.

Edited by PointMaid on Jun 23rd 2020 at 4:03:47 AM

Anyone else think there hasn't been a very good record when it comes to adapting the big 3 20th century sci-fi writers? There's been 2010(2001: A Space Odyssey was very loosely based on an Arthur C. Clarke short story) and Starship Troopers, which was the Spiritual Antithesis of the book, but not much else.

Most of Heinlein's work has aged pretty badly. Stranger in a Strange Land would be an absolutely atrocious choice for an adaptation considering what the last third of the novel is like.

The problem is that most of the really big sci-fi authors tended to write in a kind of dry, detached way, or they'd put basically impossible to adapt stuff in. And 2001 one is a strange case, because the book wasn't really an adaptation of the movie or vice versa, Clarke was kind of writing it parallel to the film's development.

A lot of the authors also mostly worked in short stories. A majority of Clarke's output was short stories, and a lot of the stuff that wasn't...no one's gonna adapt a novel about a guy who figures out Fermat's Last Theorem. A Rama movie might still happen at some point though.

But yeah, there's not much direct spectacle and the characters usually aren't that engaging for most of them. And, honestly, most of Heinlein's work should probably be left in the past. And Asimov's only really gotten two adaptations. I Robot which wasn't an adaptation at all, and a 70s ultra-low-budget adaptation of Nightfall which was really bad.

Don't forget Bicentennial Man, which was also not great.

It looks interesting, and actually something I'd like to see myself, if it weren't for it being on Apple TV.

I'm inclined to feel differently about Bicentennial Man: While I can't speak to its quality as an adaptation (I haven't read the original story), and while I may not agree with all of the points that it makes, I've generally found it to be a rather strong movie in and of itself.

My issue with it (yes, I've seen it, I mostly just forgot about it) is that while the original short story and the full length novel version by Robert Silverberg (the novel is okay, it's better than his expansion of Nightfall at least) are both pretty direct and matter of fact about things, and are more focused on the process of Andrew learning how to want to be human, with the court process being a big focus on it. The movie is way more emotional, and while I do understand why some people prefer that, I think the story works better when it's about a robot that approaches wanting to be human from his own, unique, angle and the legal and financial struggles that entails.

There's a ton of emotional stories about something nonhuman wanting to be human, but there aren't really that many that are about the actual process. TNG is the main exception I can think of.

But yeah, the love story from the movie isn't really in the short story or the book. Andrew isn't really interested in love and he doesn't seem to consider it at all an important element of being human.

Edited by Zendervai on Jun 25th 2020 at 11:38:59 AM

That's fair. As I said, I haven't read the original, but from your description both that original and the movie seem like decent stories to me. Different, but both fine in their own ways.

And while the movie's plot is nothing unique, I think that it's sufficiently well-executed that its lack of uniqueness doesn't overmuch bother me. Or rather, perhaps, that I find uniqueness and value in its execution, even if its central concept isn't all that unique.

The main complaint I have about Bicentennial Man is that it Tastes Like Diabetes. A lot of Robin Williams' "serious" films have this problem. However, I realize that's a very very subjective trope, so no shade on someone that liked it.

Edited by alanh on Jun 27th 2020 at 3:36:12 AM

And likewise, no disparagement towards someone who dislikes it for your reasons; as you say, it's a matter of personal taste. ^_^ And I can definitely see some people finding it over-sweet, indeed!

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jun 27th 2020 at 12:51:46 PM

Huh, I thought this would've come over to the literature thread. Current count on Asimov movies is around a dozen, depending on how you count them. There were two film adaptations of "Nightfall (1941)", and they both decided that what was missing from the original script was sex. -_-

The first one was in 1988, it just looked like the 70s because of their budget. It soured him on future adaptations when he was already reluctant to let Hollywood touch his work because of the ways other stories had been badly done.

I'm really glad that Robbie is part of the production for this series, it makes me hopeful for the story to take reasonable steps in adaptation. That said, I get the sense that the plot is going to be mostly invented, borrowing the chase from Prelude to Foundation and putting Dornik and Seldon in the roles of Seldon and Hummin. Demerzel will probably still be advisor to the Emperor.

I would have preferred we started on Terminus instead, since that's where the story of the First Foundation begins. Trantor is the story of Seldon and the Second Foundation, the way they hid at "Star's End". Very little of Foundation cares about events in the Core Worlds.

As for Bicentennial Man, it is the best film adaptation of Dr Asimov's stories. It's at least good on it's own, follows the same characters, and presents the same conflicts that existed in the original. It's biggest negative is that it is more of a Robin Williams story than an Asimov story.

Autumn 2021; I need to see if that's enough for our unreleased work policy.

Series.Foundation is up. New update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nJ3rBpQFV4

New teaser

Release date is 9/24/2021.

Edited by alanh on Jun 28th 2021 at 8:44:47 AM

...You mean 24, right?