Hacker Cinema
Foundation
2021 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by David S. Goyer, Josh Friedman
Follow a band of exiles on their monumental journey to save humanity and rebuild civilization amid the fall of the Galactic Empire.
44 positive61 negative24 mixed56 neutralfrom 185 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
220 comments on Hacker News
Much of the VFX and CGI industry is already in India.
Movies and shows like Inception, Interstellar, Ex Machina, Tenet, Dune 1&2, Odyssey, Chernobyl, Foundation, and The Last of Us were VFXed in large part by Indian companies like Prime Focus, Makuta, Phanton, and their subsidiaries.
A number of these overlap with HPC and Distributed Systems with a number of major players in the space coming out of the GPU design space like Raja Koduri (AMD, Apple, Intel). Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, and others having dedicated GPU design teams in India since the early 2000s also helped.
My personal issue with Foundation was, that at its core in the books, it was about ordinary humans solving problems. There of course were people with special abilities, but that was, well, special, and so special that e.g. in the case of the Mule, it completely trashed all plans everyone had due to its extraordinariness.
In the TV series, everybody seems to have superpowers. A rather pacifist politician from the book is suddenly, in the series, a gunslinging person with mental superpowers.
I liked that the original was about more or less competent people making decisions, and seeing those decisions play out. I admit, I like competence porn. Almost everyone having superpowers feels like a betrayal of the values of the books.
Best part about the TV series are the three emperors. It's the one addition which really added something to the story... and which did not betray the values of the original book series, but was just a nice addition.
Having not watched Foundation, what was the issue there?
I loved Altered Carbon Season 1, but couldn't get into Season 2 and never finished it. I never read the book(s?), so the storyline was standalone for me.
I liked Altered Carbon, at least season 1.
What I fear is another Foundation.
I’ve seen most of those. Slow horses is phenomenal no notes. for all mankind would be as well if not for the low grade melodrama of the middle seasons, but all the space stuff is amazing. silo is good fun but like severance we’ve gotten two short seasons in how many years? shrinking started out great but did a speedrun in one season of what normally takes jenji kohan three. Foundation has decent highs especially with the dynasty and invictus in season two, but the lows are loooww. And of course severance might even be a masterpiece.
But my point wasn’t that they don’t make good television because they do, it’s that their shows aren’t talked about nearly as much in the mainstream because people don’t have Apple tv. I think Ted lasso and to a lesser degree severance are really their only major popular hits. Most people I talk to haven’t seen slow horses. If it were on Netflix it would be the opposite.
> Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it, as happened to Foundation.
Denis Villeneuve (Dune, Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, Prisoners, etc) is set to direct and is writing the script as well:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama#Film
Though it may be a little while since he first has to release adaptation of Dune Messiah, and a Bond film is probably next:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Villeneuve#Upcoming_projects
>as happened to Foundation. (I actually like the Apple TV version, but it’s definitely its own thing.)
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Others have noted that a faithful adaptation would have been a snooze-fest and inconsistent at best. There's lots of cases where a movie/TV version departed greatly from the source material, and was better for it.
>Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it
It's being helmed by Denis Villeneuve, the guy who did Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, and the new Dune movies. If anyone can do a good job with it, he can.
>For sci-fi takes on truly alien first contacts,
Don't forget Villeneuve's "Arrival".
I always thought that, out of the Clarke novels, “Songs of Distant Earth” would make a good movie adaptation.
Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it, as happened to Foundation. (I actually like the Apple TV version, but it’s definitely its own thing.)
Also on the TV/movie front science fiction is doing quite well right now.
Apple TV seems to have made producing good scifi series one of their main selling points. Lots of famous scifi series are getting TV adaptations and apple TV is producing wholly new scifi series as well.
Foundation, Murderbot, Silo, For All Mankind (and the upcoming Star City), Severence, Dark Matter, Monarch, Pluribus, and Neuromancer to name some of the current and upcoming series.
And of course if my theory is right I suspect the upcoming Firefly announcement will be that Apple TV is picking them up for a continuation as well.
---------
But also scifi has a lot of other avenues for exploring their ideas now (such as via interactive media/video games). I'd argue some of the best scifi works of the current generation come from interactive media/video games rather than television or movie. Ex: Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle 1&2, Nier, VA-11 Hall-A, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Deus Ex, etc.
Like frankly television and movie are massively expensive and books are way harder to sell now than they ever were (as discoverability and reach are poor) but video games as a more visual medium are easier to sell but at the same time the entry point for making them is an order of magnitude lower than TV or movies. So it's not terribly surprising to see scifi flourish with games where other mediums have found themselves in a slump.
I generally agree, and also that it's impossible to take a book to video without change. I tend to try to think of it like this, imagine Bob and Jim watched a battle scene, but one from the west, the other from the east side. Bob wrote the book, Jim the movie.
Naturally, although it was the same battle, they'll have seen different things up close, and have different views on the battle overall.
Having said that...
It's like someone wrote the Foundation movie three generations after the book was written, turned into a play, and then told over the campfire for decades.
It literally has no more connection with Asimov's works, than Star Wars is like Star Trek. All of the technology is different, the size of the Empire is wildly different, literally almost nothing maps.
Is it good? Yes, sorta. But it's not Foundation, by any stretch. It's not even remotely in the same "world".
Binge watched it. I think the first 2 seasons were great.
Lee Pace did an awesome performance recently in Asimov's Foundation. Mackenzie Davis, another lead in the show, demonstrated good potential but she seems not to get much afterward (Terminator, Station 11 etc)
The first one, the one based on the book, was great and did fly a good deal under the radar. But definitely one of those ones with a core fanbase that evangelized for it and good critical notices. Elsewhere in this discussion Jared Harris's role in Foundation has been mentioned; he's a major, consistent, and excellent fixture in The Terror.
Since they used the book's story already, they made a turn for the series to be an anthology of loosely thematically-similar stories (think American Horror Story). The basic setting of season 2 is Japanese internment during World War II in America, and it's from different writers than the first, and of course isn't adapting the novel anymore. It was much less popular both in terms of viewers and critics.
I'm a little surprised they think the brand still carries enough power to put another original story in there under its name for a season 3. It's also a bit of a double-edged sword: you do get name recognition and some built-in initial audience, but you're also taking on expectations and baggage from the original. This is a factor in season 2's tepid reception, and there have been other similar attempts to slide something unrelated in under an existing banner that backfired: True Detective Night Country comes to mind.
> Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer.
Interesting POV because Star Trek and Foundation both have recent, big budget streaming series while new Terminator movies were flops and Neuromancer has never seen any development(?)
I've slowly become more and more inclined to "Theory 5: Purity of vision" over the past six years.
When I was younger, I valued movies more than books. I know that people usually replied that books make you exercise your imagination more, but to me that felt like a disadvantage of books, they seem to rely on a crutch (the imagination), whereas movies (in my child's mind) stood alone, proudly. I tended to see a book as infirm, incomplete until it got an adaptation, and even then, a bad adaptation seemed to me to somehow devalue the book itself, like an infection from a prosthesis. I literally couldn't sleep at night because of errors in book adaptations, it was like a hole in the universe itself.
Then I reread Harry Potter, especially the last book, and I came to love the descriptions of nature and feelings in the tenting chapters, and I suddenly realized how much I value how the book makes feel, and how irrelevant the quality of its adaptation is.
This theory got put to the test when the Foundation TV show came up, which I found awful, and for the first time I didn't care. The book was just as brilliant as before, and no bad adaptation could make me lose nights anymore.
Recently, this disappointment with adaptations together with the appreciation of literature itself made me more disappointed with movies in general, even original ones. I realized how many compromises have to be made to make a movie which simply don't exist in books.
It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented.
I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn’t read it. I couldn’t believe how well it held up 70+ years later(!!)
I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it’s appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it’s probably the best — but all three are great.
I’m now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.
> I'm hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a vintage aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and magnify this old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits.
This is what I hoped for Foundation, to replicate the 1940s now-retrofuturism I imagine while reading the books. Alas, it wasn't to be.
> Also, the books have a quaint 1940s (NOT 1950s as people usually say it) atmosphere ...
The next day’s hearings were entirely different. Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick were alone with the Commission. They were seated at a table together, with scarcely a separation between the five judges and the two accused. They were even offered cigars from a box of iridescent plastic which had the appearance of water, endlessly flowing. The eyes were fooled into seeing the motion although the fingers reported it to be hard and dry. If you've got a copy of the ebook, search for "cigar". The use of tobacco as a way to demonstrate luxuries beyond the regular is there.
In a recent re-reading of the series, I started having difficult with it in Second Foundation... and forced myself to finish Foundation's Edge. The amount of psionic ability and the... for lack of a better word "preaching" with the monologues was very much a science fiction of a different time.
Foundation (the TV series) had to do updates for modern audiences and media. I'm not sure if trying to remain perfectly faithful to the books would represent them well.
Foundation is a soft sci-fi about interactions between individuals and history and society. Trying to maintain the incidental harder parts of the written works that modern audiences expect to be somewhat consistent of far future technology with the 1950s lens on them would be quaint and a bit off-putting to people expecting future tech.
He threw his cigar away and looked up at the outstretched Galaxy. “Back to oil and coal, are they?” he murmured—and what the rest of his thoughts were he kept to himself. They took the major points, and wrote to follow the general path from one point to another given the expectations of an audience consuming it often for the first time - 80 years after the original was written... and given constraints of the format and continuity of actors (60 minute episodes rather than as a chapter of a short story in Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction).
It's definitely got problems as an adaptation of the Foundation series where it turns one of it's biggest themes on it's head by making a few people like Gail super special and having the answer to the crises where the books were more about setting up groups and organizations so that they as a whole had an advantage or edge that would be the answer to the crises he forsaw. I think it's mainly due to them wanting to have the same people across multiple seasons where the books were free to throw away the whole cast each time. Setting up new characters is much more expensive in shows/movies than books where you can just say what someone's 'deal' is and give them internal monologues to setup their internality where shows can't usually get away with that.
I think separated from that there's a good enough show in there.
A version of this also happens in the first season of Foundation, the Apple TV series based on Asimov's novels.
A terrorist attack on a space elevator happens to figure in the first episode of the TV series Foundation.
https://foundation.fandom.com/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Star_Bridge
It’s about as devastating as you would expect.
Not a movie, but I have been really enjoying Foundation. High production values and good actors. I like the story in the series, but I haven’t read the books.
I am really digging the railroad analogies in this discussion! There are some striking similarities if you do the right mappings and timeframe transformations.
I am an avid rail-to-trail cycler and more recently a student of the history of the rail industry. The result was my realization that the ultimate benefit to society and to me personally is the existence of these amazing outdoor recreation venues. Here in Western PA we have many hundreds of miles of rail-to-trail. My recent realization is that it would be totally impossible for our modern society to create these trails today. They were built with blood, sweat, tears and much dynamite - and not a single thought towards environmental impact studies. I estimate that only ten percent of the rail lines built around here are still used for rail. Another ten percent have become recreational trails. That percent continues to rise as more abandoned rail lines transition to recreational use. Here in Western PA we add a couple dozen miles every year.
After reading this very interesting discussion, I've come to believe that the AI arms race is mainly just transferring capital into the pockets of the tool vendors - just as was the case with the railroads. The NVidia chips will be amortized over 10 years and the models over perhaps 2 years. Neither has any lasting value. So the analogy to rail is things like dynamite and rolling stock. What in AI will maintain value? I think the data center physical plants, power plants and transmission networks will maintain their value longer. I think the exabytes of training data will maintain their value even longer.
What will become the equivalent of rail-to-trail? I doubt that any of the laborers or capitalists building rail lines had foreseen that their ultimate value to society would be that people like me could enjoy a bike ride. What are the now unforeseen long-term benefit to society of this AI investment boom?
Rail consolidated over 100 years into just a handful of firms in North America, and my understanding is that these firms are well-run and fairly profitable. I expect a much more rapid shakeout and consolidation to happen in AI. And I'm putting my money on the winners being Apple first and Google second.
Another analogy I just thought of - the question of will the AI models eventually run on big-iron or in ballpoint pens. It is similar to the dichotomy of large-scale vs miniaturized nuclear power sources in Asimov's Foundation series (a core and memorable theme of the book that I haven't seen in the TV series).
My only beef with Foundation, is calling it Foundation.
When I watched the LOTRs movies, I recalled several saying that it diverged from the books. And sure, it did. It had to. You cannot convert mediums and not have change. Yet the easy way to conceptualize it, is that you're listening to two different people's telling of the same tale.
Both people will perceive the world as a different place, will even be standing in different places during events, may not have been at all events, and so on. Once that's in the pocket, a movie such as LOTR does quite well I think. It captures what it should.
But move to Foundation, and I really have no idea what book anyone read. I feel that someone read the books, and wrote a 1000 word summary of it... then someone used that to write the scripts, which was heavily edited. Massive, vastly important concepts are completely dropped from Foundation. It's not even remotely the same story.
Again, it's not bad. I just hate they stole the name, and character names.
The reason I'm on about this, is that the people designing sets are typically "touchy feely" types, which is of course fine. However often these types have a really hard time with static, unchanging facts or things, very specific details, and caring about function over form. This of course can extend to world building by an artist, as opposed to a sci-fi author.
Here's one example... in the books the Empire had 25 million planets. In the series it's under 10k galaxy wide. There's no real reason for the change, other than "don't care" or "Oooh, that's a confusing number". Even the size of the galaxy was off in series 1.
So when it comes to sets? Bear in mind these people think "Ooooh, space!" and go into a flutter of excited re-design. They're not approaching it from an intellectual perspective, but instead from emotion. And space is strange, and cold, and blah blah.
Perhaps I'm unkind, I've met artist types which were more cognitive of their art. Sometimes. When they were drunk.
I download epub files and then have ElevenLabs read it to me using AI generated voices I created/cloned using its built in tool. I prefer this method because I can have a book narrated to me using any voice I want to. For example, I’m currently listening to the foundation novels but having it narrated by an AI clone of Lou Lobell’s voice since she narrates the tv show. You can also export narrations as mp3 files and listen to them however you want.
Science-fiction industrialization (TV series spoiler), Emperor Clone Cleon (Day) and Azura, "Foundation" S1E10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05qXF5QLWw
> Do you know how many people we uncovered?
Alternatively - and now that I'm thinking about it - I think Apple TV might adopt the A/24 model of purchasing individual movies and shows that they like, and marketing it like crazy.
In fact, that does seem to be Apple TV's model already. For example, Ted Lasso, Mythic Quest, Pachinko, Foundation, Silo, Severance, The Studio, and For All Mankind are all produced by entirely different production houses but licensing for them was acquired by Apple.
> Nobody was saying this prior to the Foundation TV series coming out.
I knew about this back in the 90s. It's always been out there whenever Asimov is mentioned.
Nobody was saying this prior to the Foundation TV series coming out. It seems like marketing wanted to drum up some controversy for their series because the allegations would have required evidence from 40 years prior. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, but definitively saying so either way makes it seem like you have an agenda.
My completely unscientific impression is that other services are making the effort to produce high-quality films and series, including Apple TV+ (Slow Horses, Silo, For All Mankind, Foundation, etc.), Max/HBO (Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, GoT, The Last of Us, etc.), FX (Shogun, The Bear, The Old Man, Fargo, etc.), and AMC (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Night Manager, etc.). Whatever you think of the quality of shows in those services, they at least show genuine effort to make things that don't suck.
This includes movies, but browsing their "originals" list, so far I (or my wife) have enjoyed (in no particular order):
Slow Horses Lessons in Chemistry Severance Ted Lasso Shrinking Mythic Quest Roar CODA The Problem with John Stewart And we are looking forward to checking out, in no particular order:
Palm Royale For All Mankind Criminal Record Killers of the Flower Moon Foundation Strange Planet The Morning Show Greyhound They're not all knockout hits. Overall we just feel safer trying something new there. If we don't like it, it's usually just because it's not for us, and less because it feels like an algorithmic, soulless cash grab.
The Morning Show, Severance, Silo, Tehran, Presumed Innocent, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, Disclaimer, Shrinking, Loot, Severance, Where's Wanda?, Foundation, Cowboy Cartel (short documentary), Midnight Family, The Last Thing He Told Me, Invasion, Mythic Quest, Bad Monkey, Dickinson...
There's so many good shows on Apple TV.
A recent theme of my thinking is tha enemies are important for good fiction: on Apple TV Foundation has the terrifying Tellum Bond and we’ll be disappointed if the Mule isn’t much more terrifying. Time Bandits TV series falls flat on the other hand because Pure Evil doesn’t seem that much worse than the Supreme Being.
Real life doesn’t consistently have that kind of enemy though and there”a a big difference between “a story that is compelling” and a “story that is true”. I thought Drexler was compelling in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexler%E2%80%93Smalley_debate_on_molecular_nanotechnology
But then his research program made zero progress in the next 25 years.
Light Foundation TV series spoilers below -
In the first episode, a space elevator is bombed. It’s pretty catastrophic! I think a lot of people underestimate the forces involved in something of this scale collapsing.
“ The tether wrapped around the planet like a garrote.
It cut 50 levels down.”
This is obviously fiction, but so is this research and the general concept of space elevators.
I think your description of television much better fits the mould of 90's network TV (24 weekly episodes per year) than prestige era limited series or narrative arc TV. Foundation could absolutely be done as an anthology show in the vein of American Horror story - where each season covered an era of an unfolding narrative, with characters like Hari Seldon and R.Daniel recurring as audience favourites.
Either way though, there are issues with the adaptation that are quite distinct from eschewing the episodic arc of the original trilogy. It's full of spiritual woo for one, which is entirely antithetical to Azimov's vision. It's also more than fond of sadistic violence. Azimov's whole method as a writer was to have smart characters solve difficult problems intellectually. 'Violence is the last resort of the incompetent' after all.
A book doesn’t, and Foundation makes excellent use of every inch of the novel as a medium to explore itself, but the commenter above was specifically referring to what made the book difficult to adapt into a television series. And while Malick et all can def do “rumination on a theme” as a feature film, an ongoing tv series requires the audience to invest and keep coming back week after week, episode after episode.
Generally that takes the form of characters who experience things — ideally growing or changing in response, although many genres and formats don’t require that part. It’s unnecessary since part of the medium of television, unlike the novel, is people putting on a show to entertain you which is different from reading, an inherently more-individual experience. Part of what TV is selling is a group of people to hang out with every week. Generally.
Which is not to say always — shows like Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt proved the anthology format has a wide audience. But they had the advantage of a brand new paradigm each week, which creates a relationship with the show itself (but even TZ allowed the audience Serling).
Foundation def be done as anthology style episodes with some crossovers/overlap, but again practical realities make it difficult to guarantee narratively-necessary access to actors due to contract and scheduling factors, and you have the issue of both too big for standard structure and “not big enough” for a true anthology at its core. Not saying it couldn’t work it’d just be more difficult, which is not a quality that makes studios likely to invest.
Asimov Foundation books near impossible to adapt to TV series or movies. It has no typical hero's arc. Even in Gibbon's Rome book you able to follow say Nero rise and downfall. As a generic idea book, Asimov books were ahead of his time. As a good scifi novel? He was several magnitudes below Cixin - and majority would even place Ursula way way higher than Asimov. Apple Foundation literally blast through Asimov story telling. To me, at least Apple succeeded as YA or within a potshot of Cixin. Asimov literally failed in adult scifi by today's standard. What holding you is nostalgia. Evaluate the story in contemporary terms.
Agreed. Getting season 3 of Foundation is literally the only thing Eddy Cue needs to do. Hope he's reminded every day. Once Foundation is done, they can shut down all the Apple TV+ servers.
Rather put the money into an Apple Robot. The robot needs to have Eddye Cue eyes and that constant grin.
As long as we get season 3 of Foundation and they don’t leave us hanging I’ll be happy
Foundation the TV show was so interesting to me that it pushed me to read the book series.
I'm currently up to Foundation and Earth. The show is different, but I like the changes they made for the show, especially to the emperor's lineage. The show would be painfully boring if it was filmed in the style of the books with characters talking about what happened instead of showing.
I personally find the mentalics aspect of the books kind of lame, unscientific, and God like. I hope the show does not lean so heavily into them as it continues like the books have, but seems inevitable as I read through the book series.
Severance and For All Mankind get all the hype but See, Silo, and Invasion have all been great. The only true miss in their sci-fi shows for me has been Constellation. The only more boring sci-fi show I can think of is Beacon 23.
Foundation is why I don't think they'll do Gibson justice.
To me, William Gibson is rare among sci-fi writers in that he never spends a paragraph explaining some whiz-bang future tech like a kid with a new toy. He just throws it all at you as part of the background. The world of Neuromancer goes by in a haze of analog static. It's a trip, and one that might be going bad. As the instigating work of the cyberpunk genre, it got people to stop and consider that maybe the future wasn't just going to be things getting better. The characters don't dwell on how we got here, and the narrator doesn't waste time explaining. The blunt poetry of the text tells you what you really need to know and what you need to feel. He doesn't waste words painting a picture of neon and microchips for you to ogle at in your mind's eye; Gibson is up to something else. This future isn't one you really want to live in.
The Foundation TV show ignored most of Asimov's writing and gave us fifty million dollars worth of planetscapes, and spaceships, and holograms, and don't forget the giant explosions.
And I'll bet they'll do the same to Gibson. They'll comb through it looking for things to spend their CGI budget on, and throw out the rest.
I am very confused by Apple TV shows quality. I can‘t really say they are all bad but all in all apart from Severance and maybe Silo all of their SciFi offerings didn‘t really hit for me. Especially Foundation has been such a disappointment that it kind of tainted my feelings towards the whole service. Apart from that it‘s just so strange what kind of technical issues some of the episodes have that they stream (strange audio or brightness issues)
There are a couple I think are fine. Mythic quest and Severance, but that what was it? Foundation series, omg, I couldn’t make it a whole episode.
>They all present societies which have solved social and material problems through progress, or which are still solving them, critiquing an image of the Western world in the 20th century. None of them nab at any kind of biting truth relevant to young readers today.
What are some examples of scifi you're referring to there? Because the noteworthy scifi stories I can think of, ones which drew enough attention to be televised at least, are stories like the hunger games (dystopian), divergent (dystopian), the new star trek series (which I haven't seen but I understand shoehorned scarcity back into the startrekverse), Foundation (fall of a golden age), The Expanse (dystopian) etc. I think the only optimistic scifi I've read in the last twenty years or so was Anathem, and there's no way that's getting a miniseries.
Maybe it's a function of the authors I follow, but I just don't see this optimistic contemporary scifi you speak of, naive or otherwise.
Foundation is soft SF, something like Star Wars. But I respect size of Foundation Universe, and I like when movie filmed with so big investments. Because of this, I respect movie, even when I don't like their physics system.
Foundation is an embarrassment. It has nothing similar to Asimov's books.
And focusing on the series only, forgetting the books, it's mediocre at best, and total cringe at worst. Didn't feel original or new. The storyline is just like some cheap movie that no one remembers or watches.
I think it depends on the sci-fi to some extent but Foundation is itself a highly dad book series (a publication history covering much of the boomer/gen x/millennials timespan, a massive dad cohort) and the TV show is sort of like HBO Rome in space.
It's sad season 1 of Foundation was rough to get started. The latter half and season 2 are amazing.
it will be over-sexed and dumbed down. flashy, but losing steam every episode, until you start the next one to find the “very important sex scene” just a couple of minutes in. yes yes, monkeys have sex, but don’t pretend the ratios are accurate or even meaningful. it’s wank, simple as.
just like foundation.
monkeys, calm down, not everything is sex or food or both. you’re teaching the models absolute nonsense.
I urge you to try and re-read the Foundation series as an Asimov fan. The books are... barely passable. With the exception of the first one.
People claiming that series is bad haven't read the books in a long times.
There are no characters. There are talking heads that speak at each other. Women are non-existent. Every single person is a knight without fear or reproach. Huge galaxy-spanning powers come and go in lieu of interesting ideas (first the Mule and the R. Daneel).
The TV series (at least season 1, haven't seen season 2) is the best that could happen to the books IMO.
To have a counter view of the few being unhappy as usual that a tv adaptation doesn't mean being the same as the book: foundation as a TV show is great.
I love it, would love to see more of it but I will probably start reading the books later.
I think Apple just wanted their own Game of Thrones flagship, and on paper, Foundation seems like it should be that (epic scale, big ideas). But honestly, it needs a more subdued treatment: mostly talking heads in rooms, and an anthology that jumps forward decades with each episode, rotating characters as necessary.
Blockbuster narratives need heroes, which works directly at cross-purposes to the long-term systemic thinking that defines the books. There was probably never a scenario where the high price of buying the rights could match up with the size of audience for a more faithful adaptation. (And rightly or wrongly, non-book-readers seem broadly positive on the series.)
People make a similar defense of Paramount's Halo.
>An emotionless supersoldier mary sue? It would never work as a TV series, we need to explore the spartans' emotions!
And so we get some garbage that misses what was beloved by fans and features Master Chief with his helmet off, being sad on the subway. Feels like it's written by people totally unconcerned with the source material, just like Apple-Foundation.
Unlike Apple-foundation, glimpses of what a proper Halo adaptation could have been exist:
https://youtu.be/XRMUYpH7bQk https://youtu.be/SyOAdrxlPVs https://youtu.be/40jdpzrpIps https://youtu.be/P63er_GRH1o
I'd trade the whole apple-foundation series for two minutes of content by people who cared about the books.
A lot of Season 1 and Season 2 have been showing Hari and Gaal making huge mistakes. The Second Foundation is way behind schedule and probably going to be founded "in the wrong place" versus the books and almost seems like it won't be strong enough when it is needed to face The Mule. The "real" Hari ("Knife Hari") is shown to be a fallible slimeball just as much as the religion around the "fake" "Prophet Hari" gels around his seeming "infallibility".
I think to some extent the TV show is showing a variation of the timeline with respect to the rules of psychohistory: it doesn't account for individual actions (including/especially mistakes). I personally don't think it is trying to be a "Great man theory" version of Foundation, because so many of the "changes" are mistakes from the seemingly more "pristine" timeline of the books (or at least how we perceive them from how the Encyclopedia Galactica documented them).
I can definitely appreciate where that criticism comes from though, I appreciate that it is a valid point of view of the show. I just find it worthwhile to point out that I don't feel like the showrunners are as oblivious as that and I don't think they are intending a "great man" take on the show and at least in my reading of the show so far I do think there are other ways to read what they are trying to do, plus or minus the format constraints of trying to do it as a TV show with the contractual and budget/production reality of needing to keep some cast member stability from episode to episode and season to season.
I'm a huge Asimov fan (read the Foundation series multiple times) and I couldn't make it through three episodes of the horrible Apple series. And no, it wasn't because of the changes they made, the basics didn't work either. The adapted story wasn't comppeling, the characters/actors weren't well chosen for their roles, the script wasn't good, basically, every part of it was subpar. It's like it was written and directed by someone who wasn't an Asimov fan and who never read the books.
It reminded me of Amazon's horrible Tolkien series (Rings of Power), that is, exceptional special effects, but everything else sucked.
> The only somewhat valid criticism I've read is that it's not exactly like the book
The Foundation TV show did not even have the same ethos, the same world-view, the same philosophical view of history as the books.
Apple wanted a big dumb heroic VFX-driven sci-fi saga TV show; and we can understand why. However, the source material that they chose is about history, and is actively hostile to the "heroic" view of history. It actually seems to be a critique of the heroic derring-do sci-fi of the day and the "great man" theory of history. (1)
It's like the showrunners did actually understand what the books were _about_, but decided to deliberately do the opposite. Maybe they actively hated the books.
I could not care less if they change skin colour or gender; or spice up the action scenes, updates like that are good, but IMHO this is by far the least of the problems with the _Foundation_ TV series.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
> The Foundation tv show shares nothing but the name with Asimov's books
It is closer to the source material than the film _I, Robot_ was to the short story. It retains at least some of the overall plot.
I only watched the first episode, TBH, and didn't find it interesting enough to keep going. I'm pretty old (56) and I read my dad's original copies _Foundation_ as a little pre-teen kid, when it was already 30+ years old, and the sequel trilogy when they were newly released in the 1980s.
It has not aged well, and the producers did well to modernise it, I think.
But still...
I'm a massive Foundation simp (it was a foundational - hehe - book for me and sparked my interest in econometrics and ML), and I found the Foundation show to be fairly acceptable.
The Foundation trilogy in it's original form doesn't really lend itself well to television, as it was a serialized anthology, sort of like a semi-disjointed Canterbury Tales.
When trying to convert that into a big budget prestige television show a la GoT, you will have to make some significant narrative changes.
Honestly, I appreciate it as younger people like me who are derisively called "Normies" were largely turned off to Sci-Fi due to the negative perceptions of older Gen X and Millenial fans (that fat nerd character in Simpsons is sadly too close to the truth ime), and most of the criticism I've seen against the Foundation TV show is largely Gamergate-esque and annoyed that certain characters are women or not white (despite Asimov purposely writing his stories in a race agnostic manner due to his racist editor).
> it's not exactly like the book
It's very, _very_ far from the books. There's no point calling it "The Foundation". It's not even the same genre - how much action is in Asimov?
It's fine to judge it on its own and say it's good or bad, but then why the name? Basically for the tv show equivalent of clickbait. Which is why I hate it.
I have a philosophy here. I read a book, and see it on another medium? Well, I pretend it's an account by another person who was there.
If 5 people are in a room during a big event, and you interview them, you will get 5 different accounts. Where they were looking when the event happened, what their allegiances are, who their friends are, their background, etc etc all results in a different takeaway.
So I'm OK with change. I can live with it.
Yet, Foundation IMO was well beyond this degree of change. And very very important things were left out, and could have been told.
For example, Asimov constantly described a broken culture of innovation. How many no longer even understood how the machines around them worked, and maintained them by rote. How scientists would merely read old books and papers, and debate that, instead of engaging in new research. This was a strong theme, and a massive reason for the Empire to fall, yet there were only hints of it in the TV series.
This could easily have been in the series, but I really don't think many people on staff even read all the books, and it shows.
The Foundation tv show shares nothing but the name with Asimov's books. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it's a strange "adaptation". They should have called it something else.
If they do this the same way, the name Neuromancer will just be there to get some brand recognition for an arbitrary new SF series.
> it totally drops the central themes of lifecycles of empires.
I don't get this. The cycling of one empire ("Empire") to another ("Foundation") is ALL of the series. How can it drop it if that's what it's all about every single episode?
Has anybody here listened to the BBC drama version? https://archive.org/details/foundation-trilogy_bbc-radio_1973_complete/Foundation-Trilogy_1-of-8_Psychohistory-and-Encyclopedia_BBC-Radio_1973.mp3
I enjoyed it, but I haven't watch the TV series or actually read the books, so I no idea how it lines up...
I thought Foundation was great. A direct adaptation of the books would have been terrible, which is why nobody had done it yet. In case it helps, the companion podcast gives an episode-by-episode story of the changes - I agree with most of them, but can understand why they're controversial.
https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/foundation-the-official-podcast/id1586219793
https://open.spotify.com/show/1SIqjOZcJrJSrpcDjI9fyy
Foundation suffers from it's origins as a series of disjointed short stories in the pulp magazines of the era that were later lightly edited into books. They are chock full of generic characters standing around discussing interesting ideas with very little action.
There was no way to turn it into a television show without major rewrites.
However, Invasion is my call for the weakest scifi show they've done.
Apple turned Foundation into ... something ... so hold your horses and reread the books.
Edit: I bet Wintermute will be human in the Neuromancer tv series.
Foundation was near-unadaptable as-is, given that it spans eras and wants the user to emotionally attach to the structure, rather than the individuals. For TV shows, audiences generally attach to characters (and the actors and actresses that play them), and the kind of story that allows a single cast to span eras would need to engage with some degree of time travel, cycles of life and/or abuse, or immortality, none of which fit in with Foundation.
That said, Neuromancer is a book that's more "cool" than good; Gibson is very good at painting pictures with words, but story itself is something of a convoluted mess. Hopefully an adaptation can give the writers a chance to smooth out the elements that don't work.
Oh man, I would've loved an anthology version of Foundation. Each episode covering one of Asimov's airtight Foundation vignettes. Or, maybe, just don't try to adapt things that don't work for TV? There's plenty of other incredible stuff waiting to be written. Someone needs to hurry up and film Hyperion, it would be hard but more doable than Foundation.
I'm enjoying the hell out of the Foundation series, and the first couple episodes of Shogun have been great. I'll probably love Neuromancer as well. The trick to enjoying film/TV adaptations of books is to never read the books beforehand.
I've just re-read Foundation original trilogy to wash the bad taste that the first (and for me last) season of the TV series left on my mouth. I was surprised to find so much foreshadow in the second and third books for the key twists in the plot.
By the way, Asimov is mentioned in TFA, that makes sense. With our Corín Tellado, he was one of the most prolific authors ever.
Dune has a take on this that the movie doesn't do a great job at explaining. But the shield is made to prevent high velocity projectiles and energy weapons. This way the shield can be hidden and fool enemies because the user is still able to interact with daily objects. Like you can eat while wearing the shield and since you'd have body guards it's much harder to get in and stab someone wearing a shield. The Apple version of Foundation has a similar shield but it is more sensitive. Dune's shield has obviously affected many subsequent works.
I asked it to explain several plot points in the TV series "Foundation", and it got them wrong and admitted it when pressed. Several times. Specifically, why does Raych Foss kill Hari Seldon, and some follow-up questions.
It looks just like the quantum cube thing in the Foundation tv show
There are some scenes in the latest episode of Foundation, particularly those in Trantor, where I found the shots/focus with "weird" focus and depths of field. I have a personal theory that those were already shot with spatial video capture, designed for Vision Pro in mind.
Tangentially, if you gave up on Foundation on S1 like a couple of my friends, S2 is much much better. And if you're a book purist they sort of explain why there are differences between the show and the books in a relatively decent way.
When talking about new, great content, parent mentioned only sci-fi and fantasy content: Marvel TV Shows, Wheel of Time, Foundation, House of the Dragon, the Mandalorian, Rings of Power, etc
So, it seemed that if you are into that stuff, you have some amazing content. But what if you are not?
I wish I had a way to quantify it, but it also seems like _investment_ has skyrocketed. 20 years ago HBO might make a high quality, high budget show. Now we have shows like the Marvel TV Shows, Wheel of Time, Foundation, House of the Dragon, the Mandalorian, Rings of Power, etc.. that all have MASSIVE budgets. A lot of that was funded by free money, but I think the quality and expectation of TV shows has gone up quite a bit.
Any advice on how to appreciate the Expanse tv show?
I love backstory and worldbuilding sci-fi the Foundation Trilogy, The Man in the High Castle, For All Mankind, The Silo, The Tick, and Battlestar Galactica, but I can't seem to get immersed with The Expanse despite how much I try.
Is it a work that is better appreciated in the literary form instead of on television? Or did Syfy just jumble the first season?
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
Foundation has less common with Asimov books than the "I, Robot" movie
Without disputing that Asimov might have brought up such a concept somewhere in the series, it certainly is not a prime factor mentioned in the first novel.
Quoting part of the novel, does not mean other parts do not eapouse other things.
One "decline theme" was that the overall culture of the empire was in decline. And part of that, was attributed to stagnation, which exhibited as a lack of scientific change, and advancement. There were other ways this was exhibited, such as how spacers didn't even understand how their ships worked, because they didn't need to. They had been so static for thousands of years, with no change in their drive systems, that rote repair guides were all that were required.
And that there were few experts left who even understood the drives.
Amusingly, with all the changes, the TV series got this right. The Foundation shows immediate, groundbreaking scientific advancement in many areas, the Empire immediately falls behind technologically, a mere generation after the empire withdraws from their section of the galaxy.
And with a mere handful of specialists in each branch of science, at that!
And in the TV series, again a good parallel to the books, one of the primary characters' planets has reverted to barbarism, rejecting science, demonizing those who dare learn!
Culture was a primary reason for the fall of the Empire. Stagnation.
In the real Foundation books, which the TV series barely resembles, this was part of the galactic empire's decline. With so many studies done, over tens of thousands of years, on millions of planets, each with hundreds of millions of people, there was an immense load of prior work. And meta-analysis was where all research ended up.
Just read a bunch of papers, summarize them, and write a new paper. Scientific research had devolved to the point, that no one knew how to do new research.
The idea of prophecy is kind of curious when you think about it. These days if you said you had a vision of the future that you literally saw and were so sure about, people would tell you you were dreaming, and if you kept insisting, delusional.
Plenty of fiction uses "future seeing" as an interesting plot device, (Dune for instance, and currently the Foundation tv series), so we clearly find the concept intriguing, but it is relegated to fiction of course, so likely we generally find it preposterous, and perhaps it's all just biblical references after all.
But it seems that there was a time that people could get away with prophecy as a real claim. It's hard to put your mind sometimes into a pre-scientific mindset, but obviously enough people found these claims compelling. (I realize there is some survivorship bias going on here.). How did they get away with it, I wonder? Just make it vague enough and far enough into the future to be unverifiable? Just make it scary enough that people don't want to take the risk that you are wrong?
When you think about it, it's amazing that some of these stories made it so far and that people even today still believe them. I mean this from a kind of anthropological point of view I guess. Makes you wonder what we commonly believe today that will seem silly 1000 years from now.
I can see how that could be interesting, but I didn't enjoy it cause I saw it as a perversion of an awesome character. That's a problem writers face when they reinterpret beloved series/stories. I've hated nearly all the recent TV/movie adaptations that were based on written series I love - foundation, eye of the world, the lotr show, watchmen, come to mind. One exception was the Dune movie, which I thought was rad, even though it didn't entirely align with the way I imagined it, their interpretation was great.
With these types of shows, the TV writing will almost certainly be orders of magnitude worse since the originals were written by great authors with great imaginations. So, the more the TV writers try to innovate, the more glaring it's likely to be to fans of the originals. Plus, the innovation typically involves TV writers just ham-fistedly hacking in the drama de jour. I just can't treat the TV versions as independent from the source material when I try to watch them.
Rings of Power is ok. More flash than substance. And the dialog and writing is genuinely bad in places. In one episode you had two characters pull the "don't kill him, we may need him" trope on each other within a minute of each other over the same character. And nothing had really changed otherwise. They both wanted to kill the guy and both stopped the other from killing him because, I don't know, show.
It's a solid C+. Like Wheel of Time or Foundation. Not horrible. Not great either. Not the best take on the source material, but it's fine I guess.
I don't know, I feel like both the people who say it is great and the people who say it is horrible are both wrong. If you would ask me for an opinion, I would say it is a show that I watched.
A good demonstration of this is the differences present in any sci-fi that got a remake 10-20 years after it was first written. The setting may well still be the far future .. or long long ago.. but that future has changed to match the present. The foundation TV series comes to mind. it's veeery different from the original novels.
I think the 1880s person might have an easier time with smartphones.
Tell them we figured out how to bind souls from beyond the veil into magic mirrors, and they'll immediately understand how it can show arbitrary images, video, sound, simulation.
Show a smartphone to someone from 1950 who just saw the atom bomb a few years earlier and might have read Foundation — where Hari Seldon is introduced as being so mathematically inclined he not only has a calculator, but has used it so much the numbers have worn off the buttons — and they won't understand how a device the size of a single vacuum tube can create novel art in the style of the great masters (or whatever Spock's line was in the episode where they met an immortal who had actually been many of the great artists in Earth's history; gen-AI is certainly already causing upheaval, we have yet to find out if this will end up with something analogous to the way the industrial revolution lead directly to the invention of Communism), and best everyone at chess, and speak 40 languages (contrary to what you say, I believe this alone has changed the world significantly), and take photographs (let alone video), and have a built-in library of tens of thousands of books (true story: I got my dad a 1 gig USB stick at his request, when I gave it to him my gran asked how many books it could store, I said "about 600 the size of the Bible" and she was incredulous).
Society may have learned a lot in that time, but it's been a very long time since any one of us saw the whole thing.
-
And if you do the same with medicine rather than hand radio, you get most DNA research from double helix on, successful organ transplants, the end of smallpox, MRI, IVF, oral contraceptives, and some vat-grown organs.
What we do to mice would make us seem like either gods or demons, and I'm not sure which.
Honestly, I think they could have made the foundation plot line an anthology of a rising empire while tracking the genetic dynasty as the empire fell apart.
I get so annoyed when I tune into an episode and it focuses on the foundation characters. Lee Pace is amazing as empire.
I love the Foundation series(the books) and I actually really enjoyed the TV show - I just don't think they are very related other than some surface level connection.
The Foundation series covers this as well though I can't really recommend the book series. I tried a re-read when the TV show came out and felt pretty icky with how women were portrayed in the books. Also they aren't as good I remember. The TV completely diverges from the books but in a good way IMHO. Normally that bothers me a lot but after rereading the first book again I think I prefer the TV show.
The metric to look at is viewers per dollar. If Foundation or The Expanse drew in viewers for the millions per episode spent on them, that would be one thing. But if you spend a tiny budget of a couple hundred thousand dollars, max to make an episode of, say, Naked and Afraid, and got commensurate viewership, if not higher, what would you choose, if you're running a business. Combine it with the fact that reality tv contestants don't receive residuals, there are no union writers to pay, it's obvious which direction the American TV business is headed because reality tv is a ridiculously better deal for them. Get the theme song recorded as a work for hire as well and it's pure profit for Discovery.
It's not great for the industry but culturally, we're not supportive of strikes worker rights, especially if the media tells us it's okay to hate those workers for being "rich" Hollywood folk (most writers are struggling), and doesn't point out we're supporting scabs by watching reality tv.
I have the opposite perspective: studios will stop looking for ways to give audiences what they don’t want (and stop calling them toxic for not wanting it).
People are voting with their wallets. Hollywood in the 90s was much better at entertaining people and therefore much better at getting their money.
Studios will start making shows with good writing again. Apple TV often already is, with some glaringly bad exceptions like Foundation and parts of Ted Lasso season 3. Severance, for example, is good enough on its own for me to pay for the whole subscription.
Making entertaining and thought-provoking original content, without calling their audience sexists or racists when the writing or casting misses the mark, will be profitable and that profit will fund the next wave of prestige tv.
This is precisely Emperor Cleon's storyline in the TV series Foundation...
Right, I meant to suggest there might be some "culture" bleed. Another commenter suggested it had more to do with key Pixar figures leaving for Disney, at which point Disney's own offerings improved and Pixar's suffered.
I'm not very good at articulating "feelings" so bear with me: Early Pixar movies (to me) are timeless, positive, almost fairy-tale like. They're centrist, middle-of-the-road films that don't offend or validate anyone, just faithfully follow the Hero's Journey as they try to resolve some issue in the ideal world where we're all in this together. Toy Story is the best example-- literally every single toy could not be more different, but the entire point of the movie is about all of them finding ways to leverage their differences to advance the journey for all of them, not exploiting their shortcomings to hold everyone else back. Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, all are the same pattern. Pixar's money printer used to be endless asset-swaps of "Diversity: The Movie" (the secret to Sesame Street as well), and it was a beautiful thing before the concept was perverted by the same children who grew up watching these movies.
I don't have kids' show equivalents to name from AppleTV, but I do get the same feeling ("Diversity: The Show") from their regular shows. Ted Lasso is the obvious frontrunner. For All Mankind, Invasion, Foundation (caveat: I was really high when I watched this one). All of these beautifully weave together the themes of diversity and unity into a shared journey.
I think you’re thinking of the Foundation series (not movie) on Apple’s streaming service?
Still?
How big is Foundation anyway? Or are we talking about the movie they released?
I feel like Apple´s Foundation is three shows pretzeled into one:
- Days of our Cleons: mature and political, similar to Asimov's writing.
- Star Trek Salvor: superficial action show with a main superprotagonist.
- Gaal Dornick and the Chamber of Gaia: nonsensical chosen-one kid's show.
Not a single one respects the sources enough to be called simply "Foundation", although the first IMO is the most interesting of the three, and coincidentally, the one who took most of the screen time in season 1. I don't plan on watching season 2 until mit's over, and only if the reviews are better. It would consume too much time for the quality of the entertainment.
I read a lot of Asimov in high school and for whatever reason I didn’t like Foundation.
I also didn’t like the TV series though I will probably watch season 2. It was visually appealing but I found it to be somehow flat. Like, the damage from the collapse of the space elevator - IIRC this was described to great effect in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series - but in Foundation it really felt underwhelming. (That said: “Three Colours Mars” I would definitely watch!)
Also quite weird to see Lee Pace as Empire, since the series I’d just finished was Halt and Catch Fire (recommended).
The one Apple TV show I really enjoyed was Severance. That was amazing.
Many shows have hit their strides in later seasons. IIRC I found Breaking Bad a bit boring in season one. (Granted, probably the writing was already better than season one of Foundation.)
My personal quality bar I guess? It actually started quite well, but second half of the series drags down the average in terms of story/screenwriting/camera/VFX. It doesn't stand near the likes of Foundation, Mrs. Maisel, Mr. Robot
Doing TV is a marathon, perhaps Dark showrunners are more of sprinter people and should do movies instead.
Compared to competitors, Apple TV+ currently appear to put much more emphasis on quality over quantity in their original content. I really enjoyed some shows like Severance, For All Mankind, Trying, Acapulco, Foundation. It reminds me of the time when Netflix Originals stood for content to be excited about. What they don't have is a back catalog of licensed films and shows included with the flat rate offering (they all cost an extra fee).
>EVEN technical people, don't actually understand the Internet
Didn't Isaac Asimov write a documentary on this call 'Foundation'?
Just read the books or listen to the audiobooks (with the original narrators, Kate Reading and Michael Kramer) the show is terrible. I'll continue to hate-watch it just to call out how much they got wrong but more out of a sense of obligation than for any enjoyment.
What's most frustrating is they made changes that aren't even for the better. At least Foundation made a good sci-fi show based on someone who walked by a person reading the actual book (spoiler, re-reading the book did not hold up well for me), WoT somehow made a "meh" show which diverged from the books for no good reason.
I think I've fully moved into the "dear god please don't make a TV/Movie adaptation of a book series I love"-camp. I never read GoT but I liked the show and I think I've heard that, aside from the ending, the show does a pretty good job. Unfortunately I feel like way more often than not the Show/Movie is just a huge disappointment.
>though I haven't read any of those in my adult life
You should read the first three (chronological release). They're short and sweet.
I got about two episodes into Apple-Foundation and threw in the towel. It is a good show. However the problem is not that it's 'not the same as the book'. The show takes beloved characters and alters them a great deal to teach viewers tired lessons about progressive values. I don't even disagree with the lessons! It aligns right on my beliefs! But it just reminds me of stuff that was exciting in the original books and that I'm not watching a instant-classic adaptation of a classic book.
Instead I'm watching a half-decent Apple original wrapped in a well-known brand so that it's a safer investment. It's a show I'd probably find engaging and interesting if it didn't remind me over and over of how much I enjoyed the books and how unlike them it is.
> This may be an unpopular opinion
I believe it's not so unpopular.
I believe it depends on the demography, I, for one, am tired of seeing things I grew up with being ruined by poor writing and/or low interest in keeping the source material as a pivotal element of the narration.
Few examples
- Foundation wasn't bad per se, if it was marketed as fan fiction. As an adaptation of Asimov's works it's really bad and also chose a timeline that's totally unsatisfying for everybody, both newcomers and book fans. Starting from "Prelude to Foundation" was a much better idea to set up the stage for future story development and as an introduction to the characters.
- Rings of Power, same sin: it isn't Tolkien, it is a fan fiction with some actors cosplaying Tolkien characters that, at its center, portrays a very silly, very boring, romantic story between the female protagonist and the male villain. Teenage good, if the villain was no other than Sauron, AKA "The Lord of the Rings".
- Andor, that I too consider good, is, from an objective POV, just decent. Decent enough in this time and space to stand out compared to the endless list of monstrosities that Disney recently produced especially the Star Wars themed ones, but certainly not a masterpiece, as many have called it.
- Willow: lets' not talk about it. A mediocre movie from the late 80s that has gained a cult status only because, IMO, the video game was reaaaalllyyy good, that had only one reason to be re-adapted to modern times: scrape the bottom of the barrel. It is so bad that you can actually feel sorry for he people who worked at making it.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I wish networks/services would stop trying to make safe bets with new screen adaptations of classic books and movies. Some of the worst TV I've watched this year has been adaptations of classic books/movies (Foundation, LOTR) and some of the best has been new content (Severance, Raised by Wolves, House of the Dragon).
I couldn't agree more.
LotR and the MCU have shown that when you respect the source material, you get incredible movies which are popular and long lasting. For some reason, Hollywood still thinks they can hire directors and writers who want to put their own spin on things and disrespect both the material and the audience and make adaptions like iRobot and Foundation (among many others) which are simply horrible. Even Steve Jackson fell down this hole with (to me) nearly unwatchable Hobbit trilogy.
It's not about the adaption per se - you always need to make drastic changes to transform one medium into another - it's about understanding what makes the source material great. Instead you have directors who pride themselves on having never read or seen the original. It boggles my brain.
Sometimes it works - think BladeRunner or Children of Men - but for more popular stuff, the first thing producers should do is hire a group of fanboys/fangirls to educate them on what makes a particularly loved story great and what changes would not only be unwelcome, but insulting.
I guess I'm Joe Hillbilly, because I loved the Foundation tv series. No, it's not a faithful reproduction of the books, and I couldn't care less about that. I can love both and not get bent out of shape, especially since the books would make a pretty crappy tv show.
That's not so bad. 'Foundation' clearly was not a beat-for-beat recreation of the original work. Anyone trying to do that would have created an abomination anyhow. It took a few interesting pieces from the Asimov work and made an interesting TV show that was IMO visually stunning. I think if we get 'riffs' on the original material and not a retelling of the original that's fine, especially when the original is impossible to recreate cinematically
But if their adaptation of Foundation is a sign of things to come, we should hope it's not Apple TV+ that is going to produce any of these movies/series. Yes, that's what I really came to say here, they gave Foundation to some movie industry bureaucrats that A/B tested the storyline on some Joe Hillbillies and completely butchered the genius of Asimovs novels.
I just watched the Foundation adaptation and thought it was a pretty darned good TV show. It had a reasonable compelling plotline, compelling world building, and interesting takes on how technology could lead to strange social dynamics.
Yes, I'm sure it wasn't the same as the books (though I haven't read any of those in my adult life), but taken on its own it was a good show.
I think Prelude to Foundation could of been a nice mini-series, but overall Asimov's works are just too fragmented to hold up to being a series really.
I both loved and hated the Foundation TV show. It inspired me to read the book and it was indeed a very different story.
But I loved the visuals and concept of the show. The Mary Sue thing wasn't even that much of a deal breaker like some modern scifi/fantasy TV. Just the story and characters in general lacked depth.
Game of Thrones is an example of why serialized adaptations can be great.
Apparently (I haven't seen it for myself, but all the reviews suck), Foundation is simply not such an example. This doesn't mean serialized adaptations don't work. Similarly, I can find lots of examples of movie adaptations that suck; this doesn't mean movie adaptations can't work.
For the Foundation, you really need the extra hours to chronicle an epic future historical drama with a lot of psychological themes and political intrigue. I'd have to say I'm rather worried about the upcoming Hyperion adaptation from Bradley Cooper for similar reasons, it was to be a show but now it's going to be a movie.
Interesting that the blog author dreads a serial adaptation. If anything I would dread a movie adaptation as the limited time and the pacing requirements make it difficult to avoid rushing through the story and skipping much of the worldbuilding.
They use Foundation as an example of why serialized adaptations are poor, but this understates the difficulty of the task in adopting a set of short stories that sprawl over worlds and eras, featuring complex ideas. I have a hard time believing a movie format could do a superior job with Foundation.
Same impression I had. I really enjoyed Asimov's Foundation but yearned for a bit more of exposé on the psychohistory concept. The TV series is a very different adaptation but I feel it can stand on its own, the development of characters instead of the arc feels like a good approach for the medium.
I don't think that a faithful adaptation would work so well on the screen, it spans centuries and centuries of history in the books, the revolving doors of character would just make the audience not care at all about any of them in the end, given that most would be dead by the next episode/chapter because a century or two has passed. Or just confused with many characters appearing for a brief part of the arc.
Foundation is good.
It just ain’t foundation the book.
But it is probably impossible to film anyway.
But Asimov himself ruined foundation in the 80s with the awful sequels and prequels. Nothing like the original.
This is from someone who is woefully under-read, and only remembered my teenage love of sci-fi in the last couple of years. I thought similarly for several years, that fiction was a waste of time. But then I realized I was scrolling through Twitter every day, and that felt like eating french fries as a meal: lacking substance.
Reading long form prose increases your attention span and the shape of your thoughts.
Reading fiction stimulates the imagination, which opens up the space of ideas that the mind can generate.
Fiction is a compressed simulation of life. By reading good fiction one lives more life.
Fiction is a cultural touchstone. New relationships open up when there are shared understandings of stories.
Good, hard science fiction is a record of what some of the most imaginative scientific thinkers (not necessarily scientists) have pondered. Again, mind expanding.
Science fiction stimulates curiosity by asking "what if"?
We all have to engage in lower energy activities and "waste time". Watching documentaries is a "waste of time" for someone not engaged in professional research on the relevant subject. Do you use Reddit? That's a waste of time. Having a science fiction book next to the toilet will leave you feeling more nourished after you've done your business (I look forward to using the bathroom when I know there's a delicious book waiting for me that I only read there).
Dead tree books are better for someone who has a hard time reading. Studies show there's a big difference in retention between words on a screen and words in print. Dead tree books also benefit from being "things" that can be left in the intended reading location, and give a sense of progress and of conquering when completed.
The tactile nature of flipping pages and of breaking in a paperback is lovely. The cover art attracts the eyes to the book.
Reading a book is a different action than looking at your phone or computer, and it has a different set of feelings, emotions, thought patterns. There's the smell of a printed book.
I love Asimov. I, Robot is easy because it's a collection of very short stories, but it risks being seen as shallow. The End of Eternity is considered Asimov's best novel, and it's not too long. I hear good things about The Last Question. Foundation is lovely.
Be right back, going to buy more Asimov.
Also when it fails expect the lower end to fall and wreck everything in the area underneath. Which with that length will be a lot! The insurance bill would be … astronomical (see what happened in the Foundation TV show for an example).
So far, I prefer Foundation the series over the original Asimov book.
The book has an interesting philosophical idea (psychohistory), but just doesn't work as a story. It feels too much like a disjointed sequence of deus ex machinas. (To be fair, I've read some other stuff from Asimov's Foundation series that did work as a story.)
The TV series tells a pretty compelling story and mostly does so quite well. Of course, by far the best aspect (the genetic dynasty) isn't even part of the book at all. So yeah, it's not a faithful adaptation, but it is a better story. The only thing I'm doubtful of is whether they can keep it up. Spanning millenia in this format feels sort of impossible (except perhaps as an anthology series). How often is somebody just going to cryo-sleep for centuries and ending up in just the right place without it getting the same feeling of contrived deus ex machina as in the original book?
If only these studios appreciated that they could compound the value of the IP by rallying the existing fans (ie. "early adopters") instead of trying to jump straight to the "majority" audience. It is just corporate greed mixed with hubris. The Foundation tv show is another example of this short-sighted approach.
The only way to faithfully film the book would be to make some sort of anthology series, and I don't think that format works well for big-budget prestige drama. As I've said elsewhere, might have been better to start with Prelude to Foundation, perhaps.
Yeah, the difference to Foundation is baffling to me. I can only assume people developed strong feelings growing up with the LotR movies, but nobody is particularly engaged with Foundation (and tbh it's not an easy or fun book to try and adapt). Personally I think they would have done better to start with Prelude, which not only sets the scene, but has action, ass-kicking female characters etc. Instead they created something incredibly dull and slow, the highlight of which is the intergenerational psychodrama of the emperors which is entirely made up.
They didn't seem to delete user reviews for Lightyear made by all the bigots that were offended by having two women kissing in the movie so it seems that there's some preferential treatment for Amazon properties.
And deleting negative reviews by bigots at least would be more defensible than deleting negative reviews from fans of Tolkien who take issue with the treatment of the work they love.
EDIT: I still haven't seen the show yet and I originally thought the issue with review bombing was similar to people like me hating the show foundation on Apple TV... I see now that people claim that a lot of negative reviews were due to the race of characters and people claiming the "show is too woke". In that case, it's actually more of a similar situation to Lightyear. Still, it's very interesting to see the differing treatment of Lightyear, a pixar property compared to this, an Amazon show.
I agree. The first two episodes of The Rings of Power are unbearably boring. But let's wait.
Anyway, IMDb ratings are getting totally unreliable to me. I wasted hours of my life that won't come back, watching some show called The Terminal List that scored a solid eight. Carnage of Asimov's Foundation is 7.4 and that... thing, The Wheel of Time 7.1.
I wonder if there's a way to see evolution of rating, for me Star Trek Discovery seasons are nine, seven, two, pass... but it's holding at 7 right now.
Its interesting how different tastes people can have. I, for one, couldnt stand Foundation for more than three episodes. Severance, on the other hand, is like a one, series-long, good Black Mirror episode.
Oof, that's sad..
I really liked RbW but didn't want to get too invested because it felt like it wouldn't even get a second season. Then the second season was released, got me really invested, and now this, booh!
At least the second season of Foundation is still being filmed, looking forward to that and hopefully that will last past two seasons.
The Three-Body Problem is getting a TV show on Netflix, heard good things about the books, maybe the show can live up to them.
Wasn't Campion's Power of the Dog an Oscar-rated Netflix film? I agree overall however, Apple is competing with the legacy content monsters the right way. Severance was great art, Slow Horses is compelling, Foundation had its issues but also better moments than any Netflix Sci-Fi show I've seen the past few years (Nightflyers, Another Life, etc don't even come close), and For All Mankind is well-written.
Netflix is screwed.
It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you could find it on Netflix, put it in your DVD queue and in a few days receive the DVD in the mail. Their inventory was really good, (with some exceptions) and the service had pretty fast turnaround. Phase 1.
Then broadband started becoming more available, so streaming became a natural extension. Here's where Netflix faced bigger challenges. Initially, IP owners were happy to sell streaming rights for pennies since they didn't have any idea of the real value. Netflix leveraged this to build up an even bigger catalog that wasn't constrained by the number of DVDs in their inventory.
Netflix started to dabble in producing (and buying) content for their streaming. Good stuff like Stranger Things. The Crown. Dark. Babylon Berlin. And IP owners started raising the prices for renewals for movies and series in their catalogs. Netflix decided to cheap out on the quality of their shows. And they started to cut down on their DVD catalog as well.
Now you have all of the IP owners with their own streaming services, so Netflix will find it really hard to stream anything but the crappiest stuff. And they've shown little ability to consistently produce quality series or movies.
Contrast this with ATV+. Apple knew that it had a huge potential customer base, but that licensing IP wasn't going to be sustainable; whatever they streamed had to be exclusive. So they started slow, trying to replace HBO for high quality content. And they had some meh shows like "See." Not bad, but not HBO. Then "The Morning Show," followed by "Ted Lasso." Now they're starting to get some traction. Having an infinite amount of money always helps, but they became pretty good at saying no. "For All Mankind" grabbed a chunk of sci-fi viewers. Greyhound captured the war nerds. Slowly, carefully, they've been building up a pretty solid catalog. Now you have shows like "Servant," "Slow Horses," "The Mosquito Coast," "Foundation."
Cap it off with a series and a movie that have set ATV+ on par with any streaming service: Severance and Coda.
Now ATV+ will never have the catalog that Disney+ has. They might be fine with that. But where does this leave Netflix? Netflix has no serious movies that could compete for an Oscar. They don't seem to have the ability to create must see TV anymore. Perhaps they're too driven by algorithms to give the viewer what Netflix "thinks" they want? I just can't see a path forward for Netflix as other than crappy shows. Even with their foreign content, they face increased price pressure and competition from the other SVODs.
> TV audiences would, understandably, have a hard time getting invested in a show where the entire cast and conflict changes every episode.
Do Anthology series generally perform bad?
> Changing characters’ genders and ethnicities is a must for modern times—there were virtually no female characters in Asimov’s early books—and, of course, it doesn’t affect the story in the slightest.
But it is good for marketing, women want to feel represented and bigots need imaginary problems to rant on YouTube about, effectively free advertising.
> The first two episodes of Foundation just began streaming on Apple TV+. Single episodes will drop weekly thereafter.
I'm confused, did the author get special access to episodes 3+, or is this review based on the first 2 episodes?
Overall, I can see an original storyline based on the same universe turning out better. I like the idea of a high tech Roman empire falling, and I'm also a Warhammer 40k fan.
I haven't watched the series yet, it might stay on the backburner a long time if no one I trust endorses it.
In the Apple TV series Foundation they do that, including extending beyond the family to any kind of connections, friends and etc. Eventually including something around 1500+ individuals tied to one person. The point being to eliminate whatever impact that person had on the universe.
Maybe Google's algorithm is more concerned with being a tyrannical emperor than we think ...
Are there any good studies of how well particular sci-fi writers predicted the future and what processes they used to attempt it. I say this
a) As I remember an article ranking John Bruner as one of the best, but can't remember where I read it, though a web search revealed this article [1] listing some of his significant successes in guessing right (though he had some misses as well).
b) It lists some of the techniques he tried to do this, 3 years reading up on a variety of topics, visited various places and did some 'parallel thought exercises'?
Is there anything similar for any other sci-fi writers or series as it reminds me of the psychohistory idea that popped up recently in Asimov's Foundation TV series which is a rabbit-hole in itself [2].
[1] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190509-the-1968-sci-fi-that-spookily-predicted-today
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory
Not even closely. You couldn't make the Matrix without CGI and the CGI in something like Foundation looks so absolutely gorgeous that I wouldn't mind if I could just fly around in the world and gape at it.
No matter how much I love TOS almost all the aliens were just a guy in a fursuit and all the rocks are shiny...
Now of course you can make terrible movies and try to cover it up with CGI, but back in the day they just made terrible movies and tried to cover it up with boobs, guns and explosions. Not really that I mind either.
You're too focussed on the narrow technology implementation and not on the potential consumer experience.
Here's what a rational, profitable scenario would look like to me: in the not-too-distant-future, you land in country X and you get prompted if you would you like a local number by partner Mobile network. If you agree, Apple submits your electronic ID[1] to the Mobile Network for KYC purposes (with your opt-in), you pay with your Apple wallet, and you get a local number. The network gets paid, and Apple gets its cut (as well as a subsequent payments, if it's a PAYG plan) - and you haven't even picked up your baggage from the carousel. Apple can even play off networks against each other and pick the more profitable ones, and consumers get a sleek onboarding experience for a fee, or bundled with your Apple TV/iTunes/iServices subscription, so you can resume watching season 10 of Foundation while you wait for your Uber.
1. https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/15/apple-strict-terms-on-us-states-digital-ids/
would you download a car?
theft is when you take something from someone, when you download a movie, Netflix users can still watch it, Netflix can still stream it and they don't lose anything.
In fact their profits have gone up, despite helping piracy by releasing more and more content easily sharable outside of their platforms.
Netflix alone made 7.5 billions in the third quarter of 2021, up from 6.4 billions in the third of 2020.
someone really believes that leaks are unfortunate? have you seen a single image leaked from the next Indiana Jones movie? Do you know the title?No? you know why? because they'll work next year on the post production and are keeping everything under rigorous control. leaks will be useful only when they are ready to launch. When Luca..ehm Disney wants to take secrecy seriously, they absolutely can and will.
Anyway: I pay for prime video, because it's included with prime. I rarely watch other streaming services nor download their content.
Last exception was Foundation from Apple, thank god I did not pay for that!
Usually it works like this: I wanna watch an old movie, say Total Recall, some streaming service bought it for Christmas or whatever occasion together with all Schwarzenegger movie, to release a "member berry" bundle
I probably already have it, ripped from DVD, when it comes out I download it again because I'll probably find the x265 version which is smaller or the 2160p (or 1080p) restored version.
Glad to hear RbW S2 is coming. I HATED Foundation. I tried to power through it and gave up in disgust halfway through episode 6. Agreed that the genetic dynasty was the best part of the show, and really the only parts that I enjoyed.
How did Foundation end up being after episode 2? I stopped watching then and kinda forgot about the show
It probably would be possible to turn A Deepness In the Sky into a TV series, but it would need about the same high budget and first season run time as the Foundation series (10 hours?) to really go into sufficient depth on the 3 different cultures involved, and the order of events in that one book alone.
All three foundation books. I read them before watching the series and they were incredibly good. Although you can watch the series first if you want, the TV series and the books cross over about as much as the Harry Potter books and LOTR do, there’s wizards and baddies, that’s about it
I was really impressed with Terrence Mann's eye brow makeup (eye brow wigs, probably?) that were a really understated "special effect" to make Brother Dusk feel so related to Lee Pace. It took me episodes to realize that that must have been the one weird trick, but once I'd realized it seemed kind of obvious. His eyebrows look nothing like that in real life or other films/shows. (He was the bad guy in Sense8!)
> The series was great at times and then completely flat for long strips in-between.
Yeah, I'm still not entirely sure why they paced some of the show the way they did. That said they did cover several hundred years, so weird pacing was pretty much the nature/challenge the books gave them to try to adapt to.
It's possibly the sign of a good show that most people I've talked to disagree on which exactly were the flat bits. I love a good, long fly through shot of space scenery and/or "cool planets". I know lots of people that disagree. I thought there weren't enough scenes of Terminus "in action" doing what it was supposed to be (collecting/writing the Encyclopedia Galactica; which I don't think was even properly named anywhere in the first season?). The very few scenes they did include I know dragged for some people, because there is only so much most people can take of arguments about what to include in an Encyclopedia, but I wanted way more of such scenes because instead of showing them the show just kept instead telling you that Terminus was a planet of scientists and knowledge workers and needed protecting rather than showing you what Terminus' part of the plan was and what they were supposed to be doing, and why that was a great work driving them as a community.
Relatedly, I know a lot of people that loved the strange religious in-fighting and monologuing of that "The Mother" religion, and the Emperor trying to take advantage of it to delay the Fall (and likely making the Fall worse in the process) and oof did that drag for me. None of that stuff comes directly from the books. (Isaac Asimov was an atheist for much of his life and waxing poetic about a made up religion even just for worldbuilding purposes was outside of his wheelhouse/comfort zone and he knew it. Given some of showrunner Goyer's other stuff, I think such long monologues are also outside of his wheelhouse, but yet he doesn't seem to know or acknowledge it and just keeps writing them, but that's just my hot take.) Isaac Asimov did invent a fake religion for the books, but (spoilers for stuff to come) more in the way of the Foundation itself using religion as a coarse, gross controlling tool.
The books (it's a series) are amazing, well worth it.
The TV show is at best the equivalent of a 9th grader who picked up the cliff's notes, got bored halfway through those, and then wrote a book report. Some of the characters are there, and it's sci-fi, and that's about where the similarities end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series
The book (really, the series) is absolutely worth a read. I'm only a few episodes into the show, but so far they're not at all comparable. They're different stories with some common touch points.
The original Foundation books are an epistemology treatise masquerade as a sci-fi epic.
The goal was never to establish a human kind repository of knowledge, but to rule the world. Somebody read Asimov's Foundation series, much better than the current TV show creators anyway :-)
I had a thought that subtitles could also be used to provide an "explainer" for those movies where the plot is so complex and so much knowledge is assumed, its almost impossible to understand what is going on. This would have been great for the Foundation movie.
I'm quite conflicted because I wanted to like it so much and the production is so beautiful, but the fact they have reversed so many Asimov themes is really disheartening.
The sets, costumes, lighting, cinematography and most of the acting is truly superb. I'd think it's safe to say to it's the most enveloping sci-fi universe ever captured in a tv show with all the money and details that have gone into the production.
And yet the writing has Salvor Hardin shoot someone in the neck in the very episode they quote the famous aphorism "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent". The day to day technology within the empire is so advanced what room for innovation does the Foundation have? They seem to have abandoned the religious aspect of the first Foundation expansion, which would have been fascinating to explore (though they could still potentially retrieve by skipping forward and making Seldin and his appearance from beyond the grave into the basis for a faith that grows up around the founding of the alliance).
Maybe it's true Foundation is unfilmable as written, but there was room for taking the themes of the ossification of institutions and the innovation borne of necessity and making something that matched much more closely to the spirit of Foundation. What we got feels like a cargo cult adaption where the words match the book but there isn't any meaning, understanding or depth behind them.
My other Four:
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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
> the books are fascinating, but they are almost more like historical documentaries then narrative fiction
and this is why it's near impossible to translate Asimov's Foundation faithfully to TV. I don't understand why a lot of fans can't see this
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."
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.
> 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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
Hard to think of a more difficult show to film.
> 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 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.
In between there's a "Second Foundation" which is similar and would make a great TV show, but I think that ship has sailed with this mediocre show.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/dune-movie-foundation-series.html
* https://archive.md/YFxVi
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.
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.
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.
That's like starting Game of Thrones at Season 7.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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'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.
I tend to agree with you, but it should not be the conclusion. We must become ready to handle this, it is in my opinion the real underlying challenge behind the climate problem.
We have started this technologically driven expansion of the human footprint, and either we revert to pre-industrial levels or progress. Assuming that non-nuclear technology will let us have the cake (of prosperity) and eat it too (without drowning our cites) is the collective lie I see propagated politically.
In the spirit of the recent TV series release of "Foundation", this is our Seldon problem.
I haven't seen Dune yet but my take on Foundation is the same as Krugmans. Asimov's Foundation trilogy had the same impact on teenage me as it seems to have had on Krugman. I subscribed to AppleTV just to watch the adaptation but I haven't wanted to watch beyond the first few episodes. It's a pop-y star-wars themed insult to the source material.
Of course Paul Krugman is a fan of the Dune and Foundation books!
Very few shows or movies can pull off exploring how a system works, from top to bottom, to show how the world is shaped by rules, customs, etc. The Wire comes to mind as the best "real world" example. I was very impressed by how the Dune movie hinted at the underlying systems while translating the salient points and the "feel" of Dune to the language of film. While I feel it failed in some places, it's a hugely impressive achievement. I love Lynch and like his Dune, but really it's a totally different work from the books with surface level similarities. 2021 Dune feels like a true film adaptation, no easy feat.
Well at least I can take the Foundation TV show off my "to watch" list now
Thanks for that summary; I didn't know there was a Foundation TV show, and at the moment I don't care either.
It reminds me of an attempt to make a Brave New World TV show, which based on the trailer has... little to do with the original book. The book itself wasn't even a good book in terms of storytelling IMO, it was more about worldbuilding and a bleak look at a "utopian" future.
> All that made the original interesting is lost.
The economist Paul Krugman of all people wrote a 'review' of each basically saying the same thing:
> “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.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/dune-movie-foundation-series.html
* https://archive.md/YFxVi
I agree. Having read the books of both series though and coming in with the expectation that I just wanted interesting science fiction I’ve been pleased with both the Dune movie and the Foundation series.
Foundation (on Apple TV) seems to be trying to GoT-ify the books, and not for the better in some cases (characters are less thoughtful, more action-hero, kind of weird choices). Dune (2021) at least avoided that, but it really needed more dialog. There are a lot of ponderous and beautiful scenes and soundscapes + landscapes, what Villeneuve is great at (it's in all of his movies that I've seen, and an element I greatly enjoy). However, watching it with a friend he had more questions than answers by the end, and not just because it was the first half of the book (and the first of the original 6 books). More dialog with a bit more explanation, which could easily have fit into the movie with its long scenes just watching people stand there and look contemplative or worried without extending the total runtime. The pair of movies may work well as a whole, but this movie is not a terribly good standalone film.
>>>What makes Dune and Foundation scifi and not just feudalism in space? The Foundation TV show bores me to death
A LOT of science fiction is "X in space". The Hammer's Slammers stories are "Vietnam in space". The Honor Harrington novels are "Napoleonic naval warfare in space".
I listened to Asimov's Foundation trilogy on Audible in the past 2 years and greatly enjoyed it. I hate the TV series. At this point I'm just watching the episodes to see how bad the trainwreck can get. Villenueve's Dune was like a palate cleanser for me Saturday. It's been 20 years since I read the book, but I grew up in the 90's with David Lynch's movie and always really enjoyed it. Dune 2021 felt like a faithful book rendition with some of the best visual/stylistic influences from David Lynch, but without his worst excesses of weirdness.
>>>The last time someone tried to pull this conquering stuff was almost 100 years ago and it was doomed from the start.
Arguably none of the conquest-minded leaders since the late 1700s have been successful, almost always because they've been fighting against larger economies of similar technological/industrial development. Also, offensive technology has become so destructive that closely-fought wars leave too much of the "target" economies completely devastated and not much of a prize. That doesn't mean a) tech won't develop to shift the balance towards protection (such as the shields in Dune) b) the next megalomaniac might start from a better existing powerbase, such as, say....China in 2050.
What makes Dune and Foundation scifi and not just feudalism in space? The Foundation TV show bores me to death and when I look up their summaries online, they both seem to be about lessons of past civilizations more than the future. A galactic emprire? The last time someone tried to pull this conquering stuff was almost 100 years ago and it was doomed from the start.
I am on the other side. I found the movie was a faithful rendering.
But I was bored.
I wish someone will at some piont make a free adaptation, like romeo+juliet, romeo must die, the 2009 BBC version of Hamlet, etc. were.
Gang wars with Oakland police brutality with climate eco terrorists and Indians in reserve and a mad voodoo cult or something and a mind destroying drug/device à la a scanner darkly that gives people ability to foresee things (edit: told from the perspective of a Irulan the freelance social worker). Or maybe a 16th/17h pirate movie with European powers and full blown mysticism at the foreground. The same story but with a very different spin. I like remixes :).
Great movie, not my taste. Hope they can do part 2 for people who enjoyed it :).
You can guess I rather like the other thing, Foundation the TV show. Wish the they can pull it off and have time and resources to get their vision on screens.
Asimov stated himself that the story would need to be changed if a movie/serie adaptation was to be made.
This is still the story of the foundation to reduce 30,000 years of chaos to only 1,000. After all, psychohistory was never about individuals.
The changes made to some characters do not harm the story IMHO. It is still very enjoyable. The background is still there.
It is amazing, by far the best Science Fiction TV show in years. But it isn't really doing justice to the books, more using them as a lose focus point to spin their own story. They take things that are mentioned as a side note in a chapter and do a whole storyline of it.
Which is actually what I hoped for, since a) the format of the books is impossible to translate closely to a TV show or movie and b) Asimov is definitely a bit high and low in his writing. The first two books of Foundation are amazing, afterwards it gets quite meandering.
My main criticism would be the mystification of Psychohistory, which is a very serious flaw, but I'm willing to overlook it due to seriously lacking good science fiction entertainment.
I realize that adding up numbers doesn’t tell you if it’s a prime…I liked counting primes to quell anxiety but i couldn’t after the numbers got large. So I would just add random numbers to manageable digits and stick to simple prime numbers checks.(sorry..I can’t articulate…it was just something I did on the road because I hated driving)
Thanks re: book Vs series Dornick. I am trying to get into it. I just finished episode 3. I have mixed feelings about the series so far. I don’t think I can go back and re read Foundation series. I won’t even know which order to read it in…
Not spoiler alert but small detail reveal :
. . . . .
In episode 2, there is a bit where Dornick counts primes and utters an even number..corrects herself and realizes that ‘something is wrong’. They make it look like it was pregnant with some kind of meaning. The whole thing was just odd, but it made me wonder if I missed something or if I forgot the book plot.
Haha
I studied Physics because of reading Asimov as a child, and discovered it was way more difficult and boring in real life. Re-read Foundation when I heard the TV show was coming out, and discovered that it was a terrible book. Asimov, you old deceiver
Foundation. Wheel of time. Lord of the rings. Marvel movies. James Bond. You’re right, lots of other media that drives book sales.
7 habits, win friends and influence people. There’s a decent amount of examples.
I tried subscribing to AppleTV just to not find anything worth watching and justifying subscription, many of my friends say the same. I get this show is great, but maybe for Foundation I will subscribe just to watch it and then drop. I am curious what other shows you like that make you justify that sub, if you have Netflix for example.
Came here to say this :). Especially with the Foundation TV series coming out now this could almost be a PR stunt.
The thesis seems sound, though. When you have a large number of people who have the aptitude and have invested heavily in joining the ranks of the elite (both financially and time-wise), and there's just not enough room at the top, what do they do?
We see that in India with the rise of a huge number of engineering colleges. There's a massive over-supply of engineers, so people who have invested in a masters degree at great cost and 5 to 6 years of studying wind up working in vocational jobs that could have been done with a six-month diploma / apprenticeship. They're not happy.
I’m looking forward to Apple’s upcoming TV versions of Dune by Frank Herbert and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. These are such big stories that they can’t be squeezed into a movie without losing their allure.
And don't forget about The Foundation! It's a good time to be a fan of Space Opera.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804484/
He said it, but meant reading.
Regular fans will continue to read Asimov, as they do today, 70+ years after some books where published.
In fact, there is (was?) a TV series coming up on Foundation as well...
> That I Robot movie with Will Smith as an abomination.
Funny thing about that movie. The movie is based on a spec script called Hardwired, and it originally had no connection to I, Robot. Also, the writer of that script wrote the screenplay for a cancelled film adaptation of Foundation.
http://www.screenwritersutopia.com/article/d19127d8
Big Asimov fan, and really looking forward to this. I just hope they don't screw it up. Fortunately the stuff coming out of the internet based media companies has been good. I would not trust the blockbuster movie industry to do it. JJ Abrahms does Asimov would be an abomination. That I Robot movie with Will Smith as an abomination. At least Apple has the $$$ to pull it off.
Foundation series would be ideal though, as you could cycle through actors. Really would like to see a miniseries, maybe 10 hours for each book could do it, but I don't know about the 1 hour format. Would like to see 2 hour movies. I don't know how compatible it would be with the internet attention span.
What I don't trust Hollywood to do, is to keep it hard sci-fi, which is why I love Asimov.
For example, through the series he spends many pages covering hyper-spacial navigation. Sub light until you get outside the gravity wells, micro jump, then spend two weeks figuring out where you are, micro jump again, etc. This changes as technology is developed from Robots through Foundation.
They'd have to do the same with many other topics, such as mathematical psycho-history. That's what makes it Asimov. Otherwise they would turn it into a space-opera.
I love Foundation but it is dry as hell compared to what most people expect from TV/Movies today.
If they made it like the books, those of us that have read it would probably love it, but I doubt it would be popular.
Foundation makes more sense as a miniseries/series similar to the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
There is a little bit of similarity, but to be honest the complexity is completely different.
Gene Wolfe is several orders of complexity higher than the Foundation series. Its threads are tied together in ways that will blow your mind. You need to be totally, totally awake to understand what you are reading. You don't get 'clues'. You get one chance to grasp something Wolfe is telling you. It is extremely rewarding as well as intellectual.
I cannot count the number of times I had a "holy fuck" moment, Wolfe is unbelievably smart.
You know how people on Reddit and 4chan look for 'mindfuck' movies.
This book, The Book of the New Sun, is on another level. My mind changed its frame of reference about a dozen times reading it. Normally a good author manages to accomplish that once.
There is basically no way I can ruin this book for you by hyping your expectations. It is just that good.
Also; I must beg a favour so I can return one to you. You must read the book (there's two volumes of 4 books total) while listening to a piece of 'music'. The Voyager Recordings.
This is not actually music. It is what the sensors picked up on the spacecraft as they pointed their arrays at the different planets.
If you listen to this while you read the book, it'll make it much more immersive.
I know this sounds dumb as hell, but it is hard to explain. Just do it, you'll thank me later.
P.S. Your initials won't happen to be N.D would they? Foundation is his favorite book also. If so I won't hold it against you, I'm not that kind of guy, but do read and listen. It is rewarding, and important, I think. I know I somehow changed after doing this, it was as if the world had deeper textures and certain things just clicked or something. Maybe I'm a strange person on the internet, but it is worth taking a risk to find out.
>I just (like two days ago :) finished reading the Foundation series. Psychohistory loses some of its magic for twenty-first century readers in the face of chaos theory and black swans.
Chaos theory might be good for the weather (or the stock market and other such micro/fast events) but it might not apply that well to human societies in long term trends (which are not that chaotic and unpredictable, most of history reads like a continuous narrative with cause and effects quite very much at play).
He also predicted the possibility of "black swans" ruining psychohistories predictions and had an agency (let's call it a "second foundation") to influence things and handle those situations.
That said, there were rumors of a Foundation based tv series. I wonder how that's going...
http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/asimovs-foundation-trilogy-to-be-made-into-hbo-series.454575436/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804484/
If any network could even remotely stand a chance of doing that series justice, it would be HBO. However, it seems a bit outside the norm for them. Even in their most creatively rich productions, HBO still likes to incorporate sex and violence in ways that are often flatly gratuitous.
It's been a long time since I've read the Foundation series, but I don't recall a great deal of sex or face-to-face violence. So would this series be tame by HBO standards (and possibly disappoint their usual audience), or would they shoehorn in a lot of gratuitous sex and violence (and possibly disappoint fans of the source material)?
Of course, I've never understood being hostile toward a film or TV adaptation, for fear that it will "ruin" the original source material. Maybe the series will be great, and maybe it will suck, but the books will always be what they are.
I don't want a Firefly sequel, at this point the only thing that could happen to it, realistically, is making it worse. It's good as it is, let it lie, invent some new IP or dig up something that hasn't been on the screen yet.
I could maybe go for a Foundation mini-series. Baring that, lots of other possibilities out there in terms of books or fresh ideas.