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Apple to adapt Asimov's Foundation

Anyway, Foundation is out.

I didn't expect them to drop the Space Elevator on Episode one. It's certainly a very spectacular sight, but I find it a bit worisome.

One of the core themes of Foundation is that the individual events, the individual people don't matter that much (or at least, that when they matter, psychohistory fails). The Space Elevator drop that "changes everything" as a bit of a 9/11 parallel comes across as one of these singular shocking events, exactly the kind of thing that Psychohistory is bad at.

Combine that with what appears to be a stronger focus on characters, with the Emperor appearing to be a bit of a madman (he gets introduced by blowing up an elderly servant who worked for him for 80 years for reading Seldon's work) and it seems like the adaption risks missing the point for spectacle.

In the original works (though asimov retconned it) Trantor fell not due to singular terrorist actions, but because it was the center of the empire, and as a massive planetary city it was incredibly vulnerable. The greater the empire became, the greater Trantor became, the more the security of Trantor needed to be guaranteed, the greater the centralization, and so on, until Trantor became a massive vulnerability that drew away all Imperial attention.

The outer reaches didn't fight their way free, they were just ignored and given token obligations as succesive emperors focused more and more resources inwards.

Edit : Asimov later retconned this by ascribing Trantor's fall to an increasing disinterest in technology over the worship of old authors, leading to a slow and general decline, which I find a much weaker point.


Edit 2 : Also, Galen's Homeworld Synnax is mentioned only a few sentences, but it makes a rather unsubtle point. The seas of their homeworld were rising, but no one wanted to hear it, so they burned the universities and made math illegal.

Now, they all live on pole villages with flooded landing paths. Bit of a global warming metaphor.

So yeah, I'm a bit afraid of it going all action-y and spectacle, and they also have to pad out 100 pages of short story to about 10 hours of television.

Especially with Amazon hoping to get a Games of Thrones style hit.
 
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I was... tentatively impressed. Yes, it's not the original Foundation, but frankly the original Foundation was a gigantic slog. Asimov couldn't write characters or action and so the story was a bunch of people sitting in rooms talking uninterestingly. The high concept was interesting, but as a practical piece of writing it was arguably some of Asimov's weakest.

So I don't think that major changes to the source material were unwarranted.

That being said it seems to me that while the original Foundation was essentially inspired by The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it seems much more likely to me that the writers of the new-Foundation are essentially reframing the Empire not as Rome but as America. The Empire is ruled by a succession of clones whose persons change but whose policies essentially remain the same regardless; terrorist attacks cause those same leaders to lash out, inevitably committing ever-greater resources to a series of failed peripheral conflicts that drain resources while only making the situation worse. The global warming crisis on Synnax couldn't really be more obvious if they'd put a giant bow on it with a blinking light.

And I am not sure I like that. I feel like it's a lens that's been used just too many times. At least Asimov qua Gibbon's story of the Imperial fall is... different. I fear that the writers just found it too old fashioned.

Other plot changes I care less about, but are still interesting. The significant change in the role of Cleon in the Empire - and the consequent change in the role of Demerzel, and in fact, the immediate (or nearly immediate) disclosure of the identity of Demerzel struck me as notable changes. I wonder whether it presages the return of Demerzel in some fashion. In a similar - and potentially related? - way, the almost immediate up front hint toward the Second Foundation struck me as notable, and I wonder whether we will see the evolution of the Second Foundation in parallel - along with Demerzel's potential involvement - with the story of the First Foundation and the Library.
 
I mean, Gibbon was a hack who wrote a very poor history important only because it was one of the earliest of those types of history.

But reframing every polity as the American empire is... exhausting. You can tell a story of the fall of the empire, even leaning on bad roman histories, and that would be more welcome. Well maybe, there's a lot of racial connotations in the decline and fall narrative that if you don't do carefully you end up telling the story of how race mixing brought down the decadent empire or how the racially coded howling savage barbarians did (depending on what basic interpretation you want to go with).





One change I really wish they didn't make was making Seldon an older father figure. Jared Harris is a truly fantastic actor, but, I feel like slotting another old white dude into the place of the prophetic visionary is... both dull and kind of a damning reflection on how far we have not come as a society.
 
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Asimov's take has the advantage that there are no 'barbarians at the gates' for the Empire at the start, and when the Empire starts looking at it like that, it's portrayed partly from the perspective of 'barbarians' and partly that the Empire's view of it itself is a symptom of the decline.
 
I rather like the first foundation book (least from my recollection). But they are clearly not taking it to heart (which is fine, it could make for very dull TV for most people, albeit I do occaisionally enjoy movies that are literally just 6 to 12 men in a room talking for hours). So in adapting a decline and fall patterned off rome, there's always the pressure to take the easy road of the simple narratives of scholars past, or I should say the simplified summaries of scholars past who are too dead to complain how their work is simplified. And the barbarians at the gate is an enduring, if very wrong, narrative of decline and fall.
 
stratigo said:
One change I really wish they didn't make was making Seldon an older father figure.
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Well, I mean... if you're doing Foundation and decided that you're not starting with the prequels[1] you kind of have to start with the end of Hari Seldon's story because that's where the story of the Foundation begins.

[1] Which... okay. Prelude and Forward add a fair bit of backstory to how this whole thing started (to say nothing of the Killer B books, but that is a can of worms for another day entirely) but they're not as highly regarded and get a little weird in that classic "Golden Age writer does what he wants" way. Though they're definitely taking material from the prequels given Demerzel's in it...
 
Mal-3 said:
Well, I mean... if you're doing Foundation and decided that you're not starting with the prequels[1] you kind of have to start with the end of Hari Seldon's story because that's where the story of the Foundation begins.

[1] Which... okay. Prelude and Forward add a fair bit of backstory to how this whole thing started (to say nothing of the Killer B books, but that is a can of worms for another day entirely) but they're not as highly regarded and get a little weird in that classic "Golden Age writer does what he wants" way. Though they're definitely taking material from the prequels given Demerzel's in it...
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They're madlibbing characters and periods all about. If you want your tense court drama, then Seldon as a young man developing psychohistory in the empire is where you get that.

The show really doesn't have a lot to do with the books other than a name though. It isn't just a change of adaptation, but seems more an entirely divorced story.
 
Watched both episodes, eh. Production design is gorgeous and Lee Pace is having a blast, but the dialogue is wall to wall Dramatic Hints About What's To Come without ever giving the (ridiculously stacked) cast any time to just sit down and chill. It feels like a two+ hour trailer for itself, just constant references to all the cool stuff that lays ahead, with no real characters or human emotion.
 
Having watched the second episode, they really just keep doubling down on Seldon as a messiah like figure. Iunno, this kind of happens in the later stories in the books, but I never got an impression that he cultivated this in his own lifetime. Just... feels off to have this story of the importance of science and then make the big scientist more like jesus then einstein.
 
I liked the first episode but this series is wasted on Apple's terrible streaming service. (I could not get through a single minute of runtime on my PS5 without it buffering, no matter how long I gave it to load...)
 
Anyway, a few nitpicks, not bad things, but just weird things I noticed.

1) Why is the trial with Seldon broadcast on live TV? The Emperor believes that controlling the message and the people and order is important, so why let the guy spew his fearmongering on live tv. Why not do the thing any propaganda maker knows how to do, and record it in advance and then broadcast the editted stuff, so that he can't blindside you?

2) They show Demerzel doing a violent police raid killing everyone in the lab. But she's a robot, which means she follows the 3 laws. And the first law is

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Now, there's a zeroth law exemption to this, but that's a bit of logic that significantly stresses the positronic brain. It seems weird to do the whole bloody raid thing when surely non-lethal means could have been employed. I mean, they had the tech to capture a human non=lethally by shooting her spinal cord, capturing all the other techs should have been trivial.

All of this is only minor niggles at best, but it makes it seem as if they forgot parts of the setting and parts of the logic for the sake of spectacle.
 
10ebbor10 said:
Anyway, a few nitpicks, not bad things, but just weird things I noticed.

1) Why is the trial with Seldon broadcast on live TV? The Emperor believes that controlling the message and the people and order is important, so why let the guy spew his fearmongering on live tv. Why not do the thing any propaganda maker knows how to do, and record it in advance and then broadcast the editted stuff, so that he can't blindside you?

2) They show Demerzel doing a violent police raid killing everyone in the lab. But she's a robot, which means she follows the 3 laws. And the first law is

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Now, there's a zeroth law exemption to this, but that's a bit of logic that significantly stresses the positronic brain. It seems weird to do the whole bloody raid thing when surely non-lethal means could have been employed. I mean, they had the tech to capture a human non=lethally by shooting her spinal cord, capturing all the other techs should have been trivial.

All of this is only minor niggles at best, but it makes it seem as if they forgot parts of the setting and parts of the logic for the sake of spectacle.
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The way the second episode was edited, I really feel like Demerzel is going to turn out to be responsible for the destruction of the space elevator/Trantor Station. IIRC they hard cut right to her when Brother Dawn was interrogating the ambassador's about "who was responsible", and the references to the Robot Wars/hanging sympathizers was pretty deliberate.
 
I mean, I can't imagine they're gonna pull a foundation and earth twist in the show. So I suspect Demerezel has an entirely different backstory for the show then the books.
 
Squishy said:
That being said it seems to me that while the original Foundation was essentially inspired by The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it seems much more likely to me that the writers of the new-Foundation are essentially reframing the Empire not as Rome but as America. The Empire is ruled by a succession of clones whose persons change but whose policies essentially remain the same regardless; terrorist attacks cause those same leaders to lash out, inevitably committing ever-greater resources to a series of failed peripheral conflicts that drain resources while only making the situation worse. The global warming crisis on Synnax couldn't really be more obvious if they'd put a giant bow on it with a blinking light
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They could have used the Bronze Age Collapse as inspiration instead of Rome or modern America. It wasn't used by Asimov back when he was writing Foundation because back then most historians and archeologists were clueless about most of it. Bronze Age Collapse was a Systems Collapse which is eerily reminiscent of not current day America but of current day global civilization as a whole (so it could have been used as a modern allegory too). Of course, many Americans are so Americano-centric at times, that we will get the N-th anvilicious retelling of the last 21 years of US domestic politics. 😒
 
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stratigo said:
I mean, I can't imagine they're gonna pull a foundation and earth twist in the show. So I suspect Demerezel has an entirely different backstory for the show then the books.
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Counterpoint: They're almost certain going be thinking that maybe they can make an 'I Robot' prequel series if this is successful.
 
tankdrop24 said:
Counterpoint: They're almost certain going be thinking that maybe they can make an 'I Robot' prequel series if this is successful.
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I'd have said the Baley novels would be more likely than the more disparate I, Robot stories, but considering how they're changing things...
 
Arthur Frayn said:
The way the second episode was edited, I really feel like Demerzel is going to turn out to be responsible for the destruction of the space elevator/Trantor Station. IIRC they hard cut right to her when Brother Dawn was interrogating the ambassador's about "who was responsible", and the references to the Robot Wars/hanging sympathizers was pretty deliberate.
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Ironically I think this would be probably more true to Prelude to Foundation than how it currently appears, with Demerzel pulling the strings of a functionally impotent Cleon to get Seldon where he needs to be.
 
Is anyone still watching this? I found it very entertaining as, with most adaptations, something that had very little to do with the source material except for shared names. As a show on its own I quiet enjoyed watching it so far, until we got to Episode 7.

I still enjoy it, but it feels like we've stepped a bit into (old) Babylon 5 territory here a bit. Another show I really enjoy, but definitely chock full of fantasy elements, not just the sci-fi bits.

The whole Gaal "I can feel the future" bit, and then doubling down on that with the 'your brain is greater than even math' explanation in episode 8 bothers me. It just feels way too much like this show stepped into supernatural>science, which seems ... IDK, just contrary to the type of science fiction Asimov wrote. Maybe it's because I'm currently reading Sagan's "Candle in the Dark" book concurrently. I was just not happy to see them sort of upend "science" for "the mystical" as a central plot point.

The Expanse is still my favorite modern sci-fi of the moment. Still enjoying this series, but whew those last two episodes.

Well. Still enjoying the Empire arc too.
 
Enkida said:
The whole Gaal "I can feel the future" bit, and then doubling down on that with the 'your brain is greater than even math' explanation in episode 8 bothers me. It just feels way too much like this show stepped into supernatural>science, which seems ... IDK, just contrary to the type of science fiction Asimov wrote. Maybe it's because I'm currently reading Sagan's "Candle in the Dark" book concurrently. I was just not happy to see them sort of upend "science" for "the mystical" as a central plot point.
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Yeah, the show takes a diametrically opposite point of view than Asimov had. Foundation fundamentally is based on the idea that as science advances it can explain everything, to the point that even humans can be predicted. Even when psionic powers show up, these are scientific psionic powers. The first FOundation makes a computer to detect them, the second foundation studies them rigorously, they're literally a pattern etched in a robot's brain. Religion in Foundation is a crude fake, a tool used to control people.

In the show however, religion is real. The indication we have are that visions are real. We also see that the jump drive is not a science, but more of a connection to a brain so that you can wish where you go. There's a lot of mysticism in Foundation, and it's treated as relatively credible.

That said, I'd say Babylon 5 did it's fantastical elements considerably better. Foundation's plot stands in opposition to it's fantastical elements, Babylon 5 integrated them.
 
I'm giving this show a season to impress me, but it reeks of the writers wanting to do their own story, not having the clout to do so, and saying that they're adapting Foundation to get their story off the ground.

There are certainly the names from Foundation, but the themes seem to be stone dead and regarded as 'the words of a dead old man'.

I'm giving this show until the season finale, but I fear that they instead want to have the show be more about psychic powers, chosen ones, destiny, faith, and how the individual matters, instead of the movements of people's, organizations, social concepts, trade, etc.
 
Speaking as someone who never read the books, I have a theory that might show up in the season finale:

Demerzel is somehow connected to the Brother Dawn plot.

I don't see how she, an android whose seen multiple Cleons from birth to death and would be very familiar with all the particular details all the Cleons shared, could have possibly missed the differences Dawn had from his predecessors. His color-blindness, his lef-handedness, even how he doesn't like that one food the other Cleons like. I could buy Day and Dusk taking a while to notice the differences, especially if they're busy running the Empire. But Demerzel, whose duty includes watching over and tutoring Dawn? Not a chance, and she should have surely noticed and reported the differences years ago.

The only way it makes sense for Demerzel to not have noticed the differences is if she actually did the whole time. Considering her position, she would have been the perfect person to smuggle out Cleon DNA to be cloned, alter Dawn's DNA before his birth, and even get Azura a job as a gardener. I'm not sure how her programming could allow her to do such an unambiguous act of treason, but it's possible her specific motivations didn't strictly violate her programming (similar to when she bowed to that priestess) or the programming was altered by some unknown being. Either way, Day and Dusk should have some very pointed questions about why she either didn't notice all those differences or didn't say a word about it to anyone.

Maybe I'm way off with this theory or even giving the show-writers too much credit, but that's what I'm going to go with, and I bet 20 Internet Points I'm going to be at least partially right.
 
Anyway, the season is over.

It seems like psychohistory is included as an obligation for the writers instead of being the core of what the plot is built upon.

Seldon's grand plan for this crisis relied on him explaining, at the end, how the people of the Foundation need to use the giant battleship to fake being killed by a solar flare so that the empire won't notice them.
The core of the plot then isn't about how social forces push things, but about how action heroes heroically claim a battleship. Only at the end there's a little bit of exposition about how only through working together can everyone win, but even there it's Seldon who reveals that it was Empire who originally set up the eons long conflict.

Gaal and Hardin find an excuse to be shot of to season 2 with their superpowers, which hopefully should mean that season 2 is less defined by special individuals doing special things while special, but who knows...

The Empire arc was great though.
I'm still not quite sure I like it conceptually (it reduces the fall of the empire to the fall of individuals) but it is compelling, well executed and thematically relevant.
 
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