I would say the biggest problem is the marketing that implies they faithfully are telling the books, when they’re not. The TV show is not faithful to the books.
That said: the books are fascinating, but they are almost more like historical documentaries then narrative fiction. It works well because they are _short_ stories, and following the span of history, frequently jumping ahead a generation, is cool. But it would’ve been very difficult to render that as-is for television and have much of an audience. Also, the original stories were written in the 1940s and some parts feel quite dated (everyone is smoking all the time, the hyper focus on nuclear power, the relative role of women). So whoever picked the stories up, they were going to make a lot of changes.
If you think of the series merely as “inspired by” them not “based on them,” then the show isn’t bad. It has some corny flaws like most TV (the combat, just terrible), but they’ve developed a few good characters, added some new mysteries, and the order in which they’re unfolding events over time is interesting.
So, is it a classic? No. Is it faithful to the books? Not at all. But IMO it’s decent sci-fi, and interesting enough to watch if you’re bored :)
It’s a really grand scope for a universe - but I’m enjoying the series so far and it will be interesting to see where they go with it. Basically I’m just hungry for more space and since it’s visually very appealing and the universe is compelling, I think it deserves a chance.
Agreed.
The inspiration behind the Foundation series, setting out to shorten the Dark Ages after the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is great.
However, if you try reading those short stories again today, you're quickly reminded that early in his career, Asimov was already great at world building, but terrible with characters and dialog.
Add in the mismatch between the cultural norms of the 1940's (when the early Foundation stories were written) and the cultural norms today, and a rewrite was always going to be required.
It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's the first live action adaptation beyond the robot movie. Kind of always have to be forgiving with a first attempt. Even Star Trek TNG didn't get into a grove until 2nd or 3rd season.
What movies have you seen that have been faithful to the literary work but still were great movies? I'm struggling to come up with one.
For God's sake.
It's screenplay writers work to adapt. One did a good job if they create a nice screen play. If that work is simplified by a solid foundation (pun intended), we'd expect at least not worse off from starting from scratch.
Look at what we get in this visual carnage of garbage.
Of course they had to make some changes and flesh out some characters to adapt it for TV. They just made poor choices. Instead of going with chosen ones, heroes, and battles, they should have gone for politics in space.
Something like the political manouvering in A Song of Ice and Fire but in space.
It's not like I don't enjoy anything (the Empire plot is solid even though it's not at all from the books, proof that I'm not a purist or anything), but everything just shows a lack of interest in being faithful to the main ideas of the books.
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
It's bad.. the dialogue, conflict, etc., are far below the levels we've come to expect in sci-fi shows like Expanse.
This is a complete waste of Jared Harris' talents. In the last episode, the resolution of his incomplete download was dramatized by a bit more screaming, then he was all good.
It doesn't feel elevated or sophisticated at all... it does look very pretty.
But it's not even representative of itself -- they keep talking about "trillions" of people here and there, and the new Book of Boba Fett does a better job of selling large population centers than Foundation ever does.
Also, my son made a point about the "unfilmable" books, which are a lot of dialogue: aren't most cop and lawyer shows mostly a lot of talk, usually in just a few common settings?
I don't care about the books and stopped watching mid season. The production impressed me for the first episode and then it was very bland and boring. There is no drama, nothing that caught my attention. It feels like watching a boring documentary.
Nah, consisting mostly of dialogue doesn't make something unfilmable. That description applies to tons of good movies. "Unfilmable" becomes a possibility when there's little way to show anything, other than having characters speak infodumps at the audience. Even dialog-heavy movies need to show you things, even if it's just the physical movement and reactions of characters during the dialogue, or items about the room.
I'm still surprised about how slow they can make an hour-long episode. Between fistfights, face closeups and gratuitous sex scenes and drama, barely anything advances. It's following the Star Trek Discovery formula but in slow motion.
No, the show simply isn’t good. It suffers from the Netflix Disease. High production quality, painfully mediocre writing.
I do not like the show. It's a decent scifi environment, but the actual storytelling is pretty awful, IMO.
The only thing I like is the mysteries. I'm not very far in, but they're few and far between, and wading through all the crap to learn about them is tiring. I keep trying to force myself to watch the next episode, but it doesn't happen.
IMHO, that matches the books.
If you want to make an action-y television series, then choose action-y source material. There's so much good sci-fi (and fantasy) out there that can be used for that type of style. The Vorkosigan Saga for one:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga
While it may be possible to adapt Waiting for Godot into a Die Hard-like movie, why would you do so?
I don't get the problem with Foundation. Like why can't they take the source material and create their own interpretation? What's so wrong with that? Maybe someone will go on and create a Vorkosigan Saga interpretation too?
I read the books. Loved them. Really enjoying the show too.
The characters keep avoiding explosions and evading terrorists, mostly uninterested and unaffected by them, focused only on their eventual meeting with their CIA contact who is code named Godot.
Occasionally an unusually big action sequence will trigger an extended reflection on the banality of it all.
And the Brothers’ are some of the most intriguing sci fi characters that I’ve watched.
The ideas are all new to me and I have no idea where the story is going.
They'd make terrible, boring TV.
I'm glad they've not attempted a shot-for-shot remake of the books as a TV show, and instead chosen to adapt by taking some of the core ideas and (thusfar) general gist of of the stories and turn them into something. I'm glad I get to explore those ideas further and put my head in that world a bit more. I like that they've added some other interesting ideas to play with.
I think the moaning is just the same general thing that comes up any time anything is adapted to screen. There's a huge contingent of people that, for some reason, seem to treat the source material as some holy text that's never to be changed instead of just being happy that some of the good and interesting elements are being carried over into a new story.
The issue is: they're high-glitz Hollywood garbage: "We can't think of any new ideas, so we'll just make the actors more 'modern' and relatable, and spend a lot on the CGI."
It's interesting that I don't watch much sci-fi, but AppleTV is also running Invasion which I do find watchable. Even though those characters are also kinda cliched.
I think they actually do quite a good job of integrating all these themes of freedom, social constraint and inertia, personhood and destiny. The first book doesn't really do any of that, so in doing so the show is diverging dramatically from the story of the first book. Nevertheless given psychohistory they're all interesting questions. Later books do explore various implications of psychohistory, but I don't think it's viable for a show to wait x-many seasons before bringing in these themes.
The problem is the actual story is a bit sluggish, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because I can see what they are trying to do.
I would offer an even more contrarian take: the show actually is being relatively faithful to the books. At least of the most recent episode.
More concretely, while obviously there are important changes (the Cleons, how Seldon dies, the Anacreons invading rather than making diplomatic threats, nobody smoking, etc.) none of these are terribly unfaithful to the story. Most are small bits of harmless dramatic license. Others explore parts of history that the books simply panned away from (e.g., happenings on Trantor during the first Seldon crisis.)
What really worries me is that, as of the most recent episode, they seem to be introducing characters with some kind of superpower wherein they can see or alter the future. This is going to screw the story up completely.
I'm mostly quite enjoying it, but I think they could have been a _bit_ more restrained with their rewriting and lost nothing.
> everyone is smoking all the time, the hyper focus on nuclear power, the relative role of women
Also, newspapers! The original novels had paper newspapers, transmitted across the stars. At a certain age, science fiction tends to become accidentally a bit steampunk.
This and other adaptations were made to keep the same actors for the thousand years of chaos. Some were ludicrous, like Gaal being forcefully put in hibernation for 30+ years, but the Cleon clones idea was well done in my opinion. It transmits that Cleon is the Empire. If only their interactions took less screen time...
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.
is a terribly damning critique when a show costs as much as Foundation does. It's not Netflix faff, it's Apple's flagship.
The problem is that this is sooo bad. Dull, pretentions stories where nothing makes sense, and characters that are dull speaking boxes walking around saying script lines.
That's what I saw until falling asleep halfway through Episode 3. Perhaps it got better. Perhaps it's not "for me". But that's what I saw.
That seems...faithful.
I have to skip some scenes because they become too boring: flirting, romance, sex? skip. Emotional scene that adds nothing to the plot? skip. Maybe I lost some important bit among that, but seeing the sluggish pace, I doubt it.
You need to re-read the books. While the overall ideas and plot is good, the details and dialogue are terrible.
That seems like a problem with you, not the story.
It wasn't quite just like ancient Rome, but...
> Change of technologies and productivity and economy will not lead to change of political systems?
It did, which is why their political system wasn't one of the ones popular at the time it was written. The system echoed with past ones because the combined effect of the economic and tech changes (particularly notably the relationship between travel and communications speed) echoed the past.
Then what is the point of using a license if you're just "inspired by"? The producers could just say it's inspired by sci-fi classics and do whatever they want, including not respecting the spirit of the original work, which should the primary goal in an adaptation.
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
Apple made a ton of buzz around the TV show, and it took _because_ they use the Asimov work.
Apple did the Apple thing, they overhyped a product that they then designed according to their own rules, expecting everybody to just eat their crap and smile as usual.
But it turns out people liking classic SF books are not your average fanboy, and they don't like being lied to.
It's not just about marketing, it's about trust. It's about taking a dump on a legendary art piece to make money with a the Apple smug confidence. While Dune was a masterful yet humble demonstration of respect and love to the book.
Sure, it's was impossible to adapt the book as a show. By nature. Any reader would have told you that.
They didn't care. They wanted their poney.
It was never about making something for us.
Well, for once, I'm happy it back fired. They don't get to hear "no" often enough.
> 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).
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."
You could try, but it wouldn't be entertaining in a classical sense without deviating strongly from the source material. Animated shows would have the same problem.
Is it still a somewhat hard sci-fi or has it been turned into a fantasy flick?
> “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-founda...
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 don’t think it is unreasonable for someone watching an adaptation of a book to expect that the central themes of that book to be central to the adaptation, or at least not have the main themes of the adaptation be a direct contradiction to the source material.
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.
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).
As per a sibling comment: the original authors were involved. But:
It depends on style of the show material and the style of the new medium. If the original is cerebral and low-action, can you make a commercially successful adaptation with the same qualities?
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.
And while not identical, Smith's Lensmen and Lucas' Jedi Knights have a great deal in common.
Mind you, Lucas cribbed from everything in sight; samurai movies (Hidden Fortress), Westerns, war films (the trench run is from 633 Squadron). Partly why it was so successful.
The show was absolutely amazing when it could follow the books. The definitive show everyone talked about. The moment the books ran out it started to go downhill. And when they couldn't easily extrapolate from the books the show fell apart completely. The showrunners and writes for the show weren't good enough to make Game of Thrones on their own. No offence, but that takes a lot of skill and luck. They were good enough to adapt it though.
There's a reason why people love the Foundation. Why we read the books almost 80 years later. And it's not because of the title or character names (which is all the Apple show keeps).
The creators of this show are extremely arrogant. They think they could have done better than Asimov given the setting. So they threw away the thing people loved and replaced Asimov's work with their own. Well, clearly they couldn't do better. The show is a boring disjointed mess of random scifi tropes.
Hardin is now a "warden"!? Literally, the character with one of the most memorable sayings in all of literature "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" is now all about violence. That's nothing less than a betrayal of the source material.
George R.R. Martin is still underrated, even given his success. He wrote for television for a long time and structured his novels more like seasons of TV, with each chapter serving as an episode. This is part of the reason for their popularity. Martin is also a once-in-a-generation genius of character, structure, and plot - a self-evident truth that is rarely spoken aloud because genre fiction is "not literature."
The creators of the GOT show really never even realized that they were adapting something carefully, painstakingly honed by a genius craftsman. They really figured they could just keep throwing in dramatic, violent twists and we wouldn't know the difference. In that light, it's shocking that they even made the first seasons as competently as they did.
It was never intended for film or TV. It was almost intentionally unfilmable.
“I had worked in Hollywood myself for about 10 years, from the late ’80s to the ’90s. I’d been on the staff of The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. All of my first drafts tended to be too big or too expensive. I always hated the process of having to cut.” When he took up novel-writing afterward, he recalls: “I said, ‘I’m sick of this, I’m going to write something that’s as big as I want it to be, and it’s going to have a cast of characters that go into the thousands, and I’m going to have huge castles, and battles, and dragons.”
https://ew.com/article/2011/04/04/game-of-thrones-hbo-george...
Also we seem to be saying that Hardin and other individuals (e.g. the woman who was tossed off the colony ship who narrates sometimes) are very special, which is also totally counter to the most important themes of the book.
They even pissed on the source material by having Hardin's father remind her of the saying and have her explicitly dismiss it.
Also, we don't know yet but, for all we know, Hardin might learn what the meaning of that saying is by making the very mistake it's cautioning against. After all, in the show, the line was given to her father who then follows through on his plotline (trying to be vague, here). So maybe it's not a betrayal of the source material as much as it is going a bit further back to establish why Hardin keeps that saying. Considering Goyer was involved with Man of Steel and felt like it was pivotal to establish Superman's "no-kill" rule as a result of being forced to kill, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a similar beat of character growth here.
I actually find GoT later and dumber episodes most re-watchable. I imagine it is hard as hell to film shows that are both smart and cinematic. Nolan seems to be the only one who can consistently accomplish this
I can only wish that the writer's room of Futurama could have had a go at this. Writers today seem to not understand anymore how reality works, so they aren't able to extrapolate from it.
That's a quite accurate observation. Even for the largest budgets people tasked with story telling are almost always the weakest element. Who makes them? What kind of education do they undergo to be this wrong about reality and storytelling? Are they such small and in-bred group that they are all so wrong in such similar ways?
This reminds me of another weird thing. In games, various NPCs often say the same dialog line just in different voices. So the bottleneck is writing few words? Not hiring voice talent, not recording it in the studio and postprocessing it? But writing few unique words less is where you get your savings?
Whatever the reason, we're surely becoming culturally poorer.
Screenwriters would seem to be critically important, but writing is hard, often slow and converts much less recognition than other roles in the industry. Further, there are innumerable points in the production chain in which the (necessary!) decisions of other crew members can alter/dilute/confuse the intentions of the screenwriter.
Back here in the real world we have more light than we know what to do with. We have things that seem to light up the world accidentally, like the screen of our phones, better than flashlights can do the job in the future.
There's some other tropes where super-futuristic, sci-fi technology is noticeably worse than our real-world technology (weaponry in particular, most "ray guns" are noticeably inferior to real-world guns in almost every way except perhaps ammo capacity), but none I can think of where the every day experience of everybody now is so readily at-hand to know better.
Almost all space scifi has FTL, wormholes, warp drive or jump drive out of necessity, otherwise you're rather limited in travel. Even the Expanse allows for it at some point, after allowing for the super high efficiency fusion drive just to make travel around the Solar System reasonably fast enough. It's a necessary plot device, unless you're doing a generational ship or staying close to home.
There is a definite sliding scale. Make your Sci-Fi too hard and you just have science and no fiction. But its not that hard to stick to the "One Big Lie" rule. If the expanse and the Martian can do it then so can everyone else.
> but every other plotline seems to just happen because of pseudo-magic.
I mean, you could say the same of the original books! Asimov obviously did have a good understanding of science, but it is not meaningfully on display in Foundation; psychohistory is _nonsense_, and that's before you get to the 'atomics'. Foundation wasn't (and wasn't intended to be) rock-hard sci-fi, and that's okay.
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 show-runner helped make Batman vs Superman and I see LOTS of that awful movie in Foundation.
By episode 7 that is the only interesting/good storyline the show has.
(Mostly because everything else is on par with CW network)
To me it looks like the creators have a pretty deep understanding of the book. I have a good memory of the book and there are a lot of subtle references. What is frustrating is the choices and twist they make. Like presenting everything as pseudo magical and religious. My hope is that they are bold in the narration and mixing elements from much later in the books, setting things up for big reveals in future seasons (e.g hard to tell without spoiling but like Gaal setting things up for things that only are revealed in the third book that could explain the pseudo magic).
I'm not sure they're so wrong with that. In the books, Hari Seldon understands his math and so does Gaal, but nobody else can. Same in the show.
His line in the colony ship in the show, something about "following me on what's little more than a prayer", is spot on. I think the show has done a fairly good job of playing with the discomfort I felt reading Foundation: that so much has to be taken on faith by so many people. It doesn't really matter whether your prophet got his revelation through a dream, pulling some rocks from a bag, or a few nights of multidimensional calculus; it's all opaque to the followers who just have to believe.
The rest of the additions and changes seem to make sense given the medium. Clone emperors: super great, and helped by the best acting in the show. I'd bet Asimov had something similar in mind (he named them "Cleon" in the books too, surely a clue in that anagram.) Even the time-jump with the cryo pod helps to ameliorate one of the issues I had with the books, which was the brief time we got to hang out with some interesting characters before a few centuries passed. The plot with Dornick's boyfriend on the colony ship was a good addition too, albeit quite well telegraphed. Space 9/11 was totally necessary for a TV adaptation, you can't show a couple of potholes in the highway roads and expect anyone to get "society collapses" from it.
I'm with the consensus on Hardin though. Space marine chosen one was not where I thought that character would end up. The actor playing her mom would've been better as Salvor, with her daughter being a destabilizing influence for her to try and keep leashed up (and maybe ultimately use, reluctantly, as her "last resort.")
That doesn't seem all that inconsistent with the source material; Seldon _is_ effectively treated as a religious figure almost from the start (and of course the psychohistory _is_ on the face of it more magic than science).
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RotatingArcs
It's a pretty standard technique to have multiple arcs going on in an episode. The most ready example that comes to mind is Battlestar Galactica.
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.
Humanity traveling faster than light? Check. Woman using stupid bras? Check. Radar that maps entire cave? Check. It doesn’t flag a creature 5m ahead? Check.
For many, these details are unbearable plot holes. Watching science fiction require you to be able to skip these and focus on the story (girl in love, sucking at survival sim).
That is the main issue for most people. If they wanted to do their own thing for a new show, it would have been fine. Maybe you check it out, maybe you don’t. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. But they didn’t do their own thing. They made an adaptation of an iconic sci-fi series by one of the most famous classic sci-fi writers. They sold a bag of goods that had “Asimov’s Foundation” printed on the bag. So it can’t be too surprising when people open the bag, find it is a sprinkle of “Foundation” and mostly “generic sci-fi” sawdust filler, that they feel tricked. Bait and switch comes to mind.
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.
Not so for Foundation, there are some interesting ideas, I actually like the idea of the Cleon's genetic dynasty but overall it feels like a second rate star trek show where regularly I have to suspense my disbelief at how unbelievably stupid some of the plot points or character decisions are. It's nice eye candy and not awful. I'll watch it while doing something else and try to ignore the fact that it carries and betray the name of novels I revered in my childhood. But it's not a great show and it doesn't even compare to The Expanse, For all mankind and any number of nice Sci Fi shows.
There were just too many moments with these shows where I rolled my eyes. Their inability to understand the legacy they inherit, the stereotypes, the lazy magical technology. The endless out of focus wailing of characters emoting doesn’t help either. I get they want to show grief and emotion but this is feels like filler.
I was excited for Foundation and it’s mostly fine but it’s not something I’m looking forward to new episodes of. It also suffers from the out of focus crying stuff but the new stuff they’ve added such as the clone emperor is interesting. The switch to some special chosen one is frustrating however.
All of these aforementioned shows suffer from a complete lack of scale, or an appreciation for it. An empire in the scale of the galaxy shouldn’t feel so empty. The day to day activities of the clones shouldn’t feel so bland and parochial. The Foundation shouldn’t even register as anything other than a minor whisper. Yet it seems all that matters to them along with some political squabbles. It all makes the world feel tiny.
With Dune on the other hand I never once rolled my eyes. It’s not perfect, it skips too quickly over characters and subplots, but it does an astounding job of building a believable and cohesive world.
I haven't seen Foundation (and won't), but it sounds like a similar story.
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I liked the sci-fi miniseries well enough. (As I've said before on HN, watch it as a very well-produced theater production and not a somewhat poorly-funded movie and it's really quite good.) So I'm not saying it's impossible to film something Dune and for it to at least be good. But it'll never be able to stand in for the novels.
I would be amused to see some series get far enough to try to film Chapterhouse Dune, though, which in my opinion is even more complicated than the original Dune in the ways that would matter for a film. Books 2 and 3 would be generally simpler, you can tell they didn't get as much love. God Emperor of Dune I believe holds up better than 2 & 3, but it is still narratively simpler than the original Dune. The final truncated trilogy is quite complex, though.
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.
While, as a fan of the novel, I'd have liked to see these elements given more explanation, I think on reflection that they did a commendable job deciding which elements needed exposition for audiences to follow the plot and which ones could be left as background details and texture for the world to avoid overwhelming the viewer and letting the film breathe more as a film.
I'm rereading the book and am now at "Book 3: The Prophet".
It's far from perfect but I feel that if it was a new IP work the reaction to it would be very different.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, both Foundation and Dune are almost impossible to translate to screen faithfully and still appeal to enough people to have a decent budget. Why should we judge the show by the book at all, if that's going to be the case?
I already have Foundation. I can read it whenever I make the time. It's kind of cool to see a book translated to the screen... but if it doesn't really survive the translation? That's ok too! It can just be a movie with a ton of similarities to an existing story.
Blade Runner, The Shining, Starship Troopers, or hell, Adaptation. They all have varying relationships to the source material. None are especially faithful, but they're all still good movies.
Others are just as entitled to enjoy an adaptation as you are to not enjoy it.
Some people enjoy seeing how a writer, director, cinematographer, cast, set and costume designers, etc present a written work.
Lots of people watch an adaptation and find bits they enjoy and bits they don't.
If you go through life only demanding or expecting experiences you will enjoy, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
I ended up reading The Expanse series because I loved the pilot TV episode so much. I've never read Foundation and I think I likely will in the near future.
> With these adaptations, the two options are "That sucks!" and "That's not Foundation!"
Others are entitled to opinions other than your own...
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.
Well, the last books of the original series of Dune take place over thousands of years when Leto II becomes the worm via symbiosis with the sandtrout. There is so much that happens in these millenia, sometimes told in flashback through the everlasting Duncan Idaho, or through the narrative of the religious texts.
The wars and the scheming and the plans and the plots... I mean just the sisterhood's rise and attempts to undermine leto could be its own series. Heck there are more subplots in Dune than fables in the Silmarillion. In fact, I think that the flaw with the Silmarillion is that everything becomes so much of the same after a while that I stopped caring about all of the one-off stories: it got repetitive and, frankly, boring.
Dune did suffer a Jon Galt moment with all of the exposition in God Emperor of Dune, but there was a lot of storytelling in those meetings between the Duncans and Leto.
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.
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.
Because the books he wrote in the 80s were very different to the ones in the 50s. Completely different. And awful imho.
The show has indeed been about power projection mechanisms, once it set up the universe and cast enough.
It's one thing to watch an episode and a half and say "eh, not for me." It's another entirely to declare you know "the show" and speak authoritatively about it as a whole when you haven't seen four fifths of the material.
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.
“The Crown” is a good example. This would never have been made into a show before streaming.
The Foundation could have been a intellectually stimulating sci-fi show that appealed a lot to a smaller audience and it still would have been successful.
You're right though, Foundation has an odd structure that doesn't at all match modern prestige TV templates, you'd do better with a sort of anthology series of some sort.
Beyond that, though, the differences between the books and the show seem to be done with the intention of coming up with a new and interesting narrative. I don’t have a problem with that.
Also, I think it’s important to note that the show is produced by his daughter and that she wanted to take things in a different direction. Most of these changes were made with deep knowledge of the books and the authors vision.
Just look at Dune. Brian Herbert's books are an abomination. They completely butcher the story and betray its core themes. Just like with this show.
Someone's child being involved doesn't mean anything.
If they wanted to take the show in a different direction, they shouldn't have called it the Foundation series. This show has nothing to do with the books at all, aside from stealing a few ides about the basic setting and some character names.
Dune did this too. I think making Kynes female was interesting, although it certainly changes the male/female dynamics that are the core of the story. But making the character young and attractive is just pandering to male gaze.
Hmm I'll disagree. They changed the gender of the only character whose gender doesn't matter in the story. Decent move.
Personally these days when I hear they're making a book or book series I like into movies/tv I wait for the inevitable disappointment.
I hear they're ruining Robert Jordan's books next, something I plan to skip entirely and just re-read the books instead.
They made Jessica into a physical fighter, converted Liet Kynes into a black lady, excised the distinctive word 'jihad' to refer to Paul's vision of war. They removed the Baron's homosexuality and sexual perversion and changed his servant boys into (bald) servant girls, etc.
The damage wasn't too bad all things considered, but in Dune 2021's case the source book was not the Bible and it was definitely messed with.
That said, I’m guessing the estate knows that public interest in Asimov is dwindling by the year and that either something gets made now or nothing gets made ever. Recall that 2001 LOTR was originally supposed to be Foundation before things fell through - it’s that difficult to produce.
Could you expand on this? I've never heard this before.
I'm glad we got the Lord of the Rings adaptation as it was truly a mastercraft, but I'd have loved to see the same talent do Foundation.
That's because there are so many examples it's hard to choose one. The population of planets shift by orders of magnitude between episodes; the spaceship apparently has a 'fifth quadrant [1]; the zephyr acts too melodramatically, even when she is supposed to be having an honest conversation in private, she sounds like she is speaking to the cameras at a political rally; etc. etc.
It feels like they spent their entire budget on special effects and had to hire interns and volunteers for story and directing.
[1] If it were fifth third, it could have been a nudge to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but fifth quadrant has to be an error.
I do like how the story is developing though, and I know that often it takes a show one season, one and a half, to really get into its groove.
3 more episodes to go before I can have a more full opinion...
All in all so far though it really does seem like just one long drawn-out introduction, with the juicy stuff really starts in season 2 (as teased by Goyer in a reddit AMA - Hober Mallow, Church of the Galactic Spirit, a strong general and a weak emperor)
It reminds me of our present day leaders and the way they react with their subservient robot underlings to all events.
It's incredibly, spectacularly bad!
I know native speakers can't not cringe on this movie. And there's an issue with who the author of the book was and what he did. And people can't get out of human perspective while watching this movie and can't believe how aliens can be this stupid to underestimate humans. In the book it's way better shown that aliens have as little respect for and interest in humans as workers do for the monkeys when the go out to clear the jungle with bulldozers and quibble between themselves over pay and job security.
Book have many detailes way more flashed out, so knowing stuff from the book, movie looked way less stupid to me than to average viewer.
https://deadline.com/2021/11/bradley-cooper-set-hyperion-at-...
Also I feel that a tv show would work better - with all the flashbacks you need to have.
I had high hopes for a limited series. A feature film sounds simply awful for the structured narrative style in Hyperion. Warner Bros will not make a Pasolini style Cantebury Tales. This movie will probably be lifeless.
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.
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).
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.
I wish I'd know he had done that, because I wouldn't have wasted any time reading the garbage that was the sequels.
Most the darn episodes feel like the who is cartmans mom part 2 episode.
I read the books when I was in my late teens and thought they were interesting, they kept my attention at the least. The show is, unfortunately, not something I'll clamor to watch, but rather something I'll likely keep on for background noise after the entire season airs.
I 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.
The TV series is, of course, quite different. It had to be really as viewers expect continuity of characters and an obligatory love-scene. It’s a reflection of our current TV viewing.
I’m hoping they’ll take it new directions where the book doesn’t go and, after the first season, it’ll pick up like many other series have done over the years.
I mean, I am not in the target audience as I am committed to remain outside the Apple ecosystem but, if there was a Foundation series somewhere where I might consider watching it, pretty high on my list of things that would interest me in it as opposed to any random dime-a-dozen indistinguishable brain rot available in every streaming service is that it would not feature those things.
What does make it a bad show is that they writers fell into the Star Trek Discovery Trap of making it about not one but two diverse female space jesuses that save everyone. Arguably their depiction of woman in the show is just as superficial as asimovs depiction of them in the books, just the flipside of the coin.
However, they sometimes have hints of the really interesting parts of foundation, which, in my opinion, is the thinking and planning on large time scales. Only the Empire Storyline has that kind of thinking truly ingrained and subsequently is the only interesting part about the show. I can't even remember diverse female space jesus 1&2s names.
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?
Checkout the The Expanse.
> ignore the source material and do ... something else. Blade Runner for example.
Blade Runner did not call itself Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Contrast that with the Will Smith movie I, Robot.
https://archive.org/details/foundationtrilogythe--bbc1973rad...
The machine-machine conversations, virtual hell, etc. parts of his books would probably not translate well no matter who was directing.
Otherwise, the material seems as well suited for adaptation as anything else. Consider Phlebas could be fantastic in a ~2hr movie with special effects worthy of the images he paints, a tone weighed towards realism, and an Aphex Twin / Caustic Window -like soundtrack.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090715133026/http://www.sffwor...
"How would you like to see your science fiction books filmed, if at all?"
"With a very, very, very big budget indeed. The one I'd most like to see done is Consider Phlebas; if they kept in the sequence where the megaship hits the giant tabular icceberg, the fist-fight under the giant hovercraft, the bit where the Clear Air Turbulence escapes from the GSV, and the final train wreck, I wouldn't even mind if they changed it to a happy ending!"
In this case, surely Asimov better fills the role of "old master" than the anonymous screenwriters of various lasers-and-robots movies? Thus this conclusion somewhat undercuts the ostensible thesis of TFA.
>The books that came to be called the original Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation) were not written as novels; they're the collected Foundation stories Asimov wrote between 1941 and 1950.
Asimov wrote the first Foundation story when he was 21.
https://gizmodo.com/isaac-asimovs-foundation-the-little-idea...
Another problem is that the ideas in the book are completely opposite to what the mainstream viewers want to see and are used to consume. The writers killed those ideas and tell the more familiar story of a prophet and chosen ones, where individuals are making the difference.
It's such a shame that His Dark Materials failed as that would make an excellent adaptation and the source material is far superior to Harry Potter.
Dune of the other hand...is amazing.
What's wrong with simply telling the story as told by Asimov?
https://www.astro.puc.cl/~rparra/tools/PAPERS/lorenz1962.pdf
However, the general concept was already known:
> Poincaré, 1903: “A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance. If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of that same universe at a succeeding moment. But even if it were the case that the natural laws had no longer any secret for us, we could still only know the initial situation approximately. If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon.”
Thus 'Seldon's equations of psychohistory' would almost certainly be subject to sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and would be no more useful than algorithms claiming to predict future financial market behavior, or the specific weather at a certain location on a year from now.
It's not really Asimov's fault - this was also an era when people believed they could learn how to steer hurricanes with minor energy inputs, another topic where chaos demonstrated why that would be impossible to do with any confidence.
However, it's also kind of hilarious that Seldon failed to predict fundamental changes in society (like women in leading academic or political positions), Asimov's vision is basically 1950s society projected into the future. I suppose some people have wistful longings for that era, but not me.
And vice-versa. Every time.
