Apple Lands Isaac Asimov ‘Foundation’ TV Series From David Goyer & Josh Friedman
In a competitive situation, Apple has nabbed a TV series adaptation of Foundation, the seminal Isaac Asimov science fiction novel trilogy. The project, from Skydance Television, has been put in development for straight-to-series consideration. Deadline revealed last June that Skydance had made a deal with the Asimov estate and that David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman were cracking the code on a sprawling series based on the books that informed Star Wars and many other sci-fi films and TV series. Goyer and Friedman will be executive producers and showrunners. Skydance’s David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Marcy Ross also will executive produce.
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I am Dyslexic of Borg, prepare to have your ass laminated.
I guess Ray Butts has ate his last pancake. http://steamcommunity.com/id/daehawk
"Has high IQ. Refuses to apply it"
In April, we reported that Apple was working on developing a TV series based on Isaac Asimov's highly influential Foundation series of science fiction novels. Today, Ars has confirmed not only that Foundation was in development, but it has now been given a full series order—meaning we're definitely going to see it.
There’s no indication yet of how Apple’s streaming service might work, but it will likely be a subscription service. Apple’s shows could be accessed through an app, or even Apple’s TV app, which also has access to content from services like HBO Now.
I might have to turn in my nerd card, but I have to confess that I never read the FOUNDATION books.
I came to Bradbury and Tolkien early, and then to Lovecraft and Heinlein and Herbert. I knew about Asimov and Clarke, and I read some of their short stories and novels, but I thought of them as old-school while I was leaping ahead to the New Wave SF of the late 60s and 70s (in the 1980s, natch). By the time I got to Gibson and Sterling, there was no time for Asimov.
The Foundation trilogy is the granddaddy of all galactic empire stories. I loved it as a teen and would love to see it made into a mini series (it's too big to be contained in a movie). If it's on Apple, though, I'll pass.
Asimov was a great storyteller and a competent writer, if you're not unduly focused on characters and dialog. Especially female characters. Asimov couldn't write believable women and seldom tried.
Kraken wrote: ↑Thu Sep 10, 2020 10:02 pm
The Foundation trilogy is the granddaddy of all galactic empire stories. I loved it as a teen and would love to see it made into a mini series (it's too big to be contained in a movie). If it's on Apple, though, I'll pass.
Asimov was a great storyteller and a competent writer, if you're not unduly focused on characters and dialog. Especially female characters. Asimov couldn't write believable women and seldom tried.
For me, Foundation was my real entry into SF. Back when I had a bookshelf in my house, I had all the novels from the extended Foundation series (Empire, Robots, and Foundation) plus the Second Foundation trilogy (Benford, Bear, Brin) all lined up. Sadly now they're all in a plastic tub in my basement.
That said, while I still love his writing style, I'm glad I've moved on to other authors who do much better addressing Asimov's shortcomings that you've listed.
"A company that wants to better people's lives...Apple"...HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! BS!!
Anyways anyone else sick and tired of the way they make black holes look these days ala Interstellar? PUKE. Looks like a marble I had as a kid.
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I am Dyslexic of Borg, prepare to have your ass laminated.
I guess Ray Butts has ate his last pancake. http://steamcommunity.com/id/daehawk
"Has high IQ. Refuses to apply it"
Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun Oct 04, 2020 5:42 pmAnyways anyone else sick and tired of the way they make black holes look these days ala Interstellar? PUKE. Looks like a marble I had as a kid.
hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Sun Oct 04, 2020 5:39 pm
am i the only one here who read this:
No. But that was at least partly because as a wee nipper, I found another of his non-fiction titles surprisingly entertaining and useful, too:
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." — P. J. O'Rourke
Are they releasing all the episodes at once, or are they trickling it out? I don't have an Apple TV subscription, but I'll probably pick it up for a month once it is possible to binge this.
"What? What?What?" -- The 14th Doctor
It's not enough to be a good player... you also have to play well. -- Siegbert Tarrasch
I was entertaining the thought of getting Apple TV just to see this (after the whole season is posted). And then I read this review. I'll just copy the conclusion and you can read the review to see how it got there.
Goyer’s Foundation isn’t Asimov’s Foundation. It’s not an adaptation, and it’s so different that calling it “inspired by the works of Isaac Asimov” still feels like a stretch. Maybe it truly is impossible to bring this seminal work of science fiction into another medium, but other shows could still do a hell of a lot better job than this.
One review is just that, so I await the hive's rendition. But it feels like an uphill climb.
Yeah, it's a difficult thing to adapt. I'm a big fan of the books, and I like some of the casting here such as Jared Harris as Hari Seldon, but some of the decisions they've made to the story are downright odd, and I didn't recognize much if anything in the trailers. They want the same core group of people to interact with him at every juncture, every prediction, and I get that from a casting point of view but I feel that diminishes the power of the actual concept, in him making announcements to future constituents. There's also an odd decision about making Seldon clones when a simple hologram would suffice like in the books. I think they could have easily made it into an anthology series with Harris returning each season, but to a completely new cast. That at least would have been truer to the books.
Another thing that makes it harder to film in the technology level. But at the same time, I think it's something they should have really leaned into, as retro things are really in right now and would have made it fairly unique. Everything I see in this adaptation looks modern and not really in a good way.
I think the producer and show writers completely missed the point of psychohistory in the Foundation books. It was clearly stated that for psychohistory to work it needs a large sample size of people - hence only popping into existence when humanity spanned the galaxy, and it required a large sample size of people to NOT KNOW about psychohistory.
In fact, even the initial premise of the Foundation was built on a lie. Hari Seldon initially went to the Emporer and told him his answer to minimizing the fall of the Empire was to settle an entire planet with people devoted to making encyclopedias. Encyclopedias! And all of those people didn't have a clue about what was going on until the first Seldon hologram 50 years later, when they faced their first "Seldon Crisis".
The second point about psychohistory is that it deals with large trends and so the actions of individual people or even single planet governments don't really matter. This point doesn't come through as clearly, because the first few Seldon Crises appear to be solved by single individuals with decisive action, but the point is that their actions didn't really matter. If not them, then it would have been someone else that did stuff and fulfilled psychohistory. This point becomes clear later on in the books when there is at least one crisis where the leaders are ineffectual and the main characters are running around trying to "save the day'. Ultimately their actions come to nothing and yet the Seldon Plan still works because it charts the path of an extremely large group of people who don't know the plan exists.
In fact, that's probably a good jumping-off point for a series. Show people running around, having space battles, trying to "save the day" and then show that, in the end, they didn't really need to do anything because the Plan would have still worked. But, in the Apple TV series the Plan is already in jeopardy because the Emperor knows about it, and he can control large groups of people. In fact, he could probably derail the plan by broadcasting that there is this thing called psychohistory and that people all across the galaxy just need to do crazy unpredictable things for 2 weeks. Booom, no more Plan. Or rather, since the Emperor is a clone, he just needs to repeat this cycle of craziness once a month to derail the Plan and force Seldon to make new ones.
raydude wrote: ↑Fri Sep 24, 2021 12:03 pm
I think the producer and show writers completely missed the point of psychohistory in the Foundation books. It was clearly stated that for psychohistory to work it needs a large sample size of people - hence only popping into existence when humanity spanned the galaxy, and it required a large sample size of people to NOT KNOW about psychohistory.
In fact, even the initial premise of the Foundation was built on a lie. Hari Seldon initially went to the Emporer and told him his answer to minimizing the fall of the Empire was to settle an entire planet with people devoted to making encyclopedias. Encyclopedias! And all of those people didn't have a clue about what was going on until the first Seldon hologram 50 years later, when they faced their first "Seldon Crisis".
Great points. The idea of the same cast staying with him throughout his predictions kills the entire premise. The thing that sucks is that if this show fails, they'll likely not make another Foundation series ever again, while claiming it to be unsuccessful for all the wrong reasons. I've kind of become cynical of all these modern productions lately.
So I read this thread as "Apple fails" and somehow I'm not the least bit surprised.
I haven't read the Foundation series since Azimov was still alive (I really should again), but I'd imagine it suffers from the same issues that make Dune such a difficult target to nail. Too much history, too much narrative, a lot of spacing between actual action. That's what makes it so hard to film; a good author can weave this into a compelling story, movies, not so much. A good rendition on film will find other means to convey this information (GoT does this with moderate success), but to simply ignore it will piss off fans every time.
Yeah, there's not really a whole lot of action in the books. It's mostly dialogue, a lot of talking heads. In fact, I think the format would work better as a play.
Isaac Asimov's hugely influential Foundation series of science fiction novels is notoriously difficult to adapt to the screen. The author himself admitted that he wrote strictly for the printed page, and he always refused invitations to adapt his work for film or TV. But Asimov was more than happy to let others adapt his work to a new medium, and he was wise enough to expect that there would—and should—be significant departures from the print version.
That's just what showrunner David S. Goyer (Dark Knight trilogy, Da Vinci's Demons) has done with Foundation, Apple TV+'s visually stunning, eminently bingeable new series. Goyer describes it as more of a remix than a direct adaptation, and to my taste, it is a smashing success in storytelling. This series respects Asimov's sweeping visionary ideas without lapsing into slavish reverence and over-pontification. That said, how much you like Goyer's vision might depend on how much of a stickler you are about remaining faithful to the source material.
"What? What?What?" -- The 14th Doctor
It's not enough to be a good player... you also have to play well. -- Siegbert Tarrasch
I watched the 1st episode and liked it well enough to plan on watching episode 2 tonight. I've also read the novels and found them interesting, but narratively all over the place. Asimov was more of a Big Ideas man than a gifted storyteller.
According to a review that I read, the show is based on only about 100 pages of the first book. So a lot of things in the show doesn't exist in the book.
Victoria Raverna wrote: ↑Sat Sep 25, 2021 11:16 pm
According to a review that I read, the show is based on only about 100 pages of the first book. So a lot of things in the show doesn't exist in the book.
That hardly seems a sufficient foundation for a full series.
Victoria Raverna wrote: ↑Sat Sep 25, 2021 11:16 pm
According to a review that I read, the show is based on only about 100 pages of the first book. So a lot of things in the show doesn't exist in the book.
That hardly seems a sufficient foundation for a full series.
I read Foundation books years ago, but if I can remember correctly they're like collection of short stories in the Foundation timeline which span hundred years. I guess the 100 pages is only the first short story.
Victoria Raverna wrote: ↑Sat Sep 25, 2021 11:16 pm
According to a review that I read, the show is based on only about 100 pages of the first book. So a lot of things in the show doesn't exist in the book.
That hardly seems a sufficient foundation for a full series.
Just finished the first two episodes. I’m really enjoying it so far.
The art work is just stunning particularly with the outer space shots and also the planetary vistas. I found the characters interesting and so far at least the plot lines are intriguing.
It does a great job of making this vast high-tech, system-spanning empire feel real and it makes me want to fire up Stellaris again!
I read the books ~45 years ago, but it was so long ago, I only remember a very, very rough outline of the story. Not near enough to be upset by any deviations from the original.
This is simply one of those books that doesn’t lend itself to a movie or even a mini-series. There is so little action to show on screen. It is mostly Seldon’s work playing out.
