Apple Gives Straight to Series Order to Drama Based on Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation' Novels

[shigzeo]

thanks for the answer!

This was the book series that got me into Sci Fi when I was a kid. I have no idea how the heck it'll be adapted for film/TV considering it's episodic nature of the the first 3 books. But I'm excited.

This and Dune are the two greats that have never been done right or done at all.

After the first three (the full series as even Asimov thought originally) things went downhill, and fast. I would like to consider anything after Second Foundation mere fan fiction.
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I think the first book would be OK. End it with the collapse of the empire. By the end of the series though it all became some sort of stultifying Gaia hypotheses hippy crap, trying to be big picture but ultimately claustrophobic.

I didn’t read it that way. The fourth book introduced Gaia and retconned earlier books to fit a new narrative. Book two and three existed to uncover the second foundation and stop the mule. The second foundation as invisible guiding hand was the bad guy.

 

[DevNull0]

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Palm CEO Ed Colligan, 2006

Ah, historical revisionism.

Palm was right. The original iPhone was not a very good phone and had insignificant sales and market share. Nobody outside the relatively small Apple community even noticed. The 3g/3gs were somewhat better but lacklustre. It wasn't until the iPhone 4 that Apple hit it out of the park and redefined the smartphone industry.

So no, Apple did not just walk in and figure it out, it took them years of hard work until the 4th try to figure it out. Just as Colligan said it took Palm years. In the meantime, while Apple was working hard to own the market, Palm was sitting around laughing and counting their profits, and the rest is history.

The original iPhone didn't even have an App store, and palm Apps were commonplace at the time.

 

[Lioness~]

Hope he do it right. It can really be an interesting start with the right cast too.

 

[lpetrich]

My favorite part of the series is in "The Mayors" in the first book. The Foundation spreads its technology to neighboring worlds as a religion, with its technicians being the priests of that religion. Prince Wienis, the de facto leader of one of these worlds, Anacreon, sends an invasion fleet to conquer Terminus, the Foundation's homeworld. Its flagship is an refurbished old Imperial cruiser. In it is a device that Foundation technicians installed, a device that they described as super holy. As the invasion fleet proceeds to Terminus, the would-be invaders discover that this device is a ...

...

... kill switch. (Ultrawave Relay (or Hyperwave Relay) by Isaac Asimov from Foundation)

I'd like it if that got into the series. BTW, if Wienis does, how will they pronounce his name? What I always thought, WEE-nis? Or how the BBC Radio people did it, VIE-nis?

 

[jasnw]

Nope, won't watch it. A big part of reading a book is what you bring to it. How do you think the various characters look? How do they sound? How are they all interacting with each other in physical space? What do the worlds and the things and people in them that are described in the book look like? I don't want to see someone else's vision, I want to keep my own. I've read a ton of science fiction in my life starting in the mid 1950s and I've yet to see a movie made from any of these stories that I didn't regret watching. Same thing in the other direction - why read a book that's taken from a movie you watched? All you'll see is the movie maker's vision of that story.

 

[mpainesyd]

As it happens I am currently re-reading Foundation and Empire as an iBook. I recently found (!) it there after checking for Asimov books over several years.
I do hope they get the TV show right. There have been so many disappointing sci-fi adaptions.

 

[Vjosullivan]

Be afraid, very afraid. This is one complicated series of novels, to get it right is gonna be very hard.

Should be really easy, just like Walking Dead, Dark Skies, Terra Nova, etc. You need one white-hat cowboy who doesn't quite know what happened but knows how to solve most problems with a gun, then has to struggle to save his faithful, supporting wife and two/three kids (one of whom is a rebellious but lesson learning teenager and another who is good at getting trapped/lost/kidnapped). Then you need some baddies (zombies/aliens/dinosaurs); in this case probably right-wing politicians.

For series one you lift a story arc from Foundation and bend it to fit. For series two onwards, you create random crises that - no matter how overwhelming or complicated - can only be solved by One Good Man With Steely Determination And A Gun.

Also, you need a slightly humorous sidekick (or cute animatronic animal/alien/alien animal if it's a family series), so that the hero can explain out loud what he's going to do. The sidekick will have superpowers which - while not as good as being a One Good Man - will make him indispensable to the outcome of just about everything.

Finally, regardless of how far into the future the series is set, all weapons will be about on a par with anything available in WW2 or the wild west.

If the budget runs to it, get JJ Abrams in to give everyone even more guns, wire up everything that doesn't move to explode, wire up everything that does move to explode and push the button.

 

[GeneralChang]

Should be really easy, just like Walking Dead, Dark Skies, Terra Nova, etc. You need one white-hat cowboy who doesn't quite know what happened but knows how to solve most problems with a gun, then has to struggle to save his faithful, supporting wife and two/three kids (one of whom is a rebellious but lesson learning teenager and another who is good at getting trapped/lost/kidnapped). Then you need some baddies (zombies/aliens/dinosaurs); in this case probably right-wing politicians.

For series one you lift a story arc from Foundation and bend it to fit. For series two onwards, you create random crises that - no matter how overwhelming or complicated - can only be solved by One Good Man With Steely Determination And A Gun.

Also, you need a slightly humorous sidekick (or cute animatronic animal/alien/alien animal if it's a family series), so that the hero can explain out loud what he's going to do. The sidekick will have superpowers which - while not as good as being a One Good Man - will make him indispensable to the outcome of just about everything.

Finally, regardless of how far into the future the series is set, all weapons will be about on a par with anything available in WW2 or the wild west.

If the budget runs to it, get JJ Abrams in to give everyone even more guns, wire up everything that doesn't move to explode, wire up everything that does move to explode and push the button.

You forgot the /s tag at the end.

I wanted to come back with some kind of statement that not all modern TV was that way, but then I started thinking about it, and... well...

 

[lpetrich]

There is a curious bit of technological non-anticipation late in the original trilogy. The beginning of "Search by the Foundation" in "Second Foundation" introduces Arkady Darell, and we find her using a Transcriber, something like a typewriter, but that interprets speech. Thus doing speech-to-printing instead of keyboard-to-printing.

Thus not anticipating general-purpose computers, let alone software text editors and word processors, with documents in the device's memory.

IA also wrote the sort story "Galley Slave", in which a character argues that some general-purpose system would never do as well as a specialized proofreading system, the titular robot. But in practice, it is general-purpose computing hardware that has won the day, hardware that runs stored programs. Not completely, however. FPGA's and ASIC's are still in business, all but low-end CPU's have floating-point arithmetic, and GPU's are more-or-less CPU's specialized for parallel operation.

He made a similar mistake in "The Naked Sun", where the colonists of Solaria live in isolation from each other in big estates, and "view" each other with two-way TV systems. He does not seem to have anticipated generalized data networks.

More generally, before the end of World War II, science-fiction stories features a lot of robots but hardly any computers. When real-life ones started showing up, SF writers quickly picked up on them.

I don't wish to imply that SF writers ought to have predicted stuff like the Internet. I point out these failures to indicate that the future is likely to be very different from what we had imagined it to be. IA has argued ("Future? Tense!") that an important aspect of science fiction is not so much what future technologies there will be, but what impact they will have on humanity. Not self-driving cars, but what will become of manual driving, for instance. IA himself once wrote a story featuring self-driving cars where manual driving had been outlawed as needlessly dangerous ("Sally" in "Nightfall and Other Stories").

 

[Potus]

Wow! What a coincidence! I just just rereadi the Robot series and I'm now reading Foundation! Good stories. I hope Apple updates to rid the series of sexism though.

 

[quatermass]

Anybody seen these?

https://www.oliverscholl.com/oliver-scholl-design-inc/2017/2/1/foundation

 

[lpetrich]

Wow! What a coincidence! I just just rereadi the Robot series and I'm now reading Foundation! Good stories. I hope Apple updates to rid the series of sexism though.

I also remember IA's robot stories. I've never seen the movie "I, Robot" because it had almost nothing to do with the book. The overall premise of IA's robot stories is how his Three Laws of Robotics would work out in practice and the problems with applying them. Is there any of that in the movie?

As to the Foundation series, I can imagine how Hollywood might butcher it. Put in lots of action scenes and women in gratuitous states of undress. But on the plus side, I can imagine what great vistas that they could make. Like Trantor. Imagine closing into it from outer space and then traveling along its "surface", seeing that it is one huge city. Or doing that with Terminus, and seeing how small Terminus City looks, at least at first. As the series progresses, we can watch Terminus City grow.

Also, of course, the Anacreonian invasion fleet. Though some viewers might be disappointed that it does not get involved in a big space battle.
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Anybody seen these?

https://www.oliverscholl.com/oliver-scholl-design-inc/2017/2/1/foundation

Foundation — Oliver Scholl Nice pictures, but I don't see what they have to do with the Foundation Trilogy. Only the first one of them is captioned, and with only one word: "Anacrea". But such vistas are what visual media can do very well.

 

[lpetrich]

I hope Apple updates to rid the series of sexism though.

The characters in the original trilogy are mostly male, though the later books seem to have more female characters.

In the original trilogy, the main female characters are, at least from my memory, Bayta Darell, Arkady Darell, and Lady Callia, consort of Lord Stettin of Kalgan.

 

[TheFluffyDuck]

Tim Cook is going to be mad when he finds out Foundation isn't a reality tv webisode series with famous celebrities doing their makeup in the car.