Apple Shares Teaser for Upcoming Apple TV+ Series 'Foundation'

[damphoose]

OK Apple TV+ ....you have my attention.

 

[Henk Poley]

I wonder how they'll pull these stories into the 21st century. Apparently Asimov was rather awkward at representing women in his stories. Seems odd to ignore half the population.

 

[damphoose]

No. Now I've seen what they have in mind, it's exactly what I expected. The big cop-out is the "Based on... " thing. It shares the name - "Foundation", and the names of some of the characters... and that's it. Everything else is the product of the production company. These changes are not 'alterations' for the purposes of making the task of filming easier. It's just pointless fiddling with the basics of the story to suit the personal agendas of the makers, and pandering to the appetites and social mores of the times.

Recasting / gender swapping... one of the major changes is in making Eto Demerzel female. You might consider this a trivial change, purely done in the interests of balance and inclusivity. However, if you've read any of the books set in what we might call the "Foundation" universe then you'll know what a huge deal this is, as in, utterly fundamental to the vast bulk of what comes before and after "Foundation". Read "The Caves of Steel" and go on from there, and you'll get the picture. With that one change, the producers have painted themselves into a corner which they can only escape from if they make the central theme of the whole series gender politics and sexuality. Which it isn't.

'Foundation' is not "Star Wars", or Dune, or indeed anything else. There's a school of thought which says that without changing aspects of it to make it palatable to a modern audience, it's unfilmable. This is incorrect. If you stay close to the source material, then of course, you don't get "Star Wars", or anything involving bands of plucky exiles etc. etc., but you would get something closer to say... "I, Claudius". A series which placed 12 in the list of 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. Incidentally, featuring a young Patrick Stewart! Google it if you don't know it.

Someone once commented that Asimovs books don't have any action , just lots of talking. The reply was that the talking is the action! And indeed, that is the case. No strong or pivotal female characters? Then you haven't read the books. Two characters, central to the overall story that encompasses the original three Foundation novels are Bayta and Arkady Darell. There are others. But we digress... Foundation isn't about technology, connectivity, gender politics, black holes, spacecraft, people running around with guns and stuff on fire. With depressing predictability, it's about what I'd expect from whoever thought that making shallow, forgettable 'Batman" movies was credential enough for this. Imagine deciding to film Gibbons "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", and then, bizarrely, deciding that the guy that did that Batman movie would be perfect for the job.

Sure, it'll look fabulous, as it should, and all the money will be right up there on screen, giant spacecraft, moody lighting, black holes from that other movie and everything. It might even have an engaging story of some sort, in the vein of "plucky band of outsiders, beset on all sides by sinister, monolithic and implacable foes, seek to right wrongs and save the galaxy against all the odds". I wonder why they didn't just write their own story... but it seems they've done just that, and tacked the name "Foundation" onto it to lend it some gravitas and authority.

I was not convinced when it was first announced that they were going to do this. As more information has become available, I became less and less convinced, and more sure that they'd produce pretty much what we see in the trailer. It could have been, should have been great... but instead, it looks like we'll get something like Will Smiths 2004 "I, Robot" - also notionally from an Asimov book, and about as far from it as this will be. Another missed opportunity.

NB: If you think Asimov couldn't make predictions about the future, then you should read some of his non-fiction. Also, I know these books inside out, and can, and will, quote passages verbatim.

E.g: "Foundation" - Part 1: The Psychohistorians. First line after entry for Hari Seldon is as follows:

"His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before."

First word of the first line of the first chapter of the first book - changed, for no reason. Downhill from there.

Ah ok. They are pretty much not making the show for you. I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this. Not just you but anyone in the “if they change X the whole thing falls apart” camp. That’s the viewer no one making a film or tv show wants. Good thing for trailers right? Saves you some time.

 

[Westside guy]

A great - but unauthorized - sequel to the Foundation books was written by Donald Kingsbury: "Psychohistorical Crisis". I liked it quite a lot more than any of the "Killer B's" authorized sequels... and even liked it more than Asimov's own final couple of books in the series.

But it's very dense, long, and also hard to find - it's not available in digital format anywhere, other than a very bad PDF on archive.org. I ended up spending $5 to get the hardcover from Amazon.

Note that since it wasn't approved by Asimov's estate, Kingsbury had to rename and thinly disguise places and characters. Hari Seldon becomes "the Founder", Trantor is "Splendid Wisdom", Terminus is "Faraway", the Mule is "Kloun the First", etc.

 

[quatermass]

I wonder how they'll pull these stories into the 21st century. Apparently Asimov was rather awkward at representing women in his stories. Seems odd to ignore half the population.

Then you haven't read the books. At least two characters, pivotal to the series as a whole, are female, and it is the fact that they are female that's important. Bayta and Arkady Darell. And then we have Wanda Seldon, Hari's daughter, the creator of the Second Foundation, Mayor of Terminus in the later books, Harla Branno, Dors Venabili, Susan Calvin... and many others. He did not ignore half the population. Seriously, you need to read the books.
How will they pull them into the 21st Century? By loading them up with every trope and device necessary to make them appeal to a 21st Century audience and virtue signalling what they've done, with little or no regard to the source material. If you want a preview of what happens when you go down that road, have a look at the most recent TV adaptation of "War of the Worlds", and see what a ghastly mess it creates and how inept, mediocre and artless is the result.
No, writer behind a couple of 'Batman' movies, you're not a better writer than Asimov and have neither the skill nor imagination to do this.

 

[apolkowski]

For those who did not read Foundation series there is a nice audio book (audio play) which is pretty close to the original.

 

[Henk Poley]

Then you haven't read the books. [..]
How will they pull them into the 21st Century? By loading them up with every trope and device necessary to make them appeal to a 21st Century audience and virtue signalling what they've done, with little or no regard to the source material.

I'm just coming from that women they don't recognize these characters you speak of. No need to pull the mean bully tropes on me, that people are not supposed to come up for themselves ("don't virtue signal").

I also notices that this thread is 'a sausage fest' ?. Just saying.

 

[FightTheFuture]

First word of the first line of the first chapter of the first book - changed, for no reason. Downhill from there.

I’m not familiar with the original work, but when it comes to adaptations you have to understand the “if we don’t do it, someone else will” angle. Goyer may be as much an enthusiast as yourself, and these screenwriters want nothing more than to bring their favorite books growing up to life.

Your also the only person I’ve ever heard call TDK trilogy “forgettable.”

 

[quatermass]

Ah ok. They are pretty much not making the show for you. I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this. Not just you but anyone in the “if they change X the whole thing falls apart” camp. That’s the viewer no one making a film or tv show wants. Good thing for trailers right? Saves you some time.

I fear you've misunderstood my (and others) misgivings about what they're producing. They could not make the show for me if they tried, so I was hardly expecting that. The problem with it is that by introducing predictable, pointless changes, they've missed an opportunity to do something really great, something really brave. This isn't material that you can approach in the same way that you would approach 'Batman" (or is it "The Batman" these days...) or MCU or all the rest of it. It's more akin to "War & Peace" or "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".

As you obviously don't know the source books, you can hardly be expected to know that actually, if you do change X, the whole thing does fall apart. You then end up with something completely different, and may as well have written your own story and not make out that it has anything to do with the 'Foundation' books, as they were written. It's lazy. It's predictable. It's obvious and mediocre.

Asimov knew this, and wrote about his experiences with 'Hollywood' in his 1983 book "Asimov on Science Fiction". See Chapter 54 "Hollywood and I", which was written in 1979. He details some of the experiences he had, and why he resisted. And I quote:

"There are two basic reasons for this resistance. First, I am not visual enough to write dialogue and events that are to be interpreted primarily in the form of moving images on a screen. I'm just a word man, and though it is a wise person that knows his powers, it is an even wiser person who knows their limitations.
Second, I am reasonably confident that in magazines and books my fiction will appear very much as I have written it. Anything I write for the visual media, however, I am certain will be tampered with by producers, directors, actors, office boys, and the relatives of any or all of these."

And so it is. The producers don't want the viewers that can see that what they are producing is generic, reheated, bastardised tripe, pitched to the lowest common denominator. Got that.
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I’m not familiar with the original work, but when it comes to adaptations you have to understand the “if we don’t do it, someone else will” angle. Goyer may be as much an enthusiast as yourself, and these screenwriters want nothing more than to bring their favorite books growing up to life.

Your also the only person I’ve ever heard call TDK trilogy “forgettable.”

Yep. Watched it. Forgot it. There you go.

 

[unobtainium]

Well, we don't know what will happen between now and 30,000+ years from now. Anything could happen, including the loss of distributed knowledge through electronic means. Or, as it happens in the universe of Frank Herbert's Dune, you might even have a future in which travel in space happens but without any electronics.

This is the central problem with the Foundation novels. A spacefaring civilization (traveling with nuclear power) is not going to lose the means to store information electronically. If you can cross the stars you can come up with a better solution than a book. It’s just a failure of Asimov’s imagination, ditto for the exclusion of half the human species from the first novel. Even in Asimov’s time it was considered kind of odd to have zero significant female characters, which is something he admittedly tried to correct in the second book.

 

[Idec50]

Ah... then you will need to also actually read the books, and also the books that come before the "Foundation" trilogy. And also the sequels. And then you'll understand why, if you gender-swap one character in particular, for no other reason that empty virtue signalling, you create an enormous problem for the whole series. It just doesn't work, it is not an improvement, and there's no need for it.

Well, let’s be honest here. There will be bigger problems. Like characters wearing apple watches, and just generally being flat and bland. At least we have Dune to look forward to. Looks potentially cool, but I’m keeping my expectations low until I’ve at least seen one show that is compelling from apple. ‘Amazing stories’ was remarkably vapid. Good luck to all.

 

[unobtainium]

so I guess you never read or watch anything that wasn’t made in the last 5 years.

Many works of art produced centuries ago have aged extremely well. Foundation was made much more recently and hasn’t aged well at all. That’s because its fundamental premises were always flawed.

 

[Regbial]

First AppleTV+ trailer that has me intrigued... I like the visual design.. might end up being better than Dune by Denis Villenueve. ? (visually, at least... the photos of the Dune movie make it look so... dull and lacking in creativity.. just my opinion of course..)

 

[yaxomoxay]

This is the central problem with the Foundation novels. A spacefaring civilization (traveling with nuclear power) is not going to lose the means to store information electronically. If you can cross the stars you can come up with a better solution than a book. It’s just a failure of Asimov’s imagination, ditto for the exclusion of half the human species from the first novel. Even in Asimov’s time it was considered kind of odd to have , which is something he admittedly tried to correct in the second book.

Man, it's sci-fi. You can imagine whatever you want, however you want it. You can have a nuclear powered civilization handled by talking lions and singing monkeys without computers. Or you can have a future 10,000 years from now in which virtually nothing has changed from today. You can have a plethora of Susan Calvin like female scientists or all-male scientists, or a mix, or whatever. It's sci-fi.

 

[unobtainium]

Man, it's sci-fi. You can imagine whatever you want, however you want it. You can have a nuclear powered civilization handled by talking lions and singing monkeys without computers. Or you can have a future 10,000 years from now in which virtually nothing has changed from today. You can have a plethora of Susan Calvin like female scientists or all-male scientists, or a mix, or whatever. It's sci-fi.

You can, but if it defies basic logic people are probably going to comment on it.

 

[yaxomoxay]

You can, but if it defies basic logic people are probably going to comment on it.

There are various shades of sci-fi. Buy a copy of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and buy a copy of Analog Science Fiction Magazine. At the cost of generalizing a bit, in Asimov's you'll see more stories that are "out there", with less emphasis on scientific, logical, artistic accuracy; the main goal is clearly to suspend belief, sometimes almost to a ridiculous point. In Analog, you'll read more stories with scientific accuracy, with very logical story lines, and that do not necessarily require that much suspension of belief. That's how stories are structured, and sci-fi is so wide that it's virtually impossible to box it in. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to like it; if you don't like some art, so be it. It's your prerogative. But let's not go into the "too many notes" type of argument.

 

[hrpanjwani]

I first read the Foundation trilogy with a few friends in college nearly 20 years ago and we were immediately hooked by the story that employed hero and his sidekicks on a quest idea in such a unique way. The Greater Foundation remains one of the best extended universe works of fiction that I have read so far.

It will be interesting to see what interpretation Goyer has on this seminal story, especially with veterans like Harris and Pace added to the mix.

PS: On a related note, while I encourage people to read Asimov’s novels and especially his short stories it is also important to note that Asimov has a disturbing legacy when it comes to women

 

[quatermass]

This is the central problem with the Foundation novels. A spacefaring civilization (traveling with nuclear power) is not going to lose the means to store information electronically. If you can cross the stars you can come up with a better solution than a book. It’s just a failure of Asimov’s imagination, ditto for the exclusion of half the human species from the first novel. Even in Asimov’s time it was considered kind of odd to have zero significant female characters, which is something he admittedly tried to correct in the second book.

Oh, you can absolutely lose the means to electronically store information, or at least, the means to recover it:

Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[posguy99]

Not to be nit-picking but Stranger in a Strange Land isn't Asimov, it's Robert Heinlein. And half of its principal characters are women.

Heinlein's heroines are all copies of his wife, Virginia.

 

[damphoose]

This is the central problem with the Foundation novels. A spacefaring civilization (traveling with nuclear power) is not going to lose the means to store information electronically. If you can cross the stars you can come up with a better solution than a book. It’s just a failure of Asimov’s imagination, ditto for the exclusion of half the human species from the first novel. Even in Asimov’s time it was considered kind of odd to have zero significant female characters, which is something he admittedly tried to correct in the second book.

Unfortunately Asimov is not alone in this so I kind of give him a pass. That is the reason the presentation of many of these works need adaptation before they can be presented to a modern audience. The fact is (and as I said he is not alone) many science fiction writers were not very good futurist. Seems weird to say but they weren't.

 

[sideshowuniqueuser]

Make sure you get all seven foundation books, not just the first three...

...and don't forget Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn, and Robots and Empire, which fit between the Caves of Steel and the Foundation series...

Crikey! Which would you recommend to start with? Or, if I was to only read one of them, which one?

 

[tillsbury]

Crikey! Which would you recommend to start with? Or, if I was to only read one of them, which one?

Any/all! You can read the initial novels before or after Foundation, they'll still make sense. Ideally the four I mentioned (starting with Caves of Steel) in sequence. But you probably should read those and the original Foundation trilogy before moving on to Prelude to Foundation and the subsequent novels set after the Foundation.

 

[Grey Area]

PS: On a related note, while I encourage people to read Asimov’s novels and especially his short stories it is also important to note that Asimov has a disturbing legacy when it comes to women

Ugh, thanks. I did not know about this, and I hate it when cherished artists turn out to have been *******s. I mean, I don't need them to be saints, but Asimov seems to have gone well beyond what maybe could be excused as unfortunately normal for his time.

 

[krazzix]

I know nothing about this but somehow the trailer gave me goosebumps

 

[cmaier]

Ugh, thanks. I did not know about this, and I hate it when cherished artists turn out to have been *******s. I mean, I don't need them to be saints, but Asimov seems to have gone well beyond what maybe could be excused as unfortunately normal for his time.

When I was a kid - probably 6th or 7th grade - i met him and he signed my copy of Foundation. Was incredibly nice. He came and gave a speech at our synagogue.

It's a disturbing facet of adulthood that we learn that our heroes are sometimes not really nice people.