Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series Finally Being Developed for TV

[Mike]

6 minutes ago, Max Headroom said:

Halfway through episode 2 and I can safely say, not much (yet) has carried over from the books. The general premise is there, Hari Seldon is there and so is the Empire. 
 

I think I’ll treat this as a stand-alone and see if I can spot Asimov’s plot along the way.

I watched the lot over a day or two, and can remember so little of the original that it's like watching a new series with a few familiar names.  I quite enjoyed it if I'm honest.  I don't mind it being different, but have loaded the books onto my Kindle with a view to reading them eventually, but as the latest The Expanse novel has just dropped, they've fallen back down the queue by one.  I think I'm going to have to take more baths

[Max Headroom]

I highly recommended the books, especially the original three. Must re read them all again……

 

Trevor

[ckw]

1 hour ago, Max Headroom said:

Must re read them all again……

All of the fuss over the TV thing (which I haven't seen) prompted me to re-read the books (well the first 2) after some 40 years or so. To be honest, I was disappointed. I think Asimov was a great short story writer, but sustained plot or character development ... not so much. To my mind the books seemed very dated and rather shallow. On the other hand, they are very much of their time ... and in some ways quite amusing, 'atomics' being a power source for everything   

 

On the plus side, I can see how they are a great starting point for film or TV adaptations. But not I'm tempted enough to get Apple TV.

Cheers

 

Colin

 

 

 

[Paul Thompson]

5 hours ago, ckw said:

All of the fuss over the TV thing (which I haven't seen) prompted me to re-read the books (well the first 2) after some 40 years or so. To be honest, I was disappointed. I think Asimov was a great short story writer, but sustained plot or character development ... not so much. To my mind the books seemed very dated and rather shallow. On the other hand, they are very much of their time ... and in some ways quite amusing, 'atomics' being a power source for everything   

 

On the plus side, I can see how they are a great starting point for film or TV adaptations. But not I'm tempted enough to get Apple TV.

Cheers

 

Colin

 

 

 

I find that always happens when re-reading SF books from 40 years ago - some which I remember really liking now seem unreadable, a problem for me with everything by Heinlein or Anderson. OTOH I'm currently going through some novels by Samuel Delany and they've weathered much better. To do with getting older, inevitably. I've been following this thread though and am only now realising how little I remember of the Foundation trilogy, which I last read in the mid seventies, so thanks lads, I'm off to have a go at that now.

 

Paul.

[John Laidlaw]

10 minutes ago, Paul Thompson said:

OTOH I'm currently going through some novels by Samuel Delany and they've weathered much better.

Agreed - "The Fall of the Towers" was brilliant, and still is.

 

Regarding Foundation, I enjoyed it. It wasn't the original, but took elements and expanded on them, and added more. Once I'd got past the "harrumph!" stage of wondering what they'd done, it became pretty good.

[Moggy]

The series frumpled the main premise: remember "violence is the last resort of the incompetent"?

 

The series was ok - but it should have been called something other than Foundation.

 

Cheers, Moggy (a lover of SF since being 6 years old)

[Max Headroom]

I loved the books. I seem to remember reading them slowly an building up a picture of what it all looks like - not a spoiler but Trantor should all be covered by metal clad buildings with no outside at all. I think ‘Towards Foundation’ has a scene where youngsters are taken to the top to experience The Outside and to traumatise them! That sort of is an important detail later…….(the metal, not the kids!)

 

Trevor

[Alan R]

I read the Foundation series books a few years ago (<10) and still enjoyed them.

I think that the best way to see them (apart perhaps from the later, non-trilogy books) is as a 'broad-sweep' historical view of the interregnum between the old empire and the new. It did span nearly a thousand years, after all)

 

As I am unwilling to fork out another umpteen quid a month for yet another on-line streaming service (I already have Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+), I am unlikely to see the series, unless it comers out on DVD/Blu-ray...

 

Cheers,

Alan

[Kallisti]

I watched the series and I thought it was much better than I expected.

 

Having re-read the entire series a few years back I was impressed with how they modernised what is a quite a plodding set of stories in the books into a piece of spectacle TV. The original foundation series of books was Azimov's attempt to sci-fi up The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, so it wasn't going to be a rip-roaring adventure story and was always going to be spisodic considering the time span.

 

It was also, naturally, very male dominated because it was written in the 1950s when 'a woman's place was in the home' and all that garbage.

 

So the books as they are are essentially unfilmable for modern tastes and thank goodness for that, I would not want to see a TV series based exactly on those books. Sci Fi writers at the time were focussing on plot and ideas and characterisation came a distant third, which is why all the characters in the book are essentially interchangeable cyphers with different names,

 

I think the concept of "A planet covered covered by metal buildings" is more of a metaphor - they do show Trantor as entirely built over except for the imperial palace gardens, butt hey there are probably multiple sub basements etc. It probably isn't even metal as such more like plastic and ceramics with a metal supporting framework, just like you built things today. Azimov wasn't an architect and what the TV show tries to convey remarkably well is the incredible complexity of something like that. The space elevator sub-plot was IMHO excellent.

 

What they've done is create a lot more around the central core plot that introduces real character drama to allow us to empathise with the characters which you can't do in the books - well at least until you get into Foundation and Empire and you have Bayta Darell and the Mule. I like the introduction of the clone Emperors and the way they have shown significant personality differences between them. Excellent work by the two grown up' actors, Lee Pace and Terrence Mann.

 

It looks like they are also showing us the creation of the Second Foundation rather then hiding it all as in the books. As for gender swapping some of the characters, frankly I couldn't give a damn - it makes sense as there are hardly any female characters in the novels which is just an artefact of the times they were written, fixing that for the modern age is a no-brainer.

 

There are 'other' ways to watch TV series that require yet ANOTHER subscription...

Just settling in to watch The Witcher series 2

[-Ian-]

 

On 12/18/2021 at 11:43 AM, Alan R said:

As I am unwilling to fork out another umpteen quid a month for yet another on-line streaming service (I already have Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+), I am unlikely to see the series, unless it comers out on DVD/Blu-ray...

 

Do what I do, register for a month, watch all the episodes of the series you're interested in then cancel the subscription. We have Sky and Amazon Prime, for other streaming services we just pay for the odd month here an there. In the case of Apple we extended it to 2 months as there were a couple of other good series too which we didn't know about until we'd registered, For All Mankind and See. 

 

Regarding Foundation, I really enjoyed it, definitely has the potential to be the next Babylon 5/Battlestar Galactica/Expanse, though the caveat is I've never read the books so any deviations from them are irrelevant in terms of my enjoyment of the series.