1y ago

'Foundation' Is Fixing The Trickiest Thing About the Asimov Books

www.inverse.com 'Foundation' Is Fixing The Trickiest Thing About the Asimov Books

In Season 2 of 'Foundation' the Apple TV+ sci-fi epic is addressing the biggest challenge of the Isaac Asimov books. Here's how the new characters in the show make the books even better.

The title comes from the article, but I agree with some of these changes. It's making for an engaging show that also feels modern.

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I liked the books back when I read them. But sometimes it was tough work keeping on reading, because p.e. tech references would not translate well to nowadays, and from the social structure depicted they really showed their age. Which for me works with p.e. Heinlein, but not with Asimov and Foundation.
I try to see the series not as adaption of the books, but completely apart from them. And then I have to agree with the author and with OP, its modern, engaging and really well made.
- Old school scifi always has issues with weird tech hangups just throwing wrenches into huge foundational aspects of highly advanced civilizations. Thankfully most of them can be handwaved away.
  Anyone expecting a very internal monologue driven book series to be translated well into the screen is just green though lol.
  Remember when everyone complained about Ender's Game which was so similar with blatant storytelling in character thought? Versus the reality of what's being show in universe to a 3rd party observer? I can name very few internal monologue driven movies, let alone tv series that did well. I can't name a single one off the top of my head. Maybe Sin City and that's stretching.
  
  Old school scifi always has issues with weird tech hangups just throwing wrenches into huge foundational aspects of highly advanced civilizations. Thankfully most of them can be handwaved away.
  This is something that Dune handles really well precisely because it writes a lot of the tech out of the setting. "Thinking machines" are gone and banned, guns don't work against shields, lasers are banned because of their (nuclear) interaction with shields. Even communications are largely handled by couriers. The tech is deliberately written to be at a level where it doesn't take convenience or deux ex machina for certain situations to occur.
  Anyone expecting a very internal monologue driven book series to be translated well into the screen is just green though lol.
  I thought Denix Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune handled this incredibly well when Paul and Jessica used sign language to communicate while they were tied up. In the book, that entire section is told through their internal monologues and their expectations of what the other would be thinking, so translating that to sign language for the screen was clever. I'm very curious to see how the internal-monologue-heavy second half of the book will fare, though.
  
  The banned laser guns in Dune always struck me as a funny choice. If everyone uses shields and laser guns cause them to explode like nukes… those aren’t very good shields are they? And the Harkonnens are going to respect a ban? The Fremen could have used one laser to nuke the Harkonnens but they didn’t because of a ban?
  I wish he just hadn’t mentioned lasers at all. Not sure why he felt he had to.
  
  Yes, correct. I think what made reading the books difficult for me, though - and that was many years ago, not sure if I remember correctly - was that strong "atomic" reference in everything tech related, overused. Yes, at the time of writing this was cutting edge, but for me when reading was extremely difficult to translate/take seriously. It killed the immersion.
  Can't describe it better, but did not have that effect at all wit Asimov's contemporaries.
  
  I never thought of Sin City being different in that way. But it is. Whole sections are just the current character talking to themselves.
  
  Ender's Game was bad because they changed the overall internal conflict from one of horror at making the 'necessary' decisions to a 'yay we beat the bugs' ending of generic sci fi. Yeah, internal dialogue is hard to adapt, but when the core part of the book is changed it should be an interesting contrast like in Starship Troopers.

65 comments