Apple is making a show based on Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ books
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
There's not doubt that Asimov was pretty smart and there are a lot of interesting ideas in the Foundation books. However, I don't think that those will translate to the screen very well. Since the books span many centuries, characters come and go and are mostly not very fleshed out or interesting. Asimov is pretty similar to Lem in this regard, who also was much more interested in ideas than people. Of course, a good screenwriter can make up for that, but you can bet that people will be annoyed by all the additional stuff that is not in the book (like in Soderberg's "Solaris", for instance).
So I'm much more thrilled about Amazon developing a series based on Banks' "Consider Phlebas"...
Wow that is big news, I did not know that! That book is so cinematic already, it leaps off the page. Should translate to the screen very well. Hope they do "Use of Weapons" and "Player of Games" also, in fact the entire Culture series is an amazing opportunity for TV conversion.
Excession stood out in this regard, until it didn't.
(Consider Phlebas also stands out, but it's a unique culture book by a mile)
Thats because it's not primarily about the action but about the technological, social and societal issues and conflicts. For me at least.
BTW. No spoilers please - I'm re-reading in chronological order.
Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is another great example; the book and movie are vastly different, yet both stand on there own and one could argue are great for different reasons. I'd be hardpressed to pick which I love more.
I do agree with a lot of what you are saying about Asimov's Foundation series; however I think the core ideas are what they'll focus on and most likely they'll introduce a host entirely new characters when they rework it as a screenplay.
Maybe a better/clearer point is this: I think Foundation is actually more suited for this kind of treatment because of it's 'flaws'. Aka, the idea is great and the potential is there to make it into something successful.
Of course, we'll have to wait to see if Apple/the production company can pull it off.
On a side note: I wish someone would buy the rights and reboot Babylon 5. I'm going through it with my GF for the 4th or 5th time since it aired. Still one of the best SciFi shows ever storywise and I have a soft spot for those Amiga VideoToaster graphics. Plus Vorlons.
And it likewise works OK for the characters to not be fully fleshed out immediately - they aren't on TV either, as the actors and writers get used to the characters.
Depending on how they manage it, this might not be all that much of an obstacle. Cloud Atlas faced the same problem, but I thought that their use of an ensemble cast to tell a story that spanned the several centuries worked out just fine.
Banks' "Consider Phlebas"
So they're adapting the worst Culture book. It's probably the easiest to adapt, but it's by far the least interesting.
...except for the last three, I think? They are a more typical epic space adventure that takes place within a single lifetime.
"She had a rough childhood (20 minutes of expose, plus mandatory flashbacks in every episode), her mom died when she was 9 and dad was a cheating alcoholic, but now she's a badass who will kick ass for the next 4 seasons. And oh btw look: she has a cool hoverboard and here's white platicky computers which are REALLY powerful. Also, some omnipresent AI will play God."
If you are not identifying with the protagonist, everything else is simply meh. OTOH, interesting ideas are interesting on their own.
I don't think there's anything wrong with having the setting act as a backdrop, per se. Stories set in the Wild West aren't about the technology of guns and cattle wrangling, stories set in the Middle Ages aren't about swords and battlements, so stories set in the future don't need to be about technological extrapolation.
Poorly written characters or a protagonist you can't empathize with is often the result of writers caring more about the tech and the technobabble than the human drama. Good sci-fi provides a balance of both - a plausible setting that doesn't explain too much, with stories that focus on the characters and their relationship with the setting.
So, I am extremely pessimistic, even though I would like to be excited about this news. The team behind it also leaves me feeling ambivalent. On one hand, it's a guy who has just made superhero movies (just the sort that would I would expect to destroy a thinky story like Foundation) but also the guy who made The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was actually pretty good (though rarely as smart/deep as the cast deserved; Lena Heady, in particular).
I love that scifi TV and film is seeing such a resurgence, but I sure do hate to see my favorites get butchered.
The movie didn't adapt any particular book or short story, but that doesn't mean it didn't try to be faithful to Asimov.
In all of Asimov's robot short stories (including I, Robot), there was only one instance of a robot that violated the Three Laws. That's far from a common theme...
Yes, there was the 0th Law in Robots and Empire (that later appears in the Foundation prequels), but that is a far more nuanced concept than the ideas in the I, Robot movie, where robots ran around killing and injuring humans indiscriminately.
However, in every single story, the robot(s) found a loophole in the laws that resulted in going against the spirit of the laws. It's true that the movie showed a very crude version vs the very nuanced take in the stories. But I attribute that to the medium of film making itself.
In the movie you have thousands of robots running around killing and injuring countless humans. That's something I'm quite sure would never happen in Asimov's writing.
Asimov was unique in that he was the first to start with the premise that humans _could_ safely develop advanced robots, rather than using the "robot uprising" trope that everyone before him used (all the way back to the first use of the term "robot" in Karel Čapek's R.U.R.). So, despite that groundbreaking approach, what do we get in the first major motion picture about his robot series? A robot uprising...
I don't know how you can say it both captures the spirit of Asimov's writings while also having a robot uprising as the central plot device. Asimov explicitly rejected the "Frankenstein complex" that was present in robot related sci-fi up to that point.
And I think there are at least some implications that Daneel was at least peripherally involved in much larger events than the person-by-person manipulation we see in the prequel books directly (ie. famines), but he saved himself by keeping himself more remote from them than literally pulling the switch.
Had the master robot in I, Robot actually suffered for its implementation of the zeroth law I think that would have been at least a little more in keeping with Asimov's vision, so I think it's a bit important to recognize that robots CAN do great harm with the zeroth law, there are just consequences.
(and we can probably ignore the fact that the three-Bs extended books resurrected Dors and iirc somewhat even Giskard)
Daneel and Giskard's interventions are scary, but in the end they do appear to be truly in keeping with a species-wide application of the first law, in that their attempts to 'preserve humanity' were not just a rote idea of "keep humanity alive at any cost" but to preserve the components of humanity that they didn't themselves understand like individuality, creativity, and a drive to learn and explore (very star trekky really).
If I want to get too deep into the subject, it seems like a robot that interpreted the first law so narrowly would never be capable of developing a zeroth law to begin with, because its focus would be so intent on a narrow idea of what a human was, ignoring social concepts altogether (as for eg. Solarian robots do).
To be fair though it has been a REALLY long time since I've seen the movie.
At the end of Robots and Empire he allows Mandamus to activate his "nuclear intensifier", which will eventually render the Earth uninhabitable over the course of several decades (thereby driving humanity to colonize more stars). R. Giskard decided it was in the best interest of humanity for them to disperse, but couldn't rule out the possibility that some humans would be harmed in the process, so he permanently shut down.
Also I don't think Asimov's robots would have ever had a slave mode that rendered them immune to application of the laws. They probably still would have gone inoperative before actually carrying out a massacre.
Yes, technically. But practically, every single story showed how some robot was able to reason his way into violating the spirit of the laws. The movie was very crude about showing it, but it was the same concept present in every Asimov short story.
> Asimov was unique in that he was the first to start with the premise that humans _could_ safely develop advanced robots, rather than using the "robot uprising" trope
I, robot the movie did that too. It showed that a robot could glimpse at the spirit behind the laws and act not according to the letter, but according to the spirit of the laws. Finally, he helped the humans thwart the uprising, and the movie ends with the suggestion that he will influence other robots to see his viewpoint.
Huh? There is literally one story (Little Lost Robot) where there is a "loophole" in the laws (and only because the First Law is modified to drop the "or through inaction allow a human to come to harm" bit).
EDIT: in thinking about it further, I guess I'd add That Thou Are Mindful Of Him to the list of "loophole" stories. Still, two examples out of dozens of stories is very much the exception, not the rule.
Reason: the robots decide to redefine the term "human"
Catch that rabbit: robot ignores first law unless forced by humans in a sticky situation (though this one is a bit ehhh)
Liar: to avoid "hurting" the feelings of humans, a mind-reading robot hurts them in a much more real way
Escape: due to a technical interpreation of hyperspatial travel, robot prevents humans from discovering hyperspatial travel. Vilating first law in the long term since humanity couldn't survive without a means of fast space travel.
Evitable conflict: machines decide that the only way to perfectly follow the laws is to take control over humanity, which is the exact thing the laws were supposed to prevent.
Little lost robot: you said it
That's 7 out of the 9 stories in I, Robot. I have noticed this in most of his short stories and novels.
In universe, maybe. But the actual purpose of the Three Laws as a plot device was for them to be violated, and provide the crux of the story that followed.
One is book vs script length. A film is 100 pages. Novels are 250+. This means big story-arch rewrites. It can really kill plot & character development. This is where series open up a lot of possibility.
That's usually the biggest adaption, but there are lots of other big things that must change. Novels can do character thoughts, exposition and other things well. For example, a strategic battle scene will work in a book. In a film, it's near impossible so they focus on action and drama. Films do visual representation, so action-rich scenes work. They get characters for "free," actors will represent a highly nuanced person in a way you immediately understand.
These add up to a big re-write, that cannot be avoided.
Writers like Asimov are the very best storytellers. They work on their own schedule, write what comes to them, discard bad work... If you handed a good novelist the task of writing a LOTR prequel novel about Frodo's parents, by October... It probably won't be as good as Tolkien's.
You just can't replicate genius on commission.
This is really evident in Game of Thrones. The early seasons capture what's great about the books. A politically driven story that isn't boring, a novel approach to magical realism... Early seasons were loyal to the book. The latest season was mostly "off-script." The politics got stupid. Characters wandered closer to fantasy tropes. The "realism" part of magical realism was gone. Apart from big plot points, it wasn't written by GRRM and it showed. So, it is not good in the ways he's good. It was also written much quicker, on a schedule.
It'll be hard to capture Asimov in a series, harder than GRRM I expect. His stories are just not story driven enough.
His main plot device is not a spaceship or a time machine, it's a fictional theory, psychohistory. How do you capture that on film, line charts?
Good luck to them though. I love sci fi.
I likely would have enjoyed it more had I not been expecting an Asimov story on film. I like Will Smith a lot, but somehow he's been in multiple films that ruined favorite books from my youth (I Am Legend is another book that I love and that had an abysmal film adaptation...I don't blame Smith, though, as he did a great job even in a very cheesy film). I, Robot was also pretty cheesy even without the weight of trying to live up to Asimov's legacy.
But, then we got a closer look at them a bit later and they were flying through the air, bouncing off the walls, and just all around looking like cartoon monsters. I'm just not frightened by cartoons. And, it really killed the slow, calm, horror of the book for me. The things that made the book unique and scary in a way that sticks with you are just fundamentally different from the jump scares of the film.
The Vincent Price adaptation (The Last Man On Earth) remains the most faithful film version of I Am Legend, in spirit if not in specific detail. I don't really mind when a movie script changes some plot points or some character details to make it work on screen, I just dislike it when the spirit of the thing is thrown away and replaced with blockbuster tropes (which is my primary complaint about I, Robot, as well).
But, again, I thought Will Smith was excellent in the role. I just really hate what they did with the vamps.
It's a very good movie, even if not faithful to the original.
I really hope this is good but they need to go full game of thrones in terms of scope and adherence to the source material. I'm so tired of seeing "Based on a story by Philip K Dick" and then basically seeing stereotypical sci-fi with a romance plot thrown in and any trace of the original message of the story removed.
I wonder how well the Foundation books will translate to the screen. Given the segmented format of the first three Foundation novels, it almost seems like a mockumentary-style exposition would be necessary (which could preserve things like the cool Encyclopedia Galactica quote epigraphs).
[1] http://www.player.one/foundation-tv-show-whatever-happened-h...
https://hbowatch.com/hbo-acquires-asimovs-foundation-series-...
Stoked to have discovered the handful of prequel novellas providing backstory.
It's also one of the few books that made me want to throw it across the room when I finished it.
Even if we don't count the empty space, it's pretty enormous.
It wasn't what I expected of Stargate, but it was watchable.
That show never really had the courage of its convictions.
I have failed to interest young people in the book, they seem to be put off by virtually all of the characters being cigar or pipe smoking men with females relegated to the secretarial positions where they are summoned by the very modern push button on a desk. I think there is also the very modern push button on the floor of the office which closes the door.
As a story it now suffers from what to modern readers are inadvertent anachronisms. Asimov seems to have meant to write "Here we are, maybe 15 minutes in the future and off we go into the stars and centuries beyond!", instead we've got "Once society regresses to a state which oppresses half the population and is reduced to primitive pre-electronic technology we can finally get on with a grand future!"
A TV series which starts 15 minutes in our future and presents the same ideas could be a fine framework to fill with characters people care about, but something other than world war two era United States industrialists please.
Also, was the book really meant to be Utopian in tone? I thought it was just a good space story, one of my most enjoyable reads ever (I read it when I was 23).
I didn't notice anything off when I first read it, but that was in the 1970s and I was a young studious male. I remembered it as a fun space story and one which glorified researchers and academics as important over generals and politicians… which probably is a lot of the appeal to a certain audience.
I think now it's sort of like watching space movies from the 1950s. Model spaceships swinging along on wires in front of a painting and zippers up the back of the alien monster's skin were the norm then and just ignored, now they are moment ruining features.
Instead we end up with endless comic book treatments. I dont not want to see the fourth origin story of Spiderman, Superman or Batman. However, I have to concede with a good script and director, these sometimes work.
I wish I could see more more Heinlein on film, e.g. Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and Stranger in a Strange Land. Partial treatments were in The Last Starfigher and Star Treks What of Charlie.
In either the first or second book I seem to remember one of the only female characters is depicted succeeding despite being a woman. Which is a very 50s view.
Same with Heinlein, almost all the women in stranger in a strange land are cringe worthy. They literally play in the pool all day long and are basically sexual playthings for the men.
I read (in the case of Asimov, re-read) both a couple of years ago, they've really aged poorly. While the concepts are cool, much of the stories would have to be rewritten or you'll have some real cognitive dissonance with the female parts.
The later Asimov books and prequels are better as they were written in the 80s. But then they suffer from his retconning of bringing all his series together. I don't know what others think about it as I read most of them before the internet, but I felt it was very contrived.
I agree that the adaptation will have to be adapted a lot in order to be shown today. I wouldn't even mind if they modified the society structure a bit (or a lot) in order to make the initial premise more believable.
Who would play Jubal? Kevin Spacey would be perfect, for meta-reasons even.
I’d imagine a similar treatment might work for the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, unlike the Netflix’s the Expanse where it devolved from excellent work building into a single overearnest spaceship crew solving all the solar system’s problems.
https://deadline.com/2016/10/space-drama-the-expanse-streami...
Though I'd love to see a series based on the Bridge trilogy. And his version of Alien 3 would have been fascinating.
There's a lot of weirdly introduced characters in the 2nd film especially that leave you thinking "wtf was that there for?" but were actually the continuation / conclusion / intersection of storylines started in one of the animatrix shorts (e.g. the kid) or the game (the other crew).
That said, they did make sure the films had enough injected explanation that movie-going audiences weren't totally lost, but unless you watched it the way the Wachowskis intended, it would come off as disoriented and exposition-heavy, nowhere near the quality of the first film.
Not that they are masterpieces on the level of Shakespeare. But having gone back and watched the first film, then Animatrix and played Enter the Matrix, before re-watching the final films as a two-parter, it does make sense as a consistent, coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end, and even quality throughout.
I'll never forgive The Matrix for dumbing down the idea of running the AIs on the organic brains (Agent Smith's disgust is evident) and turning it into using humans as power generation devices.
Also, there is no way Neuromancer can be made into a 90 minute script. It's miniseries material, at least.
edit: Apparently Amazon is making Snow Crash: https://www.avclub.com/amazon-is-making-a-snow-crash-tv-show...
(And I obviously love the novels, so I'm a bit biased)
It's called radio.
Seriously, I've heard radio adaptations from the 1940s or 1950s of classic science fictions stories, and they were excellent.
As far as story goes, they could follow the original better than film or TV adaptions, because their cost is pretty much proportional to length. For a visual adaption, cost is a function of length, number of settings, and complexity of those settings. With a visual adaptation you often need to cut out whole settings to keep costs down.
As far as visuals go, you leave that to the listener. A few deft words from a character or from a narrator to provide a little guidance, along with some sound effects, and the listen's imagination can fill the rest.
As an example of the kind of science fiction that was available on radio, here is the episode list for the early '50s program "Dimension X": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dimension_X_episodes
Only half-serious, since they pretty much go to the opposite extreme.
It's hard to describe but the stories seemed to be not more than sketches without richness or detail, and many of the potentially interesting ideas were never fully explored.
To be fair, there was something strangely appealing about it, and by the end I found I quite liked it even with its flaws - probably because there were some really imaginative concepts underneath (the Foundation I suppose).
This could probably be attributed to its pulp origins -- it wasn't originally a set of novels, but a bunch of pulp serials that were in the same universe.
I think given this, that Asimov was about drama an the unfolding, in a SF backdrop; TV is a very good venue.
But that's part of the unique strength of the early Foundation books. What makes the experience powerful is that the reader's imagination is left to fill in the gaps. The trick was to write a sufficiently epic framework, which succeeded because inspiration was drawn from Gibbon's famous account of the decline and fall of Rome.
A TV series faces a different logic. Little is left to the visual imagination and one is left trying to imagine what the characters are thinking, yet as deng pointed out there aren't any main characters in Foundation (apart from Seldon, who's mostly a sort of narrator in any case).
As mentioned in another comment, it began as a serialized work, and it never really escapes Asimov's "make it up as you go along" style, resulting in quite a meandering series. I think it would have to be a very loose adaptation to make it interesting.
I suppose not many people would flock to the cinema for slow scifi though (but then Blade Runner 2049 did alright...)
If they made it like the books, those of us that have read it would probably love it, but I doubt it would be popular.
But I'm damn happy it's being attempted. Here's hoping I'm surprised! (Pleasantly surprised, I mean.)
Personally I pay €15 per month for an Apple Music family plan because at the time it was cheaper than Spotify and it works well enough for me. Hopefully Apple’s new video services becomes part of that same subscription but with the mess of their iCloud storage options I won’t hold my breath.
(I really enjoy the books, so I would like to experience that adaptation.)
Abandon all hope...
They should just spin out what's left of their computing hardware and operating system business, this segment is as vestigial as the appendix to the company now.