Foundation is so awful it makes me sad. Fringe is one of my all-time favorites. Silo is pretty awesome. Jack Ryan was too Reacher (Krasinski was bad casting, and it felt like it was written by 16 yos).
I hardly know what to think…
I hardly know what to think…
https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/foundation-the-officia...
I enjoyed the other stuff, though it was more “inspired by the foundation universe”.
If you’re going to rewrite terminus, give us a hint as to how these people are going to wind up dominating the galaxy technologically.
If 5 people are in a room during a big event, and you interview them, you will get 5 different accounts. Where they were looking when the event happened, what their allegiances are, who their friends are, their background, etc etc all results in a different takeaway.
So I'm OK with change. I can live with it.
Yet, Foundation IMO was well beyond this degree of change. And very very important things were left out, and could have been told.
For example, Asimov constantly described a broken culture of innovation. How many no longer even understood how the machines around them worked, and maintained them by rote. How scientists would merely read old books and papers, and debate that, instead of engaging in new research. This was a strong theme, and a massive reason for the Empire to fall, yet there were only hints of it in the TV series.
This could easily have been in the series, but I really don't think many people on staff even read all the books, and it shows.
But then they also made other characters move through time so that... because they are special, and only they can save the plan!
It _entirely_ inverts (at least what I remember being) the entire point of the book, that individuals aren't uniquely special. It makes "The plan" look like a plan that needed to be actively managed by the uniquely special people involved - the same people, because they travel through time actively managing it - rather than an actual inevitable projection of history.
This then completely undercuts anything special about the Mule because, oops, we already gave people superpowers, so now it's just a generic action badass dude we have to fight.
At this point you aren't adapting foundation, you are fan-fictioning it. I guess attaching the name gets you money though.
It was a rather important, though not initially revealed, point in the original trilogy that the plan was a plan that needed to be actively managed, by uniquely special people (including, but not exclusively, the strongest telepaths that could be found and gathered.)
Revealing this before the Mule is a radical change to the structure of the story, sure, moreso than changing the nature of the specialness of the guardians.
It's definitely an interesting storytelling change, and probably for the better. Second Foundation in the books is very much a seat of the pants deus ex machina where Asimov seemed to write himself into a clever puzzle with no easy answer and cleverly solved it "at the last minute" with a retcon, then sort of took another trilogy and a half to complete the retcon and deal with the consequences.
The plan was managed to an extent. That was the second foundation's job. And if you read far enough, even that and the Empire before it was quietly tuned from afar by R. Daneel.
I mean, in the book series there's even the out-of-the-blue Mule without any retconning.
I haven't seen season 2 though
It reminded me of Amazon's horrible Tolkien series (Rings of Power), that is, exceptional special effects, but everything else sucked.
People claiming that series is bad haven't read the books in a long times.
There are no characters. There are talking heads that speak at each other. Women are non-existent. Every single person is a knight without fear or reproach. Huge galaxy-spanning powers come and go in lieu of interesting ideas (first the Mule and the R. Daneel).
The TV series (at least season 1, haven't seen season 2) is the best that could happen to the books IMO.
You were a fan of the books, but disliked this? ;)
I enjoyed it, but I haven't watch the TV series or actually read the books, so I no idea how it lines up...
Remember Magnolia? People said that was bloated.
Asimov is a horrible writer. The books are just bad (with the exception of the first one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39555390). And if you take the series as whole, what they did in the show is really good. Imagine springing the Mule or R.Daneel Olivaw out of nowhere like the books do?
It does have some clever plot reveals, but at some point the "Ha! Little did you know this was the plan all along" becomes rote.
The failure in adaptations I see is not understanding why people liked the source and leaning into that.
It's not the window dressing / surface-level stuff that's too often mimicked: it's a more core, simple... thing.
To me, Foundation was about 'epicness across time'
But, if I wanted a better written version of that, I'd read the first 3 Dune novels.
Some parts of the internet however dislike the adaptation because the main cast is no longer almost entirely male and really hate the skin color of some of the actors.
That's a fact.
Nobody said all who disliked it did because of the casting.
The second part of your comment could have been anywhere in this thread, especially if you actually had specific complaints.
But you had to use the word woke and get angry, so you could pretend there haven't been racist comments about the show on the internet from the sci-fi community?
Pretending nobody is racist helps no one but actual racists from getting called out.
How is someone supposed to take that? Refuting an argument not made is either a great way to make a point or a great way to make someone really unhappy.
If you're agreeing with their viewpoint but for a different reason, explain the reasoning.
If you don't feel like typing out a substantive comment, why would anyone want to read the comment you barely felt like typing out.
If someone is dog whistling they are effectively conceding the argument because they're too ashamed to make the case plainly. Just take the W. The alternative is to explain to someone (and some hypothetical audience) that you you know what's going on inside someone's mind better then they do.
And again - there are people who will literally say they are Nazi's. There are people who will make not dog whistle or beat around the bush argument but straight up I am not ashamed to say arguments for awful things.
If you like Foundation and disagree with the arguments that it's not good then engage the argument made - just saying that you think there's an unstated argument and you'd like to engage with that particular one doesn't really get you anywhere.
I think Foundation admits people of other races exist by book 5, in passing. And there are like two (maybe?) notable female characters in the entire book series.
It's very, _very_ far from the books. There's no point calling it "The Foundation". It's not even the same genre - how much action is in Asimov?
It's fine to judge it on its own and say it's good or bad, but then why the name? Basically for the tv show equivalent of clickbait. Which is why I hate it.
An entire season of characters just talking about what happened instead of actually showing what happened would be painfully boring to watch.
I've only completed the first book, but thought the show did a decent enough job of having action while condensing the characters down so they could be available over multiple arcs for consistency for the contents of the first book.
>An emotionless supersoldier mary sue? It would never work as a TV series, we need to explore the spartans' emotions!
And so we get some garbage that misses what was beloved by fans and features Master Chief with his helmet off, being sad on the subway. Feels like it's written by people totally unconcerned with the source material, just like Apple-Foundation.
Unlike Apple-foundation, glimpses of what a proper Halo adaptation could have been exist:
https://youtu.be/XRMUYpH7bQk https://youtu.be/SyOAdrxlPVs https://youtu.be/40jdpzrpIps https://youtu.be/P63er_GRH1o
I'd trade the whole apple-foundation series for two minutes of content by people who cared about the books.
Is this an argument that the series is the same as the books? "Any changes that are necessary are not really changes" or such? I didn't argue that the changes are unnnecessary, or even bad. Just that they exist, and they are many. Sure sounds like you agree with me.
The Foundation TV show did not even have the same ethos, the same world-view, the same philosophical view of history as the books.
Apple wanted a big dumb heroic VFX-driven sci-fi saga TV show; and we can understand why. However, the source material that they chose is about history, and is actively hostile to the "heroic" view of history. It actually seems to be a critique of the heroic derring-do sci-fi of the day and the "great man" theory of history. (1)
It's like the showrunners did actually understand what the books were _about_, but decided to deliberately do the opposite. Maybe they actively hated the books.
I could not care less if they change skin colour or gender; or spice up the action scenes, updates like that are good, but IMHO this is by far the least of the problems with the _Foundation_ TV series.
I think to some extent the TV show is showing a variation of the timeline with respect to the rules of psychohistory: it doesn't account for individual actions (including/especially mistakes). I personally don't think it is trying to be a "Great man theory" version of Foundation, because so many of the "changes" are mistakes from the seemingly more "pristine" timeline of the books (or at least how we perceive them from how the Encyclopedia Galactica documented them).
I can definitely appreciate where that criticism comes from though, I appreciate that it is a valid point of view of the show. I just find it worthwhile to point out that I don't feel like the showrunners are as oblivious as that and I don't think they are intending a "great man" take on the show and at least in my reading of the show so far I do think there are other ways to read what they are trying to do, plus or minus the format constraints of trying to do it as a TV show with the contractual and budget/production reality of needing to keep some cast member stability from episode to episode and season to season.