
Apple confirms TV series order of Asimov’s Foundation - yaseen-rob
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1363339
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grej
This was the first full series of novels I ever read. I recall being so
enthralled with them that I literally stayed up all night reading a couple of
them. I still remember the brilliance of the writing building the suspense
toward foundation's first encounter with empire. I hope they can capture some
of the magic!

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taobility
try to read Three Body, you will find another new world.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-
Body_Problem_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-
Body_Problem_\(novel\))

~~~
r00fus
I loved tTBP but its nowhere close to Asimov's Foundation. Perhaps the 2nd &
3rd books flesh out the universe?

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chillacy
2nd book lays out the foundations of cosmic sociology, and it's a dark, dark
universe out there. 3rd book expands on that, reaches epic proportions.

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madengr
Big Asimov fan, and really looking forward to this. I just hope they don't
screw it up. Fortunately the stuff coming out of the internet based media
companies has been good. I would not trust the blockbuster movie industry to
do it. JJ Abrahms does Asimov would be an abomination. That I Robot movie with
Will Smith as an abomination. At least Apple has the $$$ to pull it off.

Foundation series would be ideal though, as you could cycle through actors.
Really would like to see a miniseries, maybe 10 hours for each book could do
it, but I don't know about the 1 hour format. Would like to see 2 hour movies.
I don't know how compatible it would be with the internet attention span.

What I don't trust Hollywood to do, is to keep it hard sci-fi, which is why I
love Asimov.

For example, through the series he spends many pages covering hyper-spacial
navigation. Sub light until you get outside the gravity wells, micro jump,
then spend two weeks figuring out where you are, micro jump again, etc. This
changes as technology is developed from Robots through Foundation.

They'd have to do the same with many other topics, such as mathematical
psycho-history. That's what makes it Asimov. Otherwise they would turn it into
a space-opera.

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apetresc
10 hours for each book seems excessive, especially since most of the actual
events in the Foundation novels happen "off-screen" and are only revealed
through conversations by the characters.

10 hours is the equivalent of the entire Hobbit trilogy of movies, for a book
that is much shorter - and we all know how that turned out.

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stormbrew
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with taking a sparsely plotted
novel (like The Hobbit or Foundation, both of which have a lot of details
happen off-stage and sometimes bafflingly so) and fleshing out the details.

The problem with the Hobbit movies is just that they did that very badly.

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tunesmith
I have fond memories of the first time I read the Foundation series. I chose
to read it the long way, in a recommended order I found online that pulls in
the robot novels and the empire novels. Only frustrating bit with that is that
every single one of those books _except for one_ (I think it was Robots and
Empire) is available as an ebook. :)

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thinkingkong
Neat! Do you have a link to the recommended order?

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mattweinberg
Many people (including me) think it’s best to start with the Foundation core
set - Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. Then you can
move to the Robots Series - Caves of Steel, Naked Sun, and Robots of Dawn.
Then circle back to the Foundation sequels, which ties them together a bit.
It's important not to read Robots and Empire until you read the Foundation
series.

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coldtea
And I'd top them off with The End Of Eternity, which although its in its own
world (or is it?), it's ending ties indirectly to the whole series...

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sizzzzlerz
As eager as I would be for a Foundation TV show, I think about Dune and what
an abomination that was. Similarly, I loved The Hobbit, but Jackson's trilogy
was all but unrecognizable. With few exceptions (GoT, for example), multi-
volume novels are made well.

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ianai
I’d love a good modern Dune movie series. It would go well in the current
genre of dystopia movies.

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pier25
Denis Villeneuve is working on a new Dune adaptation.

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kyriakos
As a movie though, I think the material is so dense it can't be expressed in a
movie setting especially with today's need for everything to be about action
and special effects.

I just finished reading The Butlerian Jihad and even though it's not the same
as the original works it's more suited for today's audience.

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ianai
There’s plenty of dark plots and action for a movie. But his philosophy and
pernicious stuff could be hard to convey.

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kyriakos
I agree the story is hardly about the action but about politics, religion,
fanaticism, will power etc. The important parts are in the details and will be
hard to be put in a movie. More time is needed to develop the characters than
what's available in a movies length.

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technofiend
Although Amazon has had some success doing what everyone else does and
extending Philip K. Dick's work with The Man in the High Castle, Asimov
famously quoted that most of his action happens offstage. [1] So it remains to
be seen if Apple can rework Foundation's action enough to keep viewers engaged
without tweaking the material so much it's unrecognizable to True Fans (TM).

I'm not saying video can't be compelling when much is implied; Jaws is famous
for suspension building as a happy accident from the shark robot's
unreliability. But Foundation is a quarter million words and modern audiences
do IMHO expect engaging and visual story telling.

[1]
[https://archive.org/stream/AsimovTheFoundation_201705/Asimov...](https://archive.org/stream/AsimovTheFoundation_201705/Asimov_the_foundation_djvu.txt)

 _I read it with mounting uneasiness. I kept waiting for something to happen,
and nothing ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million
words, consisted of thoughts and of conversations. No action. No physical
suspense._

 _What was all the fuss about, then? Why did everyone want more of that stuff?
- To be sure, I couldn 't help but notice that I was turning the pages
eagerly, and that I was upset when I finished the book, and that I wanted
more, but I was the author, for goodness' sake. You couldn't go by me._

 _I was on the edge of deciding it was all a terrible mistake and of insisting
on giving back the money, when (quite by accident, I swear) I came across some
sentences by science-fiction writer and critic, James Gunn, who, in connection
with the Foundation series, said,_ "Action and romance have little to do with
the success of the Trilogy - virtually all the action takes place offstage,
and the romance is almost invisible - but the stories provide a detective-
story fascination with the permutations and reversals of ideas."

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kevin42
Awesome, that's the first reason I have to get an Apple device!

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dmitriid
Meanwhile the full series isn’t available in iBooks

