Apple confirms TV series order of Asimov’s Foundation | Hacker News Reader

Apple confirms TV series order of Asimov’s Foundation

arstechnica.com

84 pointsyaseen-rob30 comments

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!

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

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

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.

when I talking about Three Body, I mean the trilogy, not specific to the first book.

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. :)

Robots and Empire is relatively hard to find in print even. I think it's had a lot fewer reprints than most of the other books for some reason, in spite of its fairly critical place in the Asimov timeline and the fact that other books refer to it a lot.

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

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.

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...

Here's the order I read them in:

  I, Robot (1950)
  Foundation (1951)
  Foundation and Empire (1952)
  Second Foundation (1953)
  The Caves Of Steel (1954)
  The Naked Sun (1957)
  The Robots Of Dawn (1983)
  Foundation’s Edge (1982)
  Foundation and Earth (1986)
  Robots And Empire (1985)
  The End of Eternity (1955)

I haven't actually finished the final two because it took me a while to find Robots And Empire. I'll have to reread from the beginning.

Here’s Asimov’s recommended order. This one is pretty much chronological for characters, I think, which would spoil some narrative twists. Kind of like how watching the Star Wars prequels first would spoil The Empire Strikes Back.

  Either The Complete Robot (1982) *or* I, Robot (1950)
  The Caves Of Steel
  The Naked Sun
  The Robots Of Dawn
  Robots And Empire
  The Currents Of Space (1952)
  The Stars, Like Dust (1951)
  Pebble In The Sky (1950)
  Prelude To Foundation (1988)
  Forward the Foundation (1993)
  Foundation
  Foundation and Empire
  Second Foundation
  Foundation’s Edge
  Foundation and Earth

And here is an Expanded Chronological order, which includes books written by other authors after Asimov died:

  I, Robot
  The Rest of the Robots (1964)
  The Complete Robot (1982)
  Robot Dreams (1986)
  Robot Visions (1990)
  The Positronic Man (1992) (co-written by Robert Silverberg)
  Mother Earth (1948) (minor inconsistencies)
  The Caves Of Steel
  The Naked Sun
  Mirror Image (1972)
  The Robots of Dawn
  Mirage (Mark W. Tiedemann) (2000)
  Chimera (Mark W. Tiedemann) (2001)
  Aurora (Mark W. Tiedemann) (2002)
  Have Robot, Will Travel (Alexander C. Irvine) (2005)
  Robots And Empire
  Caliban (Roger MacBride Allen) (1993)
  Inferno (Roger MacBride Allen) (1994)
  Utopia (Roger MacBride Allen) (1996)
  The Stars, Like Dust
  The Currents Of Space 
  Pebble In The Sky
  Prelude To Foundation
  Foundation’s Fear (Gregory Benford) (1997)
  Forward the Foundation (MINUS the final section of the epilogue)
  Foundation and Chaos (Greg Bear) (1998)
  Foundation’s Triumph (David Brin) (1999)
  Foundation
  Foundation and Empire
  Second Foundation
  Foundation’s Edge
  Foundation and Earth
  The End Of Eternity (not really in order apparently, kind of in its own time)
  Nemesis (1989) (not really in order, kind of on its own)

I got these lists from somewhere online years back, I think a stackoverflow site, but I'd avoid them because they also talk about spoilers even in listing the names of the books.

Yes, I had to buy a hard back Robots and Empire. One thing I'd like is to have a hard back Asimov collection.

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...

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."

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.

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

Denis Villeneuve is working on a new Dune adaptation.

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.

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

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.

Call me crazy, but I liked the movie, and I’m a fan of the books. Just finished God Emporer of Dune.

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

Meanwhile the full series isn’t available in iBooks

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.

JJ Abrahms does Asimov would be an abomination.

What Michael Bay is to 'splosions, JJ Abrams is to plot twists.

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.

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.

But that's why it would be such a great miniseries. You should use the novels as a framework, and allow showrunners to get creative fleshing out the characters and plot details. The Novels are pretty short, but dense with plot and ideas. A direct translation of the source material would be bad but the potential is there for a great adaptation if characters are more fleshed out.

There is precedent.

Look at Altered Carbon which got 10 hours for the first book, or The Man in the High Castle which was adapted into 2+ seasons for a book that's only 240 pages.

> That I Robot movie with Will Smith as an abomination.

Funny thing about that movie. The movie is based on a spec script called Hardwired, and it originally had no connection to I, Robot. Also, the writer of that script wrote the screenplay for a cancelled film adaptation of Foundation.

http://www.screenwritersutopia.com/article/d19127d8

Well the movie actually iterates on a series of the ideas from Asimov's stories so I wouldn't call it bad. Basically it's about VIKI coming up with the Zero Law.

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