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Apple Is Developing a TV Show Based On Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series (deadline.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Deadline: In a competitive situation, Apple has nabbed a TV series adaptation of Foundation, the seminal Isaac Asimov science fiction novel trilogy. The project, from Skydance Television, has been put in development for straight-to-series consideration. Deadline revealed last June that Skydance had made a deal with the Asimov estate and that David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman were cracking the code on a sprawling series based on the books that informed Star Wars and many other sci-fi films and TV series. Goyer and Friedman will be executive producers and showrunners. Skydance's David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Marcy Ross also will executive produce.
Originally published as a short story series in Astounding Magazine in 1942, Asimov's Foundation is the complex saga of humans scattered on planets throughout the galaxy, all living under the rule of the Galactic Empire. The protagonist is a psycho-historian who has an ability to read the future and foresees the empire's imminent collapse. He sets out to save the knowledge of mankind from being wiped out. Even the Game of Thrones' creative team would marvel at the number of empires that rise and fall in Foundation. Asimov's trilogy has been tried numerous times as a feature film at Fox, Warner Bros (with Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, who greenlit The Lord of the Rings), and then at Sony with Independence Day director Roland Emmerich. Many top sci-fi writers have done scripts and found it daunting to constrict the sprawling saga to a feature film format. Most recently, HBO tried developing a series with Interstellar co-writer and Westworld exec producer Jonathan Nolan, but a script was never ordered.
Originally published as a short story series in Astounding Magazine in 1942, Asimov's Foundation is the complex saga of humans scattered on planets throughout the galaxy, all living under the rule of the Galactic Empire. The protagonist is a psycho-historian who has an ability to read the future and foresees the empire's imminent collapse. He sets out to save the knowledge of mankind from being wiped out. Even the Game of Thrones' creative team would marvel at the number of empires that rise and fall in Foundation. Asimov's trilogy has been tried numerous times as a feature film at Fox, Warner Bros (with Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, who greenlit The Lord of the Rings), and then at Sony with Independence Day director Roland Emmerich. Many top sci-fi writers have done scripts and found it daunting to constrict the sprawling saga to a feature film format. Most recently, HBO tried developing a series with Interstellar co-writer and Westworld exec producer Jonathan Nolan, but a script was never ordered.
So the show will only be compatible with Apple's walled garden*.
So, while it sounds interesting, I'm not interested.
* walled garden is interchangeable with prison camp
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Many top sci-fi writers have done scripts and found it daunting to constrict the sprawling saga to a feature film format.
I finished reading the trilogy a week or so ago. There is no feasible way to take what was five hundred or so years of conflict and intrigue, and all the attendant characters, and make it into a two-hour movie. Nor even a three-hour movie.
Whatever would come out would be a shell of the story, the characters lifeless, and the plot unable to be followed by the majority of viewers. A tv show is the only way to approach Asimov's story since it allows for longer development of plot lines and encompass the time involved.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I think it will be impossible to capture the scale of this in film.
So we will either get some watered down version where they show all the different eras briefly and don't really dig in to the full details from the books, or we will get one that focuses only on Hari Seldon and his road to making psychohistory.
Has Apple actually made anything good yet? You keep hearing about these shows they are picking up but all I have ever seen was that stupid carpool karaoke.
I can dig it!
I've heard this lie before!
On Slashdot, back in 2014. I'm beginning to suspect there will never be a Foundation movie/series.
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/14/11/11/1811227/hbo-developing-asimovs-foundation-series-as-tv-show
Everyone even remotely familiar with the Foundation trilogy knows that it's almost impossible to transpose to tv/film.
They're going to focus on sex and extreme violence (Westworld, anyone ?), like almost every series being produced these days on HBO or Netflix, and either butcher or completely disregard the core ideas and concepts of the novels.
Call me a pessimist, but I've seen to many great classic science-fiction novels turned to shit on screen in recent years not to be.
he develops the mathematics to predict the future based on large-scale statistical analysis.
Ambien is Foundation Series in a bottle. How does one express effects of a sleeping pill on the TV? An artistic challenge right there.
And its TV, which means they have to sex it up somehow. How do you do that with Foundation Series?
Its going to be nothing like the books, or its going to be unwatchable. Probably both.
Seems quite a few classic sci-fi novels are being picked up for streaming/TV series adaptations recently. Foundation, Consider Phlebas, Ringworld, The Three-Body Problem, Altered Carbon, The Expanse. And then there's Star Trek: Discovery and The Orville. Television sci-fi was dead just a few years ago, I wonder what happened all of the sudden? One could say 'Game of Thrones' led to a general resurgence of geek lit, but there's a suspicious dearth of recent fantasy novel adaptations; Shannara and Wheel of Time are the only ones I'm aware of. Maybe Black Mirror or rising interest in SpaceX are responsible.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
This (too much plot) is what was wrong with Dune (the movie). Cloud Atlas also flirted with having too much story to fit into a movie. Ender's Game and Starship Troopers each cut significant plot elements to reduce the plot into something that could fit the movie format. Lord of the Rings made it work by making a trilogy.
Foundation was a book trilogy, and still it was epic in scope.
Make a mini-series perhaps.
I love the way the streaming companies are getting into the business of creating content. Sure, some of it, okay a lot of it, sucks. But a lot of it is quite good. Another classic Sci-Fi novel I've been waiting to see made and maybe it will soon is Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. Guess who has the rights and has been trying to get it made for 20 years... Morgan Freeman. I never thought of him as a Sci-Fi kind of guy but, yeah.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Character Development in science fiction books is often lacking. However, I would like to see Revenger (by Alastair Reynolds) developed into a movie (or tv series), the characters in that book are quite interesting.
I read Foundation and its sequels as a teen, and I remember thinking it was pretty cool. More recently, when I saw that people were writing additional Foundation-based novels, I went back to reread the originals. What a disappointment that was.
The writing is really bad; Assimov had some good ideas, but should have let a writer put them into story form. The concept of psychohistory and predicting future events seems quaint now, given what we have learned about chaos theory (or sensitive dependence on initial conditions), quantum mechanics, and more.
I couldn't get through the first one without a deep sigh for my lost youth; then I returned them all to the library.
Whoever decided to adapt this for TV will have to rewrite so much of it that they might as well just forget using Foundation as source material and come up with their own plot, characters and narrative.
I am.. blown away that people believe that the three laws are a good idea. completely astounded.
I think you are overstating things a bit here.
The Three Laws are a convenient shorthand for saying "a comprehensive set of safeguards governing the operation of a robot." In the web comic Freefall people simply talk of "safeguards" rather than some arbitrary three laws.
The Three Laws have a huge place in the history of SF because they represent a sea change in how robots were presented. According to Asimov himself, in forwards to collections of his robot stories, before Asimov formulated the Three Laws robots were presented as dangerous things that generally went out of control to drive a story. He reasoned that people try to make things safe, and robots would be no different; people would incorporate safeguards, and his Three Laws were his take on a minimal set of safeguards.
Asimov then spent the rest of his career gleefully finding corner cases where the Three Laws were inadequate, and writing stories about what happens when those corner cases are hit. He was the first to promulgate the Three Laws idea and also the first to poke holes in them.
If someone really is arguing that the Three Laws are perfect and ready to implement, that shows they haven't researched the subject well and you are justified in being scornful of their shallow grasp of the subject. But if someone is talking informally and saying something like "robots should be required to have safeguards like the Three Laws" I have no problem with that, even if they phrase it less carefully and say something like "the Three Laws should be mandatory."
Also, when Asimov first wrote these stories, he overlooked two things that I consider hugely important. First of all, griefers. In his stories, any human could give an order to a robot and the robot would obey as long as no human was harmed. So a griefer could order an expensive robot to go smash a bunch of parked cars, ruining the cars and the robot, and (Asimov used this in his stories) the griefer could tell the robot "if you reveal my identity, I will come to harm" and it would be impossible for the robot to name the griefer. (It would also be possible to order "smash all these cars, and then forget ever having seen or talked to me.") The other thing is that Asimov imagined that it would be extremely difficult to make robot brains that did not include the Three Laws, which seems quaintly naive to me. If there is still a North Korea when robot brains are invented, there will be a secret project to make robots capable of serving as loyal soldiers, which means robots that obey Dear Leader's orders without question (no other safeguards included). As Jerry Pournelle used to say: "What man has done, man may aspire to do."[1] The existence of robot brains will be proof that a new robot brain design is possible.
P.S. Another classic of the robot genre is "With Folded Hands". Robots have the prime directive: to serve, and obey, and guard men[1] from harm. The robots ultimately enslave all of humanity in a smothering protective embrace: anything a human might want to do, like rock climbing, could be forbidden as too risky. Any human who resists this benevolent enslavement is lobotomized so that he/she will stop resisting and just enjoy life. I think in later stories the robots supervised even sex, on the theory that you could have a heart attack or something from the exertion, so the robots only allowed sex by young people, and only so there would be another generation of humans to serve.
Finally, for a modern take on artificial intelligence with inadequate safeguards, read the Torchship trilogy by Karl Gallagher. In these books, about a dozen whole planets (including Earth) have no living humans anymore because AI-controlled machines killed them all. In the stories, the historical events where the AIs went berserk are referred to as "The Betrayal".
The first book in the To
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
We're living the story, right? Or does everyone really believe that nobody is using big data to figure out exactly where to give little pushes in our society to create huge real-world changes in the directions societies are taking? Do people believe the manipulations throughout social media currently surfacing were done without the benefit of new data and new maths?
This will be more entertainment that people will somehow think is what the pseudo-intelligence they keep calling 'AI' actually is. They're already convinced that so-called 'AI' will take their jobs away and have a conversation with them as it drives them around (to who knows where, they're convinced they won't have a job anymore), more fantasy AI crap will just make them think more and more that the crap they're trotting out is the same as what they see on TV.
You mean, like algorithms an' all! Big data means that with the right tools you can predict the course of events! But statistical inference won't get ratings, let's call it AI instead!
The advertisers will come flocking in. And it's from google - let's call it a documentary! /s
I do not want entertainment tied to a device. The concept of that walled silo is so unattractive I would never utilise that market. These corporate fucks rely on the concept of a free market to exploit minerals from the commons while refusing to play by the same game when it comes to their own income generation.
There is no tech super hero company doing good. There is no longer don't be evil. We're the product. Our democracy has been replaced by corporate lobbying. Multinationals are destroying the world. There is too much war. Thou shalt not kill.
Stop engineering an electronic distopia you fucks.
Has it occurred to you that Trump may be The Mule?
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Of course, when Asimov tied it all up later on with the robots, it was great. But the original trilogy? Meh.
The book has cardboard characters, but the movie doesn't have to. The movie should vividly show the different personalities.
Hari Seldon - while his health was failing, warned of Trantor's fall, manipulated Trantor's government into setting up the First Foundation, and secretly set up the Second Foundation.
The Committee of Public Safety - who foolishly thought that Seldon's warnings were treasonous.
Salvor Hardin - the first Foundation Mayor, whose style of governing is "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right!".
The conniving Prince Regent Wienis, who underestimated Hardin.
King Lepold I - Wienis' selfish and weak nephew.
Those are just a few characters in the beginning, when the book's characters were the most "cardboard". With good acting and direction, the movie can show their ways of thinking and acting, and also show their reactions to what happened.
In the TV show "Columbo", it was fun to watch Columbo solve the crime, and to watch the bad guys gradually realize that they would be arrested. In the Foundation movie, it would be fun to watch events follow Seldon's plan (until the Mule came along), and to watch the expressions of bad guys when they gradually realize that their plans will fail.
I'm not really sure how I feel about this. I personally think it's really not nearly as good as many seem to think, but it could be worked into something pretty good. A TV series is a better venue than a movie for sure, since it can be tweaked over time much more easily.
I do wish'em luck, to be sure.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
...too cerebral for T.V., I doubt it will fly.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
...guess i'll have to torrent it.
Even though I'm getting pretty old, it will be interesting to see how they handle a story that takes place so much in the mind. Foundation was one of my very favorite scifi stories growing up. Come to think of it, they will probably have to update the tone for our gender-equal times. Actually, they will make the lead characters women,and the story multicultural and alien friendly. I predict a Political Correctness lecture will result and so an abject failure.
E Proelio Veritas.
"Foundation, the seminal Isaac Asimov science fiction novel trilogy.. that informed Star Wars"
Foundation never informed Star Wars, more likely Buck Rodgers and Saturday morning cinema kiddie serials informed Star Wars. Lets hope they don't ruin it like the Will Smith I, Robot movie. The Expanse and Dark Matter could be said to owe a lot to the works of Asimov and other writers of the period.
I read this series almost every 5 years or so, I cannot imagine anyone ever successfully doing this. Exactly like Dune, you're never going to be able to do this properly unless you have infinite resources and our society only relied upon reputation and not money. Maybe Netflix has a shot at making this as they seem to leave the artists alone and let them make what it is the readers want out of an adaptation.
Has it occurred to you and all others that /. has fucking OD'd on soy and/or fake news and/or Russiabots? This whole website has turned to reddit/ars level trash.
Why is that?
Been here for a long time, tho not as long as others, why did this happen to a place that was one a bastion of GNAA? It's all so sad....
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Been done, surprisingly well, and almost completely unlike ST:D: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Here's my review:
This is a remarkably faithful adaptation of the Foundation Trilogy, all things considered. I was taken aback by the upper-class English accents of most of the characters, which I suppose was unfair of me. This is, after all, the far future, and Dr Asimov's Brooklyn accent was less prominent in his writing than in his speech. Still, Salvor Hardin doesn't quite fit; and Dinsdale Landen, since he was quite suitable as Rupert Purvis in Tom Stoppard's _The Dog It Was That Died_, could hardly fit the young General Bel Riose.
The ending, of course, can only be done properly in writing, and doesn't work well here. More generally, the last four episodes, written by Mike Stott, are weaker than the first four, adapted by Patrick Tull. And, as the reviewers on the British Amazon have noted, the sound quality and effect are not up to modern standards. But if you can rise above the minor difficulties, the excellence of the story shines through.