Alternatively, if "Foundation and Dune are almost impossible to translate to screen faithfully," why are we translating them to screen, instead of writing a new work for which screen is the natural medium? With these adaptations, the two options are "That sucks!" and "That's not Foundation!"

I would reject faithfulness as a measure of success. I'd much rather have "That's not Foundation!"

I already have Foundation. I can read it whenever I make the time. It's kind of cool to see a book translated to the screen... but if it doesn't really survive the translation? That's ok too! It can just be a movie with a ton of similarities to an existing story.

Blade Runner, The Shining, Starship Troopers, or hell, Adaptation. They all have varying relationships to the source material. None are especially faithful, but they're all still good movies.

Starship troopers in particular has a very curious relationship between movie and book. Where the book manages to glorify the military the movie deliberately chooses an ironic treatment of the characters and plot elements to form the book’s antithesis. The movie is best enjoyed by not trying to fit it into the mold of the book, and vice versa.

I agree. The majority of the reactions here to Foundation seem exactly the way I felt so many years ago to the Starship Troopers movie. I hated seeing it in the theater with a passion and it was because I was one of the people that read and enjoyed the book. Even today when the ST movie is talked about as a cult classic I bristle a little bit - but I can see now it is good as a movie unrelated to the book and a disappointment to a fan.

Some adaptation is appropriate, as a lot of the pulp fiction scifi from that area has characters doing ridiculous things like using tape drives. On the other hand, setting up a scene and doing a shoot are not the same skills used for telling a story. Many directors have absolutely terrible taste when it comes to story telling, as we can see from Game of Thrones and the other Dune adaptation.

Annihilation did that rather well, I think—the source material is about imperfect clones, that had the same structure as the original but weren't the same inside. And then they released a movie that had the structure of the book, but wasn't the same inside. I thought that was quite clever.

The three books of the southern reach trilogy were the most creepy read I’ve ever had. Because of the dense and meandering writing style I felt like I was slowly losing my sanity together with the main characters of the books, trying to hold onto details and losing the fight.

The movie was ok to watch if taken by itself, but indeed not the same thing.

Agreed, but we really need a faithful adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? set in San Francisco, as Dick envisioned it.

I think this really gets at the issue. Calling it Foundation, but not keeping the spirit of the novel, is just basically exploitative.

Who or what's getting exploited? The material itself? Or the audience? I think few people who read the SF classics will be duped just by the name.

The IP... I really don't understand why having some relatively well known name is so important when it ends up being something entirely different. I think culturally that really shouldn't fly. Why not at that point just come up with new IP? If you want take the elements needed from existing work as influences...

But they didn't come up with new IP.

Instead, they hand picked 'oh, neat!' things they were told about, then just filled in all the missing bits with weird, unrelated, drama.

EG, non-story related character confict.

That's not content, but filler, designed to extend screen time.

To actors, drama is the only important part of the role, and thus to many in hollywood.

(One can have plot twists, action, suspense, without teenage drama...)

So it isn't new IP, that would require original thought, and 99% of modern hollywood is rehash. All the marvel/dc stuff, remakes of older movies, series, cartoons, the best stuff is old, but new.

Modern Hollywood can't do new.

Modern Hollywood can't even do remakes without bombs!

So it'd be hard to get buy in for new, and as this series sold loads of books...

Well, pick the juice IP bits, lather teen style drama (eg, noise), and...

Think about Why do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, an amazing sci-fi novel, and Bladerunner, an amazing sci-fi movie loosely based on it. Now, granted, maybe the book title was rejected for the movie based on marketing concerns, but it also established distinct identities for the two.

They should be brave enough to do their own take on the concept without using the title and clout of the original author. It would allow them more freedom in rewriting the parts that they need to and would transform the whiplash felt by readers of the previous work into possible delight at seeing a new story with new characters riffing on the original concept.

Selling your product to a network, and later to the audience, must be dramatically simpler when you have existing IP to build upon.

We almost certainly wouldn’t be talking about it on HN if it weren’t Foundation.

You don't think we would be talking about Apple's flagship science fiction show?

I've not seen many front page discussions of modern movies or TV shows here, no. Sometimes a retrospective on older art, but I don't remember any of those either for the visual media.

Such a post-truth comment, 'why is it wrong to call something A when actually it's not'.

Actually the sci-fi channel mini series of dune and children of dune is not bad considering the limitations of budget and 90s technology. Sticks pretty close to the books and gives more background for people to understand what is going on. Definitively worth a look.

Because a story can be re-imagined for a different medium and enjoyed by people? Who may in turn check out the original story and enjoy that, as well?

Others are just as entitled to enjoy an adaptation as you are to not enjoy it.

Some people enjoy seeing how a writer, director, cinematographer, cast, set and costume designers, etc present a written work.

Lots of people watch an adaptation and find bits they enjoy and bits they don't.

If you go through life only demanding or expecting experiences you will enjoy, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

I ended up reading The Expanse series because I loved the pilot TV episode so much. I've never read Foundation and I think I likely will in the near future.

> With these adaptations, the two options are "That sucks!" and "That's not Foundation!"

Others are entitled to opinions other than your own...

The show is basically fan fic set in loosely the same universe. It is absolutely nothing like the books.

Which is perfectly fine.

Not to me it isn’t.

If they want to make up a story, fine. Don’t use the same name for something completely unrelated.

The Expanse is exactly that. And it's pretty great.

Having read both, I don’t think Dune is impossible to bring to the screen. I think it needs to be a TV show because as a film it will need to be super long (and will be exposition heavy and/or kinda boring.)

But Foundation is like the Silmarillion. It’s supposed to be detailed over centuries/millennia and definitely is hard or impossible to get right on the screen.

> like the Silmarillion. It’s supposed to be detailed over centuries/millennia

Well, the last books of the original series of Dune take place over thousands of years when Leto II becomes the worm via symbiosis with the sandtrout. There is so much that happens in these millenia, sometimes told in flashback through the everlasting Duncan Idaho, or through the narrative of the religious texts.

The wars and the scheming and the plans and the plots... I mean just the sisterhood's rise and attempts to undermine leto could be its own series. Heck there are more subplots in Dune than fables in the Silmarillion. In fact, I think that the flaw with the Silmarillion is that everything becomes so much of the same after a while that I stopped caring about all of the one-off stories: it got repetitive and, frankly, boring.

Dune did suffer a Jon Galt moment with all of the exposition in God Emperor of Dune, but there was a lot of storytelling in those meetings between the Duncans and Leto.

Dune jumps in time basically once, between book 3 and 4, from Children to God Emperor. 1-3 is set in Paul's time, 4-6 is set 4000 years later, but within a few years. (We don't talk about 7-8.)

No, Dune is not like Silmarillion or Foundation, they both jump times more regularly, with things and episodes happening in those times.

Check out the 90's sci-fi channel mini series of Dune and Children of Dune.

Those were quite good, but imagine them with with an HBO budget.

Just my guess, the folks creating the show probably do not care too much. The vast majority of people are going to be happy with the production while the hardcore fans, or those with fond memories who've spent a lifetime waiting, are going to be disappointed a la Star Wars sequels.

If you had afsked me a year ago if “Good Omens” could be adapted to the screen I would have told you it was impossible. Heck if you asked me back in the day of A Song of Fire and Ice could, I would have told you it was impossible, but in reality it’s just the case that it’s only possible if you start from a place of respecting the source material and building everything around that. If you start by defining that it has to be a 8 season high budget series. It has to be a 2.5hour movie and try to shoehorn the material into that, then you get rubbish and it looks impossible.

The format of Foundation is rather terse and spare encyclopaedic entries alternating with stories of the characters meeting each other, conversing and so on.

One of the reason it fires the imagination I think is that the encyclopaedia portions leave plenty of gaps for one's imagination to fill. Paradoxically this makes it seem all the more real.

The characters (with one exception) are of course ephemeral, changing from one story to the next.

Hard to think of a more difficult show to film.

Today, you could train such a "Physics Model" simply by having it crunch on FB or Google Data annonymized User Data. One could even apply social engineering models to that simulation and watch the outcome ahead of time. Sell it to politicians and 3 letter agencies and get yourselves a catchy name - like palantir and you are the future.

Now that I think of it, Emperor "Cleon" is a nice wordplay on "cliodynamics".

It's an anagram of "Clone", shirley?

A happy accident, since Asimov was the originator of the "Cleon" name but there were no clones in the Foundation books.