I've recently seen the TV series and I liked some of its scifi ideas, but wonder if the bad parts are down to the original material or Apple's writing. Is it much influenced by the past's societal norms, or visionary enough to foresee at least the now?
The original Foundation books are an epistemology treatise masquerade as a sci-fi epic.
Having read dozens of Asimov books, that’s a good summary of many of them: Asimov’s social opinions and technical ideas masquerading as literature.
Hmm. This is utterly wrong.
I am dismayed by this attitude towards scifi writing based on the socalled "literary merit". What is literary merit? It's a measurement of the writer's ability to use human language to convey ideas. Just that. That skill is tangible between different content as well. Just because SciFi idea and a human emotional idea are different, do not translate into different literary merit.
Now back to the judge on "writer's ability to use human language to convey ideas".
Really, in what sense the SciFi writers are inferior to other literary writers in this measurement?
Isn't that SciFi writing are not poetic? Of course, SciFi are not poets. And if there is a poetic story, I see not reason why any SciFi writers cannot be poetic. Dune, in some parts, are certainly very poetic. Just because the content is not poetic, which would be a wrong choice to use poetic wordings, that does not dminish the litrary value.
Isn't that SciFi writing are not sophisticated enough? No, scifi's sophistication is the ideas, the ideas that builton futuristic technology and human environments. Those ideas are certainly less emotionally attached than other writings. But again, those ideas are better served in the SciFi writing. One can say SciFi ideas are less literary, but one cannot say SciFi writings are less litrary.
The list goes on and on...
This attitude towards SciFi itself is a symptom of the resistance from the stagnant literary community.
And, yes, I think they are really good but they are idea-driven not character-driven.
That's because it was originally an unrelated screenplay titled "Hardwired", which was rewritten to include Asimov's Three Laws after-the-fact. And it shows.
In terms of morality Asimov is quite forward for his time and still very relevant but there are sections that dates him a bit.
I haven't watched the show so i cant say if they are related.
(Relatedly and spoilers: any Robot involvement at all in the Foundation series is a very late in the books "twist". In part because it came from Asimov's late use of Foundation as the "capstone" to tie together/lightly retcon Robots and Empire and few other things into a final united timeline. They were considered all dead in the Empire era. It was another interesting departure to show one in direct service to the Empire in the first season, and a lot of interesting speculation on how that is expected to play out over the series versus events in the books. Again, another departure driven by trying to get more of the actors to make it across some of the bigger time jumps. Though there is precedence for this one in the books as the trilogy of prequels by the "Killer Bs" [three authors whose last name start with B who were not Asimov, but invited to write prequels by his estate] also brings Robots into play much earlier in the Foundation timeline than later.)
The series was great at times and then completely flat for long strips in-between. I don't get how half-assing it was acceptable to production. Why let's make it expensive and mediocre!
> The series was great at times and then completely flat for long strips in-between.
Yeah, I'm still not entirely sure why they paced some of the show the way they did. That said they did cover several hundred years, so weird pacing was pretty much the nature/challenge the books gave them to try to adapt to.
It's possibly the sign of a good show that most people I've talked to disagree on which exactly were the flat bits. I love a good, long fly through shot of space scenery and/or "cool planets". I know lots of people that disagree. I thought there weren't enough scenes of Terminus "in action" doing what it was supposed to be (collecting/writing the Encyclopedia Galactica; which I don't think was even properly named anywhere in the first season?). The very few scenes they did include I know dragged for some people, because there is only so much most people can take of arguments about what to include in an Encyclopedia, but I wanted way more of such scenes because instead of showing them the show just kept instead telling you that Terminus was a planet of scientists and knowledge workers and needed protecting rather than showing you what Terminus' part of the plan was and what they were supposed to be doing, and why that was a great work driving them as a community.
Relatedly, I know a lot of people that loved the strange religious in-fighting and monologuing of that "The Mother" religion, and the Emperor trying to take advantage of it to delay the Fall (and likely making the Fall worse in the process) and oof did that drag for me. None of that stuff comes directly from the books. (Isaac Asimov was an atheist for much of his life and waxing poetic about a made up religion even just for worldbuilding purposes was outside of his wheelhouse/comfort zone and he knew it. Given some of showrunner Goyer's other stuff, I think such long monologues are also outside of his wheelhouse, but yet he doesn't seem to know or acknowledge it and just keeps writing them, but that's just my hot take.) Isaac Asimov did invent a fake religion for the books, but (spoilers for stuff to come) more in the way of the Foundation itself using religion as a coarse, gross controlling tool.
The TV show is at best the equivalent of a 9th grader who picked up the cliff's notes, got bored halfway through those, and then wrote a book report. Some of the characters are there, and it's sci-fi, and that's about where the similarities end.
Science fiction has moved on since Asimov wrote that. In Foundation the characters are quite cardboard for modern taste. It is very much a product of its time.
It has less of the flowery prose that modern writers are so enamoured with
IMO there is plenty of much better science fiction both in books and on TV. But Isaac's writing is easy to consume and enjoyable enough.
Would you care to name a few?
For me The Expanse, For All Mankind and, although not hard-scifi, Raised by Wolves is where it's at in terms of TV.
The Man in the High Castle: Alternative history
Hand Maid's Tail: Near future dystopia (gotten a bit close lately)
Thank you for Raised by Wolves and For All Mankind. I musty have been living in a hole. Never heard of them
I do not know what is not hard enough about The Expanse. Taste is personal!
I like plot and character development. Without that it is just one thing after another.
Unfortunately, I've seen/tried those already. Handmaid's Tale is brilliant, and I also like BSG and Caprica. Couldn't get into Man in the High Castle, tho.
> I do not know what is not hard enough about The Expanse.
Misunderstanding. I consider only RBW as non-hard scifi.
> Thank you for Raised by Wolves and For All Mankind.
I envy you. Both are phenomenal! Although RBW may be a matter of taste. I am rewatching FAM right now and still love absolutely everything about it. Kind of the reason why I had high hopes for The Foundation, as I've seen what Apple television is capable of.
Btw. if you like the historic space theme, you may also like a "Strange Angel", which I enjoyed a lot. You likely haven't heard of that, either, as it's super niche and under the radar. It's not scifi tho.
Enjoy!
No we prefer Twitter because everything can be boiled down to three sentences from my favourite prop agitator.
Now anyone can, yet almost nobody does.
Once the books were completed, they were chained to the community center so that everyone had access and no one could take it for themselves.
Of course most common folk were illiterate back then anyway.
It’s interesting to consider what it even means to say that the church forbid these hand written Latin texts from getting in the possession of those who couldn’t read. This is why most of the experienced Bible since about 1800 BC was experienced through vocal tradition.
You see this in many ways. You see some statistic reported, or some event happens, and they say "It's the highest (or the first) since 2017", like that makes this really unusual.
You see it in sports, where people argue whether LeBron or Michael are the greatest, as if Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson never existed.
You see it in web frameworks.
You see it in the 24 hour news cycle. "Here's what's happened in the last hour, and we'll repeat a few things that happened a couple of hours before that" - as if anything older than 3 hours is no longer relevant.
You see it in video. I once took a half-hour non-news TV show, and for a 12-minute segment, I counted the cuts. It worked out that the average time between cuts was 3 seconds. This was clear back in the 1980s; it may be worse now. So video is tuning us to a world where, if you don't like what you see, it will all be completely different in 3 seconds.
So maybe nobody is explicitly stating as a philosophical that we should ignore the past and just move on... oh, wait. Doesn't existentialism teach that this moment is all you've got?
But American in particular is a place where the past is not relevant. It's a place where you go when you want to leave the past behind - leave the old country with all its constraining history. And you can do the same in America, too - just move to another state when you want a new life. I've heard that the difference between America and Europe is that in Europe, 100 miles is a long distance, and in America, 100 years is a long time. We don't have the sense of deeper history that Europe has.
So, combining philosophy, lack of history, instant-everything society, and media focusing on what's new right now, yes, I'd say that we're effectively ignoring the past - not totally, but more than most cultures have.
I think what we are seeing in large part is a retooling of the past. America cares deeply about it's past. The only thing you ever hear them talk about is "founding farther this" or "Confederacy that". From my perspective America seems infatuated with its own past. Here in Europe we rarely even talk about that time Germany tried to take over the whole thing, maybe because we all tried to do the same previously.
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Hardin continued: "It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject—written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weight the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that?"
Again the note of near-pleading in his voice.
Again no answer. He went on: "And you men and half of Terminus as well are just as bad.. We sit here, considering the Encyclopedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the Periphery they've lost nuclear power. In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power."
And for the third time: "Don't you see? It's galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration—a stagnation!”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation