There's not doubt that Asimov was pretty smart and there are a lot of interesting ideas in the Foundation books. However, I don't think that those will translate to the screen very well. Since the books span many centuries, characters come and go and are mostly not very fleshed out or interesting. Asimov is pretty similar to Lem in this regard, who also was much more interested in ideas than people. Of course, a good screenwriter can make up for that, but you can bet that people will be annoyed by all the additional stuff that is not in the book (like in Soderberg's "Solaris", for instance).
So I'm much more thrilled about Amazon developing a series based on Banks' "Consider Phlebas"...
> So I'm much more thrilled about Amazon developing a series based on Banks' "Consider Phlebas"...
Wow that is big news, I did not know that! That book is so cinematic already, it leaps off the page. Should translate to the screen very well. Hope they do "Use of Weapons" and "Player of Games" also, in fact the entire Culture series is an amazing opportunity for TV conversion.
Well, Hari Seldon - a recording of him at least - is a constant presence. There are lots of episodic tv series with varying cast. For example, Twilight Zone, Black Glass, etc. I'm sure all of the ages treated in the series can be fleshed out in sufficient detail to make for entertaining tv. As another example, Tolkiens original lore is not exactly ... visual ... but it gained lots of artist output in the decades between the publication of the series and Jackson's movies. Jackson's movies own cinematically almost as much to the artistic output by cadres of fantasy artists as much as to Tolkiens original work.
Adaptations are never so strick. Hollywood wants original ideas they can take and craft/mold for film. A great recent example is Jeff Vandermeer's Annilation. Great book, totally different movie that is unique and stands on its own though I much prefer the original book.
Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is another great example; the book and movie are vastly different, yet both stand on there own and one could argue are great for different reasons. I'd be hardpressed to pick which I love more.
I do agree with a lot of what you are saying about Asimov's Foundation series; however I think the core ideas are what they'll focus on and most likely they'll introduce a host entirely new characters when they rework it as a screenplay.
Those are the reasons I think it could work... yes, the stories span centuries, but they are laid out in specific chapters, which not only are short enough to work in the scale of a TV show, but would allow for cast changes on a regular basis, and could be more of a Doctor Who-style series, with different eras expressed by different show-runners, directors and casts.
And it likewise works OK for the characters to not be fully fleshed out immediately - they aren't on TV either, as the actors and writers get used to the characters.
> Since the books span many centuries, characters come and go and are mostly not very fleshed out or interesting.
Depending on how they manage it, this might not be all that much of an obstacle. Cloud Atlas faced the same problem, but I thought that their use of an ensemble cast to tell a story that spanned the several centuries worked out just fine.
I agree with what you’ve written, but I also think that Black Mirror has recently shown that there is an audience for intelligent, idea-driven sci-fi without recurring characters.
It's criminal that Banks never got to see his books as movies/series. Banks is, hands down, my favorite scifi author, so I hope the adaptation is well done.
It could potentially work if it's a series rather than a single 2hr movie. Too much to cram into a movie, but a series could develop the story and characters over multiple episodes/seasons.
I'm with you. I like Foundation too much to accept anyone's interpretation but my own. But who knows? Apple's take might kick ass. I liked the Galactica reboot until the Starbuck weirdness in Season 3.
I'm probably a minority here, but I think lack of huge characters could actually be a good thing. Too many sci-fi shows use science and technology as a glorified backdrop to showcase the characters, which quite often happen to be a recollection of same old tropes again and again.
"She had a rough childhood (20 minutes of expose, plus mandatory flashbacks in every episode), her mom died when she was 9 and dad was a cheating alcoholic, but now she's a badass who will kick ass for the next 4 seasons. And oh btw look: she has a cool hoverboard and here's white platicky computers which are REALLY powerful. Also, some omnipresent AI will play God."
If you are not identifying with the protagonist, everything else is simply meh. OTOH, interesting ideas are interesting on their own.
I've been disappointed by nearly every film adaptation of Asimov novels. I, Robot and Bicentennial Man had big budgets, but seemed like they were written by people who simply didn't like Asimov at all and wanted nothing to do with the kinds of stories he told.
So, I am extremely pessimistic, even though I would like to be excited about this news. The team behind it also leaves me feeling ambivalent. On one hand, it's a guy who has just made superhero movies (just the sort that would I would expect to destroy a thinky story like Foundation) but also the guy who made The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was actually pretty good (though rarely as smart/deep as the cast deserved; Lena Heady, in particular).
I love that scifi TV and film is seeing such a resurgence, but I sure do hate to see my favorites get butchered.
I felt that the Will Smith movie was pretty good and true to Asimov's stories. There is a common theme in Asimov's stories that he exploits loopholes in the interpretation of the 3 laws. I robot the movie did that pretty faithfully. It also hinted towards the advent of a robot like R Daneel, who would see beyond the 3 laws.
The movie didn't adapt any particular book or short story, but that doesn't mean it didn't try to be faithful to Asimov.
One is book vs script length. A film is 100 pages. Novels are 250+. This means big story-arch rewrites. It can really kill plot & character development. This is where series open up a lot of possibility.
That's usually the biggest adaption, but there are lots of other big things that must change. Novels can do character thoughts, exposition and other things well. For example, a strategic battle scene will work in a book. In a film, it's near impossible so they focus on action and drama. Films do visual representation, so action-rich scenes work. They get characters for "free," actors will represent a highly nuanced person in a way you immediately understand.
These add up to a big re-write, that cannot be avoided.
Writers like Asimov are the very best storytellers. They work on their own schedule, write what comes to them, discard bad work... If you handed a good novelist the task of writing a LOTR prequel novel about Frodo's parents, by October... It probably won't be as good as Tolkien's.
You just can't replicate genius on commission.
This is really evident in Game of Thrones. The early seasons capture what's great about the books. A politically driven story that isn't boring, a novel approach to magical realism... Early seasons were loyal to the book. The latest season was mostly "off-script." The politics got stupid. Characters wandered closer to fantasy tropes. The "realism" part of magical realism was gone. Apart from big plot points, it wasn't written by GRRM and it showed. So, it is not good in the ways he's good. It was also written much quicker, on a schedule.
It'll be hard to capture Asimov in a series, harder than GRRM I expect. His stories are just not story driven enough.
His main plot device is not a spaceship or a time machine, it's a fictional theory, psychohistory. How do you capture that on film, line charts?
The film I, Robot originally had no connections with Isaac Asimov's Robot series. It started with an original screenplay written in 1995 by Jeff Vintar, entitled Hardwired. [1]
Well they certainly won't have to worry about running out of source material...
I really hope this is good but they need to go full game of thrones in terms of scope and adherence to the source material. I'm so tired of seeing "Based on a story by Philip K Dick" and then basically seeing stereotypical sci-fi with a romance plot thrown in and any trace of the original message of the story removed.
For the record: HBO was apparently supposed to do this a couple years ago [1].
I wonder how well the Foundation books will translate to the screen. Given the segmented format of the first three Foundation novels, it almost seems like a mockumentary-style exposition would be necessary (which could preserve things like the cool Encyclopedia Galactica quote epigraphs).
I have it a bit mixed up in my head, but yeah, Sony announced they would do one abandoned it, and then HBO bought it and announced it and abandoned it. So this would be the third step (but I seem to have a memory of that this has been going on a lot longer).
I think one thing that is missing from modern Hollywood sci-fi is the feeling of the vastness and emptyness of space. Foundation certainly had that. It seems like everywhere they go in new sci-fi is crowded. Maybe this is because the overcrowded eco-doom dystopia trope is so deeply embedded in our culture recently or it could be because there's too much temptation to use CGI to create baroque environments.
The Foundation could use modernization. The "big ideas" are still interesting, but the nuts and bolts of putting characters in a world to act out a story has them inadvertently soaked in late 1940's United States culture.
I have failed to interest young people in the book, they seem to be put off by virtually all of the characters being cigar or pipe smoking men with females relegated to the secretarial positions where they are summoned by the very modern push button on a desk. I think there is also the very modern push button on the floor of the office which closes the door.
As a story it now suffers from what to modern readers are inadvertent anachronisms. Asimov seems to have meant to write "Here we are, maybe 15 minutes in the future and off we go into the stars and centuries beyond!", instead we've got "Once society regresses to a state which oppresses half the population and is reduced to primitive pre-electronic technology we can finally get on with a grand future!"
A TV series which starts 15 minutes in our future and presents the same ideas could be a fine framework to fill with characters people care about, but something other than world war two era United States industrialists please.
You are correct that the books are dated, but I have found the occasional teenager (I teach high school) who is able to look past that and be fascinated with the big ideas inside. I loved the books as a teenager, but now I have issues with some of the big ideas. Nonetheless, they are worthy of note.
Wasn't the main character who eventually discovers the secrets a the end of the book a female?
Also, was the book really meant to be Utopian in tone? I thought it was just a good space story, one of my most enjoyable reads ever (I read it when I was 23).
Bravo! I have always wondered why people avoided the classic scifi novels. Often many of these where cerebral- more philosophy than action. But as far back as Twilight Zone and Outer Limits showed you could sucessfully film philosophical scfi.
Instead we end up with endless comic book treatments. I dont not want to see the fourth origin story of Spiderman, Superman or Batman. However, I have to concede with a good script and director, these sometimes work.
I wish I could see more more Heinlein on film, e.g. Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and Stranger in a Strange Land. Partial treatments were in The Last Starfigher and Star Treks What of Charlie.
It will end up being a shoot-em-up clone of Star Wars. All the psychological aspects of the books just won't be interesting enough to mask the fact that there is essentially no action or excitement or romance. They'll probably turn Harry Seldon into sort of a Yoda character. Using the precepts of psychohistory, what a few people will think about the film is unpredictable but as a population of movie goers, it will be boring and unintelligible.
There's something about the Asimov books that make the mundane interesting. I loved the planning aspect of the foundation's millennia long plan. I'm dubious how a book that focuses so much on slow progress progress and averting major crisis will translate to TV.
(And I obviously love the novels, so I'm a bit biased)
Off topic but it would be nice is sci fi could be made in which not every scene had to be the most amazing, innovative, creative, eye popping visual you've ever seen. Story might become the star then.
I'm a huge sci fi fan (anyone on HN who is not?) and gave Foundation a go, and found it to have flashes of brilliance but overall to be lifeless and frankly pretty boring.
It's hard to describe but the stories seemed to be not more than sketches without richness or detail, and many of the potentially interesting ideas were never fully explored.
To be fair, there was something strangely appealing about it, and by the end I found I quite liked it even with its flaws - probably because there were some really imaginative concepts underneath (the Foundation I suppose).
I thoroughly enjoyed the Asimov Foundation series (all of them, not just the original trilogy) and often wondered why nobody made a film about them. I think it'd be tricky to do them justice (a slow exploratory pace would be good) and hopefully not Hollywood-style like I Robot turned out to be (compared to the book).
I suppose not many people would flock to the cinema for slow scifi though (but then Blade Runner 2049 did alright...)
If someone managed to make a lot of cash and success adapting LOTR (for a long time thought to be "impossible" to adapt to big screens) someone can equally adapt Foundation, given a bit of space for fixing quirks and changing a few things here and there. Let's remain skeptical, alright, but this is actually pretty awesome news if true and I certainly hope for the best.
Anyone else feel that now with tracking users to the extend of CA and the user prediction software that it's getting into the realms of Hari Seldon? And not only track what's going to happen, but also shape society with posts timed at the right time, and sent to the right people to nudge society into certain paths. We already see it with what happened to voting.
[+] [-] deng|8 years ago|reply
There's not doubt that Asimov was pretty smart and there are a lot of interesting ideas in the Foundation books. However, I don't think that those will translate to the screen very well. Since the books span many centuries, characters come and go and are mostly not very fleshed out or interesting. Asimov is pretty similar to Lem in this regard, who also was much more interested in ideas than people. Of course, a good screenwriter can make up for that, but you can bet that people will be annoyed by all the additional stuff that is not in the book (like in Soderberg's "Solaris", for instance).
So I'm much more thrilled about Amazon developing a series based on Banks' "Consider Phlebas"...
[+] [-] alphadevx|8 years ago|reply
Wow that is big news, I did not know that! That book is so cinematic already, it leaps off the page. Should translate to the screen very well. Hope they do "Use of Weapons" and "Player of Games" also, in fact the entire Culture series is an amazing opportunity for TV conversion.
[+] [-] fsloth|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evo_9|8 years ago|reply
Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is another great example; the book and movie are vastly different, yet both stand on there own and one could argue are great for different reasons. I'd be hardpressed to pick which I love more.
I do agree with a lot of what you are saying about Asimov's Foundation series; however I think the core ideas are what they'll focus on and most likely they'll introduce a host entirely new characters when they rework it as a screenplay.
[+] [-] codingdave|8 years ago|reply
And it likewise works OK for the characters to not be fully fleshed out immediately - they aren't on TV either, as the actors and writers get used to the characters.
[+] [-] brandmeyer|8 years ago|reply
Depending on how they manage it, this might not be all that much of an obstacle. Cloud Atlas faced the same problem, but I thought that their use of an ensemble cast to tell a story that spanned the several centuries worked out just fine.
[+] [-] mayank|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thechao|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiph|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asfgionio|8 years ago|reply
So they're adapting the worst Culture book. It's probably the easiest to adapt, but it's by far the least interesting.
[+] [-] hashkb|8 years ago|reply
...except for the last three, I think? They are a more typical epic space adventure that takes place within a single lifetime.
[+] [-] squozzer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kofejnik|8 years ago|reply
"She had a rough childhood (20 minutes of expose, plus mandatory flashbacks in every episode), her mom died when she was 9 and dad was a cheating alcoholic, but now she's a badass who will kick ass for the next 4 seasons. And oh btw look: she has a cool hoverboard and here's white platicky computers which are REALLY powerful. Also, some omnipresent AI will play God."
If you are not identifying with the protagonist, everything else is simply meh. OTOH, interesting ideas are interesting on their own.
[+] [-] SwellJoe|8 years ago|reply
So, I am extremely pessimistic, even though I would like to be excited about this news. The team behind it also leaves me feeling ambivalent. On one hand, it's a guy who has just made superhero movies (just the sort that would I would expect to destroy a thinky story like Foundation) but also the guy who made The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was actually pretty good (though rarely as smart/deep as the cast deserved; Lena Heady, in particular).
I love that scifi TV and film is seeing such a resurgence, but I sure do hate to see my favorites get butchered.
[+] [-] dingo_bat|8 years ago|reply
The movie didn't adapt any particular book or short story, but that doesn't mean it didn't try to be faithful to Asimov.
[+] [-] dalbasal|8 years ago|reply
One is book vs script length. A film is 100 pages. Novels are 250+. This means big story-arch rewrites. It can really kill plot & character development. This is where series open up a lot of possibility.
That's usually the biggest adaption, but there are lots of other big things that must change. Novels can do character thoughts, exposition and other things well. For example, a strategic battle scene will work in a book. In a film, it's near impossible so they focus on action and drama. Films do visual representation, so action-rich scenes work. They get characters for "free," actors will represent a highly nuanced person in a way you immediately understand.
These add up to a big re-write, that cannot be avoided.
Writers like Asimov are the very best storytellers. They work on their own schedule, write what comes to them, discard bad work... If you handed a good novelist the task of writing a LOTR prequel novel about Frodo's parents, by October... It probably won't be as good as Tolkien's.
You just can't replicate genius on commission.
This is really evident in Game of Thrones. The early seasons capture what's great about the books. A politically driven story that isn't boring, a novel approach to magical realism... Early seasons were loyal to the book. The latest season was mostly "off-script." The politics got stupid. Characters wandered closer to fantasy tropes. The "realism" part of magical realism was gone. Apart from big plot points, it wasn't written by GRRM and it showed. So, it is not good in the ways he's good. It was also written much quicker, on a schedule.
It'll be hard to capture Asimov in a series, harder than GRRM I expect. His stories are just not story driven enough.
His main plot device is not a spaceship or a time machine, it's a fictional theory, psychohistory. How do you capture that on film, line charts?
Good luck to them though. I love sci fi.
[+] [-] dantheman|8 years ago|reply
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot_(film)
[+] [-] xom|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonnybgood|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slivym|8 years ago|reply
I really hope this is good but they need to go full game of thrones in terms of scope and adherence to the source material. I'm so tired of seeing "Based on a story by Philip K Dick" and then basically seeing stereotypical sci-fi with a romance plot thrown in and any trace of the original message of the story removed.
[+] [-] elvinyung|8 years ago|reply
I wonder how well the Foundation books will translate to the screen. Given the segmented format of the first three Foundation novels, it almost seems like a mockumentary-style exposition would be necessary (which could preserve things like the cool Encyclopedia Galactica quote epigraphs).
[1] http://www.player.one/foundation-tv-show-whatever-happened-h...
[+] [-] rotorblade|8 years ago|reply
https://hbowatch.com/hbo-acquires-asimovs-foundation-series-...
[+] [-] narrator|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmitriid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rainbowmverse|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trextrex|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justherefortart|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jws|8 years ago|reply
I have failed to interest young people in the book, they seem to be put off by virtually all of the characters being cigar or pipe smoking men with females relegated to the secretarial positions where they are summoned by the very modern push button on a desk. I think there is also the very modern push button on the floor of the office which closes the door.
As a story it now suffers from what to modern readers are inadvertent anachronisms. Asimov seems to have meant to write "Here we are, maybe 15 minutes in the future and off we go into the stars and centuries beyond!", instead we've got "Once society regresses to a state which oppresses half the population and is reduced to primitive pre-electronic technology we can finally get on with a grand future!"
A TV series which starts 15 minutes in our future and presents the same ideas could be a fine framework to fill with characters people care about, but something other than world war two era United States industrialists please.
[+] [-] cicero|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unethical_ban|8 years ago|reply
Also, was the book really meant to be Utopian in tone? I thought it was just a good space story, one of my most enjoyable reads ever (I read it when I was 23).
[+] [-] peter303|8 years ago|reply
Instead we end up with endless comic book treatments. I dont not want to see the fourth origin story of Spiderman, Superman or Batman. However, I have to concede with a good script and director, these sometimes work.
I wish I could see more more Heinlein on film, e.g. Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and Stranger in a Strange Land. Partial treatments were in The Last Starfigher and Star Treks What of Charlie.
[+] [-] sizzzzlerz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zabana|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThirdFoundation|8 years ago|reply
(And I obviously love the novels, so I'm a bit biased)
[+] [-] hoodoof|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoodoof|8 years ago|reply
It's hard to describe but the stories seemed to be not more than sketches without richness or detail, and many of the potentially interesting ideas were never fully explored.
To be fair, there was something strangely appealing about it, and by the end I found I quite liked it even with its flaws - probably because there were some really imaginative concepts underneath (the Foundation I suppose).
[+] [-] 72deluxe|8 years ago|reply
I suppose not many people would flock to the cinema for slow scifi though (but then Blade Runner 2049 did alright...)
[+] [-] caio1982|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justherefortart|8 years ago|reply
If they made it like the books, those of us that have read it would probably love it, but I doubt it would be popular.
[+] [-] thom|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] adamnemecek|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalore|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] laacz|8 years ago|reply