It’s been a while since Apple provided us with our first glimpse of its upcoming adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. That first teaser hinted at the impending fall of a massive intergalactic civilization and showed off some pretty visuals, but didn’t give us too much to go on.
Now, Apple’s released a new trailer for the series, as well as a release date for when it’ll premiere on its streaming service: September 24th.
The series is based on Asimov’s classic novel, Foundation, which was compiled out of a handful of short stories written between 1942 and 1950 and published as a single volume in 1951. Over the course of centuries, it charts the fall of the massive Galactic Empire, and the efforts a man named Hari Seldon (played in the series by Jared Harris) to try and stave off the coming dark ages.
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Seldon is a mathematician and psychologist who had come up with a field called “psychohistory”—a scientific field that uses probability to predict the general direction of the future when it comes to large bodies like the Galactic Empire. Over the course of his work, Seldon has come to realize that they’re about to witness the fall of the Empire, and sets up the Encyclopedia Galactica (created by the titular Foundation), a database that holds all of humanity’s knowledge, on a distant world, as an effort to shorten his predicted 30,000 years of darkness and chaos.
We get a sense of this in the trailer for the series: we hope with the Emperor (Lee Pace) musing about his legacy—he’s been cloned over and over again for more than four hundred years, and notes that his empire has brought peace (juxtaposed with some epic-looking space battles) to thousands of worlds. Seldon’s theories of an impending collapse threatens that stability, and as we saw in the first trailer, the mathematician is persecuted for his work. “Order will vanish,” Seldon says in the trailer, “wars will be endless.”
The problem that the Emperor faces is that he can’t just vanish Seldon — he’s got quite a following, and he doesn’t want to escalate the situation or turn him into a martyr. The trailer saves that bit for the very end, when Seldon and his followers are exiled to a distant planet called Terminus, where they’re not only out of the way, but where they get to set up their Foundation project.
The original novel is pretty dry, and I’ve heard plenty of people note that it’s pretty much just characters in rooms talking about things. The series looks like it’ll be jumping off from that a bit, putting the conflict between the Emperor and Seldon front and center, at least during this first season. From the looks of things, there’ll be plenty of action as we explore the Empire and its impending downfall.
That’s good for Apple and its subscribers — from the two glimpses that we’ve seen of it, it looks like the company’s putting together a pretty big space opera, something that’ll accompany its other original content offerings like The Morning Show and For All Mankind. Apple’s been quietly building up a solid library of content — it’s recently picked up Hugh Howey’s Wool, has reportedly picked up Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter, renewed For All Mankind and See for a third season, and has a big series called Invasion coming after Foundation wraps up its run this fall.
The original short story collection is dry and smart people talking in rooms saying that they cannot change the course of history and shouldn’t try. They need to wait until there’s no longer a action to take or a decision to be made and just go with the flow. It was simply put, extremely boring. It sounds like follow on stories and novels change things somewhat and people start to fight back. I never would have expected the original foundation stories to generate all the follow-on books and stories and a tv project
If it wasn’t for the quote “the Empire is dying” and the mention of Seldon’s name, wouldn’t know this was Foundation until end title drop. Just looks completely different from the tone/ideas/feel of the original series. Feels like instead of the grandiose philosophizing and epic worldbuilding of the original series, we’re going more action heavy with a pro-revolutionary bent. Honestly gives me a weird kind of Jupiter Ascending vibe, except not as pretty and fabulous. I just started re-reading the Foundation series again and I love it for what it is. I hope I’m wrong and that this series keeps at least a little of the Foundation vibe I know and love!
There is a lot of “action” in the Foundation novels that occurs offscreen that could easily be brought onscreen. The Empire is dissolving into warlords and such. The Mule plot is war. The search for the Second Foundation is a classic quest. They just better not toss out the real plot to sell the story.
This trailer looks and feels more like Warhammer 40K than Foundation. Too much smashing, too many explosions, too many clones. The Emperors in Asimov’s books weren’t cloned demigods. And as Salvor Hardin was fond of saying, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” … in storytelling as in life.
It goes without saying that there’s no way to do a literal adaptation of the books. This is going to be something new inspired by the books, and it should be judged on its own merits. It’s not unlike how the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the Arrowverse takes bits and pieces from decades’ worth of comics and uses them as building blocks to create a new version that works as its own entity.
What matters is not whether it’s changed, since change is what adaptation is. All that matters is how it’s changed. Some adaptations fail when their new additions are inferior to the original; Syfy’s Childhood’s End miniseries, for instance, was rather dreadful. But some adaptations turn out quite well, even when they change the original immensely, because what they add is worthwhile on its own terms. Blade Runner is massively different from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but I think Philip K. Dick once said he liked the movie better than his own book. And Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is immensely superior to the novel that it only borrowed a few broad elements from.
My guess is that the cloning and “genetic dynasty” are a way to tell a multigenerational saga while keeping the same core cast, by having the actors play a succession of clone descendants of their original characters.
Hmmm, with a “genetic legacy” forcing “order” on a universe, this take looks like an empire that deserves to die, not one worth preserving.
For those concerned by the proportion of action-explodey scenes — it’s a trailer, so of course it’ll be biased towards gripping visuals rather than contemplative, talky scenes — but it has some of those, too. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” has always been true for written SF/F, and it’s just as true with trailers for filmic projects.
It does seem that this project adds some social dynamics (Seldon has collected angry adherents rather than a bunch of academics on Trantor), but that might be a trick of editing — maybe the violence portrays the collapse of the Empire at its margins.
IMHO, the Apple TV script would be irresponsible if it didn’t update Asimov’s premise with 70 years of social science. Seldon’s psychohistorical plan requires that the mass of the galaxy not know its specifics, but how plausible is it that he’s the only person to notice an imminent problem and try to do something? There might be a plot thread about successful local efforts — depending on the scale of the Empire as depicted in the TV version, there might be planets or entire sectors which do well (i.e., not fall into post-atomic depotism) for themselves. Conversely, the premise “centralized Empire good, independent planets bad” could be a hard sell with today’s audience — there’s likely sympathy with the “independent, even if they’re at war” condition.
@7/emmaline: “Hmmm, with a “genetic legacy” forcing “order” on a universe, this take looks like an empire that deserves to die, not one worth preserving.”
That was the point, though — that the Empire was doomed to fall because it had become decadent and corrupt. The goal of the Foundation was never to preserve the political institution of the Empire — it was to preserve civilization, the knowledge and technology and worthwhile things in society, from being lost in the chaos that would follow the inevitable fall of the bloated, ossified Empire.
Asimov based Foundation on a now-discredited view of European history, the mythical “Dark Ages” that followed the fall of the Roman Empire (a fiction invented by Renaissance-era thinkers who glorified Greece and Rome and assumed that anything that followed them had to be inferior), in which the culture and literature and art and science of that era were lost and centuries of supposed barbarism reigned instead (never mind that that “lost” culture and science were still thriving in the Mideast, as well as being meticulously preserved by the very Church that was later accused of suppressing or destroying it). The idea behind the Foundation was that the fall of empires was inevitable, but if it were anticipated and prepared for, the society’s knowledge and culture could be preserved through the dark age and be there to be rediscovered when civilization rose anew.
From the perspective of the italian peninsula, 10th and 11th century were a Dark Age indeed.
In the later foundation books Asimovaddressed the Trantor-centric perspective of Seldon.
@10/Dracomilan: “From the perspective of the italian peninsula, 10th and 11th century were a Dark Age indeed.”
If you say so, but it’s a common opinion in the West that the “Dark Ages” were a worldwide phenomenon — I recall one of Robert L. Forward’s novels, probably Dragon’s Egg, stating as much explicitly, and I think Star Trek has asserted it too. In fact, the time of the supposed Dark Ages in Europe was an era of great cultural dynamism, growth, and innovation almost everywhere else on Earth.