Foundation season two was really good.

I'm not an abject fan of Asimov's Foundation trilogy, as it is rather dry and boring in ways that The Silmarillion by Tolkien is also dry and boring. It takes place over huge swaths of time. Characters rarely last more than three chapters. So you're switching out constantly with new characters who are following the decline of a galactic empire and trying to make sure that instead of 30,000 years of darkness and lack of knowledge, that it only lasts for 1,000 years. But one of the things that the Appl plus series did to correct this was to make concessions for the story that really rile up the "Die Hards" of Asimov's fanbase. I think these changes are a huge bonus to the story. But (I think) people will always be divided between what works in storytelling and what is sacred and should not be altered in any way. My thoughts on this are simple: sometimes big stories are two big for one mind. I think this is the case with Game of Thrones, which functions much better when there's a small village of people providing input than it does with one person's brain who tires and quickly reaches the limits of their imagination and falls short of filling in all the blanks. So what are these changes exactly? There are spoilers ahead in case you intend to watch Foundation, which I hope you do. It's an incredible science fiction series...maybe one of the best in modern times. Okay, now to answer that question.

The first of these is that Hari Seldon gets to die and yet through computer programs and cloning and what all else, he's a continuous character that not only gets to exist to establish the Foundation, but he continues onward as a primary protagonist throughout the narrative. He doesn't just "appear" in the vault as a pre-recorded message every fifty years or so like he seems to do in the book. 

The second thing that Apple's staff of writers did was establish a genetic dynasty of emperors named "Cleon" that continues on and on and on, and is in fact one of the main reasons the whole thing is collapsing.

The third thing they did was bring in the character of Demerzel, who is the real power behind the throne...her story comes to full bloom in season two. Demerzel is the most fascinating character in the show, full stop. Demerzel is the last survivor of this event called "The Robot Wars," which occurred between man and machine thousands of years ago. And her story is extremely sad, having been sliced up and imprisoned for countless centuries within a room, fully conscious of who she was, and just having to stay there without company only to then be freed by a morally ambiguous Emperor who had romantic designs that had to do with her, would force her to love him through programming, and would force her to be a caretaker of his clones for even more centuries to come. How awful would that be?

And the fourth thing they did was invent Gaal Dornick, who is Hari's protege and who they've managed to figure out how to hurl through the centuries as a living person (they use hybernation pods for this to slow down metabolic processes). She's the tape measure by which Hari's plan can be measured. You see, Hari has got this timeline of events that need to be overcome due to what he's learned from his mathematically-based psycho-history. With Gaal Dornick, she's a living person, and thus she can have children. If (for example) a child dies outside of when it is supposed to (as predicted by psychic dreams and prophecies), it means that the future can be changed. I really liked Gaal's kid named Salvor, and I was sad when Salvor died at the end of season two. But this is exactly what shouldn't have happened but did, and because of that they know that the next big bad that they will face, called "The Mule" will be overcome because Salvor wasn't supposed to die when she did (if that makes any sense).

Anyway, I get why some of the "die hards" are upset at all of these changes. But they make for some really good storytelling if you can let go of a stoic adherence to Asimov's actual writing. We have gotten quite a few good things from the books. The Hober Mallow/High Cleric-Brother offshoot of the Foundation arc was fantastic. We also got the Riose-Mallow-Constant arc that was a genuinely interesting adaptation of the books. That arc emphasized the Foundation from Terminus using their soft power. Season 2 also gave us the necessary Second Foundation introduced into the story via the mentalics arc, and we now have Gaal becoming the single most important person in the universe because she has nigh on "magical" powers that are probably aimed at an upcoming boss fight with "The Mule." Even though the writers have had to do a lot of hand wavy, science magic to keep characters from aging out of the story, I think the sacrifice has paid off in spades. And the nothing but spectacular destruction of the planet of Terminus left me awe struck. The way the show has been doing the ships "faster than light" travel is to have each of them use a micro black hole that serves as the engine. Well, they crashed one of the big ones into the planet Terminus, and I never really put together that the singularity in those ships could in fact tear apart a planet, but it totally did. One of the best pieces of special effects I've seen in sci-fi shows.

Anyway, thanks for visiting. On Wednesday I plan to talk about HBO's fourth season of True Detective called Night Country.

The Apple TV adaptation of Foundation can't resemble the book at all if it expects watchers.

Apple TV released the first trailer for their adaptation of Foundation. I've included it below. The first season of the series comes out in the fall, and I will probably watch it. Having read the Foundation books, I'm actually surprised that these could be made into something watchable. From a reader standpoint, they were barely entertaining, with no main characters having any emotion or likeableness, and spanning a length of time that is absurd by modern-day fiction standards. If you haven't read them, imagine getting a slice of a character's day...perhaps heated dialogue with another character...and the rudimentary dressings of what Asimov believes will suffice to "set the scene." And then there's a break, and the next scene takes place fifty years later. Those characters are now dead, and their descendants find something that remotely connects back to that argument that took place fifty years prior. That's how Foundation lurches its way forward in its narrative.

The characters in Asimov's famous work are not really the story. It's the idea that this immense galactic empire is collapsing and that one man can foresee and prove that it will happen to the doom and detriment of all the civilizations that form the empire. So the empire IS the character. This doomsayer prophet using math and science doesn't convince many people. But those whom he does convince become his army to essentially work toward making sure that there is only a dark age that lasts a thousand years instead of thirty thousand years by preserving knowledge. This future-seeing man is Harry Seldon, and he checks in every once in a while with preprogrammed holograms of himself that provide instructions to people so that they can go about the tasks of ending the Dark Age of the galaxy within a single millennia.

But I read from a standpoint that characters are what make a story interesting. Without them, the story is just a summary of the rise and fall and resurrection of a galactic empire containing billions upon billions of people that I don't really care about. Asimov essentially asks us to care about civilization in these books, and the question I always have while reading is: why should I care? It's like being asked to care about a thousand people getting wiped out by a plague in Bangladesh. We gasp at how horrible that sounds, but none of us actually shed a tear (or very few at least). We don't know those people. It's just a number. "Oh...did you hear that a thousand people were killed in Myanmar?" It's that kind of thing. We never know more than the headline.

Look...you know I'm not a scientist. I'm not an archeologist. I don't really have an interest in studying the rise and fall of a fictional civilization. But therein is probably the audience for this kind of thing: scientists and archeologists. It's clear that Asimov wrote this book for those people, who read science fiction and were blown away that someone would write what is essentially a summary of the Roman Empire with an added "we're back" hook that takes place over so many centuries that the characters involved in the story are just footnotes. It's the "what if" scenario. "What if there was this huge civilization, and someone saw it was falling, and then they took steps to preserve knowledge so that the horrible barbaric period only lasted a thousand years instead of thirty thousand? Wow! Wouldn't that be interesting!" And it undeniably is to some people. For me, the hang-up is just that huge timeline. It's too big for me as I never get to know a character other than in the five pages they exist.

I can see the likes of astrophysicists like Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson waxing poetic about Foundation. Though these people are super smart, they also wax poetic when talking about Earth history and cosmological time. "In this collection of a billion years...trees evolved...and there were no microorganisms that could digest the wood pulp when they fell because they hadn't evolved yet. So, it all got buried under volcanic ash and earth and became petrified...giving us vast petrified forests today." I mean...scientifically...it is interesting. But I don't really care about those trees, and it's hard for me to care about any animal that may have lived at that time. I just don't. That's what Foundation is...more or less.

Asimov as a writer has been compared to being the worst of the great writers. More than one person has pointed out that he has thin characters whose only spin is that they face and overcome intellectual challenges that Asimov poses through his writing. You can see that Asimov was amused over his plot twists and his big ideas every time you read Foundation or any of its sister books. I will say this about him: he writes very clearly, and all of the things he says are easy to understand. But his prose isn't pretty.

This all leads me back to the trailer for Foundation. Does it make me want to watch the series? Yeah...I will watch it. But they are going to have to depart from the books a lot, because successful television requires a "soul." And you only get that through emotional connection to characters. So they are going to have to slow down the narrative of the one-thousand years to give us characters whom we can slip into in order to see the events of the collapse of the empire, which are essentially just glossed over in the book. I mean...it's pretty much just a steady decline that is narratively talked about on just a few pages. This happened, followed by that, and now we will focus in on a world on the fringe that now finds itself by itself and in need of government, because government has collapsed. Hmm...what happens next for these poor people? Oh! A hologram from Harry Seldon left fifty years ago will provide clues! Some people watch said video...and then you never hear from them again because another fifty years has passed. But they did things with that knowledge that will be built on by others.

In other words...it's kind of boring.

It's weird that something like this could get published and lauded as so amazing. Foundation as it stands feels like a really well-developed outline. You know how you outline a book's plot? Well think of Foundation as that only being like 240 pages in length. That's what it feels like when you read it...an outline. But in it's age, there was nothing else like it. It was like Asimov was the greatest world-builder ever, but he never got past the world-building stage to build a story that took place in real time. So all  you get is world-building. And there's pages and pages of it, telling you about all the things that happened and when. Imagine all the Star Wars stuff and its immense history being boiled down to 240 pages of outline, telling you when Order 66 happened, when the emperor was defeated, what Jango Fett did, etc. I mean...it'd be great world-building, but you wouldn't care about any of those characters. That's how Foundation reads, more or less. It's a summary of things that happened.

How on Earth is any of that going to translate into a watchable television series? Our first clues are in the trailer embedded below: