changing race and genders: yes! adding nuances: yeah! some of this stuff: no!

[cimorene]

I finished the first Foundation book and now I really want everyone else to reread the trilogy too while watching the show so we can have a conversation about it!

I have stuff to say, but I'd really rather talk about it than just monologue.

Comments

[vass]

venndaai is talking about it on Tumblr.

[princessofgeeks]

Wish I could make time but I know I won't. Will be reading the comments, though. I am so behind on all media I will never catch up. Plus I just started a new book. Have fun!!!!

[msilverstar]

We've watched the first couple of episodes, have you seen Gavia's review?.

We read the books when we were teenagers, I tried to re-read the books a couple of years ago but they did not age well for me. But I would be very interested in your insights!

[cimorene]

The books are full of stuff that didn't age well, but I watched the first episode before I reread and I couldn't remember well enough, but there were about forty places where I was like "This is stupid, but not in the way 1940s white scifi writer guys were stupid. This can't be right", and my curiosity was aroused. We've watched 2 eps which is all that are are out here yet. Foundation 1 was a quick read, at least, unlike Dune.

[stranger]

Wait, there's a screen version of Asimov's trilogy? Somehow? I loved parts of the epic, but some of the component stories were a slog the first time, let alone now. Does it use the much-later books that were meant to combine Asimov's robot series with the Foundation universe? That always seemed the product of writerly senioritis to me, but an adaptation might make use of them.

[cimorene]

I don't know. Didn't know those were a thing actually. I think at the time I first read them my Dad said I didn't need to bother with any after the original trilogy because that's what was really a classic and worth my time, and I saw no reason to doubt him. I'm not really an Asimov fan.

I haven't read much around the adaptation so far. I know they changed the gender and race of a bunch of characters, and then they made a lot of other changes too, like adding more detail and more conflict (especially physical conflict and violence) and more characters, which made sense, and other changes which seemed not to make sense. Also there's some skipping around in time and stuff that doesn't appear in Foundation 1, although I haven't reread the other two yet, so maybe it'll be in there.

[stranger]

On the later sequels, what the "thing" was, was several writers (I was only following SF writers closely enough to notice) revisiting early works and extending or combining them in sequels. Consider, for instance, the extreme late Heinlein. Asimov published maybe three new books in the '80s-'90s that included Foundation backstory, but of course his style and worldview were thirty years older. The original trilogy stood by itself; your Dad was right.

At the same time, the original trilogy covered a thousand years or more and invented "psychohistory" to manipulate its developing history, and was more or less modelled on the Roman Empire and its collapse. It completely has room for any amount of additional material, like robot technology, or sub-plots involving battles between minor stellar empires, or grappling with racism/colonialism in modern terms.

It certainly has room to make the default-white, default-male character set more varied, and I'm glad the show-makers are doing that. But... the story itself is based in the Western history that exemplifies patriarchy and kyriarchy, even if psychohistorians (the "Foundation") are trying to subvert the historical trends.

This last was always, to me, in the realm of SF inventions that are more fantasy than possible. Well, not the part where they try to direct historical-scope events, which is very human behavior, but but idea that humans are, even slightly, as quantifiable as atoms. It's a fun theory, but about as workable as an atom that's conceptualized as like a solar system.

Thoughts? I'm not even a physicist, let alone a historian.

[cimorene]

I'm definitely not a physicist, but having gotten almost enough social sciences to make a bachelor's in sociology, including statistical analysis for the social sciences most relevantly... the idea seems fairly laughable! I think nobody with even a passing knowledge of soft and semi-soft sciences would think this possible now. There's a lot of stuff that the study of history can, evidently, teach people about human movements and politics, but none of that could ever go so far forward in time because causality is too complicated for probabilities so high to attach to social groups that far in the future. (That said, it is a temptingly cool idea. And of course, it helps that science can actually predict a LOT MORE things than politicians act like is true or acknowledge, and that's been true since the 1940s and before.)

As silly as the premise is, though, at least for a lot of book 1 the story is following characters who aren't privy to the predictions, so they're a BIT easier to ignore, and I can see why the political history nature of the story appeals enough to some people who do care about diversity to attempt to salvage it for entertainment value.

[stranger]

That's exactly it, for the statistical history plot, and also for the way it looks to audiences that are living through far too much history in their own times. I suspect part of the original appeal was as a wild and vaguely explainable AU to Rome-and-later history.