HBO to adapt Asimov's "Foundation" Series

[Passdagas the Brown]

I'm more excited about this than I am about the Star Wars films:

http://io9.com/hbo-will-make-asimovs-fo ... 1657018306

It doesn't look like this is a done deal just yet, but the fact that this news has gotten out bodes well.

[yovargas]

Golden Age sci-fi - now with extra T&A!

[Passdagas the Brown]

Occasionally, during a crisis, Hari Seldon appears without pants on.

[Primula Baggins]

This sounds really promising, although I do worry that they'll feel compelled to make it more "adult" with sex and violence. . . . Wow, that sounds stodgy of me, but lack of sex and violence was one of the key qualities of Asimov's work; he wrote gripping stories with almost none of either. Spicing up his characters might change the flavor entirely, distracting the viewer from his ideas. Which were always the cool part.

[Dave_LF]

Golden Age sci-fi - now with extra T&A!

By which you mean Tolkien and Asimov, I assume.

[Frelga]

Tonsillectomy & adenoidectomy?

Asimov fascinates me both for his flights and failures of imagination. There's a thrilling interstellar chase, but the characters calculate their route based on tables in paper books. There's a colony on Mars, which consists of families in standalone houses and women seem to be mostly housewives. A group of scientists goes to investigate a tragedy on a remote planet, and amazingly they are not all Americans, but they are all male. In other words, technology soars, but social order stays largely the same.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm more excited about this than I am about the Star Wars films:

http://io9.com/hbo-will-make-asimovs-fo ... 1657018306

It doesn't look like this is a done deal just yet, but the fact that this news has gotten out bodes well.

It's not even close.

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[Inanna]

Fingers crossed!


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Please bear with my typos & grammar mistakes. Sent from my iPhone - Palantirs make mistakes too.

[Passdagas the Brown]

I'm more excited about this than I am about the Star Wars films:

http://io9.com/hbo-will-make-asimovs-fo ... 1657018306

It doesn't look like this is a done deal just yet, but the fact that this news has gotten out bodes well.

It's not even close.

---------
Sent from my LG G3 using tapatalk

I would say that the following development:

Sony Pictures acquired “Foundation” in a multi-studio auction back in 2009 and attached Roland Emmerich to direct and produce. Two years later, the studio hired Dante Harper (“Akira”) to adapt the books. When the project failed to materialize, HBO spent big bucks to acquire the property when it became available earlier this summer.

Coupled with comments from the Wrap's sources about Nolan's possible involvement, makes this a very real possibility. It may end up fizzling out, but "not even close" seems to be off the mark.

The timing of it, on the other hand, is certainly a very open question. We might be waiting until 2020, for all we know!

ETA: One thing I am very happy about is that SyFy doesn't have their grubby, unimaginative hands on it.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Sorry to be unclear. By 'not even close' I meant that my excitement level for Star Wars is now nowhere near my excitement for this.

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[Passdagas the Brown]

Oh! Please retract my comments, then.

I agree whole-heartedly with your clarification.

[Primula Baggins]

Asimov fascinates me both for his flights and failures of imagination. There's a thrilling interstellar chase, but the characters calculate their route based on tables in paper books. There's a colony on Mars, which consists of families in standalone houses and women seem to be mostly housewives. A group of scientists goes to investigate a tragedy on a remote planet, and amazingly they are not all Americans, but they are all male. In other words, technology soars, but social order stays largely the same.

That's the Golden Age of American science fiction in a nutshell. I'm not knocking it—some of my favorite books and stories appeared in the '40s and '50s. But the writers then were almost entirely white, and almost entirely men, except for a few women who wrote under gender-ambiguous names like Leigh or Andre, or used their initials. And the writers were brilliant, coming up with wildly entertaining, "out there" ideas.

Except for the one thing most of them couldn't seem to imagine: that society itself would ever change in any important way. That gender roles or family structures would ever change. That gay people would be able to live as gay people. That most people on Earth aren't white, so presumably most of us off Earth won't be, either.

Robert Heinlein got some of this, but his best-known novels written at that time were intended for teenagers and were carefully edited to remove any "disturbing" ideas. The most he got away with was depicting a future that contained important, sympathetic male characters who were not white Americans.

It's a failure of imagination, and also a clear demonstration of how strong cultural blinders can be—that writers who were deliberately trying to create new worlds didn't seem able to avoid including large chunks of the old one. Didn't seem even to see the incongruity.

[Passdagas the Brown]

Agreed with all that - particularly on the lack of imagination on gender roles. Quick question about the Foundation series and diversity. How do we know none of the characters are non-white? It has been a while since I read the series, but I remember scant attention being paid to physical descriptions of characters.

[Primula Baggins]

We don't know. But the default was white. Illustrations and covers showed white people. Heck, they still do; I had to specially request my hero's skin to be made darker on a cover in 2007. To Ace's credit, they did it. To some degree.

[Passdagas the Brown]

Got it. I imagine that it was indeed a default, and that the authors of the day may not even have thought to object. I just wasn't sure if those illustrations were actually based on physical descriptions in the text, or not. But yeah. If Asimov meant for Hari Seldon to be non-white, I imagine he might have communicated that to at least one illustrator!

[axordil]

I hate to admit I never much cared for Foundation et al. I liked The Gods Themselves better, but Asimov's shorts were better than any of his novels; overall, though, I always thought him the weakest writer of the Big Names of my youth (fiction-wise; much of his non-fiction pieces were good reads for their time). That said, I'm thinking an adaptation would help with some of the more annoying aspects of the books.