Isaac Asimov’s Foundation as a tv series, part 1

Apple TV just launched a new series, a serial adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s famous Foundation series.  I’d like to review it here, partly for professional reasons, since the stories are famous examples of futuring science fiction.  Personally, I’m fond of Foundation since I first read it around age 12.

To begin, I took a pleasant break and reread the first half of the first book.  I’ll share some of the high points here, then switch to the tv adaptation.

1: THE BOOK

If you’re new to the whole thing, a quick summary.  Foundation takes place in a far future when humanity runs a galaxy-spanning empire.  A scientist appears whose new field of study, psychohistory, lets him predict the future behavior of humanity at a large scale. Hari Seldon’s work reveals that the giant empire will shortly crash, and its collapse be followed by thirty thousand years of horror.  To shorten those dark ages he sets up a Foundation designed to preserve human learning.  That’s just the first part. The story races on into the future as people in the Foundation try to survive and fulfill Seldon’s mission, while surrounded by an increasingly immiserated and hostile galaxy.

It’s also worth noting the origin of the whole fiction, in the author pitching to legendary editor John W. Campbell the idea of a decline and fall of the Roman empire in space. That Gibbonian theme saturates what follows, unsurprisingly, from an arrogant and declining empire to successor kingdoms and rampaging barbarians and a new religion defeating a temporal power, even to the point of little jokes, like a post-imperial politician starting as a mayor or naming one too-scholarly character after a famous medieval historian, Henri Pirenne.

So, observations from this reread: so much is going on in these very fast pages! Asimov quickly assembles pieces from what was the science fiction genre in the 1940s: a galactic empire, spaceflight, awesome atomic power, science under attack, lots of male characters. He uses what Eric Rabkin calls “transformed language” to subtly point to a different world, as when characters refer to money as rusty (61; because it’s made from precious metals, which are unusually scarce in that setting).

You can also see some ways Asimov courts the reader.  Some of the antagonists are simply stupid, and our heroes successfully work around them. The book is a paean to brains over brawn, repeating a now famous adage: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” (84)  (Later amended to the less well known “violence [is] an uneconomical way of attaining an end.” (148)) Others are stereotypical classists, while the Foundation is egalitarian (56), a nice appeal to American audiences in the New Deal era.  You can see other nods to the 1940s, such as a successful strike with which the reader should sympathize (151ff). An old order appears as either dangerous or stupid, and certainly stagnant, which can appeal to younger readers.  And yet Asimov pulls back from simply pandering, or from the classic fans are Slans trope.  He never lets us into psychohistory, much like Mary Shelley holds back from showing us how Victor Frankenstein animated the dead. We never get into Seldon’s head. Indeed, without too much risk of spoilers, our point of view characters are always at best just outside of that epic awareness.  We don’t get to see the end before anyone else. Unlike a psychohistorian, we are bound blindly to the wheel of history – except for these glimpses, and, ah, but there lies spoiler territory.

There is also the intellectual thrill of psychohistory’s basic idea. Predicting the future accurately is an ancient dream, and perhaps Asimov came up with it when science had been advancing rapidly for a century.   Psychohistory doesn’t exist, of course, but it’s a terrific narrative device. Asimov deploys it well in some nicely staged scenes.

Speaking of which, a common criticism of Asimov’s fiction in general, from contemporaries through the present day, is that it’s too talky.  And it’s true, in that Foundation is certainly powered mostly by dialog.  There is no shred of Bradburian lyrical prose.  The text doesn’t spend much time describing the world and its objects in any detail.  Yet in this case the approach succeeds very well. Like a stage play it offers dramatic scenes of confrontation, scheming, humor, and disaster.  Perhaps Asimov was relying on his readers to have been well trained by radio to visualize what he sketched. At any rate, I don’t think this is a flaw.

One more note: the first Foundation stories exist in the arc of history, as all texts do. The first four short stories (the novel is really a fix-up) appeared in the early 1940s, and the opening tale came out with the book in 1951. This means that it dates itself in some ways.  There are few women, which is not unusual for contemporary science fiction, nor for a story seeking to remix the late Roman empire. Technologies are often retro, as characters read newspapers and watch television screens fixed in place; some of that is, again, intentional in trying to depict an era in decline.  It’s important to bear in mind that last point, I think.  While some science fiction authors flog medieval tropes out of laziness, Asimov, like Frank Herbert in the Dune sequence, uses them to show a society with certain structures and a deep stagnation.  Warring princes aren’t cheap or for fun, but demonstrations of a future society recapitulating the past.  Making the Empire great again, one might say.

2: TV SERIES, FIRST TWO EPISODES

I have watched the first two episodes so far, all that’s available, and rewatched parts of them, to show my family.

Overall,tl;dr, the tv series strives mightily to succeed.  It represents the bones of Asimov’s story and adds piles of extra stuff.  Some of the latter work; some fail.

To summarize the show’s plot so far: we recapitulate the beginning of Asimov’s novel, introducing psychohistory, the challenge to the empire, and the Foundation’s relocation to Terminus.  Introduced earlier than in the books are plotlines involving political struggles to come.

As a work of visual storytelling the show is gorgeous. Designers and location scouts did very well in creating interesting settings and costumes, creating a sense of other worlds and different cultures.  There is an awful lot of CGI to visualize space travel, future cities, art, technologies, and more.  Further, many characters are black, which represents an engagement with today’s racial reckoning, although I’m not sure of the politics of having so many black people as colonists in our similarly anticolonial time, nor of seeing what seems to be a majority- or all-black planet be violently anti intellectual.  I am not sure what to make of a suicide bomber being nonwhite, beyond the classic formulation that all science fiction inevitably reflects its present day. All of the actors are often excellent, striving to make the most out of scenes and dialog that, frankly, all too often fall flat.

As an adaptation… like Peter Jackson’s Hobbit series, you can see the original story represented, with padding extra stuff inserted alongside. We get the great early courtroom scene where a prosecutor arraigns Seldon almost beat for beat. There’s the young mathematician confronting the old psychohistorian. We see imperial anxiety and options around Seldon’s forecast.  The show expands the chronology a bit in ways that I find interesting, both formally and pedagogically. Before the Foundation leaves Trantor the empire hosts representatives from two warring polities, both of whom will play parts in the later narrative.  Another character is quietly, visually a robot and Seldon refers to “the Robot Wars,” both of which gesture to Asimov’s other great series and how he ultimately tied them together.  So far this should work for fans, as well as for people new to the stories.

Then Goyer et al make up new things and try to weave them in.  Gaal Dornick, not Hari Seldon, becomes the central character, complete with intertwined personal and planetary backstories. It looks like her planet was a climate-change-denying anti-science theocracy, which she escaped through winning an academic contest (itself revealing a salvific attitude towards education). The emperor, barely present in the book, expands into a three-person entity, each of whom is a clone from a founding emperor, representing “a genetic dynasty.” So far each of the trinity gets a character arc based on their ages.  There is also a massive space engineering and terrorism disaster plot.  The novel’s relocation to Terminus happens offstage and is entirely about politics; in the tv show it becomes a colonization and survival story about getting to live on a hostile planet.  Additionally, romance, sex, and childbirth plotlines take off in the second episode.  Seldon’s death occurs off-stage and unremarkably in the novel; here it is front and center, involving a plot we can just glimpse.  Looking ahead, it seems that the vault on Terminus is a forbidden and mysterious object which only Hardin can access; this is a major change from the book.

In short, we can view the series as one part reproduction and one part fanfiction.

The former succeeds in some good ways. We get some echoes of Asimov’s class politics, as the Day emperor is cruelly snobbish.  There is some transformed language, when people refer to the emperors as “Empire,” as opposed to “your majesty.”

I’m not sure the latter works.  For someone new to the stories they amplify some points, I suppose, but also add tons of cognitive load. I don’t know if these additions make the show more engaging or harder to follow. Personally, I have two problems with them.  First, I found the infills increasingly uninspired, disconnected from the source plots, and derivative of heaps of other sf. My attention drifted off.

Second, the two episodes seem to change key themes in the book.  Asimov’s tale is about powerful science and political maneuvering. The show instead emphasizes emotion and faith.  Several times it likens math to belief, and we don’t actually see any of the math beyond pretty infographics of the galaxy.  Science never really appears. I don’t think we saw a scientist character or anyone either do or refer to science. There is, in contrast, a lot of religion. Gaal Dornick comes from a very religious society. The empire mediates an interstellar tension between two groups which is partly shaped by religion. We also see emotion foregrounded as a powerful and validating force, as when one emperor unit asks another – very portentously – how they feel, as a way of making policy. In the novel, characters use reason to set aside emotion, or to make emotions work for their purposes.  In Star Trek terms, Asimov is more like Spock, while the Apple series is closer to the betazoid.  Given how calculating characters in the next stories within the novel will cynically use religion as a tool of statecraft, I’m not sure how the show will make that happen.

I have questions about some of what I’ve seen, wondering how they’ll play out.  One is that the show is curiously low tech in many ways. Yes, we do see starships, immersive virtual reality, and some kind of variable body covering. Yet information seems scarce, physically based without an accessible internet. Every planet, including the capital, features plenty of open fires and candles. On one planet people row boats to spacecraft.  The bad scene where Seldon cheers people up takes place in a massive laundry that would not have been out of place in 1940s New York.  There is also a lot of public television, where people gather to watch single, shared screens, again like the 20th century. Executions are by old-fashioned hanging (which gave me a Nazi resonance, for the source material’s composition).  It reminds me of what I saw in the Star Wars Rogue One movie, and I wonder if the reasoning will play out similarly.  Or if this is the show’s attempt to depict an empire not only stagnating, but already regressing.  Alternatively, the mix of high and low tech suggests an empire with systematic inequalities.

Miscellaneous notes:

• The show starts with children and a mystery.  The kids swear and dare each other with some classic cruelty.  Then we see Gaal who is also young, a teenager immersed in her parents’ world. This has two functions: first, setting us up for explanations.  Second, establishing the multigenerational theme.
• I like the visual pun of Synnax being literally and culturally a backwater.
• The show uses the word “mankind” instead of “humanity.”  I noted this twice so far.  A deliberate call out to the novel’s sexism?
• Derivative sf: the starships look like a cross between those from Mass Effect and Interstellar.  Trantor is the familiar giant future city we’ve seen from Metropolis to Blade Runner and the Star Wars prequels.  Armored cops and soldiers are like Stargate. Kim Stanley Robinson did a falling space elevator much better in Red Mars. I think the genetic dynasty draws from Lexx.
• The music is disappointing. The title theme is hazy and forgettable. Otherwise it lards scenes simply diagetically.

I’ll keep watching, but my expectations are low.