Yes. I loved "Dune" and hated "Foundation". I was expecting something more from "Foundation". ~String
I really don't know about this directors "vision" of what he thinks it should be interpreted as. Every director sees a book in a different way, I just hope he doesn't ruin what a masterpiece this epic trilogy novel really is. They screwed up, to me, Hitchikers Guide To The Universe when they made it as well as I Robot and The Day The Earth Stood Still. Dune also was not really done that well but it was OK.
Hitchikers Guide To The Universe was not just perfect creation of the movie industry, it was flawless like a pink Australian diamond!
the Earth creation thing? Well yeah I agree, they could have made it more realistic...I mean hollow mountains Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! and guy filling the ocean from a hose...lol...
People again, The Fundation series is simply unfilmable. There isn't much action but lots of talk. That doesn't transfer. There was another Asimov book made a movie about a planet having 4 Suns and that was not good either... The Robot series was an exception...
Like Minority Report, there could be all kinds of action and activities, if done right...the mathematics can be interpreted like Wolfram's "a new kind of science". After all prediction depends on total knowledge and degree of randomness within subsets. "The premise of the series is that mathematician Hari Seldon spent his life developing a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory, a concept devised by Asimov and his editor John W. Campbell. Using the law of mass action, it can predict the future, but only on a large scale; it is error-prone on a small scale. It works on the principle that the behaviour of a mass of people is predictable if the quantity of this mass is very large (equal to the population of the galaxy which has a population of around a quadrillion). The larger the mass, the more predictable is the future. Using these techniques, Seldon foresees the fall of the Galactic Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a dark age lasting thirty thousand years before a second great empire arises. To shorten the period of barbarism, he creates two Foundations, small, secluded havens of all human knowledge, on opposite ends of the galaxy. The focus of the trilogy is on the Foundation of the planet Terminus. The people living there are working on an all-encompassing Encyclopedia, and are unaware of Seldon's real intentions (for if they were, the variables would become too uncontrolled). The Encyclopedia serves to preserve knowledge of the physical sciences after the collapse. The Foundation's location is chosen so that it acts as the focal point for the next empire in another thousand years (rather than the projected thirty thousand)."
I've read all of Asimov and he has been my favorite sci-fi author. I read I-Robot around the age of 12 (I'm 56 now) and it was that book that set me on my computing career with perhaps the dream of seeing his ideas become reality. Well, even though I run an R&D department for HP I really do not see myself much closer to making "Positronic" robots a reality. Pity Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The I-Robot movie was OK but I think Asimov would be turning in his grave if he could see it. The movie missed his vision quite badly and was yet another variation of the frankenstein theme. Sigh! I read the foundation series several times and would love to see that in a movie if done well. The Hitchhikers Guide movie was a disaster, not close to the books and added too much extra nonsense. A bitter dissapointment. A much better treatment of the book was done by the BBC in a TV series where they strictly kept the books. I have those on video and they are superb - the movie didn't come close. Asimov was one of the sci-fi greats alongside Heinlein. Clarke I never enjoyed too much, and the I couldn't finish the Dune series - I found it boring and it went on too long.
I'd be interested to see the film(s), but I think it would probably work better as a TV series like Babylon 5.
I think Asimov was at his best popularizing science with his essays. Though I enjoyed a fair amount of his short stories as a kid, I had to slog through Foundation to finish it. Some of the characters seemed very unlikely to me. I just don't think he was a particularly great fiction writer. I enjoyed the film I Robot, but I just chose not to dwell on the fact that it was supposed to have anything to do with the Asimov story of the same name.
I first read the Foundation series as a young teenager. At the time, I found some of the ideas interesting (like the whole psychohistory thing), but thought some of the storylines were boring. Recently, I re-read the first couple of books. Now I realise that they are more about politics and human nature than about science fictions per se. In a sense, they would have worked equally well without the sci-fi setting. I think there was an element of cashing in on success in some of the later Asimov books. First we had robots, then Foundation, then at some point Asimov jumped the shark and the robot stories met the foundation series. Nonetheless, the fact remains that Asimov was still a more interesting writer than 90% of the sci-fi authors out there today.
With all of this I wholeheartedly agree. However, I couldn't disagree more with this conclusion. Asimov, to me, represents the epitome of exactly what SciFi is not supposed to be. Current SciFi is hardcore speculative fiction, not just ordinary human interest stories dressed in a 'futuristic' setting. Try out Charles Stross; Iain M. Banks; Alastair Reynolds for just three.
I've always loved it, listen to the BBC version here http://www.archive.org/details/IsaacAsimov-TheFoundationTrilogy
Nice. Thanks for the reminder on these books Oli. The only thing that bothered me about these was the format they were released in over here in Canada: somewhere between paperback and trade paperback that made for small-sized, but cumbersomely thick books. I know I'm off topic now but I've always been annoyed at how a book can be physically manifested in different versions by the very same publisher, contingent upon the release market. Arrrrg.
We got the thing as three separate volumes - very thick but "paperback" height and length. And I agree on the different formats, it makes it hell getting all your books onto the shelf when you have to accommodate different sizes. Hamilton's other series are equally as if you haven't read them: the much smaller Greg Mandel series and the later Confederation books.
Hi Cris, I see you are alive and well....perhaps one of these days, we can touch base as I am now the chief architect for a Knowledge Management Project for the DoD. I have some ideas about hardware and system that HP may be interested....to build for us. That would be fun.
Brief notes Clarke does have something named for him, but it's so insignificant I can't recall what. (Oh, wait, it's not insignificant at all. Just obscure. The Clarke Belt is a range circling the Earth in which all geostationary satellites orbit.) And Sir Arthur, at least, has certain shady suggestions about him that, for the most part, people have chosen to politely ignore. To the other, as nobody really wants to have that discussion, it is unlikely that an RLV or wing of the ISS will be named after him anytime soon. Eventually, though, we'll name some spectacular shit for him. As to Asimov: Can't say I enjoyed Foundations much. But I was young, and probably reading over my head at the time. Meanwhile I adore David Starr, and some of his short stories are awesome. He'll probably have an early Martian colony attempt named after him. Or a mission to Saturn.
