I’m a big fan of C. J. Cherryh’s Chanur series, where humans are on an at least equal footing but mainly incidental (except for a few parts). The nice part is you can then read her Cyteen and Foreigner series to find out how being technologically advanced doesn’t necessarily always work out well for the humans.
I haven't seen any of season two yet, but enjoyed the first one with the understanding that it was an adaptation. I had always said that any attempt to bring the Foundation books to TV or movies would have to take the general plot and ideas and heavily adapt them to make them work. The Foundation stories are both very dated in characters and in science fiction to make them believable to today's audience, and were originally short stories that eventually were combined for a large scale galactic story spanning centuries with lots of different people. You might be able to pick out from these points as to how the TV series handled those issues in a new imagining of the overall concept of an Empire that both in its peak and yet doomed to collapse, and the attempt to minimize the effects.
Read the books. They won't spoil anything since the series is using things but in different ways. There are later prequels written by other authors to fill in more of the story with the permission of Asimov's estate, and while they're not too bad it's a similar problem to try and use and capture the original magic while being more up to date with new ideas. It doesn't always work.
Do you remember what those prequels were called? I could have sworn there were some prequels written by Asimov himself. Specifically Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation.
He had a few that were published after his death, presumably finalized and edited by someone else. The other ones are: Foundation's Fear by Gregory Benford, Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear, and Foundation's Triumph by David Brin.
I think the reason they’d need to do a thing in a pressed timeframe is that, while psychohistory describes populations over time, sufficient understanding can allow someone to make a relatively small tweak that ripples through time.
You make a good point. With sufficient knowledge of the mathematics they might be capable of exploiting it. It seems like it should be possible to expedite the results you want, but I don’t feel like that should make them a necessity.
spoilerI suspect we will see Demerzel in season 3 taking full advantage of this.
The show writers add a lot of additional content that isn’t in the books, especially pertaining to characters. Almost none of the character stories are from Asimov, because the books are focused on events over thousands of years, not on characters. The content the show writers add isn’t very compelling or interesting.
The books themselves aren’t all that great. They’re okay. They were probably pretty revolutionary in their time, but they’re just okay now. I think they’re worth reading as important pieces of sci-fi history, but don’t expect anything mind blowing.
Basically I’m saying it doesn’t matter if you read the books or watch the show. Both are okay, but the show is a lot more boring than the books. Some people probably love the content, I could take it or leave it. For the books I took it to the end, for the show I left it after a couple of episodes.
It would be way more sense to film a wet wall drying. or the grass growing. This “show” not just makes an unbearable joke out of Asimov’s legacy, but the even the message got lost… this whole thing is nothing more than an other disgusting cash-grab. I read the book multiple times, I had to drop after ep 4… It’s a trashy romantic space-turd packaged with Asimov’s name to anyone who have no idea who Asimov was or anything what he was doing / creating… for anyone with iq over 45 and have experienced the original works realize there’s nothing to watch here… “An other one bites the dust”… :(
I think these are all valid. I’ve enjoyed the bood, but the overarching plot felt a lot like the Star Wars sequel trilogy. I didn’t feel like it was planned ahead of time.
That being said I highly recommend the first book. There’s an audiobook on YouTube.and if you love it, then check out the rest. But if you stop after the first one, it’s completely fine.
I think you are expecting too much from these stories. This crux of HHGTTG is situational humor. Arthur is set up to have no clue and bumble through. Zafod is a narcissist. Ford is Ford. Having them grow takes away from their ability to contribute to the type of humor that is the objective. It’s like saying Mr Bean skills have gotten smarter.
I guess if you want to just sort of vaguely gesture toward things that were very obviously the point and focus of the novels, and things that they do better than the vast majority of books, and instead lament the nominal failure to expand on side issues that aren’t even relevant to anything else, then you’re free to do so. I really don’t see the point though.
To me, it’s as if you’re looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night and saying, “Well yeah, the colors and texture and movement and composition are all great and all, but I’m just disappointed that there aren’t any people in Victorian dress in it. And not even one madonna and child!”
Science Fiction
Oldest