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News Foundation Adaptation Series Officially Ordered by Apple

The way Seldon's plan worked out in the books is that he seemed to have done his calculations about the Empire's collapse and a way to save civilization and then once he had a way to save civilization, the Second Foundation was there to make sure it happened. He wasn't leaving it to chance. The First Foundation was the face of the new galactic civilization and the Second Foundation was the real force behind it. Then Golan Trevize changes the end game from just preserving civilization to creating a galactic consciousness at some point in the future. So Seldon's plan goes on as the framework that the galactic consciousness will grow.
 
The Emporer stuff was fun, with Lee Pace doing some high quality yelling. Still finding Terminus boring.
 
Ok, I watched the latest episode and I'm getting a little lost.
I said last episode that the possibility exists that maybe they were going to turn Hardin into The Mule with the talk that suggested she was a mutant, and now she's reading minds, which kinda goes with that theory, but she can also predict the future? And is having flashbacks to Seldons life? Is she the reincarnation of Seldon, filled with his memories and unconsciously using his match to tell future events, like the coin flip? But that doesn't explain the psychic abilities. Honestly, this is just starting to get weird and overly convoluted.

I had been thinking the Empire portions were occuring at a different time than the Terminus bits, Westworld style, but this episode showed they are occurring simultaneously. Lee Pace & Mann are the best parts of this show. I don't like the kid who plays teenage Dawn though, he doesn't seem very good actor, especially since he's with Pace and Mann so often.
 
Milan Janosov Ph.D., chief data scientist at Datapolis and research affiliate at the Central European University, and Flora Borsi, distinguished digital artist, have recently carried out a study that merges data science and digital art in an innovative and intriguing way. Their paper, pre-published on arXiv, was aimed at analyzing Isaac Asimov's science fiction book series "Foundation," while simultaneously producing a unique digital artwork based on this analysis.

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-analysis-asimov-foundation-art.html
https://www.researchgate.net/public...on_-_turning_a_data_story_into_an_NFT_artwork
 
If Hardin is somehow connected the the Vault/Seldon, it could be her apparent psychic powers are actually her intuitively using (or being fed the results of) psychohistory equations. Yeah, sure, you can’t predict the path of one flake in a snowstorm the way you can predict the path of the storm as a whole, but that’s mostly because it’s not worth the trouble. If you take a fine enough slice, say, three people in a locked room flipping a coin, maybe you can predict a half-dozen coin tosses in five minutes with the same level of accuracy as an entire galaxy over fifty thousand years. And working backwards can be easier than forwards, and the Anacreon leader’s reactions were constantly giving Hardin more information, so she could’ve again been laser-focusing psychohistory principles to work out the broad strokes of her biography. It’s just a largely pointless application of the theories, like when Lisa meets the fortune teller in that episode of the Simpsons; “Wow, I guess you really can tell the… present.”
 
I think i have to break out the books again to re-read the story because it's been 20+ years but i honestly don't remember so much being different than it happens in the show ( the obvious changes being the Emperor storyline which is completely new). Right now it seems they just took the barebones story and then rewrote the majority of it. I get that some things had to be updated such as the scientific/engineering advancements made since. For Asimov the absolute pinnacle of science was atomic power, we have moved way past beyond that even if some of our theories can't be produced yet such as an orbital lift or perfect human cloning.

Don't get me wrong, i really like the show and fortunately i am not a die hard Foundation purist, who has already lit the torch and is looking for the pitchfork but i have rarely seen this many changes of an adaptation and i'm curious how far will they stray from the books.
 
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The original trilogy would have made for a deadly dull adaptation if done literally and the main cast would have been cycled through far too rapidly. This one is holding my attention precisely because it is only following the original in the broadest of strokes so it's not very easy to predict what's coming next. The human Galaxy is much more diverse in this vision than it was in the original. This seems believable to me if contact between worlds is somewhat sporadic - the fast form of FTL travel seemingly only being available to very few people. The communications infrastructure is also seemingly not robust, especially towards the periphery - single points of failure mean that worlds can be cut off from contact with the rest of the Galaxy quite easily.
 
Yeah, my issues aren't with the world building (other than Goyer repeating himself again with the cloning) that could never have remained the same. The Terminus stuff and how weird and confusing and boring it is is where the show is losing me.
 
Yes, the first Seldon crisis with Anacreon is being dragged out far too long and I expect will be wrapped up in a similar way to how it was in the novel Foundation - through the provision of technology - although whether it'll be bound up with religion remains to be seen.

The religious leader dying and consequent succession crisis at the start of episode 4 is not in the books. Ok, that's fine I guess - but the way it was handled was confusing. Perhaps it's a contrived way to get Brother Day off of Trantor so that Brother Dawn has the opportunity to upset the stability of the empire, presumably by attempting to re-establish a conventional dynasty.
 
The thing that bothers me is that they keep including these new facts that are never explained like who destroyed the tether and why and why did Raych kill Seldon?
That's not something Asimov would do, IE introducing important facts like these and then no explanation. How many of these should we expect before the end of the series?
 
I believe such events will be explained but not all of them by the end of the first season. I'm not even sure how many Seldon crises will have been solved by then. One would hope two at least. I don't expect the Mule to show up until next season at the earliest.
 
If this show goes for 16 seasons, they'll need to slow it down even more, since the books only make it half way.
 
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