As opposed to the quality days of yore when people lined up to watch disaster movies with big stars and little sense.
Asimov's "FOUNDATION"
- Thread starter UncleRogi
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As opposed to nothing. It is what it is.
This thread has made me want to go read "Foundation" again...Luc Basson might be an interesting director for a film adaption.
That BBC audio version was a really faithful adaption. Aside from the silly sci-fi sounds, it was great. They left out the shortest and most unimportant story, but what can ya' do?
No, the difference between the Soviet Union and Anacreon is Asimov's epigram - he assumes anyone who would resort to violence is innately stupid. And of course in his own story, he controls all aspects. However, there are pivotal weaknesses to his stated assumptions.
In three decades, the people of Anacreon go from being able to wage war on a planetary scale in spaceships (remember, the original premise was they were going to invade Terminus) to a society that accepted that science was a form of magic granted by the benevolence of priests. Needless to say, this is a fairly spurious assumption.
Because of his epigram (and that it is the entire point of his little morality tale) the leaders of Anacreon (and the other three 'barbaric' states) are prime examples. He calls Wienis a fool almost from the very beginning. Indeed, he's such an idiot that Hardin puts his plan that requires cooperation from hundreds of priests residing on the planet Anacreon in motion a week ahead of time - they even begin preaching against Anacreon half an hour prior to Hardin's announcement. Indeed, a mob is formed by this time. Yet Wienis and the monarchist faction which politically control that planet are completely oblivious.
Let's forget the fact that even feudal nobility from our own history would have looked at political resolutions to their problems (such as blackmail of scientists or insinuation of their own people into the priesthood). The simple fact is plain old fashioned force could have compromised any number of the priests at any time - and Anacreon was a kingdom of two dozen worlds with 20 billion inhabitants and had regular contact with the priests. The fact that the de facto ruler of that group is defined as a complete fool by Asimov is unlikely in the extreme. To keep that population unified would require remarkable political adroitness. To dismiss them all as barbarians is dismissing political darwinism, which if anything is reinforced in 'barbaric' societies, because the price of failure isn't political disgrace but your very life, and likely that of your family. You'd have to be damn good to stay on top in that environment.
All in all, it's a silly contrivance, and underlines what Asimov doesn't understand about history, sociology, and psychology.
And that is particularly ironic considering the premise of the novels is the utilization of just those disciplines into a new superscience.
The rest is really off the point (especially the Iraq War stuff, which would branch quickly into TNZ material). Suffice it to say I think the subject matter is considerably more complex than you would like to pretend.
We have the advantage of looking at the concepts from nearly 70 years later, and the outlook was likely revolutionary during its time.
But considering the context of what was going on in the world when Asimov was writing it, the assumption that the violent are innately and inevitably stupid was pretty inexcusable. Stupid people are rarely dangerous. The world of the 40s was exceptionally so.
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Then why preface the statement with the date, if not implying things are different now?
Because it's so much worse now. But it's pointless to argue that there were bad movies in such-and-such a year to justify current low standards.
Come now. Cinema has had a strong element of gaudy attractions since the earliest shorts and it's rather ahistorical to say otherwise.
Worse also is fairly subjective. If anything the cinema of attractions (blowing shit up, y'all) has gotten only more technically refined and visually impressive as the decades wore on. Maybe you'd like to argue that The Towering Inferno has a better story or acting than the typical Emmerich movie, of course.
The silly contrivances in the Anacreon story are the result of the initial failed metaphor.
He was trying to force the history of an interstellar technological civilization into the tiny confines of the story of the fall of Rome. [Worse than that - into the tiny confines of one fairly shallow interpretation of the history of the fall of Rome.]
That meant that "psychohistory" had to include a stage where civilization "relapsed into superstition", regardless of how silly that narrative actually was. Why would a technological civilization of billions of people relapse in such a way? Why would they need the rest of the former Empire to avoid relapsing? The problem is the analogy between the collapse of the western Roman Empire's literary culture and a hypothetical collapse of the Empire's technical culture. Since the analogy doesn't really work in the first place, when you build a plot around it, someone like Demiurge is going to be able to poke holes in it.
The problem isn't that the author thinks that people who use violence are stupid. The problem is that he thinks everyone is stupid. He has to think that for the society to relapse in the first place.
Why hasn't our technological civilization of billions managed to drag itself out of the cloak of superstition in the first place?
People may not be stupid individually, but as a collective their track record of doing non-stupid things is pretty thin... it seems the larger the group the lower the group IQ most times. He might have been closer to the truth than you guys are giving him credit for.
I think the history of the 20th century backs you up on that one.
Actually, it has. In the broadest sense.
At one time there was a real cultural battle between people who thought the best way to get knowledge about the world was to examine and the world and test it, and those who thought the best way to get knowledge about the world was to meditate on the question and consult sacred texts. That battle is over and has been for a long time. Even the fundamentalists pretend to look for evidence to justify their belief in the Flood now.
Think of it this way: nearly total physical destruction of our civilization would be necessary for people to forget, say, how the printing press works, or that such a thing is possible. There is NO level of political dissolution that could make us forget such a thing. Asimov wants us to believe that mere political collapse - on an interstellar scale, and not even on a planetary scale - would make people forget all their technical knowledge, and become dependent on a priest class again. And that's like saying that if the United States split into 50 states, people would forget how cars work.
There is a tendency for science fiction authors to dramatically underestimate the level of skill of their fellow citizens, and the sheer ubiquity of knowledge among their fellow citizens, either out of a kind of "scientist's misanthropy" or for dramatic effect in their writing. As an example, think of the difference between the post-apocalyptic worlds depicted in The Road Warrior and The Postman. In TRW, the writers remember that there are people in the world who understand things like the way that refining and distilling work, and how you put together and repair cars. Even the villains show a lot of creativity in improvising weapons. But in The Postman, people seem to have forgotten virtually everything, within the lifetime of Tom Petty. And that's one reason why The Road Warrior is awesome and The Postman sucks.
The question isn't really whether there were always movies like The Towering Inferno; of course there were, and that's not even a bad thing in and of itself. The question here is how Hollywood would adapt Foundation, which is totally idea-driven SF by an intellectual Grandmaster. The chances of a faithful adaptation at this juncture are virtually nil, because the definition of Science Fiction in the mass media is not "sense of wonder" or literature of ideas," it's "special effects and blowing shit up."
Which isn't new. Hell, it's something Isaac Asimov was complaining about back when he was still alive, he famously derided it as 'eye sci-fi', so fundamentally different from literary sci-fi that audiences would reject the latter as non-sci-fi should it be put onscreen.
Which is, rather obviously, not the sort of attitude that should have lended itself to that dumb Will Smith movie or a Roland Emmerich vehicle, but such is the way of things.
Those weren't adaptations (or corruptions). There probably would have been a better chance of a faithful adaptation of Foundation in the 50s because there wouldn't have been the expectation of it being a billion-dollar action franchise.
Exactly. And I didn't say it was new, I said it was worse. I don't think we're likely to get anything like The Day The Earth Stood Still or Outer Limits or Silent Running or ST:TMP these days.
Yeah, it is the way of things, which is why I think we're more likely to get something that looks more like nuTrek than Masterpiece Theater.
Just like our society today, the Roman Empire was full of sophisticated people with a sound grasp of their technology. But that political dissolution did lead to a loss of technology. Increasingly information is locked up in highly perishable electronic storage form. The widespread use of microchips that are replaceable but not repairable means that as a matter of fact there are lots and lots of people who don't know how their cars work. The general tendency of intellectual property laws looks like it will make general understanding of material culture defunct. The problem, really, is that the role of religion in destroying knowledge is glossed over, both in regular histories and in Asimov's Foundation series. The sacrifice of industrial manufacturing to finance also limits the supposed widespread availability of knowledge.
In other words, the impossibility of the loss of technology seems to me to be grossly exaggerated.
This doesn't matter, because Asimov really expends his effort in rationalizing the rise of Terminus, not in analyzing or explaining the fall of the Empire. Essentially, Terminus, being on the periphery makes advances in technology. Which is much like some of the advances in other kinds of technology in the cultures that replaced the Western Empire. (A few paint such a rosy picture that the fall of Rome seems to be a Good Thing.) There really is a failure of historical analysis in the series, which is an examination of why a Second Empire would be a Good Thing. But these were stories in John W. Campbell's Analog magazine, after all.
In other words, the impossibility of the loss of technology seems to me to be grossly exaggerated.
This doesn't matter, because Asimov really expends his effort in rationalizing the rise of Terminus, not in analyzing or explaining the fall of the Empire. Essentially, Terminus, being on the periphery makes advances in technology. Which is much like some of the advances in other kinds of technology in the cultures that replaced the Western Empire. (A few paint such a rosy picture that the fall of Rome seems to be a Good Thing.) There really is a failure of historical analysis in the series, which is an examination of why a Second Empire would be a Good Thing. But these were stories in John W. Campbell's Analog magazine, after all.
Actually, we did. It was called Moon.
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