News Foundation Adaptation Series Officially Ordered by Apple
- Thread starter JD
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I figured we'd get some other POV's of things mentioned "offstage" in the books, like space battles. As for Hardin, Dornick and Demerzel....I care less about their gender and race and are more concerned that they may not be doing the generational aspect of the books, which was one of the appeals of it, for me anyway. I loved the broad sweep of history and seeing it's effects on various worlds, like Trantor, Korell, etc.
But... but... what about Anacreon's coal-powered starships?
To be clear, I'm just kidding. I don't know how anyone even in the 1940s took that seriously.
I don't know that that was ever stated. I recall Hardin saying something like "back to coal and oil are they?" as well as the occasional mentions of Anacreon being back to "coal and oil", but I never took that their ships were coal powered. I've got the e-books and did a search for "coal" and it doesn't bring up any results with the word "coal" that shows their ships were powered thusly. I always just assumed they were powered in the way that we currently power our own space vehicles. Not sure how they were crossing stellar distances as I'm guessing the hyperdrives required nuclear power. I certainly can't see Asimov believing that ships could be powered by coal, and I really can't see him not doing a "fix up" in one of the later novels to address something that would've been so ludicrous. I mean, he did go out of his way to include computers in the 80's books due to recent tech advances even though the audience just assumed computers were so innocuous in that far future time as to not need mentioning.
The coal and oil line always fascinated me. It seemed to me in the books that they no longer understood nuclear fusion or fision, having converted Trantor to hydrothermal and being unable to repair complicated systems that broke down. Since we don't know what magic tech Asimov may have had in mind as a drive system to go FTL, I don't mind the idea that these late Imperial ships had some ridiculous steampunk apparatus to power a drive system they no longer could theoretically understand. I find the idea both sad and charming.
OTOH
You can technically make rockets with coal. Not that anyone would unless they were just completely desperate, but coal using gaseous nitrous oxide as a hybrid system would make a not particularly great rocket motor. It's just there's always been better methods available. As a primary motor, bad, but if you absolutely had to use it as an ullage motor or thrusters, for reasons I can't understand I guess maybe sorta, it could find some use.
Towards the end of WW2, there was at least one German group working on a coal dust fueled ramjet.
Space elevator! I guess I have to watch just for that! 
My thoughts too - this is the problem between the mediums. Books can be very cerebral and that works there, movies/TV shows need visuals because it is much harder to keep an audience engaged with 90% dialogue. It seems to me they took the core essentials of Foundation and crafted something else around it - might have been the best way to go about it and we'll see soon enough.
I also wouldn't be surprised if they alter the plot by having some core character or group of characters somehow surviving to see (and guide) the full breadth of this story through to completion. Either through some crazy medical immortality tech, taking advantage of relativistic effects and/or dropping in and out of cryo every few centuries; because introducing a new set of characters at every time jump without an consistent POV through-line is going to just be narratively impractical for the medium.
In one of the trailers they show a character watching his own clones mature in a tank, so i assume this will be the way to keep main actors around throughout the story that spans over centuries and millennia.
Yes. Apple's official summary, which is quoted here (I can't find the original), refers to "the ruling Cleons (led by Lee Pace) — a long line of emperor clones." I'm assuming that the old man and young boy we see flanking Pace in some shots are his previous and subsequent clones.
I don't think it matters.
If the ships were powered by atomic batteries, rather than each having their own atomic pile... A pile can recharge a space ship battery in hours, and a coal stack can recharge the same space ship battery in months or years. Or you know millions of Coal stacks can do the same job as one atomic pile, but its still the same battery no matter where you get the electricity to put in it.
Just because they can't build new ships, or repair the old ships, its still going to take years, maybe decades until they revert to barbarism.
Running and building and fixing steam engines still requires a lot of education, that's almost as difficult to acquire, as any other engineering degree.
Cloning, means that you can have the same faces showing up decade after decade.
Just because they can't build new ships, or repair the old ships, its still going to take years, maybe decades until they revert to barbarism.
Running and building and fixing steam engines still requires a lot of education, that's almost as difficult to acquire, as any other engineering degree.
Cloning, means that you can have the same faces showing up decade after decade.
TLJ: "Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."
TROS: "Somehow, Palpatine has returned, LOL"
To the MCU consumer caste and people who have never been into Asimov in general it probably wouldn't.
I probably read almost every piece of fiction written by Asimov (even his Black Widowers Club stuff) and for me, it doesn't matter. Really, almost none of his works are filmable without heavy alterations. The two most famous adaptions of his works are I, Robot and Bicentennial Man and both resemble very little their literary counterparts.
Asimov once said something in a TV special that I liked so much I wrote it down and memorized it: "If robots turn out exactly like human beings, it would be a terrible waste; we've got human beings." So I think he'd feel that if an adaptation turned out exactly like its source books, it would be a waste, because we've already got the source books. The value of an adaptation is that it explores the concepts in a fresh and different light, rather than just duplicating the way it was done the first time.
I don't think the two examples are truly comparable. The problems with The Lord of the Ring were purely technical (how many films to make, the complexity of the special effects etc). But from a technical point of view there would have been no major issues adapting Foundation if one had wanted to be absolutely faithful to the plot. Probably even in the 50s they could produce some convincing matte paintings and a couple of spaceships flying around.
