Nah, Goyer just really likes stories about clones and how the lack of genetic diversity caused by them brings down civilizations. He's done it a bunch.
News Foundation Adaptation Series Officially Ordered by Apple
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Nah, Goyer just really likes stories about clones and how the lack of genetic diversity caused by them brings down civilizations. He's done it a bunch.
Even so, it adds a worthwhile element to the story. The Empire of the original trilogy seemed to lack so much technology that was predictable in the 50s that it made one wonder what was the reason. Asimov retrofitted the absence of robots (although I don't believe they were taboo like in Dune). Computing devices seemed to be present, but not very advanced ones with no hint of AI capabilities. In this series, there are also alien lifeforms, but none are sapient, just as in the books. The reason for this likely won't be addressed though. So far, there has been no speculation on humankind 's origins, which is an important element in the books.
I think there was a small flashback scene in season one where Gaal was talking about the original planet humanity came from with her father as a child. Pretty much just enough to establish that the planet was obscure, at best, but it planted the seed if that plotline is going to swing back around at some point.
Yeah, I don't recall if there were non-sapient alien lifeforms mentioned in the books. I don't object to the series introducing them to provide local colour. I only recall that there were no sapient aliens...
I probably wasn't paying attention and missed that. We have yet to have the significance of the planet Ignis revealed. In the books, the Mule was looking for the Second Foundation on Stars End. Ignis is, of course, Latin for fire, so I guess it'll be a bit toasty.
Over on Reddit, David Goyer has just had an Ask Me Anything about Foundation. I haven't read through it yet, but a highpoint I saw mentioned elsewhere is that they were able to make a deal with Fox (who has the adaptation rights to Asimov's robot series, even after all this time since the Will Smith movie) so Foundation can incorporate some elements and backstory from the Robot series, like certain important biographical details about Demerzel.
Which is kind of weird when most of the major characters are immortal.
My understanding is that only the Elves, Maiar including Istari, and Ainur are immortal. The Elves can die (their bodies or hröar anyway) and their souls or fëar be resurrected via the Halls of Mandos in Valinor or held there until the time of the final battle, the Dagor Dagorath. I'm not sure about the Maiar and Ainur, who are basically Tolkien's version of archangels and angels. I understand that Gandalf was resurrected directly on Middle-earth via the intervention of Eru Ilúvatar. I assume Saruman's fëa returned to the Halls of Mandos or somewhere that Eru directed. The Númenóreans and descendents such as Aragorn were mortal with lifespans of two to three hundred years. All men (except Beren, who was granted a one-time resurrection via the Halls of Mandos) go to some place known to Eru alone. The dwarves were mortal. The Harfoots/Hobbits were mortal. I don't know what happens to their fëar. The principal theme of the Legendarium is the dichotomy between Men and Elves and what happens to them after physical death in Middle-earth. I'm sure someone more versed in the lore can correct me.
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Having read through it, some more highlights:
They did revise the mannequin that plays the preserved corpse of Cleon I, but that was just for aesthetic reasons, and it's still the same corpse. Goyer has a headcanon that Cleon XIII was so enraged when we last saw him, trying to smash the glass case to attack the adulterated corpse, that Demerzel had to kill him to get him to stop and replaced him with his backup.
In the most recent episode, they experimented with hologram-Seldon not having a shadow, but it made it look like he was floating over the ground, so settled on the flickering shadow and no footprints.
They've started saying "fuck" in the show because there wasn't a lot of strong language in season one, so Apple asked them to trim it out to get a TV-14 rating. The median viewer turned out to be 35 years old, so Apple told them they could cut loose and go for the TV-MA, since they wouldn't be losing out on a lot of younger viewers.
There's an idea floating around for a miniseries about the show's version of the Robot Wars, but that depends entirely on Foundation itself being enough of a hit Apple decides to commission a spin-off.
Goyer anticipates there will be presence by an adult Cleon (or, at least, Lee Pace) at least through season 4. The Mule storyline will be the focus of seasons 3 and 4, but there will be a small bit more of him in season 2. He also mentions that the badass cyberpunk Mule we saw and the fact that the Mule in the books disguised himself and acted through intermediaries/imposters(? Not sure of the specifics, I really need to read those books) is not a coincidence. The sacking of Trantor would take place in season 4.
In the current draft, at least, season 3, episode 4 has a lengthy segment of dialog verbatim from the books.
If they get to a fifth season or beyond, the storyline would begin incorporating elements from Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth, "but not everything." He's emphatic on that point in a way I find interesting.
If all goes well and the show reaches its maximum length, at least three characters will make it all the way to the last episode, with two of them in the final scenes. Seems like a small pool of candidates, but it is more than three characters/actors.
In the current draft, at least, season 3, episode 4 has a lengthy segment of dialog verbatim from the books.
If they get to a fifth season or beyond, the storyline would begin incorporating elements from Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth, "but not everything." He's emphatic on that point in a way I find interesting.
If all goes well and the show reaches its maximum length, at least three characters will make it all the way to the last episode, with two of them in the final scenes. Seems like a small pool of candidates, but it is more than three characters/actors.
Speaking of, the renewal for season 3 isn't final yet. The scripts were commissioned and completed for pre-production, but work beyond that was pending Apple's decision based on how this season does. The writers have "fairly well" outlined season 4, loosely mapped out season 5, and very loosely up to an eighth season.
There's some vague description of 209, the penultimate episode of the season
The episode is heavy on Demerzel's backstory, and includes flashbacks to Cleon I, when he was young and looked like Lee Pace. There's also an important clue in the episode about Demerzel's nature, in that her line about having a "decentralized consciousness" might mean more than just that her brain can survive losing half her head.
Goyer works with the Asimov Estate through Robyn Asimov, Isaac's daughter. He runs all the big changes by her and makes sure she's comfortable with them and feels her father would've been. She also recently related a story (that's circulated elsewhere from Isaac himself in old interviews) about how, when he reread the Foundation trilogy before starting on the later books thirty years after he'd last revisited them, he was mildly horrified by they were wall to wall exposition and dramatic action was limited.
Goyer teased that he's involved with an adapation for another sci-fi book series that should be announced soon.
If anyone's curious about the AMA and strike rules, he can do as much promotion as he wants in his capacity as director, and as writer, he can do anything directly set up by him or his publicist as an individual, not commissioned, arranged, or hosted by Apple et al. More or less the same loophole Neil Gaiman is using to still talk about Good Omens in Tumblr.
In addition to the aftershow podcast (it's no "Ron Moore getting hammered alone and telling us we don't have to post about it, everyone who made it knew 'Black Market' sucked, sometimes things just go wrong in TV," but it's pretty informative about both BTS creative elements and backstory), Goyer also mentioned that he posts notes and behind-the-scenes photos for each episode on his blog, which I hadn't known about.
haven’t read the original books in a while but I think there was a reference to coal fuelled spaceship after the fall of the empire.
There was.
But... "realistically" they had to have been talking about batteries filled up from coal burning power plants, which are effectively the same as batteries charged up from a nuclear power plant, it just takes a hundred times longer to generate the power for the battery.
Depends on exactly where they go with it. I’ve only read the original trilogy, though.
Setting up the Second Foundation didn’t happen “on screen” so to speak in the original trilogy, and Seldon still has work to do in getting them established and hidden away.
That is just your speculation, surely? It takes the same amount of time to charge a battery to 1kWh whatever the energy source, provided the power output of the source is the same. It seemed to me like Asimov was describing spaceships containing fossil-fuel powered steam turbines - which would mean having to carry oxidiser mass in addition to the bulky fuel. Nuclear binding energy is, of course, much more densely packed than electron potential energy for redox chemical reactions. It just seemed his jokey way of emphasising the regression of technology on the Periphery. Of course, back in the 1950s, nuclear power was the shining path forward, which is why the Foundation make the effort to miniaturise it and presumably find a way other than the Rankine cycle to extract mechanical energy to drive electricity generators.
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Total speculation, because the alternative is ridiculous.
Asimov would have been thinking of a steam liner from his youth, like we would be thinking back to the last time we watched the Titanic. Big dudes with no shirt, shoveling coal into a furnace.
The truly incredulous part is carrying that much coal, a billion billion tons in a coal bin to get a million ton space ship to the moon and back.
...and an additional huge tonnage of oxygen or other oxidiser. I'm not going to bother to work out exactly how much. It really did seem like Asimov was describing stokers shovelling coal into furnaces. In the heady days of the 50s, nuclear was the way forward. Nuclear thermal rocket engines only have to carry propellant mass such as LH2 - no LOX or similar required. Asimov never went into detail about how the spaceships worked - they just did.
All their ships needed 8 times as much air as one would expect, to accommodate all the 4 tons of tobacco each man woman and child needs to process every month, to avoid the shakes.
BIG THANK YOU for sharing this.
Some very interesting information bits and pieces, both on the series and well the Hollywood Strike
Nope. Not even once.
Salvor Hardin says 'back to oil and coal are they' when he realizes Anacreon doesn't have nuclear power. Wienis mentions remembering when the cities of Anacreon were warmed by 'the burning of coal and oil'. 'Coal and oil' are mentioned in the prologue to Foundation and Empire. In Second Foundation it says 'the fragmentation of organized science, back, back past even the fundamentals of nuclear power into the chemical power of coal and oil'. The only other mention of coal is in the form of payment requested by Hober Mallow when talking to the Commdor of of Korell.
That's it.
I don't know where this 'coal fuled spaceship' stuff started, but nothing of the sort is mentioned in the original trilogy.
Not having cloning technology mentioned in the books is due to the time they were written, i.e. the 1940s onwards. Atomic power was the pinnacle of scientific achievement back then which is why it's featured so much in the books, nowadays it's Nanotechnology and AI if writers want to appear cutting edge to the masses.
The book itself sometimes breaks its own rules even if it likes to mention that Psychohistory deals with the actions of masses of people yet it's a small group of people or even a single person that actually makes a decision that has vast repercussions down the line - it's debatable if that small element is accounted for to be the catalyst for larger developments or not but then again it's "just" a story.
The show also likes to mention this often enough but breaks that rule even more by keeping this small group of people around beyond their crisis they solved, now it seems Seldon has been reborn into an actual body so he can take direct action - something that is a big departure from the book as Seldon only appears through hologram during crisis points.
I'm currently more curious where they'll go with the Second Foundation concept, which was a sort of failsafe to correct the First Foundation in case something unforeseen would happen and they would need to adjust the plan.
