Foundations

Apparently Apple TV+ is adapting Isaac Asimov’s landmark Foundation Trilogy.

I never considered myself an Asimov fan. I still don’t. I respected his fiction, but even the books I enjoyed (The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun) read as bloodless and uninvolving, like diagrams of stories rather than stories themselves. Characters were stiff and unconvincing. His Foundation Trilogy spanned an entire galaxy yet remained painfully provincial, lacking even the basic worldbuilding successors like Larry Niven took as a given. 

It didn’t help that, by the time I became a teenager, I received monthly sense-of-wonder infusions from my Omni subscription, making any reading of Asimov (or Heinlein or most of the big writers from the pulp era, though I had a soft spot for Clarke) seem quaint and, worse, insular, separated from me not only by a few decades but also by the little frame of reference allowing me almost no footing. Given the choice between Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, or a stories like Gibson’s “Burning Chrome,” Sterling’s “Sunken Gardens,” and Cadigan’s “Roadside Rescue,” what do you think a teenager weaned on Star Trek, Blade Runner, and Repo Man would choose? 

That said, the trailer for this looks impressive, and may breathe life into what always seemed a workmanlike effort. Here’s hoping it joins the ranks of The Expanse and Picard.