Foundation

Foundation is a good book whose context may push it into great book status. As someone who watched the TV show first, it’s been an interesting experience to see how the source material and adaptation are similar and different.

Some context — as a sci-fi fan, I had of course heard of Isaac Asimov but mostly through adaptations of his works (“can a robot write a symphony?”) plus having read the short story The Last Question.

I don’t know exactly when I heard this, but by reputation I had heard that Foundation was considered to be a book series that couldn’t be adapted into something like a movie or TV show. Obviously it got picked up as an Apple TV series, and in retrospect — I can understand why that sentiment was prevalent.

Reading through the book, it seems the clear challenge of trying to adapt Foundation is that the book is essentially an anthology of short stories that are connected through an overall grand narrative. Adaptations — especially TV shows with multiple seasons — need a sense of continuity for their stories, typically delivered through viewers getting to know characters and watching them grow.

In the book, characters get their time in the sun, and then the story moves on. It was very surprising to learn that critical TV characters like Cleon and Gaal Dornick are essentially small footnotes in the book.

In some ways, this is a testament to the advantages and disadvantages of the media vehicles that each story is delivered through. In a book, you have no real constraints on what you do with characters, and it’s easier to land a grand story because you literally get to tell it to people in the most direct way besides a mind meld. In the show, it’s bad practice to “talk” the plot, though more and more this is becoming a trend as viewers deprioritize watching the show over just having it on in the background. Also, TV shows have production realities — you need to have long-term commitments from actors, and they may pass on your opportunity if you can only promise them one season on a multi-season show.

I’ll have broader thoughts on the franchise but regarding the book itself, it was very fun and interesting to see how Foundation, and its author, is both a product of its time and also still very relevant. The grand narrative, essentially telling the story of how humanity progressed through history, is a classic. The technology and its frequent references to “atomics” is a distinct product of its time. I’m reminded of Meghan O’Gieblyn’s book God, Human, Animal, Machine, which noted the phenomenon that people envisage reality using metaphors that reference the most advanced technology of their time. The mind is like a clock, or an engine, or a computer. For Asimov, no wonder that everything advanced is credited to nuclear or atomic; quantum mechanics had yet to be much of a thing, and certainly not AI.

But even though this is a book that was written in 1951, it’s completely readable to a modern audience and so for that, I have to give it a 4.5. I bought the second book as soon as I finished the first one, which makes it an easy recommendation for sci-fi fans.