Thursday, October 14, 2021

Foundation's Fruit, Part 2

 

                Another word for change is adaptation, and none more so from a medium of words to a medium of people. This is particularly important in adaptations of sources long on words and short on action, a description which epitomizes the earliest stories of the Foundation series. Many Golden Age stories suffer from this, in the opinions of many modern readers, and most lack the rigor of Asimov’s genius. There is a serialized version of Flash Gordon, black and white, but the scripts are written with radio in mind. This mismatch is jarring, even with allowances for the slower pace of action in the early days of film and television!

                The other challenge is the reflexive presentism of most of the viewing audience. Logic can tell a person that this work was produced before another work which received an adaptation sooner, but the nature of television and film, especially since the development effective CGI, is to bypass that logic. The number of people who read the book first and watch the show later has diminished, although the percentage is thankfully not yet so low as Brave New World levels. Dune and Star Wars used ideas found in Foundation, but they preceded it to television and film adaptation. The latter adaptation, therefore, must establish visual distinction from the former.

                The third challenge is a different kind of adaptation. The history of Rome upon which the Foundation series was based is that of Edward Gibbon. This is a classic history, but there have been many changes in Roman historiography since his time. Even if his thesis were correct, there are multiple other causes for the collapse of the Western Empire. A contemporary adaptation can use this historical knowledge to expand the world of the adaptation.

                The premise of the Foundation series, in whatever form it may be, is that the Galactic Empire is stagnant and will fall. There will be a period of barbarism. The use of psychohistory can reduce this period from thirty millennia to one millennium. The Imperial government does not like doomsayers such as Hari ‘Raven’ Seldon. They want to harness the predictive power of psychohistory for its own continuance. Psychohistory works through probability, not predication, but the Imperial government either does not understand this or does not want to understand this. Psychohistory is also more effective the less people are aware of it, and certainly the less people understand the mathematics.

                In the show and the books, Trantor is the imperial planet, the world-city save for the Imperial gardens. The show’s space elevator is impressive and becomes important later – there is only one dramatic reason to showcase a space elevator. The trip down the space elevator, unlike the descent to the surface in the original framing device, is visible to Gaal Dornick, the new kid who provides reasons for exposition. This visibility is partially to provide the audience with an idea of the size of Trantor; but it also immediately contrasts with Dune, in which a rule of the Spacing Guild is that nobody sees planets from space. This lack of visibility is as important to the plot of Dune as the visibility is to the Foundation series. The visibility of the space elevator also contrasts with the literal covering of the inhabited areas of Trantor and its people. The greater galaxy is hidden from the populace by a physical barrier, just as the true level of rot of the Galaxy is hidden from the Imperial Government from their own psychological barrier. Perhaps psychohistory acts as the space elevator for the entire galaxy; or maybe there are other forces at work.

                The sheer scale of everything is true to the source material, although there are only as many absolute numbers as necessary – perhaps science fiction script writers have finally learned their lesson about scale. Everything in the Empire is large, larger than you can imagine, and this should be regarded as a bad thing. There is only one technological item which is small, but it is present to show that the Empire can miniaturize if it wants to. There is also no indication of the cost of miniaturization, so perhaps it is astronomically expensive. Both this item and the robot (because no Asimov IP would be a cash cow without at least one) cover items which are (mostly) unchanging and therefore stagnant, reflecting this important theme of Foundation.

                The solution to solving the problem of showing galactic stagnation while portraying personal interactions is quite interesting. The use of Empire (rather than Emperor, and specifically without the definite) as a personal name is infelicitous but understandable, if the purpose is to show the identity of Emperor, Empire, and Imperial Dynasty. The length of the present dynasty as four centuries is coincident with the length of the Western Roman Empire, and its origin in a period of interminable civil war may be a reference to the Roman Crisis of the Third-Century or the fratricidal wars of the Constantinian dynasty. The existence of Empire is a logical conclusion in a science-fiction setting to the problems of Constantinian strife, as well as the closest thing to a God-King in a setting where religion is minimized and treated pejoratively. The action of the religious leaders on Synnax, Gaal Dornick’s homeworld, illustrate the position of the Foundation show regarding religion.

                The companion to Empire is not a Bene Gesserit, although that may be the first impression. Those who have read the books know the identity of Demerzel, but the series has changed so much that one should not assume. The names given to Empire alliterate with Demerzel, which in turn suggests Demerzel’s identity, but the demeanor of Demerzel towards Empire suggests their identity is the other character whose name begins with D that could fulfill that role – especially since Seldon’s personal life has changed from the book series. This change (if true) does raises the question of where Demerzel’s book identity is; his absence from the series, at least long-term, is inconceivable.

One last note: the brief mention of the Robot Wars on a time scale not conducive with the timeline of the books is the show’s way of saying that we know Asimov has robots and everybody loves them, but that is not the focus of this story. The show is also saying that this show is (mostly) robot-free, but this is not Dune, in which the absence of thinking machines in the likeness of a man is a conscious driving force for the society.

                The big changes over which many have panicked wait for another time. And somehow I have avoided Hari Seldon almost entirely!

Monday, October 4, 2021

Foundation's Fruits: Prologue

 

                Before I start to analyze the Apple TV Foundation series, I think it only fair to lay out my own perspective as a long-time fan of the Asimov Foundation and Robot novels. I am a fan of Golden Age science fiction, with all its flaws. I enjoy exposition, which is why I could read most Stephen Baxter novels once. I was introduced to the Foundation, Empire, and Robot series (by which I mean the novels, not the short stories) as separate series. My favorite Asimov, however, has always been The End of Eternity. All three had the same author, and therefore used similar themes, but because they were separate series, their timelines and technologies did not need to line up perfectly. Eventually I had read all the originals and moved on to the novels which tied things together, both the Robot and the Foundation series. When Foundation’s Edge brought the conclusion of The End of Eternity into the Foundation series as a legend, at first I thought it might just be an Easter egg, since time travel is not a feature of the Foundation, Empire, or Robot series. The incorporation of the critical character of the Robot series suggested otherwise. Nonetheless, I understood the unified timeline as one of the many that could arise from the conclusion of The End of Eternity rather than the exclusive one. The limiting factor in The End of Eternity was the limitation to Earth, which in turned limited the possibilities of Humanity’s development; the galaxy is orders of magnitude larger, and therefore contains commensurately more opportunities. Multiple timelines would allow not only for the divergent dates for the formerly independent series, but also timelines in which the other Asimov stories could live – particularly the ones with alien species, which are conspicuously absent in the Foundation series, both original and expanded. At the time, I was under the influence of Heinlein’s later works, whose multiverse is wild and chaotic (and a bit creepy), but I had hoped that the unification of Asimov’s popular series would at least leave room for his lesser stories in other universes. (I’m not sure where I should put this, but I had these thoughts before Nemesis was published).

I thought the unification was a mistake, like the continuation of the Pern series past the recovery of AI, but Asimov had written it and it was therefore canonical. It was a long time until I read Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation because I had confused it with the Second Foundation trilogy. I am a bit of a purist in the sense of favoring the original author and perhaps his successor if he had worked with him long-term, such as Christopher Tolkien and (originally) Brian Herbert. After I had read all five Dune novels, I read the immediate prequels and found them a decent if not necessary addition to the Dune canon, but the prequels set during the Butlerian Jihad felt like a betrayal. I had become wary of sequels and prequels not written by the original author. Once I realized that Asimov had written Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation, I read them. The expansion on Trantorian society was welcome, but the reason for humanity not encountering aliens was disturbing. The reason for humanity’s lack of innovation was even worse, and absolved, at least in part, the Empire itself of the sin of stagnation. Sometimes the unrealistic elements in a story are best left unaddressed in canon for fans to speculate upon; look what happened to the simple statement about Klingon foreheads and Worf’s refusal to elaborate. I did eventually read the Second Foundation trilogy, whose authors I respect greatly, but each book felt less and less like the Foundation universe. Newer additions are Nemesis and Mark Tiedemann’s Robot series, both of which would have benefitted from a multiverse or at least a looser canonicity akin to that of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle; thus I have always thought of the unified series as one possibility among many.

The inevitable truth is that a TV adaptation of the Foundation series would have to change and elaborate even more than the later published books. The chronologically books have slightly more actions, but the chronologically earlier books are conversations and interrogations, devoid of actions and (thankfully) Heinleinian sexuality. Much like the Hobbit, the extant text was not designed to carry live action of the length necessary for modern television. There are other Golden Age texts that could sustain more action but lack the intellectual depth; there are others that have even less dialogue and more monologue. This denseness is not solely a thing of the past; Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee novels can be dense in this way. A well-timed and well-delivered speech, on the other hand, can be entrancing; this was a strength of the (original) Babylon 5

            The necessity of change is not just a matter of a change of medium, but of time and influence. I like to call this the “John Carter” problem. An influential work inspires imitators, or perhaps plagiarists in a less generous interpretation. If the imitators become popular in a separate medium, or the originals fade from memory, then when the originals enter that medium as a second work, many people assume that the older work is stealing from the later one. The older work then does not do well in the new medium, and the fans of the older work are annoyed at fans of the younger work who proclaim the originality of the younger work in the second medium. Even worse, the anti-creative nature of intellectual property often prevents the older work from a second, better thought-out adaptation.

I realize that I have said nothing about the Foundation Apple TV series yet, but I am around the thousand-word limit, and that seems sufficient for today.