Isaac Asimov’s Foundation as a tv series, part 1

Posted on September 26, 2021 by Bryan Alexander

Apple TV just launched a new series, a serial adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s famous Foundation series. I’d like to review it here, partly for professional reasons, since the stories are famous examples of futuring science fiction. Personally, I’m fond of Foundation since I first read it around age 12.

To begin, I took a pleasant break and reread the first half of the first book. I’ll share some of the high points here, then switch to the tv adaptation.

1: THE BOOK

If you’re new to the whole thing, a quick summary. Foundation takes place in a far future when humanity run

s a galaxy-spanning empire. A scientist appears whose new field of study, psychohistory, lets him predict the future behavior of humanity at a large scale. Hari Seldon’s work reveals that the giant empire will shortly crash, and its collapse be followed by thirty thousand years of horror. To shorten those dark ages he sets up a Foundation designed to preserve human learning. That’s just the first part. The story races on into the future as people in the Foundation try to survive and fulfill Seldon’s mission, while surrounded by an increasingly immiserated and hostile galaxy.

It’s also worth noting the origin of the whole fiction, in the author pitching to legendary editor John W. Campbell the idea of a decline and fall of the Roman empire in space. That Gibbonian theme saturates what…