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Sci-Fi Television

HBO Developing Asimov's Foundation Series As TV Show 242

Posted by Soulskill from the to-succeed,-planning-alone-is-insufficient dept.
wired_parrot writes: Jonathan Nolan, writer of Interstellar and The Dark Knight, and producer of the TV show "Person of Interest," is teaming up with HBO to bring to screen a new series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation series of books. This would be the first adaptation of the Hugo-award-winning series of novels to the screen.
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HBO Developing Asimov's Foundation Series As TV Show More

HBO Developing Asimov's Foundation Series As TV Show

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  • Yes! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Best. News. Ever.

    • Re:Yes! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Jhon ( 241832 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @02:49PM (#48362101) Homepage Journal

      Good thing it's Asimov and not George R R Martin...

      Hari Seldon would have been killed by a classmate before he ever developed psychohistory.

      • Re:Yes! (Score:5, Funny)

        by Vlado ( 817879 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @02:53PM (#48362137) Homepage
        How will HBO put boobs in this? Will there be fembots in it? :-)

        • Weiners!

        • Well, we still don't know who's going to be cast as Dors. :-)

        • Agreed, I was going to make this comment. HBO stands for Needs More Boobs.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ponos ( 122721 )

          There was some sort of sexual adventure between a male bot and a woman, but the story, although situated in the Foundation "universe", does not take place in the Foundation series itself. Actually, the story takes place in the distant past, before the appearance of the Foundation.

      • ...and Martin would have been killed my old age before he ever finished the final novel.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by OzPeter ( 195038 )

          ...and Martin would have been killed my old age before he ever finished the final novel.

          No way .. I've got my money on "heart attack"

    • Or worst, as we haven't seen the outcome yet. Meanwhile, I still hope that someone eventually films Lem's The Invincible (à la 2001). (It's also bad we've been deprived of the chance of seeing the old Caves of Steel from the 1960s again, even just for some retro fun.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jhon ( 241832 )

        There WAS a VHS "game" that came out that matched the plot of Caves of Steel back in the 80s... It actually wasn't that bad. That's about as close as you're going to get to film/video right now.

    • Oh my god yes! Bring on the Nuclear Hand Drills!

    • Let's not get too excited. The Foundation setting is a mash-up of ancient Rome anbd 50's sci-fi. The closest thing in contemporary movie culture that captures the same 'feel' would be the original Star Wars trilogy (Lucas cited Asimov and Flash Gordon as a few of his inspirations). I'm not sure it matches with the modern Hollywood sci-fi formula.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by bakes ( 87194 )

        I'm not sure it matches with the modern Hollywood sci-fi formula.

        Maybe this is exactly why people ARE excited.

  • I bet there will be a lot more nudity than I remember in the books.

    • Eh, it'll fit in with the Hober Mallow storylines. He was hanging out basically nude in his tanning room even with other politicians visiting.

    • I bet there will be a lot more nudity than I remember in the books.

      Yeah, my books didn't have any pictures _at all_! :(

  • While you're at it... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dimwit ( 36756 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @02:56PM (#48362163)

    Make a Rendezvous With Rama movie, would ya?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Enry ( 630 )

      First book was great. The sequels....well...this was about the time that Clarke was phoning it in with things like 3001.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by SumDog ( 466607 )

        Well the other three were co-authored. Yea, that first book was amazing. There was a video game too. It wasn't so great. :(

    • There are so many great, GREAT books which deserve great, GREAT movies: Tuf Voyaging, A Fire Upon The Deep, Spin (by Robert Charles Wilson), Camouflage (which is really not difficult to put on screen).
      If you really want to go crazy, Greg Egan's books are the thing. I'd be very much curious to see Schild's Ladder as a movie.
      As for the sex-laden tendency of HBO as of late, they should simply take "Tous vers l'extase" written by Philippe Curval and be done with it - they don't even have to modify it :)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dimwit ( 36756 )

        Greg Egan's stuff wouldn't translate well to the screen, I think. I absolutely love his work (Permutation City is one of my favorite books, and I loved Schild's Ladder, Quarantine, and all of his short fiction). The problem is that there's too heavy of a cognitive science/philosophical bent to them. You'd have to have a character sit down a monologue for a while to get everything out.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jonwil ( 467024 )

        William Gibson's Neuromancer should be made into a movie. Just as long as they get the "Cyberspace" stuff right (there are some "cyberspace" type scenes in Jonny Mnemonic that are exactly how it should be done.
        Cryptonomicon is another book deserving of a movie (and with all the current stuff going on, the modern-day parts of the book are scarily topical)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zedrick ( 764028 )
      Morgan Freeman is already working on that.

      http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134933/a [imdb.com]

  • I'm sure it will suck (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gander666 ( 723553 ) * on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @02:56PM (#48362165) Homepage
    Since the book(s) have all the action in the background, and the big reveal in the post crisis recap, I am sure the movie will suck. The temptation to turn it into a special effects Michael Bay-like cinema enema will ruin the complex story line. But the CGI teams will win a shit-tonne of awards.

    • Since the book(s) have all the action in the background, and the big reveal in the post crisis recap, I am sure the movie will suck.

      1. First, it's a series, not a movie.
      2. Second, HBO usually does a great job with these types of series. Game of Thrones doesn't have every battle that's in the books, but they often-times refer to the battles and the aftermath in dialog. No reason to think this would be any different.
      • See, I think Game of Thrones sucks, so I am not too hopeful.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by danlip ( 737336 )

          I think the GoT TV series sucked much less than the books, so it's a positive in HBO's column.

      • Re:I'm sure it will suck (Score:5, Insightful)

        by alexander_686 ( 957440 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @03:22PM (#48362465)

        It's not the translation of action that I am concerned about. It can be done. Books and movies have different strengths, and "action" is not the strong suit of books. HBO has done a good job. Personally, I think of Jackson's Lord of the Rings / Hobbit movies, where Jackson either extended or invented from scratch action scenes.

        I am more concerned about scope. Each chapter in the Foundation saga is a vignette, a thin slice of time, separated by vast amounts of time. For each seasons they would almost have to fire the entire cast, strike all of the sets, etc. It would have the same problem as anthology shows like the Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt. There is a low correlation between a winning episode and a losing episode. Hit upon a great story line or a new great actor and you need to junk it for the next episode. The Twilight Zone was consistently good, but Tales from the Crypt was all over the place.

      • Since the book(s) have all the action in the background, and the big reveal in the post crisis recap, I am sure the movie will suck.

        1. First, it's a series, not a movie.
        2. Second, HBO usually does a great job with these types of series. Game of Thrones doesn't have every battle that's in the books, but they often-times refer to the battles and the aftermath in dialog. No reason to think this would be any different.

        Except GRRM grew up in the age of television and has written for television. Even if he didn't write with the aim of a television adaption his books were still written with the influence of television storytelling and visual action. They're a lot easier to adapt for television as a result.

        Asimov grew up with pulp magazines and the major non-book mass media would have been radio (which also influenced the pulp fiction), as a result his stories emphasized dialogue over visual storytelling.

        They still might be

    • Re:I'm sure it will suck (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pavon ( 30274 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @03:03PM (#48362259)

      This is an HBO series, not a movie. They are big on dramas, not CGI explodaramas. I have my reservations about how well this will translate, but if it sucks it won't be because they turned it into a Michael Bay action shit-fest.

  • If my wife hears about this, she's liable to want us to go out and get cable again.

    • If my wife hears about this, she's liable to want us to go out and get cable again.

      HBO is going to have a standalone service [businessinsider.com] in the near future.

      • Not only that, but many HBO shows are available via Amazon VOD. It looks like it is one season behind (in the case of Game of Thrones, at least), but you could still catch up with the Foundation series without subscribing to HBO/Cable TV.

        • Just to clarify, he's talking about the *purchase each episode individually* scenario on Amazon. (IMHO, ridiculously expensive.)

          It's not available on (free with Amazon Prime) Amazon Prime Video. That's only (some?) HBO shows several years old. That's not meaning to disparage it, it has a bunch of good shows (e.g. Rome, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, etc.) Just not currently airing shows.

  • This is definitely news for nerds. I hope they don't butcher the story.

    • This is definitely news for nerds. I hope they don't butcher the story too much.

      There. FTFY

    • I somehow worry less about them butchering the story with it as a HBO series than I would were they going to turn it into a movie (or even a series of movies). In the latter case, Michael Bay would probably get hired to direct, Hari Seldon would turn into a buff action star out to save the galaxy along with his scantily clad female assistant, and things would explode (utilizing the latest in CGI explosion technology) just by people looking at them.

  • Woo-hoo! (Score:5, Funny)

    by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @03:07PM (#48362301) Homepage

    Now I don't have to read the books.

  • Just the trilogy, I hope (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @03:07PM (#48362309) Homepage

    The original trilogy was awesome, but later books were not the same caliber. But knowing how the entertainment industry works, they'll milk it for all its worth.

    • Re: Just the trilogy, I hope (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Make three movies. Then reboot a few years later with lots of lens flare. Then reboot the reboot without the lens flare but the Mule will be an actor who is all steroided out body builder. Then of course there will be a Wayan brothers' spoof called "Floundation Series" and the mule is a pot head flaming gay guy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jjn1056 ( 85209 )

      Yeah I felt the later stories were fair stories but not groundbreaking in the same way. I think the whole thing where he wants to connect the Robots saga stuff with the Foundation stuff felt a bit forced, although as a fan of his work I recall enjoying it at the time of reading (when I was much younger.)

      And I tremble at the idea they might be trying to do this. I think Foundation and Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant stories are two series I read when I was much younger that I always wondered if someon

  • It's HBO and... (Score:3)

    by Hussman32 ( 751772 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @03:10PM (#48362347)

    ...Jonathan Nolan that will make this good. HBO is careful about choosing show runners for these projects, and I think they'll treat it with the proper gravitas. Even the changes in the Leftovers were fine.

    Just when will they start? Asimov wrote the prequels later, and they were really tight stories about Hari Seldon and the formation of the Foundation. However, the Golan Trevize storyline was great too. The Mule was short, I don't think you could base a series on it.

    Maybe they'll cross-cut timelines from before The Sack to the ultimate end of the story.

  • to television more easily, including the the ones written by the Killer B's [kaedrin.com], IMHO.

  • I remember space ships and personal shield belts but no sex. HBO has a lot of work to do

  • I'm going to keep a positive outlook towards this and hope it will be good. Damn, they could do it justice if done well... The cgi would just add flavor and spice to an already epic tale.

    Up next? Ringworld? That would be incredible.

  • Take the names of the characters, drop all the technobabble (the essence of the stories), add a starlet for romance, use an existing script for the plot, and bang! Hollywood SciFi disaster.

  • Hope it's better than the movies (Score:3)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @03:25PM (#48362505) Homepage
    Generally fantastic sci-fi books tends not to do well when transformed for the screen.

    I Robot, and Bicentennial man simply did not live up to the books.

    • Re:Hope it's better than the movies (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @03:46PM (#48362729)

      I Robot had nothing to do with the book. It was in fact written on another title first and then they bought the name to slap on it because people would recognize it, and, hey, it's about robots, right? A bit of script touch-up to change a few names (gotta have Susan Calvin, although of course she won't be plain) and put in a few references to Asimov's concepts, and we're done!

      • I Robot had nothing to do with the book. It was in fact written on another title first and then they bought the name to slap on it because people would recognize it, and, hey, it's about robots, right? A bit of script touch-up to change a few names (gotta have Susan Calvin, although of course she won't be plain) and put in a few references to Asimov's concepts, and we're done!

        I love Will Smith, and the movie was quite the spectacular, but Asimov would have had an aneurysm.

        Asimov was actually more of a mystery writer than a straight-up SF author. He wrote straight mystery novels, too, but then he wrote something for every aisle of the Dewey Decimal System. The robot stories are almost all mysteries, and quite a few of them were murder mysteries, where a robot was apparently at fault despite the Three Laws. The riddle was how to explain what happened without violating those laws.

        T

  • It's been years since I read the original books. (I should definitely go back and re-read them.) Wasn't each book/story set in a different time period? You had the introduction with Hari coming up with Psychohistory, then various stories involving the Foundation (actually First Foundation though we don't learn of the Second Foundation until later). Each story takes place years, if not decades later often with an entirely different cast of characters.

    It will be interesting to see how they handle this. W

    • Or they could give it the Edmond Blackadder treatment....

    • ... if not decades later often with an entirely different cast of characters.

      Not infrequently a century or more, IIRC. The Foundations were supposed to collapse the interregnum down to a mere millenium or so.

  • I got HBO..well..mainly because Verizon gave it to me for free for a few months, but after watching Newsroom, John Oliver, and some of the other original programming they've done (From the Earth to the Moon, Band of Brothers), I think they could nail this. I mean, all of the talk about doing World War Z properly would be to make it a miniseries on HBO. Sure a TV show might need to change a few things but there's lots of opportunity for background stories to make this into a multi-season show.

  • Still hoping someday to see a movie based on Arthur C Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" book/series. Wish a serious producer would develop it (yes I know of that IMDB entry that has been there for nearly a decade). It is one of the best works of one of the best SciFi writers. Are the rights to it too expensive? Is it too difficult to translate to the big screen? The set at least would be no more complicated and green screened than any other larger SciFi. I'm just surprised it hasn't been done yet on wh

  • The whole premise of the Foundation series is obsolete. The premise was that it was possible to predict the future to a moderate level of detail by calculation. Now that vast efforts have been expended in that direction by the weather and financial communities, we have a reasonably clear understanding of what can and cannot be accomplished in the prediction department. We know now that little changes grow into big ones (the "butterfly effect") rather than being filtered out. The future is driven by unpredi

    • I don't want to spoil too much for you but they reveal that they can't predict stuff as good as they led you to believe later on in the series.

    • I felt the same way when reading the trilogy for the second time. The first time that read it, I was quite taken with the psychohistory concept. However, between readings I had learned about Chaos Theory and I felt that I couldn't enjoy the story properly.

    • The whole premise of the Foundation series is obsolete. The premise was that it was possible to predict the future to a moderate level of detail by calculation. Now that vast efforts have been expended in that direction by the weather and financial communities, we have a reasonably clear understanding of what can and cannot be accomplished in the prediction department. We know now that little changes grow into big ones (the "butterfly effect") rather than being filtered out. The future is driven by unpredictable noise.

      Hardly obsolete. Validated, if anything. The modern-day psychomathematics is just Big Data and statistical analysis rules. The book gets thicker every day, and the NSA is based on it. So is corporate marketing.

      Asimov also realized that a butterfly could run the train off the rails, which is why Seldon didn't merely work out the mathematics and turn it all loose. The Second Foundation existed precisely to apply compensating forces and to re-calculate the math as time unfolded.

    • Re:Pre chaos theory (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Mozai ( 3547 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @05:44PM (#48363855) Homepage

      The story has antigravity, faster-than-light travel, force-shield projectors you can wear as a belt buckle and you're okay with the unrealistic physics, but you dismiss the entire series because you don't like the abstractly-defined maths in the first book?

      If you thought Asimov was unaware of chaos theory, then you haven't read past the first book, and you also don't know the author's other works.

  • As much as I loved the books, I can't help but wonder if people will be put off by the idea of a universe where the only sentient beings are humans, from earth.

  • ...at least for the first few episodes. This could be really, really good, and pave the way for more hard science fiction shows that are not remakes of earlier shows, if it's successful.

    Or, it could suck. It could suck like Skiffy's Earthsea miniseries. We'll have to see.

    The potential is there. We have the technology to show pretty much everything that happened in the books, at a budget that a TV series could afford. Hell, Hari Seldon's future history handheld calculator is practically current technol

  • "TV Adaptations are the last refuge of the semi-literate." --Salvor Hardin

  • Radio Drama anyone? (Score:3)

    by khb ( 266593 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @05:00PM (#48363371)

    For those who care: https://archive.org/details/Is... [archive.org]

    Will be interesting to see if HBO does better than the BBC ;>

    • For those who care: https://archive.org/details/Is... [archive.org]

      Will be interesting to see if HBO does better than the BBC ;>

      Yes! You beat me to it. I taped these off my old valve radio when they were broadcast, back when I was 14. I lovingly cared for the cassette tapes over the decades since, hearing them once every blue moon... and then found out I could get flawless copies off this website.

      I remember hanging the mike next to the speaker... portable cassette player. Back in those days, the big thing was recording birdsong.

  • Foundation might have been ground breaking and original when it was written. But its best ideas have either been adapted by other science fiction (Look! A city-planet, just like Coruscant!) or rendered quaint by the progress of technology (A handheld calculator! How amazing!). HBO has had success adapting contemporary fantasy, they should try adapting some contemporary science fiction.

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