281–290 of 498 posts
My greatest gripe with the show is that none of the writers seem to have any understanding of science, technology and have only a vague understanding of sociology, pretty much all of the main themes of the books. I actually liked the imperial cloning elements, as they fleshed out well an ossified society, but every other plotline seems to just happen because of pseudo-magic. I can only wish that the writer's room of…
I can usually forgive some tech contradiction details, but its really annoying when there is faster than light travel... But to create contrived suspense because no technology exists to make a flashlight strong enough to illuminate a cave for 10m ??!?!
There is a definite sliding scale. Make your Sci-Fi too hard and you just have science and no fiction. But its not that hard to stick to the "One Big Lie" rule. If the expanse and the Martian can do it then so can everyone else.
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I agree with you. It took me a while to get my head around the approach they were taking (I re-read the whole series prior to it airing) but what struck me most on re-reading was how completely boring it would be to be faithful to it. Even just getting rid of the 1950s stereotype gender roles - which is the obvious place to start - doesn’t change the long arcs of obvious dialogue. It’s a really grand scope for a univ…
>what struck me most on re-reading was how completely boring it would be to be faithful to it Agreed. The inspiration behind the Foundation series, setting out to shorten the Dark Ages after the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is great. However, if you try reading those short stories again today, you're quickly reminded that early in his career, Asimov was already great at world building, but terrible with char…
The Foundation stories were written in 1941-1950. In 1951 Asimov stopped writing fiction for thirty years.
So it's not "early Asimov" by any means.
When he came back to write Foundation sequels his characters and dialog hadn't improved.
Asimov was always an author only of ideas. His best dialog was the terrible and deliberately corny dialog in the Azazel fantasy-comedy stories, very much done in imitation of P.G. Wodehouse's cleverer banter.
Excerpt from one of the 80's foundation books:
“Is not all this an extraordinary concatenation of coincidence ?” Pelorat said, “If you list it like that.”
“List it any way you please,” said Trevize. “I don’t believe in extraordinary concatenations of coincidence.”
Cringe.
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Those movies are outstanding on multiple axes, but in terms of story I hate what they did to the source. Yes you need to mess with it to make a movie that works as a movie, no that doesn't mean your Aragorn can murder an emissary on a parley. These changes aren't just unfaithful, they're standard modern Hollywood tropes, subtracting rather than adding interest.
> that doesn't mean your Aragorn can murder an emissary on a parley What emissary?
"Well, I guess that concludes negotiations!"
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Having read both, I don’t think Dune is impossible to bring to the screen. I think it needs to be a TV show because as a film it will need to be super long (and will be exposition heavy and/or kinda boring.) But Foundation is like the Silmarillion. It’s supposed to be detailed over centuries/millennia and definitely is hard or impossible to get right on the screen.
Check out the 90's sci-fi channel mini series of Dune and Children of Dune.
Breaking news: Hyperion by Dan Simmons will be adapted courtesy of Bradley Cooper: https://deadline.com/2021/11/bradley-cooper-set-hyperion-at-...
They're scraping the barrel now for literature to adapt. The studios desperately want another Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings . I feel like Foundation and even Dune are just not fit for being adapted. Foundation is so easy to read that people should really just read it. It's such a shame that His Dark Materials failed as that would make an excellent adaptation and the source material is far superior to Harry Potter…
Breaking news: Hyperion by Dan Simmons will be adapted courtesy of Bradley Cooper: https://deadline.com/2021/11/bradley-cooper-set-hyperion-at-...
... Huh. At this point I'm beginning to wonder if they're deliberately choosing the most difficult-to-adapt sci-fi. I can't see this working, at all.
Wheel of Time will tell.
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I'd say that Dune, as a single book, is a metaphor for a local Arab community rising up to overthrow a pair of colonial powers (Brits/Harkonnen and American/Atreidis) to take control of their own oil reserves (spice). It is a story about Jihad, a word that is used many times in the books but is notably absent in the latest film. Start changing too many characters and the metaphors to our real world fall apart.
It's about a marginalised community's manipulation by a cynical religious cult, which indoctrinates them to await a messiah, then provides them with that messiah in order to usurp power over their entire society for the cult's own nefarious ends.
There are a lot of people really hating on the TV show here, so I’ll offer a slightly contrarian take: I would say the biggest problem is the marketing that implies they faithfully are telling the books, when they’re not. The TV show is not faithful to the books. That said: the books are fascinating, but they are almost more like historical documentaries then narrative fiction. It works well because they are _short_…
The problem is that this is sooo bad. Dull, pretentions stories where nothing makes sense, and characters that are dull speaking boxes walking around saying script lines.
That's what I saw until falling asleep halfway through Episode 3. Perhaps it got better. Perhaps it's not "for me". But that's what I saw.