This sounds like its going to be just another hollywood rape of aclassic. It’s going to have little or nothing to do with Asimov’s work. They’re just going to turn it into a routinr action movie and throw in a stupid, pointless obligatory love story.
The sad thing is, that this is going to poison the well for any serious Steel/Baily adaptations.
I would love to see Foundation adapted as a TV series, though.
(small voice) um, Fenris? Except for some parts of Foundation and Earth (mostly the parts with the Solarians), I actually liked the other Foundation books. OK, yeah, so Gaia is horribly clichèd… now. But Asimov is the one who created the clichè. You can’t complain about Asimov in that regard any more than you can complain about Shakespeare. And Daneel’s part in the whole business was rather inevitable, as soon as the telepathic Giscard was introduced. Combine telepathic ability with a robot capable of handling ethical crises without locking up, and you can bet that he’s going to set out to guide humanity for its own best. In any event, you certainly can’t say that Asimov’s worst comes anywhere close to as bad as Heinlein’s worst.
I think we’re in agreement about Calvin, though. Maybe it’s just the nerd factor, but I found it incredibly easy to relate to her, as I was reading the stories.
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That’s ok. That’s what makes horse races, etc. It’s all a matter of taste. 
But my taste is better! 
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In 1983? No he didn’t. Gaia (the hive-mind planet, not the silly eco-concept) was introduced in Foundation’s Edge. The whole “hive-mind planet” thing has been around for decades before that. Hell, Asimov ripped Gaia off from one of his old stories from the '50s and I’m sure Stanley Weinbaum did one in the '30s and Sheckley did one around the same time. And wasn’t one of the Deathworld books from the late '50s a hive-mind planet?
Gaia was (IMO) an attempt by 1985 Asimov to undermine 1950s Asimov: the idea of an elite group of telepaths “guiding humanity” which sounded so nifty to Young Isaac didn’t excite Old Isaac so much: the only options given in the three “true” Foundation books were: an unelected First Foundation in charge of a huge galaxy-wide bureaucracy or a small elite Telepathic-Superman Second Foundation in charge or a boom-n-bust cycle. So he dredged up an old horror story of his (“Green Patches”) about a hive-mind planet, filed off some of the serial numbers, put a nauseating icky-sweet new-age Shirley McClain type coat of paint on it and tried to sell it as a “solution” to a problem no-one wanted fixed. (And if he did have to “fix” things and give a fouth solution, how 'bout planets as independant city-states in a republic. How 'bout planets as individual countries? Why does there have to be a galaxy-wide central government (or hive-mind)? Asimov, even in trying to undo his “mistakes” in his earlier books still couldn’t get past the idea of requiring a powerful centralized controlling body.)
Authors (or worse, their heirs or even worse, sharecroppers hired by their estates) “fixing” classic stories so that they’ll fit modern sensiblities should be prohibited by law. Or severe beatings.
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#1: I’m fairly certain that Giscard was introduced in Robots of Dawn ca. 1985, so it’s not like he was forced to do so by decades old material. And Gisgard was a dumb idea in the first place. The telepathic robot in “Liar” was a million-to-one chance. I can suspend my disbelief to buy a million-to-one accident. I can’t buy two identical accidents.
#2: I hate what Daneel does to the character of Hari Seldon. The minute Daneel-The-Superbeing is introduced, Seldon: the exciting, powerful character is reduced to a puppet of Daneel.
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Wanna bet?
I’d rather reread Number of the Beast five or six times before reading Prelude to Foundation again even once.
Heinlein produced some quality work in his later years: Job was very good, Friday had a lot of good points, and (though I admit to being in a minority), I liked parts of To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I can’t think of a single sentence of any Foundation or Robot book written after Robots of Dawn that didn’t make me cringe. And while Robots of Dawn wasn’t bad at all, Foundation’s Edge was pretty damned bad and all his remaing Foundation/Robot books were (IMO) utterly without merit…except as toilet paper.
And for all the griping that Heinlein gets about his women, at least he was trying to allow women to be strong and sexual people. Asimov even in his later books couldn’t write a normal woman to save his butt. Look at the female characters in Foundation’s Edge (to pick one I’ve reread recently) Harla Branno? She’s a harridan. Whasshername: the shrewish Second Foundation chick? She’s evil and a shrew. Bliss: an animate brainless Barbie doll. As annoying as the females from Number of the Beast were, they were still closer to real women than Asimov’s charactures.
IMO, there’s a great debate to be had about who’s best stuff is better: Asimov or Heinlein’s? (I’d lean towards Heinlein’s stuff, but just barely), but for me, the answer of who’s bad stuff is worse, is a hands-down slam dunk for Asmiov.
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I agree. Of all of Asimov’s characters, Susan Calvin is one of the three best drawn (Elijah Bailey and Pre-Daneel Hari Seldon* are the other two)
Fenris
*Well drawn in a minimalist way: he was only in each story for a few pages, but Asimov, like an artist who can paint a picture with only a few strokes of a brush, Asimov was able to give an idea of who Hari was in only a few words.
There is some interesting commentary on Asimov’s (and others) later works in the Foundation series in the rec.arts.sf.written FAQ. It’s too long to quote here, so just follow the link and search for “Foundation”. (The link is to an ftp so there is no imbedded link to take you directly there.)
I have to agree with Fenris here; Foundation’s Edge was barely readable and Foundation and Earth was bad enough that I try not to consider it part of the series. Read the link I indicated above and you will see what I mean.
To echo a point someone made earlier, you don’t read Asimov for the characters; you read him for the ideas. He was a master of the “idea as story” concept. The Foundation trilogy isn’t about the characters in it, not even Hari Seldon or the Mule (though, ironically, the Mule is probably one of Asimov’s better characters). No, the trilogy is about “The Plan” and the decline, fall and rise of the Galactic Empire. The characters are simply there to explain what is going on and are otherwise pretty much unneccessary.
What I like about the Foundation books is the sheer scope and scale of the setting, a story that spans the galaxy (did you know there are over 100 named worlds in the original three books?) and covers a period of hundreds of years. It is an epic and, on that scale, individual characters become meaningless.
Remember that under the concepts of Psychohistory (as defined in the book) the actions of individuals are actually unimportant! The story would have advanced even without them.
As for the stories in *I, Robot{/i], I always thought of them more as puzzles than as stories. Look at it this way; the stories all revolve around the Three Laws of Robotics which we are told are inherent to all robots. Each story involves either a) figuring out how to get around one of the laws or b) figuring out how a robot seems to have broken one of the laws. They are logic puzzles disguised as stories and the characters are (again) only there to explain the setup and provide the final solution.
So, many plusses for idea but quite a few minuses for characters and story.
All this is IMHO, of course. YMMV.
Oh, we’ve mentioned them a few times in this thread so for those of you following along at home who have no idea what we’re talking about.
The Three Laws of Robotics
[ol]
[li]No robot may harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.[/li][li]A robot must obey the orders of a human being, unless this would conflict with the first law.[/li][li]A robot must protect its own existence, unless this would conflict with the first or second laws.[/li][/ol]
Personally, I’d say that Heinlein has a larger range of quality than Asimov, in both directions. Nothing Asimov ever did (not even the original Foundation trilogy) is as good as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and nothing Asimov ever did (even, say, “Victory Unintentional”) was as bad (IMHO) as Number of the Beast or (please don’t lynch me) Stranger in a Strange Land. But that one’s a bit of an odd case: It’s definitely either better than Asimov’s best, or worse than Asimov’s worst, but nobody can seem to agree which it is.
I have to agree with you about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Of course, that’s one of my all-time favorites. (Not that that wasn’t obvious, was it? :))
I could make a pretty good case, I think, for the original two book Elijah Bailey series being better than Moon… But I could argue the other way too. Both are such perfect classics…
On the other hand, I was able to finish Number of the Beast and there were some good moments (Oz, the big cocktail party scene at the end, the Doc Smith bit) in Number, whereas with Forward the (or Prelude to) Foundation they were so atrocious that I couldn’t finish it (whichever one I read): it damaged the characters of both Daneel and Hari Seldon beyond repair and had no redeeming features. Even the prose was thuddingly bad.
I’ve read tons of Asimov, (even his rejected attempt at a story for UNKNOWN (which is really lame) and his book about Slide Rules…which is kinda cool, but doesn’t seem to correspond to the old slide rule I have, so I still can’t use the stupid thing) but his last three or four books in the Foundation/Robot series are so bad that, if there weren’t some obvious prose bits that are clearly Asimov, I’d believe they were ghost written by, say, Piers Anthony.
Chronos: I know I’m sounding like I’m pontificating. Please assume IMOs throughout. I’m really enjoying this discussion and don’t want to come across as speaking authoritatively on what’s clearly a matter of taste.
Fenris
Yeah, you want to talk about poorly written characters, Heinlein takes the cake. He is simply incapable of writing an even remotely believable character, in terms of that character’s attitudes, choices, etc. Stranger in a Strange Land is a good example, with the one character at the end inexplicably going from totally opposed to the new religion to totally embracing it and reverting to cannibalism for no discernible reason. And Number of the Beast doesn’t even approach being as bad as the totally unreadable I Will Fear No Evil.
The stuff being considered Asimov’s worst is still much better. (Considering only the stuff Asimov actually wrote himself, not the Foundation prequels.) Foundation’s Edge I found somewhat enjoyable. Admittedly, Foundation and Earth turns into just one long debate between Golan and Bliss with some random plot elements tossed in to connect it with the Spacer worlds and the robots. Still, I finished that book a couple of times, and can’t even get past the first 200 pages or so of I Will Fear No Evil.
I think the telling difference is that they can actually make a movie out of an Asimov book. They could never make a movie out of a Heinlein book without cutting out all of the cannibalism, sex with adopted children, sex with actual children, sex with mother, castration, and repeated references to turn-of-the-century literature that nobody reads anymore (no offense to Tars.)
(I still read some Heinlein, and used to admire him for working libertarian ideals into some of his works. However, in the last couple years I think Terry Goodkind has done that much better, his last couple Sword of Truth books being like fantasy adaptations of the ideas in Atlas Shrugged.)
Perhaps we need to open a Heinlein vs. Asimov thread someday and just duke it out
You know, reading this discussion has brought back an old memory. I was about 22 years old and decided to try reading science-fiction again after long hiatus, previously just reading mostly the juvenile stuff as a kid, (including “I, Robot” LOVED IT!). I was at the public library and picked up a copy of “I will fear no Evil” thinking, hey! Heinlein, I loved “Starship Troopers” I’ll try this. Well, I could not even finish it and didn’t read another SF book for about 10 years (I wound up joining L.A.S.F.S. and got some good advice). Funny thing was, I assumed I didn’t like science fiction much and it never occurred to me that maybe the great Robert Anson just turned out a dog’s breakfast of a book.
I would postulate that the reason we’ll not likely see some of the early classic SF novels on the silver screen is that folks at Lucasfilms & Paramount et al have um… ‘borrowed’ so many of the concepts that if you did make a movie about Barsoom, or the Lensman books most people would say “Oh they just copied Star Wars episode XXXII” Be honest, who didn’t immediately think ‘Trantor’ when we first saw Corsucant?
“I, Robot” is a great collection of stories but as a movie I can think of several episodes of Star Trek, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits and such that have, over the years, borrowed so much from those stories that the original impact of the ideas is longer there for anyone younger than 40. Heck, any plot line involving Lt. Cmdr Data has Asimov written all over it.
Lastly, even though I am a big movie buff, I defy anyone to make a good motion picture of “The Demolished Man”. Different subject.
I think that The Demolished Man would make an excellent movie. It’s a detective story at heart. One can either treat it as a hard-boiled film noir or as an Agatha Christie-type whodunit. Or fuse the two: an Agatha Christie-type film noir. That should be something to see.
I refered to Mr. Bester’s use of telepathy as a means of communication. The printed words on the page were type set so as to show a non-linear form of conveying thoughts. The usual way to show telepathy in cinema is to either have a whispery voice or a rapidly flashing image montage. Plus the concept of your sense of self and the world around you slowly disappearing while you have this paranoid dread of something wrong…
…Oh never mind, they did this quite well in episode 79 season 4 of Star Trek TNG. SEE WHAT I MEAN!?!
I’ve said on numerous occasions that I’d like to film The Demolished Man. Handled properly, the telepath cocktail party could be a tour-de-force. The plot, if you tell people about it properly, is a helluva puzzle (How do you commit a crime on a world full of telepaths? And get away with it?)
1/4main, @kins, Mr Bester was writing in 1337-speak long before anyone else. Unfortunately, this is first concept that will have to be dropped in making the transition to a visual medium. The basic premise is still sound, though. I agree with Dr Meacham that the telepathic cocktail party could well be the highlight of the movie. A director would have to constrast that party with the non-telepathic one where the murder takes place.
They are working on bringing Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series to the big screen. However, I have no doubt they’ll screw it up as they’re talking about having Tom Cruise play the lead. :rolleyes:
No doubt it will be as thoughtful, exciting and as true to the spirit of the original as “Tarzan and the Lost City” with Casper Van Diem. or the ‘Dune’ miniseries. Yuck. Give me my eighth ray of Barsoom and Ghek the Kalbane! God, I love those books.
By the way, it’s been years since I read the book, what does ‘1337 speak’ mean? I feel like a doofus for not remembering, (or is that d@@fus?)
Haven’t been on the Internet long, have you?
“1337” is short for “leet”, which is short for “elite”. Usually used to describe hacker-wannabes who think typing 1i|<3 7|-|1z is cool.
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/elite.html
w00t!
Thanks. My short time on, and small understanding of, the intricacies of the internet and hacker lore is a source of great comfort to me.