Nov292008
Asimov’s “Foundation” to be filmed?
Filed under General by david brooks at 2:57 pm
I have no idea how likely this is to come to fruition - here’s the story I saw, via Slashdot - but it wouldn’t be easy to turn Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series into a bunch of long movies, a la “Lord of the Rings”. The essential plot element tying together the series - its version of the whole “destroy the One Ring” business or, in Hitchcock-speak, its McGuffin - is a complicated mathematical formula {”psychohistory”} that’s supposed to predict behavior of huge numbers of people, just the way quantum mechanics predicts the behavior of huge numbers of subatomic particles. There are lots of scenes where people stand in front of the high-tech equivalent of a giant blackboard and talk - not exactly great theater.
On a personal note, I loved Asimov when I was a teenager - I own scads of his 70s-era paperbacks - but I find his fiction almost unreadably clunky now, with cardboard characters and god-awful dialogue. The plot elements are still clever, though.
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