Coupla topics

[J Strobridge]

M Holmes writes:

> Gekke Henkie writes:
>
> > > The other great film-to-be of Space Opera is of course Asimov's
> > > "Foundation" series, so long as they don't make as bad a fist of it as
> > > they did with "Nightfall".
>
> > Foundation as a space opera in 7, 8 no 9 parts...or did I miss
> > some...don't know
>
> Well I'd stick to the Straight Hari Seldon stuff and keep the Robots out
> of it. It irritated me that suddenly every Asimov book had to be tied
> to the Robots. If he hadn't died they'd have started appearing in his texts
> on biochemistry.


You know that Benford has written a prequel to this (and Greg Bear has
done one too I think) leading up to the collapse of Trantor - and, yes,
the robots feature prominently!   I don't think you can write them out.

>
> Come to think of it I'd probably skip the stuff with The Mule too...

Apparently just before Asimov died he re-read his Foundation trilogy and
expressed absolute amazement that "nothing happened" in them.   This is
true - they are gorgeous (and I use this word in its 'richly coloured'
'amazing' sense) environments but contain very few events.   I don't
think the Foundation books themselves would make a good film but
they'd be a good background for somebody's heroic adventures perhaps - a
sort of butterfly-wing-flapping situation within the whole context of
psychohistory - but then I'm not at all sure how you could realistically
put the psychohistory concept over in a film either!

jill

Vague on-topic reference: I wonder if Ron Tree ever managed to sell his
robot.  Perhaps he could offer it as a prize at the SF convention.

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J.D.Strobridge at ed.ac.uk                         eset08 at holyrood.ed.ac.uk
                                                ELIJSA at srv0.arts.ed.ac.uk
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