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One disappointment. Though the visuals and art production are clearly solid and big budget they seem a bit uninspired. The show doesn’t have its own signature world-building look. It looks like a mashup of existing sci-fi properties. Star Trek/Star Wars/Expanse…
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The jump drive has an actual mini black hole rendering within it that looks lifted from interstellar The ceremonial robes for outlier world delegates and Cleon staff in particular seems like a false note. Not Asimovian at all. Was hoping for something like the Loki 50spunk look.
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Asimov-verse has a consistent feel of a 50s bureaucracy from earliest robot stories to final foundation and earth/galaxia stuff. This Dune-like pageantry feels off somehow.
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Yes the empire is a monarchy but one based on a bureaucratic rather than theocratic state apparatus. You want gray/beige grimness. Closer to Star Wars. That influence is clearly there (soldiers look like storm troopers… it’s practically a “these are the baddies” label) but weak.
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This is going to be a good show in its own right I think, but something of the Asimovian soul has been accidentally abandoned (it’s not intentional clearly because it’s not displaced by an alt soul but by random acts of art production)
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Just for fun, I’m going to try predicting the plot turns of the show, but without spoiling it for people. Here is the SHA-256 hash of my first prediction. Will reveal when either verified or falsified 851606c989ff0da8fe3f3ede3861d8a012469dbb67e82391825eb3e511e69f86
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Episode 3 is really good so far. The poignant opening 20 minute meditation in the cycling of the Cleons serves no narrative purpose but damn it sets the psychohistorical mood. Now we’re into the Salvor Hardin story. I guess we’ll learn what happened to Gaal and Raych later.
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A clever trick this show is using is jumping around in time a lot, showing events out of order. Another good mood-setter. Characters dying doesn’t mean plot arcs ending. We’ve already seen Seldon’s death, but there’s clearly going to be more of him beyond the vault scenes.
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Fourth episode good. The added Cleons subplot is really solid. Injects soul into the story the original lacks. Also a good way to keep Demerzel/Daneel actively in the story.
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Also the slow approach shield technology seems like a pointless Dune borrow. I’m guessing an assassination subplot on Day is being setup. Which they also side-shadowed via the poison-testing scene for Dawn. Not encrypting this prediction since it doesn’t seem that important.
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The Cleons clones plot has really turned into a sort of mind worm for me Btw “clones” is an anagram of “cleons” I really like the brother dawn/brother day/brother dusk scene. Started calling my 17 year old cat ‘brother dusk.’ Nice way to grapple with mortality.
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The parts that kinda drag are the parts that clearly borrow from Dune type fantasies. I guess fantasy is more popular so it’s a pragmatic move but still 😐
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Kidding aside, there’s something knee-jerk about the shallow foundation takes. There’s false notes and fluff to be sure, and I’d have done it differently. But this is a good treatment in the broad spirit of the original. Not a cynical one like Joss Whedon Star Trek.
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I can see why Krugman has shallow teenaged expectations unchanged by decades and a Nobel. He probably maps psychohistory to spherical cow economics. He wants fictionalized macroeconomics.
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The emotional subtext of Foundation is surrender to the Plan. It’s weakly developed but it’s there in the original. The story is sociological soul in economics body.
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Got my first prediction kinda 70% right I guess based on Ep7. Shouldn’t make such omnibus predictions.
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Just for fun, I’m going to try predicting the plot turns of the show, but without spoiling it for people. Here is the SHA-256 hash of my first prediction. Will reveal when either verified or falsified 851606c989ff0da8fe3f3ede3861d8a012469dbb67e82391825eb3e511e69f86
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It could be a bit more right depending on how they explain Raych, but the baby/Wanda prediction is a wash I think
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Many specific criticisms of the show are valid. It’s a good but not great show in execution terms. But so far I see no sign of actual cynicism. To repeat: there is genuine affection for the work and true instincts of where the soul of the work lies.
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Neither the books, nor the show is about mid-century high-modernist economist style spherical cow conceits. Nice that Krugman was much inspired by it all, but the material in its comp;etc canonical form is NOT galactic Keynesianism even allegorically.
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If you read the last 3 books (Robots and Empire/Prelude to Foundation/Forward the Foundation — 1985/88/93), written after the chaos theory/Santa Fe revolution, you can see Asimov game.y trying to retcon a more modern mathematical sensibility onto psychohistory.
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There’s even chaos-theoretic vague gestures in one of the books, where Hari is trying to fix late stage problems with the theory. But perhaps the most revealing thing is that even the original trilogy is primarily about the *second* foundation which is the more powerful one.
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If you know the history you realize that 2nd foundation comes from the same zeitgeist tendencies that gave rise, via Campbell’s other protege, L. Ron Hubbard, to Scientology! Ie in real life, Asimov was arguably Campbell’s first foundation, Hubbard was second.
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People also misunderstand Asimovian heroism. The protagonists are Everyman types, but they’re NOT helpless. Asimov drew from the same Competent Man tradition that Heinlein and others in Campbellverse did.
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In fact, Asimov once rewrote a story about a man who discovered he could float but is not believed, to have a high-agency Asimovian-competent-man redemption because he was dissatisfied with the original draft that had a helpless ending. I can’t remember the name of the story.
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In Foundation erase itself, heroism is not absent, it just appears as kinda ironic after-the-fact in-universe mythologization. Salvor is a Competent Man when we meet him live but a legend a few centuries later. Etc.
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Related: there isn’t even a consistent What Would Asimov Think lens on this. Even if you aren’t in the Barthesian death-of-the-author camp like I am, Asimov himself clearly shifted his view of what the story was about multiple times.
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Don’t forget, the original story was 3 long magazine short stories. Pure pantsing, not plotting. It inherited some grand narrative arciness from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, but otherwise was made up in a shitposty way as the prolific guy was racing to log the words.
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Rome history buffs too overstate their influence of Gibbon. A far bigger influence was Cold War 1950s-80s milieu. Including nuclear war, which is critical to the plot. It’s the reason the Spacer/Settler schism happens, earth is abandoned, and robots except for Daneel disappear.
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Pebble in the Sky originally had a “bad physics” nuclear fallout premise that was later corrected while being retconned into Foundation timeline in Robots and Enterprise as the result of an “ultimate weapon” by Spacers to make earth uninhabitable. Asimov explains it in a preface.
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In fact the entire Asimoverse is the result of prolific pantsing coupled with masterful retconning. It’s not conceived as an organic whole like LOTR or Harry Potter. It kinda grew like slime mold around his influences. A fox larping hedgehog. An Austrian in Keynesian clothing.
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