Will Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation' Survive Its Transformation into a Streaming Series? (arstechnica.com) 181
Apple TV+ has released a nearly three-minute long trailer for its upcoming series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation books.
Ars Technica calls the trailer "stunning." A mathematical genius predicts the imminent collapse of a galactic empire, and he and his protegé set plans in motion to preserve the foundational knowledge of their civilization in Foundation, Apple TV+'s adaptation of Isaac Asimov's hugely influential series of science fiction novels. It's a story that takes place across multiple planets over 1,000 years, with a huge cast of characters. That makes adapting it extremely difficult, particularly to film. But the streaming platform is betting that the series format will be better suited to bring Asimov's futuristic vision to life...
The first teaser appeared in June 2020 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). That included some behind-the-scenes images and brief commentary from showrunner David S. Goyer, who co-wrote Terminator: Dark Fate and Batman v. Superman. He noted all the past efforts to adapt Foundation over the last 50 years, as well as the enormous influence the series had on Star Wars... Asimov was strongly influenced by Edward Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, particularly while writing the earlier books. This trailer really brings out the theme of embracing inevitable change, even if it's frightening — and there's nothing more frightening to a ruler than the imminent collapse of his empire...
The first two episodes of Foundation will premiere on Apple TV+ on September 24, 2021. After that, new episodes will air weekly every Friday.
Ars Technica calls the trailer "stunning." A mathematical genius predicts the imminent collapse of a galactic empire, and he and his protegé set plans in motion to preserve the foundational knowledge of their civilization in Foundation, Apple TV+'s adaptation of Isaac Asimov's hugely influential series of science fiction novels. It's a story that takes place across multiple planets over 1,000 years, with a huge cast of characters. That makes adapting it extremely difficult, particularly to film. But the streaming platform is betting that the series format will be better suited to bring Asimov's futuristic vision to life...
The first teaser appeared in June 2020 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). That included some behind-the-scenes images and brief commentary from showrunner David S. Goyer, who co-wrote Terminator: Dark Fate and Batman v. Superman. He noted all the past efforts to adapt Foundation over the last 50 years, as well as the enormous influence the series had on Star Wars... Asimov was strongly influenced by Edward Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, particularly while writing the earlier books. This trailer really brings out the theme of embracing inevitable change, even if it's frightening — and there's nothing more frightening to a ruler than the imminent collapse of his empire...
The first two episodes of Foundation will premiere on Apple TV+ on September 24, 2021. After that, new episodes will air weekly every Friday.
I predict (Score:5, Insightful)
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Who is Asiminov?
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Apparently he was some dude who made movie scripts by grouping alphabet letters into words, stringing the word-groups into long lines, and getting some dude to print the word-groups on bound paper sheets to sell as-is. What a strange idea - instead of just calling Dino de Laurentiis to make the film in the first place...
Re: I predict (Score:3)
Who is Asiminov? A Russian chess grand master. No, a new class of antidepressant. No, the next cargo payload for the ISS.
Re: I predict (Score:2)
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Apple has so far been a mixed bag. See was high budget crap. For All Mankind is enjoyable but annoyed a lot of people because it's so unrealistic (flying Shuttles to the Moon etc.) There is the potential for Foundation to be good, but it's by no means a guarantee.
There are always changes when something transitions from book to TV/film, but that doesn't always mean that the result is bad. It's very easy to nit-pick when something differs even slightly from the source material but if you just relax and enjoy
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The Shuttles to the Moon is really the only thing that raises my eyebrow. But I can see it justified in a world where the Cold War is turned up to 11 and the space race is HOT. I can see any hair brained ideas getting approved with unlimited budgets.
You are right (Score:2)
Re:You are right (Score:4, Insightful)
With that said, I do think that it is possible to write Foundation into a decent SF series. And I hope that the trailer does not reflect the final product; it looks spectacular as trailers tend to do... but it would be sad if they perverted Asimov's work into one of Michael Bay's wet dreams.
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Re:I predict (Score:4, Interesting)
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genius young mathematician from a backwater planet
I like Asimov, I've read most of his work but this description sounds like Mary Sues brother.
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Re:I predict (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if he were Mary Sue's brother, it wouldn't matter. Mary Sue's brother always gets a pass. Consider basically every male action hero, they're bulletproof, or dodge bullets or just stand there unflinching while people just keep shooting at them and almost always miss except for the occasional "flesh wound" that the hero basically just shrugs off. Male heroes can, through the virtue of their intense training, defeat enemies several times their size, even when those enemies also have super-human strength. They can wield massive weapons that would be far too unwieldly for any normal person. The ones that are smart are geniuses operating at unreachable levels, etc. For some reason, when they're female, there is a sizeable portion of the population, who seem to have had no problem with heroes with impossible abilities up to that point, who note that there is no way the female hero should be able to avoid being shot, and that no amount of training will allow a woman to beat a man who is 50 lbs heavier than her, and that there's no way she could wield that sword/axe/hammer/minigun because women just would not be able to build up the required strength and stamina. Not even going to go into the bell curve and other arguments that will be made for a female supergenius.
There is a female equivalent of a Mary Sue, which is a Marty Stu, but the fact that a huge number of male heros in various media are Marty Stus goes pretty much entirely unrecognized. For some reason humans capable of flying, defeating dragons, casting spells, hacking the Gibson, defeating an army in single combat, etc. is entirely unexceptional to some people until their suspension of disbelief is finally broken by the character doing it being... female.
It's a bit of a cousin to the effect where a male superhero who looks like an anatomical model in some fabric that's way clingier than spandex goes unnoticed, but is suddenly sexual exploitation when they're female. Even when it's basically a female version of a male superhero and the image is practically traced from the male version. In short, people are weird.
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Re: I predict (Score:2)
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But foundation was an Anthology with little character development
Which might actually make for a good series. A lot of series either lose steam because they spent too much time on the overarching plot, or they fall apart because each episode focuses only on the details of the subplot, with the story arc largely forgotten by the characters. In an antology this is much less of an issue, and the story arc of Foundation is strong and interesting enough to tie the individual stories together and keep interest going.
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Just hope that there will be different actors so that they don't re-use actors too much. Too much actor re-use just looks weird.
No big deal if they re-use a side actor in a minor role, like guard in one episode and bar man in another and just have different makeup. But for main actors it can be very unsettling.
Re:I predict (Score:4, Insightful)
The most encouraging thing I’ve seen so far, and really the thing that has me most interested in it, was a quote I read a few months back. The showrunner was talking about trying to adapt it for a long-form series, apparently hoping that it could be told over the course of 80 episodes, and he talked about the difficulty in adapting it for screen. There are jumps in time, entire empires fall “off-screen”, and so on. Apparently he was talking with the Apple folks at one point and was worried that they’d tell him to cut major elements or dumb it down to make it work.
Instead, if I’m remembering correctly, they told him to lean into the source material’s weirdness, embrace it, and trust his audience.
Goyer’s last good thing was arguably The Dark Knight, so I still don’t trust him to pull this off, but that one nugget gave me a little glimmer of hope.
Re:I predict [this movie will not make you think] (Score:2)
FP haste strikes again. I think you had a good idea there, but your rushed-to-FP typo negated it on a cheap joke. (But I would have gone with "The original Russian version of his name.")
The main point of the thread could have been how much Asimov's writing made you think and how hard movies work to prevent thinking. You have to think and imagine to fill in between the words, but the combination of video and audio basically keeps your brain too busy to imagine anything. I actually count it as another negativ
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survive serialization?
It didn't survive Asimov writing a cash-in "fourth book" decades later! (Not to mention how many more came after that!).
Reading it was painful. I didn't even look at the next ones.
Asimov is by far my favourite golden era sf writer (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope to never catch a single episode of whatever this is.
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Mine too but I'm actually looking forward to it. "I, Robot" sucked but "Bicentennial Man" was absolutely worthwhile. I'd actually prefer a Robots of Dawn style trilogy of films.
An important thing to note is that the script for the "I, Robot" movie was not originally intended to be "I, Robot." The studio that had rights to the Asimov story series took a script and asked for a rewrite to add the three laws.
(In fact, the movie plot is closer to Williamson's "With Folded Hands.")
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I remember downloading a D&D demo (thank god), and it was just a rented name wrapper for some other game that had nothing to do with D&D mechanics.
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I recently picked up Foundation and had to put it down since many of the situations portrayed are simply comical. The main protagonist, for example, has to show his paper passport when he arrives on a starship. Even today we're not so far from biometric scanning being used to identify people. Mind you Foundation takes place more than 10.000
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main protagonist, for example, has to show his paper passport when he arrives on a starship. Even today we're not so far from biometric scanning being used to identify people. Mind you Foundation takes place more than 10.000 years from now.
Covid vaccination proof still seems to be mostly provided on a slip of paper, just fwiw.
Maybe it's like Dune and the Butlerian Jihad. Certain technologies have certainly been developed, but there are social or philosophical or religious (etc) reasons not use them.
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And on earth in 2021, after using computers for medical assistance for 30+ years we still have a hard time connecting two hospital databases together, even though they're likely using similar technologies
Mostly due to legal hurdles. Now if both planets belonged to an "empire" and the "empire" defined that standard for data exchange ...
Yes, yes, there is a high cost for getting the "trains to run on time".
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It's a feedback loop. People like you automatically hate stuff without even seeing it, so there is no point trying to please you.
The more you do it the more the creators target other people's tastes, because they might actually give it a chance.
The Foundation books are fine (Score:4, Interesting)
Every once in a blue moon, a cinematic adaptation of a great book - or book series - turns out fo be as good as the original work. A great example of something that didn't pan out that way is Dune. An example of something that did is Bladerunner (and more amazingly, the sequel did too).
But whether the adaptation works or not, it doesn't matter. The books are still there and they ain't going nowhere.
If anything, even a bad adaptation is good: if the adaptation is well done, it might entice viewers to go and read the book. If it's bad, at least it puts the book on their radar. And surely after reading reviews that say the movie doesn't do the book justice for the 10th time, they might just go and check out the book too.
I bet a lot of people got to know the fabulous world of Philip K. Dick or Frank Herbert by watching the great Bladerunner or the not-so-great Dune.
Incidentally, what I'd really, REALLY want to see is a film version of one of Iain M. Banks's Culture [wikipedia.org] book. God, just thinking about it makes me shiver. I want a Culture movie so bad! I love Asimov, but Iain M. Banks seriously blows him out of the water in the genres he dabbled in.
Re:The Foundation books are fine (Score:5, Informative)
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Amazon has the rights for the Culture series.
Oh really? I didn't know that. That's disappointing. I was really hoping someone other than fucking Bezos owned the right to this fine body of work.
Having said that, it'll probably take an Amzon-level budget to make a Culture movie of any decent quality. So perhaps it's a good thing.
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Why is it dissappointing? Amazon's done really well with The Expanse, aside from cancelling it prematurely and leaving us hanging on the last few books worth of plotlines. What makes you think they'd muck up the Culture? Or it it the the stopping after only 2/3rds of the story that bugs you? In fairness, I was pretty P/Od when I found out they'd pulled the rug out from under The Expanse after book/season 6 myself. So I can sympathize. But the Culture books do stand on their own as independent stories
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Hollywood (and I'll include Amazon in that for this) tends to have a problem with handling moral ambiguity, and the Culture series has more than a bit of that.
It's clear reading some of the works that Banks is not fully comfortable with the Utopia he's created. The Culture is very much "the end justifies the means" in many circum
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I'd like to see "The Mote In God's Eye".
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"If it's anywhere near as good as the tv Expanse adaptation I will lose my fucking mind,and honestly, I'm expecting it to be that good."
There's not many spaceship scenes in it, but seeing Trantor would be nice.
But it will be like Titanic, everybody knows where the Second Foundation really IS.
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A great example of something that didn't pan out that way is Dune. An example of something that did is Bladerunner (and more amazingly, the sequel did too).
According to whom? The great thing about film critics is you can always rely on someone to contradict you.
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One only needs to count the number of adaptations of a book to a movie to understand if the first (or any subsequent) were successful.
Can anyone imagine a remake of Blade Runner? Not for another decade or two, and even then, it will be an homage. The movie trumps the book in so many ways (Mercerism is an unnecessary distraction, and the end of the book in particular is weak). Apparently, Hollywood can't imagine a remake either, because there has been only one adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric S
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One only needs to count the number of adaptations of a book to a movie to understand if the first (or any subsequent) were successful.
Strange metric to consider how good a story is based on if it's been remade. There were many remakes and adaptations of literature where the original was very well regarded, hell The Thing (1980s version) was nominated for many awards and is a classic piece of must-watch film history, that didn't stop someone from taking the script, wiping their arse with it and reshooting what was ultimately a turd in 2011.
Do any of the ones that have come out (not counting the aborted attempts) feel definitive?
What does definitive mean? I thought we were talking about whether something is good. No Dune movie w
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Blade Runner started as an adaptation of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Street?", but it seems to have transformed itself into a sequel of the book. As in: the human Deckard moved north with his wife, the synthetic Deckard thinks his wife left him.
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But whether the adaptation works or not, it doesn't matter. The books are still there and they ain't going nowhere.
If anything, even a bad adaptation is good: if the adaptation is well done, it might entice viewers to go and read the book. If it's bad, at least it puts the book on their radar. And surely after reading reviews that say the movie doesn't do the book justice for the 10th time, they might just go and check out the book too.
I think that this should be the takeaway. It's been over 20 years since I read the Foundation books, but I might use this as an excuse to go back and read some again. I did this during the beginning of the pandemic with Dune, though it helped that my library offered Kindle access to it through Overdrive. Maybe if this is a series it will be the impetus to get more people interested in science fiction, and maybe more science fiction will get published.
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Dune is definitely not a universally disliked film, you'd have been off with something more universally disliked like I, Robot. It would even tie with the topic. Unlike I, Robot Dune has a very loyal cult following. Personally, it might even make a top 5 list of Sci fi movies for me and I know I'd take its portrayal of Baron Harkonen over Darth Vader any day of the week.
Just check out the comment section on this YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] breaking down "how bad" Dune is. It's just a li
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Yeah Dune is okay. I like it personally - enough to watch it again and again way too many times :) But objectively it's not in the same league as Bladerunner.
But yeaj you're right: at least it was a thoughtful and somewhat intelligent movie (or at least trying to be intelligent - too many cut corners). I, Robot took a great story with a complex plot and a real reflection around the 3 laws and bastardized it into a Marvel-like action flick. Because if Hollywood has learned anything in the last 20 years, it's
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Well sure it's not as good as Blade Runner. There's plenty of greatness between Blade Runner and more mediocre fair though.
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Funny, you should mention Phillip K. Dick. The show "Man in the High Castle" was really good--until they deviated from the plot of the book, and then it wasn't.
Foundation is way too cerebral to translate as-is to the screen. I'll try to watch it, but I have no expectations.
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Having seen the series and read the book - it was always deviating. What killed it was Amazon suddenly losing interest in it and them having to introduce a new plot element and simultaneously wrap it up with all the other loose plot points in the one season they had left. Just like GoT, come to think of it. What a crappy end to a good series.
Time tells all... (Score:2)
God, just thinking about it makes me shiver. I want a Culture movie so bad! I love Asimov, but Iain M. Banks seriously blows him out of the water in the genres he dabbled in.
You have me on everything except that part. You don't need to pretend to uplift others, or teardown yet others still, to prove something. The work stands on its own -- both are equal in the power of the messages they bring.
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"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"?
I'd love to see that too. I thoroughly enjoyed that story. Fat chance it will get done as written with today's politics - perhaps they will change the libertarian ideals into socialism instead. The villain in this story works with either type of system.
Wish I could say more about it, but don't want to spoil it if anyone wants to pick it up.
I'd also like a more true-to-the-book version of Starship Troopers. Or for something a bit less flashy: Stranger in a Strange Land.
I hope it's amazing. (Score:4, Insightful)
I loved Asimov as a kid, so so much. All that 50's scifi was my favorite thing while other kids were into pokemon or whatever.
And I think the trailer looks fantastic. People are getting upset and whining already, because they think it is against the spirit of the books, but that isn't so. The books were about the fall of a galactic empire, so there is plenty of opportunity to make things exciting and show that visually while being completely faithful to the spirit of the books and the story being told.
Goyer did an interview with the hollywood reporter where he went into some detail, and it's clear he is a fan and I was a lot less worried after reading that.
Let's wait until it is released to judge shall we?
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I also loved Asimon as a kid, including the Foundation Trilogy.
But then Chaos theory and the Butterfly Effect entered the public consciousness, including a mention in Jurassic Park (1993).
I figured, "well that kills the premise of Foundation", nobody is going to make a movie now.
But then I remembered that Asimov was more about quantity than quality. He never was particularly imaginative. Trantor was just ancient Rome rehashed.
His idea of self-driving cars was a humanoid robot holding the steering wheel. U
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I also loved Asimov as a kid, including the Foundation Trilogy.
Did you eventually read all 7 books in the series?
To paraphrase Judge Gen (short for Hydrogen -- the only element in existence when she was born) on "The Good Place":
"It's okay. I mean, I'm immortal, but that thing is long."
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[Asimov's] idea of self-driving cars was a humanoid robot holding the steering wheel.
You obviously did not read Sally [wikipedia.org].
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It would also make robosexuals happy
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I totally agree. This is true for a lot of scifi writers of the time. Lots of good ideas, but they couldn't actually write that well. Awkward prose, flat characters. In the first Foundation book, every time you start to get to know the characters he jumps forward another generation and you have a whole new set of characters. It's almost like he was trying to prevent you from caring about them as individuals. But I don't think he was. He was just focused on his Big Ideas and didn't know how to turn th
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The books were about the fall of a galactic empire,
The books are about backwater hicks unaffected by the fall of said empire.
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Goyer did an interview with the hollywood reporter where he went into some detail, and it's clear he is a fan and I was a lot less worried after reading that.
Goyer's recent work includes Terminator: Dark Fate, and Batman vs Superman. Both were absolute abominations. Terminator: Dark Fate in particular absolutely shat all over the legacy of the previous Terminator franchise.
I'd love it to be amazing, but with Goyer at the helm, I very much doubt that will be the case.
answer.. (Score:3)
No, of course not.
It seems that sci fi films (Score:5, Funny)
can never escape the popular hairstyles of the year they were filmed.
Streaming fragmentation (Score:2)
No. (Score:2)
It's a yes or no question, right?
I read the books, fuck the movie. (Score:2)
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You totally forgot nearly everything in the books.
Big Sci-fi fan/reader & Isaac Asimov's Foundat (Score:5, Funny)
Why is this modded "Funny"? (Score:2)
Personally I thought the post was quite insightful - My first thought with all the explosions in the trailers that I'd give it a miss, but maybe I was being too hasty as there have been some terrific interpretations of source material (*cough* Battlestar Galactica *cough*).
Having said that I gave up an opportunity to see the premier of "Dune" at TIFF in September simply because there is no Feyd Rautha - I like Dave Bautista as an actor but the character of the Beast Rattan is really minor and one dimensio
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I should point out that even though I can quote the main characters from the Foundation Trilogy, Dune and a whole bunch of other Sci-Fi books, I have been laid.
Pics or it never happened.
When the headline is a question... (Score:2)
The answer can safely be assumed to be "no".
Sometimes I feel alone in my opinions (Score:2)
It was Asimov's Foundation which convinced me that reading science fiction was pointless, and I've read hardly any since then.
Reading Plato did the same thing for me for philosophy.
On the plus side, my bookshelves are now full of actual science and actual history, so those early experiences did do that bit of good for me.
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That's better than the logician's parlor tricks where you show him a drop of water and he deduces the existence of Niagra Falls. You read a single science fiction work and deduced the non-existence of sci-fi worth reading.
Having books on history and science on your bookshelves doesn't make you as unusual as you appear to think you are. There's no rule saying you have to choose to read either fiction or non-fiction, but not both.
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I read some other science fiction, too. Foundation is just the one that tipped me over the edge. So I looked at at least a dozen drops of water before deducing the existence of Niagara Falls.
Ironically, I didn't mind the pulp science fiction that I read as much, perhaps because it didn't seem to be trying to make some deep point. It was the attempt and failure of Foundation to make deep points that turned me off, I think.
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I'm a huge fan of pulp era sci-fi, although it is often crude and presumes upon the reader's ignorance. The best writers of the era would be outstanding in any era, e.g. C.L. Moore, Charles R. Tanner. The best pulp writing has a fairy-tale quality just one step removed from magic beans.
But the idea that pulp era writers didn't have axes to grind is just silly. They had all kinds of axes, often leaning on racist and and colonialist themes that would have been uncontroversial, even conventional in their ta
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I think literature that remains relevant has an open-ended quality to it that frees the audience to have their own point of view. Every generation has a new take on Shylock from Merchant of Venice, because although he is an antagonist, Shakespeare gives him powerful lines and compelling arguments. You can watch ten productions of Hamlet and not only will they all be different, what you come away from a performance with may be different from the person sitting next to you.
One relatively recent book I reall
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Well, what's the point in reading anything without utilitarian value? People do lot's of pointless things quite often. It's called entertainment and relaxation. Reading science and history is cool too, of course. More power to you.
As for Plato, he made an effort to use logic on issues that continue to tantalize humans to this day whithout the need for a religious doctrine. It really puts today's religions into perspective, in my opinion, and that's where it's value lies.
Pedigree (Score:4, Insightful)
[...] showrunner David S. Goyer, who co-wrote Terminator: Dark Fate and Batman v. Superman.
So, confidence is not high...
Evil Empire (Score:4, Funny)
Not so Evil Empire (Score:2)
The empire in Foundation isn't evil. In the books I never saw it as anything much more than a decaying bureaucracy.
I thought the way the Mule was portrayed and the way he used his powers were somewhat unique and sophisticated in the book - it definitely wasn't of the garden variety "Put the gun to your head and pull the trigger" mind control you read and see if most stories.
The Foundation traders were definitely not rogue - they were an important part of the Seldon Plan and working toward the goal of e
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Movies that are better than the books? (Score:2)
This should probably an "Ask Slashdot", but I thought I'd put it here.
For myself, the list is pretty short and includes:
- "Die Hard", quite a bit better than "Nothing Lasts Forever"
- "The Guns of Navarone"
There are quite a few movies that are based on the setting of a book but aren't the same stories, "Blade Runner" being a prime example of this. Maybe this is the same case as we'll see with the "Foundation" movie(s).
WTF Pessimistic headline EditorDavid? (Score:2)
Why come at it like this? You start off wit a headline that begs the question that it will fail, but maybe it can survive.
WTF are you to even ask such a question. A mammoth sci-fi classic by a legendary author. In an age where book series are successfully being turned into TV/Streaming series and becoming very popular.
Why do you have to come at it with doom and gloom? What, just to bait those clicks?
Fuck all if Slashdot isn't setting new standards for shitty posts.
Bad start (Score:2)
The first book was boring. I read the whole series at least three times, but it's hard to get past that, it's just too dry. The adaptation will have a hard time making it interesting.
Yes. (Score:2)
To be fair, (Score:2)
foundation (Score:2)
..might make a good SETTING for a science fiction series, and even some of the shorts might make action packed movies.
But...
1) let's be honest, the books' general disregard and dismissal of women are going to need...substantial rewrite and updating to bring them to something a 21st century audience would watch, enough that the stories - where women really even show up as characters - will be unrecognizable, and
2) "scenes" from the foundation series aren't foundation. Foundation was a galaxy spanning, millen
If they had to make a movie based on classic SF (Score:2)
Character beyond 1000 years (Score:2)
It's a story that takes place across multiple planets over 1,000 years, with a huge cast of characters. That makes adapting it extremely difficult, particularly to film.
There is one character than spans the whole story through multiple millennials: R Daneel Olivaw.
Re:Gaal is a female now ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless they are dealing with sexism, it's rare that the gender of characters in stories matters.
Gender Generally Means a Lot in '50s Sci-Fi (Score:2)
I just wrote a comment noting the importance of Baya Darell and Arkady Darell in the original trilogy and what they achieved in the books is largely due to the fact that they were women not fitting into the expectations of women at the time.
You'll find in '50s Sci-Fi that there were definite gender stereotypes that defined what a character's role in a story would and would not be. Men were typically the story protagonists, doing "manly" things including protecting the women. Women on the other hand tend
heck see "see you all Zombie (Score:2)
it changes the dynamic with other characters (Score:4, Insightful)
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But stating it won't change anything except in case of story of sexism, then I have to ask if we live in the same society.
Truth is, we don't live in the same society as when the book was written. When I was young and reading things from the 50s, it felt normal that all the main characters were men. Now when I read or watch things from the same era, it feels really weird: mostly-male characters create an incongruity to modern audiences that was not experienced by original audiences.
Therefore: to have the work received by modern audiences in the same way that it was received by previous audiences, without the incongruity, you of
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Indeed they are very reflective of their times. An interesting thing was pointed out by another slashdotter ages ago in another thread. Repeating it here but I don't wish to claim credit, but I cannot remember who said it.
You can see bias in what the robots do. Traditionally woman's work is automated away, but men's work isn't, so cleaning is done by robots but astronavigation is done by smart men with slide rules. There's an implicit value judgement on the work buried in there.
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All economic theories except capitalism depend on overpopulation for economic growth.
I would say exactly the opposite; capitalism depends on population growth for economic growth.
Most other economic theories implicitly assume equilibrium. (But then, I'm not sure that most other economic theories really work.)
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Search the trailer for the character Eto Demerzel. That was the alias and role Daneel took while watching over the Empire in this time.
Clearly you haven't read the books (Score:3, Interesting)
As then you'd know the names Baya Darell and Arkady Darell and the role they play in the trilogy.
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Yeah I heard they were also going to then Dr Calvin into a woman in the other adaptation.of Asimov's work. Just awful.