Foundation
By Well, this is hell of a thing.
“I read it with mounting uneasiness,” Asimov wrote the next year. “I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and of conversation. No action. No physical suspense.”
Asimov’s self-deprecating description of his own series sounds as inviting as a synopsis of Season 1 of The Leftovers. And soon, it might be available for the same subscription price: According to a report at The Wrap earlier this week, Jonathan Nolan (brother of Christopher, and cowriter ofInterstellar) is writing and producing an HBO/Warner Bros. TV series based on The Foundation Trilogy.1
I wonder if we can avoid Ben Kingsley as Hari Seldon? And let me be the first to put in a vote for Robin Lord Taylor as the Mule.
There’s nothing I’d like better than a well-executed television version of the Foundation trilogy (we’ll set aside, for the moment, the prequels and sequels). And there’s no one more capable of doing this well than HBO. But having read the entire trilogy a dozen times, I struggle to come up with the names of more than a handful of characters, most of whom don’t appear until the Mule cycle of stories. It’s going to be tough.