News hit late yesterday that Jonathan Nolan (Christopher’s brother and often creative partner) is developing the seminal Foundation stories by Isaac Asimov for HBO. There is no word on what the format will be (movie, mini-series, series), but we can only hope that it’ll get the big-time Game of Thrones treatment that it deserves. For many of us geeks who grew up devouring sci-fi literature, this series was huge, and outlines some of the biggest ideas in the genre. From Wikipedia:
The premise of the series is that the mathematician Hari Seldon spent his life developing a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory, a concept of mathematical sociology. Using the laws of mass action, it can predict the future, but only on a large scale. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Galactic Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a dark age lasting 30 thousand years before a second great empire arises. Seldon also foresees an alternative where the interregnum will last only one thousand years. To ensure the more favorable outcome, Seldon creates a foundation of talented artisans and engineers at the extreme end of the galaxy, to preserve and expand on humanity’s collective knowledge, and thus become the foundation for a new galactic empire.
This will be SUCH a hard project to pull off, given the current ways of making space epics these days. This is NOT a space battle, special effects epic. It has to be done like the best miniseries in ‘normal’ fiction, like those in the 70s, like Rich Man, Poor Man. (is Richard Chamberlain still alive? 😉 Heaven FORBID if they destroy it and totally ignore the real gist of the books like the horrible, Horrible, HORRIBLE Starship Troopers movie!! THAT was NOTHING like the incredible Heinlein book. It was like they had oneof their kids read 2-3 pages of the book and the character list and didn’t have time to read the rest themselves. They would do well to read/watch some of the true 50s/60s classics I have in my eBay collections, like Forbidden Planet, Day the Earth Stood Still (NOT the crap Keannu Reeves version), When Worlds Collide, War of the Worlds (NOT the crap Tom Cruise version – see a pattern here? ;-), 2001, Planet of the Apes, et al. (-:
http://www.ebay.com/cln/missingpieces4u
This is from one of the writers of the movie ‘Interstellar’ I think Jonathan Nolan knows what he’s doing.