Agreed.
The inspiration behind the Foundation series, setting out to shorten the Dark Ages after the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is great.
However, if you try reading those short stories again today, you're quickly reminded that early in his career, Asimov was already great at world building, but terrible with characters and dialog.
Add in the mismatch between the cultural norms of the 1940's (when the early Foundation stories were written) and the cultural norms today, and a rewrite was always going to be required.
The Foundation stories were written in 1941-1950. In 1951 Asimov stopped writing fiction for thirty years.
So it's not "early Asimov" by any means.
When he came back to write Foundation sequels his characters and dialog hadn't improved.
Asimov was always an author only of ideas. His best dialog was the terrible and deliberately corny dialog in the Azazel fantasy-comedy stories, very much done in imitation of P.G. Wodehouse's cleverer banter.
Excerpt from one of the 80's foundation books:
“Is not all this an extraordinary concatenation of coincidence ?” Pelorat said, “If you list it like that.”
“List it any way you please,” said Trevize. “I don’t believe in extraordinary concatenations of coincidence.”
Cringe.
OK, great, it's not just me. I was about to respond, "wait, did he ever get good at characters and dialog? I've read a lot of Asimov, and at no point have those ever not been distractingly bad."
He wrote the first Foundation story when he was only 21.
That certainly qualifies.
Having said that there were cringeworthy aspects of the first Foundation book that improved over the subsequent books. I recently reread the series and came to the shocking conclusion that he must have been a virgin (or at least not exposed to women) in the first book.
It gets confusing because once he was famous, magazines would call him up asking for a story and he'd give them one that he'd written between 1939-1951 that had been rejected. They'd accept it because he was now a legend.
So Second Foundation, at least, is not early Asimov. It's arguably late Asimov. And it's exactly as wooden as the other parts of the original trilogy.
That said, I've read every bit of fiction he ever wrote and loved most of it, so...
> The first foundation book is one of the best
Best of what, though?
Suggestions?
In my case, it’s been 20+ years since I read Foundation (IIRC only the first three books)
If you haven’t already, I recommend reading “A Canticle for Leibowitz”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deconstruction_of_Fallin...
(For very fuzzy definitions of “these days”)
I loved the premise of the books, but I just couldn't find myself to care about any of the actual characters.
I think the same story, but where at least some of the characters are truly immortal (reasonable for far future sci-fi), would be better.
Basically a mashup between Peter Hamilton and Foundation would be cool, his work does a good job of showing "far future technologies".
I felt the only actual 'character' you where supposed to care about was Civilization itself. Everybody and everything else where bit players and side characters who's fates only mattered to the extend they helped or hindered Civilization.
The Empire changes/storyline in the show are potentially setting up Demerzel at least to overtly be in some interesting places across the timeline. [1] They've also taken a fun path to play Lee Pace across most of the Fall, though not directly as an immortal.
[1] Plus, lots of fun debate to be had over which Robot Demerzel "really is" and/or how much in communication Demerzel is in with any/all of the rest of Asimov's most famous Robots that we know survived to (and were observing) the Foundation era.
The world building for the Confederation and the Adamist and Edenist societies as well as the various alien races was very well done.
They might want to rethink the choice of Al Capone, which seems a bit over the top.
All the possession contagion dovetails with our COVID concerns, yet is so different as to allow exploration by metaphor.
The instagramish phenomenon Kiera Nightly convinces youths to travel to a remote place where they are tortured until they yield to possession: Reminds me of fyrefest.
The large amount of hilarious dark humor should translate very well. For example, the sadistic edenist who overcomes possession by being the mentally strongest edenist. And the plain sadist who re-possesses his body from his possessor by being more screwed-up than a soul that had endured what amounts to hell.
