Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Could Be Science Fiction’s Next Great Adaptation

Apple has announced its first cast members for its upcoming adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation: Jared Harris (Chernobyl, The Expanse) will play Hari Seldon, while Lee Pace (Guardians of the Galaxy, Halt and Catch Fire) will play Brother Day. On Wednesday evening, Deadline reported that Snow White and the Huntsman and Ghost in the Shell director Rupert Sanders will direct the pilot episode for the series.

It’s a promising next step in the classic series’ long and winding road to the small screen.

In August 2018, Apple greenlit the project for a 10-episode series after putting it into development for its forthcoming streaming TV service in 2018. The show will be part of the company’s Apple TV + platform, which launches on November 1st with the alternate history space race saga For All Mankind, from Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore, as well as the non-genre entries See and The Morning Show. David Goyer will serve as showrunner for the series, and the show’s writers’ room includes noted fantasy and comic author Saladin Ahmed.

Apple TV+ is part of the tech company’s big push into content creation (which also includes streaming music and video games) aimed at driving consumers towards its devices, a general industry trend that has proven to be a boon for sci-fi and fantasy fans as many popular novels have been snapped up for adaptations by franchise-hungry platforms, from Netflix’s Altered Carbon to Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

It’s easy to see why Foundation was a prime target for Apple. With its genesis in a series of short stories in Astounding Science Fiction in 1942, Asimov’s series was inspired by Edward Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The first novel, a fix-up of several of those earlier stories, was released in 1951. It follows the efforts of a mathematician named Hari Seldon as he discovers that the millennia-old Galactic Empire would soon collapse. He begins setting up measures to ensure that the resulting dark ages will be shorter in the form of an archive on a distant planet; called the Galactic Encyclopedia, the installation is intended to help civilization rebuild itself. Apple’s log-line promises more action: “a band of exiles who discover that the only way to save the Galactic Empire from destruction is to defy it.”

Asimov went on to write two other books in the initial trilogy, Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953). Decades later, he expanded it by way of a number of sequels and prequels, including Foundation’s Edge (1982), Foundation and Earth (1986), Prelude to Foundation (1988), and Forward the Foundation (1993). In these later volumes, the series also broadly connects to his novels and stories in the Robots series.

While published decades ago, Foundation has had an immeasurable impact on the state of science fiction: franchises like Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and George Lucas’s Star Wars all draw from it in ways both obvious and subtle. Accordingly, there have been numerous efforts over the years to adapt the novels as films—New Line Cinemas optioned the books in 1998 and again in 2008; Columbia Pictures worked with Roland Emmerich on a film trilogy—and, when those projects failed, as a television show. Before Apple got involved, HBO took a stab at it with Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan.

It’s not hard to see why those earlier projects didn’t work out: Foundation is a book from a different era of science fiction, a sometimes difficult read with a narrative that plays out over hundreds of years and featuring little in the way of the tropes that many associate with epic space opera (big battles, flashy technology). Those factors alone make the story a difficult one to adapt as a two-hour feature film, but after HBO’s Game of Thrones demonstrated that audiences will stick around for a dense, complicated fantasy story, premium TV networks and streaming services have begun scooping up tons of genre novels, from the aforementioned Altered Carbon, to His Dark Materials, The Lord of the Rings, The Stand, Who Fears Death, and others.

Foundation certainly seems to be Apple’s attempt at launching its own Game of Thrones-level genre show. Should the series succeed—and recent casting and behind-the-scenes announcements seem to be a promising start—it could develop into one of the most thoughtful, interesting dramas ever to be set in deep space. And given the number of sequels already on bookstore shelves, there’s plenty of material for Apple to mine for many, many seasons to come.