Jack Ryan seasons tended to start off strong, but then lose my interest as they got to the end. To be fair, that's also true of their source: the beginnings of Tom Clancy books are more interesting than their resolution.
We'll see.
Hopefully this doesn't go Altered Carbon and decide "This bit is too complicated for the audience, so we'll rewrite it." (Envoys were UN black ops used for civilian unrest suppression, some of whom defected, which was way more interesting than TV's "they're rebels")
Edit: What happened to Gibson being historically unwilling to sell media rights, after dissatisfaction with previous attempts?
Foundation is so awful it makes me sad. Fringe is one of my all-time favorites. Silo is pretty awesome. Jack Ryan was too Reacher (Krasinski was bad casting, and it felt like it was written by 16 yos).
I thought Foundation was great. A direct adaptation of the books would have been terrible, which is why nobody had done it yet. In case it helps, the companion podcast gives an episode-by-episode story of the changes - I agree with most of them, but can understand why they're controversial.
The empire parts are done well, and a nice solution to not having the same characters around when the time jumps. The production and design is good (at least for space/empire parts).
But then they also made other characters move through time so that... because they are special, and only they can save the plan!
It _entirely_ inverts (at least what I remember being) the entire point of the book, that individuals aren't uniquely special. It makes "The plan" look like a plan that needed to be actively managed by the uniquely special people involved - the same people, because they travel through time actively managing it - rather than an actual inevitable projection of history.
This then completely undercuts anything special about the Mule because, oops, we already gave people superpowers, so now it's just a generic action badass dude we have to fight.
At this point you aren't adapting foundation, you are fan-fictioning it. I guess attaching the name gets you money though.
> "The plan" look like a plan that needed to be actively managed by the uniquely special people involved - the same people, because they travel through time actively managing it - rather than an actual inevitable projection of history.
It was a rather important, though not initially revealed, point in the original trilogy that the plan was a plan that needed to be actively managed, by uniquely special people (including, but not exclusively, the strongest telepaths that could be found and gathered.)
Revealing this before the Mule is a radical change to the structure of the story, sure, moreso than changing the nature of the specialness of the guardians.
Right, the radical change is showing the Second Foundation getting built (and it having interesting reasons, in part due to individual mistakes, why it is getting built very slowly in time) not that the Second Foundation exists.
It's definitely an interesting storytelling change, and probably for the better. Second Foundation in the books is very much a seat of the pants deus ex machina where Asimov seemed to write himself into a clever puzzle with no easy answer and cleverly solved it "at the last minute" with a retcon, then sort of took another trilogy and a half to complete the retcon and deal with the consequences.
> It makes "The plan" look like a plan that needed to be actively managed
The plan was managed to an extent. That was the second foundation's job. And if you read far enough, even that and the Empire before it was quietly tuned from afar by R. Daneel.
So was Hari's exile to Terminus, which IIRC wasn't mentioned in the original stories that later formed the 1950's trilogy. That first part of the first book was written a few years after the original 8 shorts and IIRC contained things not at all alluded to in those shorts.
It's in the book series though. So they did the rather sensible thing of not doing the sudden reveal, but slowly building the anticipation and understanding that there are people with immense psychic powers etc.
I mean, in the book series there's even the out-of-the-blue Mule without any retconning.
I have a philosophy here. I read a book, and see it on another medium? Well, I pretend it's an account by another person who was there.
If 5 people are in a room during a big event, and you interview them, you will get 5 different accounts. Where they were looking when the event happened, what their allegiances are, who their friends are, their background, etc etc all results in a different takeaway.
So I'm OK with change. I can live with it.
Yet, Foundation IMO was well beyond this degree of change. And very very important things were left out, and could have been told.
For example, Asimov constantly described a broken culture of innovation. How many no longer even understood how the machines around them worked, and maintained them by rote. How scientists would merely read old books and papers, and debate that, instead of engaging in new research. This was a strong theme, and a massive reason for the Empire to fall, yet there were only hints of it in the TV series.
This could easily have been in the series, but I really don't think many people on staff even read all the books, and it shows.
I'm a huge Asimov fan (read the Foundation series multiple times) and I couldn't make it through three episodes of the horrible Apple series. And no, it wasn't because of the changes they made, the basics didn't work either. The adapted story wasn't comppeling, the characters/actors weren't well chosen for their roles, the script wasn't good, basically, every part of it was subpar. It's like it was written and directed by someone who wasn't an Asimov fan and who never read the books.
It reminded me of Amazon's horrible Tolkien series (Rings of Power), that is, exceptional special effects, but everything else sucked.
I urge you to try and re-read the Foundation series as an Asimov fan. The books are... barely passable. With the exception of the first one.
People claiming that series is bad haven't read the books in a long times.
There are no characters. There are talking heads that speak at each other. Women are non-existent. Every single person is a knight without fear or reproach. Huge galaxy-spanning powers come and go in lieu of interesting ideas (first the Mule and the R. Daneel).
The TV series (at least season 1, haven't seen season 2) is the best that could happen to the books IMO.
I enjoyed what we got in Season 2 of the "Brothers" of the pseudo-religion going out into the galaxy and sharing Terminus technology with already technologically fallen behind worlds. I wouldn't have minded more of that. I think that was at least a small hint as to how Terminus is going to wind up dominating the galaxy technologically.
After the last two seasons the Empire is the only interesting thing so they might have well just got rid of the parts of the story that was in the book of foundation but that would be two people talking to each other …
I'm a huge fan of the books since childhood and hated Season 1. One big speech after another by some god/demagogue/mathematician. It took me months to bother watching Season 2 but was happily surprised to find it as good as Season 1 was bad. Not without flaw, for sure, but certainly more watchable.
I hate-watched the first season just because I love Jared Harris and Lee Pace, held off on S2 but actually enjoyed it a lot more than the first one when I got around to it.
I think I enjoyed season 2 in part because I didn't have any expectations that it would be a faithful adaptation. I just enjoyed it for what it was. I think if I rewatched season 1 with the same attitude I'd probably like it more. It's a really solid SciFi show if you can just view it as its own thing and not constantly compare it to the books.
I watched season 1 with interest, but by the time I got an episode or two into season 2, I just couldn't muster the interest. Sounds like I should give it another try…
It’s antithetical to the books and it’s just painful, to me, to watch. I kind of like what they did with Empire in the first season, but only made it through two episodes of this latest season before giving up. I hate-read summaries of the rest of the season on Wikipedia and nothing I saw made me reconsider my choice. I’ll grant that Lee Pace is great but they stranded Jared Harris.
I think the number of people who read the books is quite small so they kind of had to pander to an audience that hadn't. I kind of enjoyed it but it is a bit...strange.
I read the books. But not many years ago like most people who claim to be Asimov fans or something. I went ahead and re-read the entire series before Season 1 was released.
Asimov is a horrible writer. The books are just bad (with the exception of the first one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39555390). And if you take the series as whole, what they did in the show is really good. Imagine springing the Mule or R.Daneel Olivaw out of nowhere like the books do?
Not the PP, however it seems Foundation is one of those series both the audience and the actors themselves must sort of adapt to. I didn't read the Asimov original books (well I started like 40 years ago but gave up after finding them boring in contrast to short and non SF stories by him) so I didn't have any expectations, and was mostly satisfied with the series that appears getting better and better with time. Definitely not a masterpiece, but quite good.
The only somewhat valid criticism I've read is that it's not exactly like the book. I went in fresh to the show and loved it so much that I decided to start the books. I'm enjoying both and mostly agree with the adaption changes to keep some semblance of familiar characters over a story taking place over hundreds of years. But I can see how it can be jarring if you went in expecting huge cast changes constantly.
Some parts of the internet however dislike the adaptation because the main cast is no longer almost entirely male and really hate the skin color of some of the actors.
It's very, _very_ far from the books. There's no point calling it "The Foundation". It's not even the same genre - how much action is in Asimov?
It's fine to judge it on its own and say it's good or bad, but then why the name? Basically for the tv show equivalent of clickbait. Which is why I hate it.
>It's not even the same genre - how much action is in Asimov?
An entire season of characters just talking about what happened instead of actually showing what happened would be painfully boring to watch.
I've only completed the first book, but thought the show did a decent enough job of having action while condensing the characters down so they could be available over multiple arcs for consistency for the contents of the first book.
People make a similar defense of Paramount's Halo.
>An emotionless supersoldier mary sue? It would never work as a TV series, we need to explore the spartans' emotions!
And so we get some garbage that misses what was beloved by fans and features Master Chief with his helmet off, being sad on the subway. Feels like it's written by people totally unconcerned with the source material, just like Apple-Foundation.
Unlike Apple-foundation, glimpses of what a proper Halo adaptation could have been exist:
> An entire season of characters just talking about what happened instead of actually showing what happened would be painfully boring to watch.
Is this an argument that the series is the same as the books? "Any changes that are necessary are not really changes" or such? I didn't argue that the changes are unnnecessary, or even bad. Just that they exist, and they are many. Sure sounds like you agree with me.
> The only somewhat valid criticism I've read is that it's not exactly like the book
The Foundation TV show did not even have the same ethos, the same world-view, the same philosophical view of history as the books.
Apple wanted a big dumb heroic VFX-driven sci-fi saga TV show; and we can understand why. However, the source material that they chose is about history, and is actively hostile to the "heroic" view of history. It actually seems to be a critique of the heroic derring-do sci-fi of the day and the "great man" theory of history. (1)
It's like the showrunners did actually understand what the books were _about_, but decided to deliberately do the opposite. Maybe they actively hated the books.
I could not care less if they change skin colour or gender; or spice up the action scenes, updates like that are good, but IMHO this is by far the least of the problems with the _Foundation_ TV series.
A lot of Season 1 and Season 2 have been showing Hari and Gaal making huge mistakes. The Second Foundation is way behind schedule and probably going to be founded "in the wrong place" versus the books and almost seems like it won't be strong enough when it is needed to face The Mule. The "real" Hari ("Knife Hari") is shown to be a fallible slimeball just as much as the religion around the "fake" "Prophet Hari" gels around his seeming "infallibility".
I think to some extent the TV show is showing a variation of the timeline with respect to the rules of psychohistory: it doesn't account for individual actions (including/especially mistakes). I personally don't think it is trying to be a "Great man theory" version of Foundation, because so many of the "changes" are mistakes from the seemingly more "pristine" timeline of the books (or at least how we perceive them from how the Encyclopedia Galactica documented them).
I can definitely appreciate where that criticism comes from though, I appreciate that it is a valid point of view of the show. I just find it worthwhile to point out that I don't feel like the showrunners are as oblivious as that and I don't think they are intending a "great man" take on the show and at least in my reading of the show so far I do think there are other ways to read what they are trying to do, plus or minus the format constraints of trying to do it as a TV show with the contractual and budget/production reality of needing to keep some cast member stability from episode to episode and season to season.
I hate this sort of "woke" argument. It's a way of shutting down valid criticism by portraying anyone who didn't like the show as a racist. I thought Foundation was a badly written show and poorly cast, but it had nothing to do with the gender or race of anyone, I just thought the cast mostly didn't give a shit, had never read the books, combined with a poor script.
But there were also people who criticized black female actors playing white male roles from the book, and that's not a valid critique if the gender and skin color isn't a necessary part of the role.
Besides, Asimov's book tend to have neither female characters nor people of color.
I think Foundation admits people of other races exist by book 5, in passing. And there are like two (maybe?) notable female characters in the entire book series.
So why are getting offended about call outs of actual racism if you aren't upset about the races of the characters?
The second part of your comment could have been anywhere in this thread, especially if you actually had specific complaints.
But you had to use the word woke and get angry, so you could pretend there haven't been racist comments about the show on the internet from the sci-fi community?
Pretending nobody is racist helps no one but actual racists from getting called out.
Oh I wasn't calling you a racist I was just saying that a lot of racists agree with you.
How is someone supposed to take that? Refuting an argument not made is either a great way to make a point or a great way to make someone really unhappy.
Dog whistling is like sealioning. I'm not saying it doesn't happen but it's the least worrisome and bothering thing on the Internet.
If someone is dog whistling they are effectively conceding the argument because they're too ashamed to make the case plainly. Just take the W. The alternative is to explain to someone (and some hypothetical audience) that you you know what's going on inside someone's mind better then they do.
And again - there are people who will literally say they are Nazi's. There are people who will make not dog whistle or beat around the bush argument but straight up I am not ashamed to say arguments for awful things.
If you like Foundation and disagree with the arguments that it's not good then engage the argument made - just saying that you think there's an unstated argument and you'd like to engage with that particular one doesn't really get you anywhere.
Woken Furies (the 3rd book) is my favorite of the trilogy, which is the other reason I'm salty about the Envoy rewrite, as it made reusing the plot impossible.
Perhaps once you reach 75 (76 in 3 weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson) you take a different view of media rights, what with your heirs not knowing how to extract maximum value.
> Jack Ryan seasons tended to start off strong, but then lose my interest as they got to the end. To be fair, that's also true of their source: the beginnings of Tom Clancy books are more interesting than their resolution.
To be fair, the Amazon Jack Ryan series is only related to Tom Clancy's in name(s) only. Loosely based on, Inspired by, or some other weasel words should be permanently affixed to the title screen.
On a tangent, I think the series Designated Survivor should be called Blatantly Ripped Off Clancy Plot
They track fairly closely with Clancy in tone and plot progression, IMHO.
To me, Clancy was always {interesting event} -> {discovery of unexpectedly serious implications of event} -> {race to uncover extent of implications, before it's too late}.
And I get why he converged on that! That's a banger plot, guaranteed to sell copies!
His earlier stuff bucks this trope (e.g. Red October and Red Storm Rising), but he was something of a different author in his more technically curious years.
"How to make neuromancer into a tv show/movie" is one of my favorite idle past-times, and for a long time, I used to think about how it would have to be updated to make sense with current technology, but after playing Cyberpunk 2077, I think they should fully commit to retro-futurism, and keep everything _exactly as it is in the book_, and just make it the future as seen from 1983, banks of pay phones and all.
I just don't think there's any way to update the technology and keep the story as it was written coherent, and I don't think it's necessary.
I don't think the phone scene at the Istanbul airport is particularly anachronistic, even now. (Cue Phoebe Bridgers' song "Kyoto": "They still got payphones")
The challenge for the showrunners is probably more that that scene was already done in one of the Matrix movies. Neuromancer was so original and has been so influential in so much mainstream media that playing it straight might feel derivative in some way.
BBC created a two part radio drama of neuromancer back in 2003. It disappeared from the BBC web site in 2011 but finally popped up online again. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/197833/105798
The other problem with updating it is that the future it was predicated on is mostly lost in mainstream.
Sure, the Sprawl trilogy has looming megacorporations, but fundamentally the Matrix is still a democratic, standardized, and free communication medium, open to use by all. Those megacorporations are simply islands in a much more vast net.
In contrast, modern computing reality is much more defined by walled gardens: Apple+Android devices, Meta, Microsoft Office, Discord.
To the extent that "doing what you want in the dangerous corners of the net" is an alien concept to younger folks.
I am a huge Neuromancer fan and have read the book at least twenty times. I’m not really optimistic about this, mostly because the world of the novel is too dirty, chaotic, and messy for a company like Apple to produce. It would need to be made by a director like Gaspar Noé or Alphonso Cuaron (I’m thinking of Children of Men) to get the mood right.
It will not be produced by Apple the company. It is comissioned by Apple TV but will be produced by some tv production company.
In any case, the “grittiness” and overall style is due to the director and creative team, not the company (although a company may specialize in certain genres).
Of course Apple might comission a production targeting specific demographic.
Apple+ definitely gives me a feeling of, well-polished, minimal, adult but in a cerebral, not somatic, way. Which is why I don't think they're a great fit for the very chaotic, 80s maximalism that is the Sprawl series.
The key point from that thread is probably about set dressing:
>> Unlike other traditional studios, Netflix does not store/warehouse set pieces. It all gets fire-sold at wrap. So at say, Paramount, a set designer can use elements from the last 25 years stored away with Paramount. Producers can pull elements from storage and slide chunks of the budget towards casting or other high production value.
It certainly seemed like For All Mankind warehoused a significant chunk of set elements, but I assume it was no-question greenlit into subsequent seasons.
I don't think Apple TV+ has a fixed brand aesthetic for their sci-fi shows. They seem to currently be the streamer most focused on variety of aesthetics for sci-fi shows. The retro-future of "Hello Tommorrow" was very different from that of "For All Mankind'. "Foundation" seems very different yet again from both of those. I have a hard time comparing "Severance" to much anything else in TV. Even on the grim/dark/grimy side they've got shows like "See" and "Silo". At least in terms of sci-fi shows I don't think there is a single "sci-fi brand" they are cultivating, they seem to be buying whatever interesting stuff they come across regardless of aesthetic. So far as a sci-fi fan I've found their variety refreshing in contrast to some of the other streamers.
I will say they've done 'not a terrible job' with their Foundation series -- another hardcore SciFi book. I don't recommend it to people for viewing but I've enjoyed it myself.
The Foundation tv show shares nothing but the name with Asimov's books. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it's a strange "adaptation". They should have called it something else.
If they do this the same way, the name Neuromancer will just be there to get some brand recognition for an arbitrary new SF series.
It is very definitely based on ideas from Asimov's books (along with a small pile of other inspirations – the clone emperors arguing amongst themselves reminds me a lot of Ann Leckie's Ancillary series).
The adaptation is very lose, but to say it has nothing in common beyond names is unfair.
I'm enjoying it (though not massively “wow”ed). A very accurate rendition of those works really would not make good TV, so I wasn't expecting it to be close to the original.
I think the only "accurate" adaptation would have been a Ken Burns style documentary of mostly someone reading out Encyclopedia Galactica articles, personal letters, and long slow pans of paintings of events because any "footage" was lost. There's probably an audience for that. It's probably a smaller niche audience than the adaptation we are getting.
> The Foundation tv show shares nothing but the name with Asimov's books
It is closer to the source material than the film _I, Robot_ was to the short story. It retains at least some of the overall plot.
I only watched the first episode, TBH, and didn't find it interesting enough to keep going. I'm pretty old (56) and I read my dad's original copies _Foundation_ as a little pre-teen kid, when it was already 30+ years old, and the sequel trilogy when they were newly released in the 1980s.
It has not aged well, and the producers did well to modernise it, I think.
> It is closer to the source material than the film _I, Robot_ was to the short story.
The film I Robot started out as an unrelated sci-fi who-dunnit that had bits of I Robot (the collection by that name, not the single short story of the same name it included) grafted in because the company had the rights for a limited time and needed to do something with them or lose them.
I'm a massive Foundation simp (it was a foundational - hehe - book for me and sparked my interest in econometrics and ML), and I found the Foundation show to be fairly acceptable.
The Foundation trilogy in it's original form doesn't really lend itself well to television, as it was a serialized anthology, sort of like a semi-disjointed Canterbury Tales.
When trying to convert that into a big budget prestige television show a la GoT, you will have to make some significant narrative changes.
Honestly, I appreciate it as younger people like me who are derisively called "Normies" were largely turned off to Sci-Fi due to the negative perceptions of older Gen X and Millenial fans (that fat nerd character in Simpsons is sadly too close to the truth ime), and most of the criticism I've seen against the Foundation TV show is largely Gamergate-esque and annoyed that certain characters are women or not white (despite Asimov purposely writing his stories in a race agnostic manner due to his racist editor).
The book has a lot to say about VR and AI, which are sensitive topics to show in a negative light at Apple. I'd be surprised if there isn't a lot of corporate oversight into how these subjects are presented.
"Do we really want to have the AI kill so many people? Maybe it can just incapacitate them..."
I haven't used one myself, but I don't get that impression at all. The Ono-Sendai is entirely VR, not AR, and definitely doesn't come across as having a user-friendly design.
The Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 was the visualization translation unit connected to a dermatrode headset (superseded by neuro jacks in later books) and was not completely alien to simstim input, evidenced by Case toggling between the two.
I always envisioned the Ono Sendai as something like an Alienware, except designed by Sony and actually popular amongst real computer enthusiasts (and powerful enough to warrant the reputation.)
One of my favorite things about Gibson is how impressionistic he is, especially for scifi, which leads to people having a lot of different mental images as they go through the books. :)
Per closest reading of the source, it seems like a complete Matrix set would be {computer} + {deck/sensory translator} + {neural interface hardware, e.g. trodes or jack}.
Believe it's also implied decks can run the Matrix standalone, without a computer, but likely have limited processing capacity.
My physical manifestation of the deck was definitely very 90s crap plastic, but hinting that there were powerful and expensive electronics concealed within.
There's also some textual stuff about them essentially being epoxy-filled / security-sealed to prevent tampering or reverse engineering.
The Mosquito Coast had a fair bit of grime and jankiness to it, although of course there were still a lot of pretty drone shots of the jungle. I think they can go there if they choose.
Seems Apple is owning the quality Sci-Fi TV space now, "For All Mankind”, “Foundation”, “Severance”, “Silo” to name a few. Keeps my subscription intact for now.
Of these I've only watched Foundation and I was unhappy with it. Salvor "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" Hardin solves every problem with punches and guns. The overall plot is the worst kind of mystery box and it totally drops the central themes of lifecycles of empires.
Of those, Foundation is the only one I wouldn't recommend at all. It might be middling if it was named something else but as a show that purports to be Foundation it's a complete insult to the books.
But the other shows, especially For All Mankind are really great.
For those who start For All Mankind, stick with it until the end of episode 2. I dropped out after episode 1 a while ago, thinking it was interesting but a little too slow and everyone was just moping around, but when I gave it a shot again by the end of episode 2 I was hooked and have binged all 4 seasons since.
I had a very similar experience, watched a bit of episode 1 and didn't really like it - went back and watched it again and really got into it and its probably my favourite long running show at the moment.
Yes, I really wish they hadn't done that Karen/Danny subplot. It was a cheap way of introducing tension between characters that didn't add anything to the show.
If it were most other show, this particularly subplot would have made me quit but this show is so good otherwise that I still follow it despite this.
> it totally drops the central themes of lifecycles of empires.
I don't get this. The cycling of one empire ("Empire") to another ("Foundation") is ALL of the series. How can it drop it if that's what it's all about every single episode?
> totally drops the central themes of lifecycles of empires.
That theme is very much out of fashion, you even have people trying to argue that the Roman Empire never went into decline. Everything always gets better, because technology, the inevitability of progress, etc. Anybody who worries about decline is a reactionary, etc.
Personally I think it fell out of fashion because it makes Americans nervous. It's more comforting to think that we're at "the end of history" and American global hegemony will be forever. The Foundation is just too challenging for modern audiences.
That's the thing I liked the most about the books. It was so painfully obvious that empires fall and rise that a mere human could predict the details of how it would happen. It's hand wavy sci-fi, but it's a fun setting and it does really push the point. The change in rhetoric, stagnation of culture, centralization of wealth, talks of secession, they're all markers of a declining empire. It's already happened.
Foundation suffers from it's origins as a series of disjointed short stories in the pulp magazines of the era that were later lightly edited into books. They are chock full of generic characters standing around discussing interesting ideas with very little action.
There was no way to turn it into a television show without major rewrites.
However, Invasion is my call for the weakest scifi show they've done.
Hard agree. I never bothered to look it up, because we were so disappointed, but it was like they changed writers or show-runners to people who didn't appreciate the material, but everything we liked about the first season was changed.
No more slow burn mystery, with lots of character-based world-building, and protagonists out of their depth putting things together from a limited perspective (with the audience usually one step - but only one - ahead of them). The second season is action heavy, with characters reduced to tropes who seem to have had a knowledge download and all become "special".
I've seldom been more disappointed in a continuation of something I loved.
For All Mankind first two season were great, it was competence porn and the alternative timeline was fresh and cool. Season 3 and 4 are just space drama. Good actors are keeping the characters alive and that doesn't help the overall story (which is totally irrelevant since the end of season 2 anyway).
That's my short take, I could be more nuanced but I don't have the time for a blog post :(.
And in non-scifi department, Ted Lasso and Masters of the Air are quite good indeed! I'd say they've got the best quality shows of any platform right now.
Ted Lasso has such a tonal shift across its seasons that it's definitely going to alienate a lot of people somewhere. The first season is a comedy with some poignant moments. The second is a comedic, yet poignant, drama. I've been told the third is a poignant drama with some comedy. As you can guess, they lost me after the second season, which I only finished due to momentum.
Reading this thread, it's interesting how divisive Apple's streaming lineup is. Sure, that's par for the course with any media, but opinions seem even more varied with Apple's.
Yes, I find that I either really like or really dislike Apple TV+ media. Which I don’t mind, because it means they are taking risks. But it’s a near 50/50 ratio, not 10% good and 90% garbage, which would make me question paying for it.
I think going farther than that, they are going for owning the quality "nerdy" science-ish related content.
See "See" as a good example to add to that list. Silo was incredible and I started working on the books because of that show.
And the show that I was looking forward too every week "lessons in chemistry". Was so good and very charmingly nerdy.
Some others like Prehistoric Planet, Hello Tomorrow (which wasnt great, but it had a certain charm too it), and whatever that D&D show was I can't remember the name of.
The books decline in quality very, very sharply. So much so that after loving the first book, I almost didn’t watch the TV series because the last book seemed like it was phoned in by a ghost writer and left a bad taste in my moth about the competence and vision of the author.
I'd watch that, but the beauty of the book is not so much in the storyline, but in how it's written.
Where more conventional authors would use a paragraph, Gibson drops select few words that convey as much. It's like reading from a zip file. It's truly something else. It'd be very difficult if not impossible to capture this in a film adaptation.
Someone who can convey the feeling and emotion of the text with just music and visuals, not by having a character or narrator blab on about how/why this tech does that and how the history of the world and blahblah.
I'm so upset they canceled that show. The time travel gimmick was as silly as it was in every time travel show (yet as sci-fi fans we can't help but watch anyway...) but the vision of the near future with e-bikes and stealth vehicles and drone warfare felt really contemporary, which is kinda awesome for a book written 10 years ago.
> The time travel gimmick was as silly as it was in every time travel show
I dispute that. It is perhaps the only SF I've ever read that solved the problem of time travel -- moving matter forwards or backwards through time -- and still told an interesting story.
I'd say in terms of realistic nature, it's maybe the best time travel story ever told.
It has the same problem as Quantum Leap in that the time passing in one timeline takes exactly the same amount of time as time passing another timeline. It feels like a contrived scenario that only exists to create dramatic tension.
Since the show got canceled, I don't know if it's ever explained, but the implication was that one "timeline" was essentially just a computer simulation in the other one... but if that's the case why not pause it? Why not adjust the parameters? Why can the simulation only be run in real-time?
I don't really need an answer. I don't mind suspending my disbelief for a decent story, and this was a decent story. It just stood out for me because the time travel stuff stood in contrast to the more plausible "20 minutes into the future" setting that perhaps could've made a compelling story on its own.
> Since the show got canceled, I don't know if it's ever explained, but the implication was that one "timeline" was essentially just a computer simulation in the other one... but if that's the case why not pause it? Why not adjust the parameters? Why can the simulation only be run in real-time?
The book's sequels do explore some of "physics" (and "ethics") of that. Worth a read if you enjoyed the show.
I loved the first season (watched it last month) and was blind sided by the ending, I thought they were just getting set up for the conclusion and I had two more episodes to go! So I googled when the next season was coming and got gut punched. :(
I'd say that's somewhat "victim-blaming" to say the strike killed it. It's Amazon Prime Video execs who killed it, apparently because the strike caused some delays that they weren't willing to make the effort to work around (while they did choose to renew many other shows).
I really enjoyed the Neuromancer book so hopefully Apple can make something of quality. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for The Peripheral, which was an ok book, but got a strange TV show adaptation (and I wasn't surprised at all to see it get cancelled after one season).
I'm always puzzled by the feedback I see on The Peripheral. Granted, I haven't read the book, so I'm not comparing to anything.
But the show was interesting, compelling, and fun. It also ended satisfyingly and absolutely doesn't need another season: in fact, it's hard to imagine a second season that doesn't go downhill. Better to leave it as it is.
The series started off reasonably well but then quickly became typical (season 3) Westworld-style television, filled with superheroes and entirely devoid of any consequences for the characters' actions. I recommend watching the first few episodes, then pretending that the rest don't exist.
> It's almost certainly too much to hope for, but my impossible dream is that this gets done up like it's the 1980s with circa-2012 CGI. A bold kind of retrofuturism we haven't seen yet in film.
> Thing is, you can't take Neuromancer out of the '80s. The newness of computer networks, the ascendancy of Japan, the aesthetics of computer hardware -- boxy, whirring things with stark, green CRTs spewing masses of indecipherable alphanumeric incantations, big clunky cables, heavy briefcase-size mobile units; it's all there. And the mash-up of digital and analog technologies is no less integral than Gibson's opening lines to the book, comparing a halogen-hazed night sky to the analog noise of TV transmission.
> Neuromancer didn't arrive into a world comfortable with computer technology like ours today. The book stands as a fantastic trip back into a time when technology could be dark, dangerous, and foreign, a zeitgeist Gibson leverages to dazzling effect. "Updating" Neuromancer would bring its entire shadowy world out into the unthreatening, mid-day sun.
If any streaming service has proven hospitable to retro futurism, it’s Apple TV+. I'm cautiously very hopeful that the Sprawl has finally found the right home for a translation to screen.
Disagree - I think computer tech is notable for its absence if you read the book carefully. From memory there's the "megabytes of RAM" throwaway, a paragraph-long description of the Ono-Sendai deck, and not much else. I think it's because Gibson's focus wasn't the technology, it was the medium that the technology created. He was writing at one level of abstraction, and us geeks were reading at another, much lower level of abstraction.
Apple has been really hit and miss. Slow Horses and Masters Of The Air are great, but For All Mankind focussed too much on the relationship drama rather than exciting missions.
To each their own. To me this is like complaining about the relationships in Breaking Bad, which would have been just another Mexican drug cartel show without the relationship "drama."
The relationship drama added quite a bit of depth to the traitor plot, I don't see it detrimental at all to the exciting missions and social issues arising from those missions.
Yeah, I wish there were a similar high-budget series about the actual real missions from both the USA and USSR. So many exciting close-calls in Apollo, the race after Sputnik, the unfortunate Soyuz deaths and Space Shuttle disasters, the attempt at N1 and Buran.
Masters of the air is Amazing! The costumes alone are amazing. Restored leather bomber jackets, period accurate women's clothing, they even got the medals on their jackets right and you can see them changing the episodes. Colleen Atwood did an amazing job.
Apple is surprisingly good at sci-fi and sci-fi-adjacent TV series. It's somewhat strange to see a genre that has been shunned for years suddenly flourishing.
Apple seems distinctly interested in, and respectful of, sci-fi. I have at least a little bit of optimism that, in their hands, it will work better than The Peripheral did on Amazon, which unfortunately was a hard to watch for me.
I agree that Apple is surprisingly good at sci-fi, but I'd disagree about the genre being shunned for years. It seems you can't throw a rock these days without hitting some lame, sci-fi-flavored TV show that has no internal consistency. I think Apple's doing well because they're doing the work (and paying the cost) of getting well-done sci-fi shows made.
Please note that you aren't getting downvoted because people disagree with your disagreement, but because your comment adds nothing to the discussion. (currently "I completely disagree.")
I’m good with that, internet points don't matter to me. But ask yourself, did the comment I replied to actually add anything to the discussion either? I think a simple voice vote is reasonable discourse.
You won't find many people on HN that care about Karma, it's not that kind of site. However, you'll find that many people here don't care for trite comments that add nothing to the discussion.
If the producers want to retain the spirit of the book, they'd have to take a film noir approach, and also include the reality of a world in which corporate conglomerates with private armies hold at least as much power as the traditional nation-states and institutions (e.g. Turing Registry). This might be challenging for Apple to embrace, it might not be the kind of dystopian vision the head office will want to promote.
I also hope they don't try to update themes, in particular Rastafarian Zion habitat (sort of a 1970s concept) shouldn't be chopped out... all in all seems pretty challenging, and the result might be some atrocial rewrite like the Hollywood version of Ghost In The Shell.
I really hope this and 3 Body don’t go the way of Wool or Foundation. None of them are stories with broad appeal yet the huge investments don’t bode well for persevering their spirit as we’ve seen with the latter. The skimping on wool/silo really hurt.
Foundation was near-unadaptable as-is, given that it spans eras and wants the user to emotionally attach to the structure, rather than the individuals. For TV shows, audiences generally attach to characters (and the actors and actresses that play them), and the kind of story that allows a single cast to span eras would need to engage with some degree of time travel, cycles of life and/or abuse, or immortality, none of which fit in with Foundation.
That said, Neuromancer is a book that's more "cool" than good; Gibson is very good at painting pictures with words, but story itself is something of a convoluted mess. Hopefully an adaptation can give the writers a chance to smooth out the elements that don't work.
Exactly this. The "characters" of foundation was pretty much just men sitting around drinking alcohol, smoking and congratulating each others on how amazingly their plans worked.
There's nothing for people to follow or root for, the characters are just vehicles for the story, they don't grow or have a much of a personality.
As a voracious reader of Asimov/Clarke/etc. as a kid, I can confirm that your description fits a depressingly large fraction of that era of SciFi.
That kind of SciFi is at its best when the ideas (which are often the only thing that really matters) are so strong, they carry it all — Nightfall, Rendezvous with Rama — and at its worst when it's a bunch of “just men sitting around drinking alcohol, smoking and congratulating each other” (God, I love that description!). Even when the rest of one of his books is good, Heinlein can't resist inserting at least one pompous character just like that, and I can never believe it's not him!
The more recent deluge of female/non-binary/asexual/etc. characters and authors in SciFi is such a breath of fresh air.
I feel that 'Civilisation' was supposed to be the main character in the book, and you should be rooting for 'Civilisation' to survive and grow. The humans that come and go are bit players that are only relevant to the extent they help or hinder this main character.
I don’t think any novel is un- adaptable. That’s like the statement “such and such musician defies categories” which is meaningless to anyone who studies the topic. Retroactively I could say the same thing about any popular blockbuster sci-fi like Star Wars for example. The fact that TFT takes place over centuries doesn’t disqualify it from being adaptable. It just take directorial talent.
I watched it because I can tolerate quite a bit of jank if there's nothing else compelling to watch, and if the source is good.
That said, I don't know if I'd consider it enjoyable. Effects being cheesy is fine. But the pacing was very odd. Not sure if it was originally released on another schedule, but watching it straight through, the pacing seemed really odd. It started out fairly decent, but around the midpoint it seemed to keep rehashing things a lot more while completely forgetting about some threads.
I still applaud the effort, because it's not necessarily an easy adaptation, and as you say, they stick to the source pretty strictly. I'd rather a mixed but solid attempt than a complete rewrite to be more typical cable/streaming fare (which is what I expect from the upcoming Netflix version).
Also, I know this is common in reverse, but it was hilarious to see the C-grade acting from the not-Americans in the "war room" scenes. It was like someone reading from a script with zero comprehension or emotion. I was curious if they just didn't bother past finding a guy who spoke English, or if they wanted him to sound a certain way but didn't care about the acting since it wasn't aimed at an English-speaking audience.
The AI aspects of Neuromancer probably have more relevance and cultural appeal now than they've had at any time since it was first published. There's a lot of topical material in the book to work with.
The challenge will be updating it so that it feels fresh and non-derivative to an audience that has already seen "The Matrix". I wonder if they'll take the approach of renaming core elements introduced by Neuromancer like the "matrix" and "Zion", or whether they'll take the tack of keeping it all as written and leaning in ("see the material that inspired other sci-fi legends").
What was wrong with the Wool adaptation in your opinion?
I (re)read the books while watching the show and yes they did some modifications, but I could see why most of them were made (the lack of intra-silo email for example) and there were a few choices that will echo into the later seasons more than I could expect. (Like people ending up in different places than in the book)
But I trust that the writers read all of the books before writing the first season =)
Silo jumped from reveal to reveal without giving enough development time for them to matter. You (the viewer) immediately know who is good and who is bad through TV tropes. My partner understood what was going on and the characters alignments almost immediately. (They hadn’t read the books.) when I see an adaptation I don’t want to just be shown the highlights so that I can go “yep I know that scene” I want to experience the story told though a different medium using that medium’s unique characteristics. Not just a picture book with captions. (And the size of the silos was way off from the books. Modern CGI could have pulled that off but the reduced size of it for the sake of the shot… it felt cramped and silly.)
As I said in a sibling comment, I really did like the Tencent version of 'The Three Body Problem'. They did add a couple original characters, and condensed certain sub-plots, but overall it is a good watch and a pretty faithful adaptation.
I agree, the trailer did not endear me to this retelling. I thought that the Tencent version of the first novel was a good watch, but they added material too. I will probably give the Netflix version a chance, but I’m not holding out hope that they resist the urge to Americanize the story by adding action and romance for more ‘mass market’ appeal.
I watched the trailer as a cynic who has be burned for DECADES by shitty translations of beloved books into movies/made-for-TV. My favorite adaptations vary so significantly that it almost doesn't make sense to compare. (E.g.: Carrie, The Shining, 2001 diverge quite a bit from the books.)
That being said, I was excited to see Da Shi looked almost exactly as how I pictured him, maybe a little less grizzled and angular. And I'm embarrassed to admit the cover "everything in its right place" gave me chickenskin. I think the sophon countown looked interesting (scribbling like a fast etch-a-sketch, which is probably what it would look like if it had to travel the planet all day!), and the unfolded sophon looked pretty badass. I was also thrilled about the trial of Ye Zhetai, and the army of logic gates. Hm... i'm getting excited again despite my better judgement. The suicides OTOH looked gratuitous.
I hope it's good. I hope they can get around the fact that Neuromancer has been so influential for so long that making it now risks having it seem like a rip-off of all the things which copied it.
In any case, I'm intensely curious to see how they approach the visual representation of jacking-in. How do you not have it end up like Lawnmower Man or Johnny Mnemonic? My guess would be to have jacked Case look exactly like non-jacked Case except he's in some kind of workspace or cockpit. That would allow you to have the Dixie Flatline there too for all the "as you know, Bob" asides they're probably going to need.
I enjoy the Sprawl books the most, but of his three completed trilogies, I think either the Bridge Trilogy or the Blue Ant trilogy would be 1) more easily put to film and 2) possibly more enjoyable as television series.
I remember being astounded by Johnny Mnemonic when in came out in Omni Magazine, of all places.
(Incidentally, for those old enough to have encountered that magazine, you can see it online at: https://archive.org/details/omni-archive/). I have a ton of nostalgia for Omni. It reflected the techno-optimism of the era and along with G.E.B., was a profound influence on in my life, ultimately leading me into CS.)
You know I was thinking the other day that "civilization" is becoming a lot like the novel. We're quite enmeshed with technology already. What do we need a TV series for? Perhaps it's another mechanism of industrial society to create fiction such as this so that it is perceived as something distant, when in fact we're becoming like the world in Neuromancer as we speak.
"I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible." is one of my favorite phrases I've found in a book (Right there by also William's Neuromancer's the sky is set in a dead tv channel - not verbatim here)
This is from Johnny Mnemonic actually, not Neuromancer. The full section:
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I'd had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on the lathe, and then load them myself; I'd had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand-loading cartridges; I'd had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers-all very tricky. But I knew they'd work.
I think TV static is like floppy icons in UIs. It's been referenced enough as a no-signal indicator, as well as a deeply rooted cultural thing, that even Gen Z will recognize it.
It's funny because they'll recognize it as a cultural artifact. Used for artistic effect. Whereas, for me, it meant something more practical. Meant I was up too early or too late for anything to be on the telly. Or it meant something was wrong with the reception and I'd have rearrange the rabbit ears. Later on, it meant my Atari 800's connector had gotten loose and I'd have to go back behind the massive TV to tighten it up.
I see a lot of bill boards showing "No Input" and "HDMI 1" on a pastel blue starry skyfield. It's what pops up when you google image search for "no signal samsung".
Looking forward to see another of my childhood favorites turned into a woke-culture war casualty…
For novels, being “canceled” is apparently a better fate than being loved by the new elites.
(Sorry, I really hate how the Foundation is treated by Apple)
Enjoyed LOST and Fringe.
Jack Ryan seasons tended to start off strong, but then lose my interest as they got to the end. To be fair, that's also true of their source: the beginnings of Tom Clancy books are more interesting than their resolution.
We'll see.
Hopefully this doesn't go Altered Carbon and decide "This bit is too complicated for the audience, so we'll rewrite it." (Envoys were UN black ops used for civilian unrest suppression, some of whom defected, which was way more interesting than TV's "they're rebels")
Edit: What happened to Gibson being historically unwilling to sell media rights, after dissatisfaction with previous attempts?
And also, reference to the New Rose Hotel movie that was supposedly Gibson's fave: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133122/