Foundation on AppleTV vs Asimov's books

[ionelv]

We started watching Foundation on AppleTV (3 episodes so far), and since I never read the books, I was curious how far have the writers strayed. This article summates it nicely (with spoilers). Reviews so far have been mixed to put it mildly: The Independent (with a nice summary of previous and current SciFi book->screen adaptation attempts), Vulture, The Guardian, Geek Tyrant, metacritic, Roger Ebert, reddit, NY Times, WaPo, BBC, Empire.

PS: Paul Krugman covered his admiration for the original books back in 2012.

PS2: Asimov wrote about how he came up with it and one can find the original short story from Astounding May 1942 on archive.org (see also the 2nd , 3rd , 4th , 5th, 6th [a , b], 7th, 8th [a, b, c] installments from 1942-1950 in the same mag @archive.org).

PS3: A few thoughts: 

* The idea of the Encyclopaedia Galactica reminds me of a bit of the futility and limitations of Principia Mathematica project.

* The timespan and wide angle of the series reminded me of Card's Homecoming saga. Until now, I did not realise that Card's Homecoming has some overlap/similarities with LDS and BSG :)

* Converting words into pictures will always fail to deliver due to screenwriter's liberty with the original (e.g.  relations between Empire, Anacreon and Terminus) and losing all the nuances of the original (e.g. humor such as "by the Emperor's left big toe").