Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels: are they really filmable?

News comes from the Wrap that Jonathan Nolan, brother to Christopher and co-writer of hit film Interstellar, has a new project in hand: a television series for HBO and Warner Brothers TV of nothing less than Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.

According to the Wrap, Nolan has “been quietly developing the project for the last several months”, although he let slip his admiration for the work in a recent IndieWire interview. Asked which was “the one piece of science fiction you truly love that people don’t know enough about”, he named, swearily, the Foundation books.

“They’re certainly not unknown, but that’s a set of books I think everyone would benefit from reading,” said Nolan. “That’s a set of books where the influence they have is just fucking massive; they have many imitators and many have been inspired by them, but go back and read those, and there are some ideas in those that’ll set your fucking hair on fire.”

Well, yes. It’s many years since I last read them, but I’d say the Foundation books were probably the first proper, grown-up science fiction I read as a teenager, picking up my parents’ ancient paperbacks and seeing my horizons widen, instantly, as I fell into the world of psychohistorian Hari Seldon, the mutant Mule, and my favourite character: Arkady Darell, stowaway and teenage hero.

Set in the far, far future, the series is hooked on Seldon’s prediction of the collapse of the Galactic Empire into barbarism, using psychohistory – a future-predicting science – and maths. Seldon’s calculations forecast a dark age of 30,000 years. He sets out to shorten this, by collecting and saving and expanding the knowledge of humanity in the Foundation. That’s what I remember – as I said, it’s been years. But I have a vivid memory of almost dropping Foundation and Earth in shock and delight when I got to the end … .hair not quite on fire, but getting that way.

The books won Asimov the Best All-time Novel Series Hugo Award in 1966, beating The Lord of the Rings. They are, according to the Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, a “unique masterpiece” (Krugman’s is a fantastic introduction to the series, by the way, not least for his assertion that, rather like Seldon, we are “making progress” towards developing “a social science that gives its acolytes a unique ability to understand and perhaps shape human destiny”. Wow.)

God knows how Nolan is going to pull the centuries-spanning, disparate, many-stranded stories together to work as a television series; they were written “over the course of 50 years, starting from a time when Asimov was at the unspectacular beginning of his career and the Golden Age was a year old, to a time when Asimov was one of science fiction’s Big Three”, says Asimov Online – and the author himself admitted to their occasional contradictions. “The 14 books, all published by Doubleday, offer a kind of history of the future, which is, perhaps, not completely consistent, since I did not plan consistency to begin with,” he is quoted on Asimov Online as writing.

According to the Wrap, it’s been tried before: “Sony Pictures acquired Foundation in a multi-studio auction back in 2009 and attached Roland Emmerich to direct and produce. Two years later, the studio hired Dante Harper (“Akira”) to adapt the books. When the project failed to materialize, HBO spent big bucks to acquire the property when it became available earlier this summer.”

Nolan’s focus is the original trilogy – Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation – the Wrap writes. Is it filmable? Can it work? I’m not sure, but I really, really hope he can pull it off. At least I’ve time before it happens to unearth those old paperbacks, and reacquaint myself with Seldon and psychohistory, and most importantly with Arkady. Anyone care to join me?