The Apple Foundation is related to the I, Asimov’s Robot as in the books

Isaac asimov Foundation comes to Apple TV Plus almost 80 years after the first publication in history. It’s the first major adaptation of the famous science fiction novels, but showrunners David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman’s series goes beyond the events of that original 1951 novel to incorporate elements from across Asimov’s sprawling and renewed universe. . Including the subject he is most famous for: robots.

Throughout his career, Asimov is probably best known to both Foundation, and his stories and robot novels, from which his quoted “Three laws of robotics. “While he kept those two great stories separate for most of his career, he eventually merged them into a single chronology. To better understand how this happened, you need to go back and look at the course of Asimov’s career.

The author began writing what would become the Foundation series in 1941, as a science fiction version of Edward Gibbon. The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Your editor at Amazing science fictionJohn W. Campbell Jr. was enthusiastic about the idea and sent Asimov to summarize not a short story, but an outline of a much larger future story, which will be told in separate installments in the magazine.

Around the same time, Asimov was also having some success writing a series of stories about robots. In his introduction to his collection of 1990 robot stories, Robot visions, the writer explained that he wanted to change the script about the types of robots he had read in pulp magazines growing up: “I decided to write a robot story about a robot that was used wisely, that was not dangerous, and that did the work that was I was supposed to do. ” His first story was “Robbie,” published in 1940, and he followed it up with others, all exploring the certain limitations that the Three Laws place on robots.

First: a robot cannot harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to be harmed.

Second: a robot must obey orders given to it by humans, except when such orders conflict with the First Law.

Third: a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov eventually compiled the various short stories that made up the Foundation and Robot worlds into two novels. I robot brought together nine of those original Robot stories and came to light in 1950, while the Foundation stories were published in three volumes called Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. But he kept the two series separate, noting in his memoirs: “If I got tired of one of them (or if readers did), I could move on to the other with minimal worrying overlap. In fact, I got tired of the Foundation. ”

The Robots and Foundation series catapulted Asimov to incredible fame within the sci-fi fandom, but left the Foundation behind to produce more than 30 stories and novels about robots, including a couple of books about a robot named R. Daneel Olivaw who solved mysteries with detective Elijah Baley in 1954 Steel caves and 1957’s The naked sun.

In the mid-1960s, Asimov ended up taking a short break from writing science fiction novels, but was finally drawn in in the early 1980s by his publisher, Doubleday. In his memoirs, he recounted the scene:

“Isaac, we want you to write us a novel,” editor Betty Prashker told him. A follow-up call clarified their marching orders: “When Betty said ‘a novel,’ we mean a ‘science fiction novel’; and when we say ‘a science fiction novel’, we mean ‘a Foundation novel.'”

Obediently, Asimov opened his own book and began to think about a continuation of the story, which would eventually become Foundation’s Edge, the fourth installment in the series. When it hit bookstore shelves in 1981, it was an immediate best-seller, prompting Doubleday to ask him to write another book. He was not particularly interested in returning to the world of Foundation, however, and chose to return to his Robot series, producing The robots of dawn in 1983, that became another best-seller.

When he set out to draw up his fourth book on Robots, he decided it was time to start bringing those two universes together, despite his publisher’s objections. As “my robots progressed further and further with each robot book,” he wrote, their absence from the Foundation universe became more and more pronounced.

In that fourth book, Robots and empire, Asimov began to explore some of the greatest limitations of the Three Laws and eventually established a Zero Law, one that prompts his robots to seek the greater good of humanity. Throughout the book, its two robotic protagonists, R. Daneel and R. Giskard Reventlov, established the basic principles of psychohistory, establishing the science that Hari Seldon would later learn thousands of years later in Foundation.

Subsequently, Asimov returned to the Foundation for three additional novels: the sequel Foundation and Land, as well as two prequels, Foundation Prelude and Forward the Foundation, which details the early life of Hari Seldon and how he came to develop psychohistory. In the end, Seldon comes face to face with R. Daneel, who was serving as Emperor Cleon I’s chief of staff under the name Eto Demerzel. After learning that Seldon was trying to devise a mathematical method to predict humanity’s future, Demerzel / Daneel tells him that he would like to help Seldon in an attempt to promote the Zeroth Law by developing a method to help protect to humanity.

[Ed. note: The rest of this piece contains spoilers for Foundation on Apple TV Plus.]

According to Goyer, while working to develop Foundation for Apple, he landed on a roughly eight-season plan (80 episodes total), and that there will be some major plot points over the course of that run, if at all. Talking with Reverse, Goyer went a bit further and noted that his focus was essentially remixing the original novels, sequels, and prequels. “Some elements of the sequels will appear in season 1,” he says, “and some of the elements of the prequels will appear in season 2.” (Apple has yet to publicly greenlight a second season of Foundation.)

Evidence for those robot stories appears in the first few minutes of Foundations second episode, in which Hari Seldon (played by Jared Harris) makes an interesting reference to world history: “There is an apple orchard in the Imperial Gardens that is older than Robot Wars,” he tells Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), a tantalizing hint of the big world and the history that Goyer has created.

There’s also an even more explicit reference to those stories, as we meet Demerzel, an adviser to the trio of Emperors, who is revealed in the second episode as a robot hiding as a very realistic-looking human.

Goyer explained Polygon that he has some important things planned for the first season of the show and beyond: “At the end of the first season we are going to answer a lot of important questions,” he says, “but there are some questions that we are not going to answer, or there are things to which which we allude to, as Robot Wars, which the plan is that we will get into. Hints and Easter eggs that are dropped for future seasons. My hope is that it also rewards the multiple views. ”