[Bryan See]

This was released during WWDC20. As you know, Foundation is the greatest influence of Star Wars, of which our mods here, as well as Mortal Engines (both the film and novels, the former is being used as a setting for my mod, Rekt Galaxies) is based.

[Colonol Dekker]

I've never heard of it.

But it looks intruiging,  I'm curious as to how much apple identifies/self deifies with the titular entity, despite no tangible improvement to life.   All they've done is repackage something existing.


Disussssssss

[The E]

Foundation is one of the foundational (heh) works of classic SF. As such, it has some great concepts and visions, but is not that enjoyable to actually read today; The concepts are good, the execution... less so, by modern standards.

Calling it a "great influence on Star Wars" is laughable. There's a big city planet in Foundation and a big city planet in Star Wars; that's about it.

The titular Foundation is a ... complex entity. It's an organization whose outward goal is to produce an Encyclopedia Galactica, an all-encompassing compendium of human knowledge. Secretly, its goal is to serve as a nucleus to restore the human imperium after its fall, to shorten the dark age to last only about a thousand years with the guidance of Hari Seldon's psychohistory (a statistical tool that is able to predict large-scale changes in human civilizations).

(Even more secretly, it's one of two such entities, the Foundation's founders being acutely aware that prophecy does have limits and needs to be helped along occasionally)

In other words: If Apple identifies with the Foundation (either one) on any level, they are either the latest in a long line of modern tech people completely misunderstanding SF-nal works (see also: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Iain M Banks), or ridiculously full of themselves.

[Luis Dias]

It was a major influence on many sci-fi, including star wars, hyperion, warhammer, even dune. The main contribution was to imagine an empire of galactic proportions and how it was slowly decaying and losing its ground, using the roman empire as a template.

I don't think Apple identifies with any of it, they just bought the IP and thought they could make a killer-app for their channel. A lot of that has been happening lately. I'm just waiting until they buy the 3 body problem trilogy and make a show out of that. Now that would be something potentially interesting.

Regarding Foundation, I'm a bit curious how they will manage such a long story with so many different protagonists in an actual "televised" show which usually demands consistent protagonists from start to finish.

[Colonol Dekker]

ridiculously full of themselves.

We have a winner.

[Buckshee Rounds]

It's been a few years since I read the books. I'm wondering where they will start it from, because you've got Prelude that takes place on Trantor then you've got the first book after that. If they start from the very start as far as the in-universe timeline goes, it will actually take a while before they get to Foundation.

Then there's the Robots series as well which takes place in the same universe hundreds (thousands?) of years before Foundation and gets tied in much later. I actually really would've liked to see a Robots series.