But Hari Seldon is being very clear that those characters are wrecking his psychohistorical predictions by being like that. It's perfectly fine, IMO, for psychohistory to have not been as complete and omnipotent as Seldon initially thought it was. It'd be kind of annoying if it was, frankly. I prefer stories where the characters have agency and have to make efforts for things to turn out well.

That flaw turned out to be present in the books too, BTW. The Mule was the universe's most special boy in there, the show's just added two extra ones to the mix on the protagonist side.

Also, "the entirety of psychohistory and the Foundation hinges on us storming X place with guns and explosives in the next fifteen minutes!"

Ugh. Yuck. Hard pass. Go home, Goyer, you're drunk (on the aroma of your own emissions).

Which would be fine if the magic pixie dream girl wasn't insufferable as hell and had a terrible actress.

The needed the mystery to follow Gaal without her being in the story, just a legend they searched the galaxy for.

There's Anacreon, though it's only very loosely based on the books.

I can't do it. There's a very simple principle here that seems to escape most of hollywood lately: If you want to do something different, then call it something different! I mean at least change part of the name. Look at the first four Star Trek sequel series, they all had different names, and still were closer to the original than that crap that Abrams spewed out. Even The Orville is closer to Star Trek and it doesn't use any of the original names at all. The Gotham tv series doesn't even have the name "Batman" in it. I know they weren't allowed to but still, makes it far easier to take as its own thing. It's almost like they are trying to do it backwards, where the closer the name is to the original, the less it bears any resemblance to it.

The big time jumps do make it a difficult story. The names of the people on the page are always changing and you don’t get true character development or drama.

The show doesn’t execute this well, it tries to avoid it. It bends over backward to invent multiple ways for the characters to defeat death. Cryo sleep. Digital consciousness. Synthetic bodies. Clones. Has there been any outright time travel yet? If not I’m sure there will be.

I love the Expanse, but I hate Foundation. Has nothing to do with the books. If they want to make something different, they should call it something different.

I liked The Expanse and still hate Foundarion.

Old school scifi always has issues with weird tech hangups just throwing wrenches into huge foundational aspects of highly advanced civilizations. Thankfully most of them can be handwaved away.

This is something that Dune handles really well precisely because it writes a lot of the tech out of the setting. "Thinking machines" are gone and banned, guns don't work against shields, lasers are banned because of their (nuclear) interaction with shields. Even communications are largely handled by couriers. The tech is deliberately written to be at a level where it doesn't take convenience or deux ex machina for certain situations to occur.

Anyone expecting a very internal monologue driven book series to be translated well into the screen is just green though lol.

I thought Denix Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune handled this incredibly well when Paul and Jessica used sign language to communicate while they were tied up. In the book, that entire section is told through their internal monologues and their expectations of what the other would be thinking, so translating that to sign language for the screen was clever. I'm very curious to see how the internal-monologue-heavy second half of the book will fare, though.

I never thought of Sin City being different in that way. But it is. Whole sections are just the current character talking to themselves.

Yes, correct. I think what made reading the books difficult for me, though - and that was many years ago, not sure if I remember correctly - was that strong "atomic" reference in everything tech related, overused. Yes, at the time of writing this was cutting edge, but for me when reading was extremely difficult to translate/take seriously. It killed the immersion.

Can't describe it better, but did not have that effect at all wit Asimov's contemporaries.

Ender's Game was bad because they changed the overall internal conflict from one of horror at making the 'necessary' decisions to a 'yay we beat the bugs' ending of generic sci fi. Yeah, internal dialogue is hard to adapt, but when the core part of the book is changed it should be an interesting contrast like in Starship Troopers.