In 1942, Isaac Asimov published Foundation, a series of science fiction short stories inspired by Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Apple TV’s new adaptation of this classic arrives at a time when talk of civilizational decline has become ubiquitous. While conservatives have long pretended to be the last patricians surveying a dying world, liberals have recently joined them in diagnosing inevitable decline. Foundation is a sometimes entertaining show that often stumbles in its attempt to adapt such a broad story. The show is the latest entrant in a now-decades-old genre: the gritty reboot, in which fun-loving fantasy is remade in an overly serious manner. Because of this, Foundation draws attention to the trends that are making us dread the future.
Foundation is set in the far distant future in an intergalactic empire. The mathematician Hari Seldon has discovered a way to predict the future using advanced mathematics. The show begins when a young woman named Gaal Dornick wins a galaxywide math contest held by Seldon. When she arrives at the capital, she learns that she’s been set up. Seldon’s model predicts that the empire will collapse in the next several hundred years and usher in thousands of years of dark ages. The empire thinks this prediction is an attempt to stir up political turmoil and is prosecuting Seldon for treason. Gaal has been brought to the capital because she is the only one who can check his math to see if his prediction is correct. During Seldon’s trial, he reveals his master plan. In order to shorten the inevitable dark age, he wants to create a foundation that will preserve civilization by creating an all-encompassing encyclopedia. The emperor agrees and banishes Seldon and his foundation to an uninhabited planet near the edge of civilization. This, too, is all part of Seldon’s plan.
Thus far, the show follows the shape of the book’s first story. The book then describes the history of the colony Seldon founded, using short stories to stretch across the more than thousand-year process of nurturing civilization in a dark age. The show struggles with the time jumps between storylines. It becomes confusing and boring. The most interesting thing about it is the way that it diverges from the source material, which affirms the original story’s criteria for decline.
The book paints decline as a type of apathy. A bureaucratic ethos combined with an overzealous respect for authority results in people who aren’t interested in asking deep questions. Scientists repeat what other scientists say instead of investigating things themselves. Machines are maintained, but no one knows how they were built. The show adds world-building and new stories, with mixed results, but mostly falls back on genre cliches. By offering a retread of previous science fiction, the show is itself indicative of a type of stagnation.
For example, in the book, Gaal Dornick is a very minor character. He is a man who gets a job with Seldon. In the show, Gaal is a woman who escaped a repressive religious past because she won a semimagical contest and has semimagical abilities that no one at home appreciated. It’s a mix of Willy Wonka and Harry Potter. In the book, Salvor Hardin is a crafty political leader who recognizes that the colony cannot avoid politics in the name of science. He stages a coup to seize control of the colony and averts a crisis. In the show, Hardin is another woman with semimagical abilities. It is astonishing that no one involved in the production ever noticed that their two main protagonists are the exact same thing. Just as noticeably, the show is derivative in its style, tone, and imagery.
Foundation offers a completely generic science fiction vision. Every set looks like a million other shows, and the images are indistinguishable from Star Wars, Star Trek, or Dune. When Asimov wrote the book, the purpose of science fiction was to imagine what the future might look like. Today, its purpose is to regurgitate past science fiction. The color palette is drab, and none of the environments look like places humans would actually want to spend time in.
The show’s tone is also dreary. The book is a space opera, a rollicking adventure in which the heroes consistently get out of tight jams with ingenious plans. The show jettisons fun in favor of terrorist attacks with outlandish death tolls, genocides, and the anguished cries of serious acting. Isn’t it odd that every superhero movie or science fiction film now includes images of entire cities getting wiped out or planets getting blown up? There is something equal parts creepy and comical about the insistent need to drive up fantasy disaster death tolls. Why does Hollywood only seem capable of imagining total destruction?
The apocalypticism and the lack of originality are related. Today, no one can articulate a positive vision of the future. The simple reason is that technology is viewed as a tool that we use, even though it is increasingly obvious that this is backward. Technology uses us. Human society gets prodded and shifted in order to make it more receptive to new technology. For example, the establishment of a social credit system is almost inevitable despite the fact that it terrifies all normal people because the technological capability to track people with permanent records already exists. Humans recede from view, and history becomes nothing more than the index of technological progress. This is why Hollywood confuses realism with nihilism and why our vision of the future is simply rehashing the science fiction vision of the 1950s.
But is decline all about us? News stories about how no one at Colonial Pipeline knows how to run our infrastructure manually anymore certainly seem like something out of Asimov or Gibbon. But it’s also worth noting that we live in a secular age and that hope is a theological virtue for a reason. Without supernatural belief, hope is for chumps. Everyone knows to be suspicious of political visions that depend on hope in a terrestrial Eden, but in an age that cannot seriously entertain hope, predictions of dystopia function the same way as predictions of utopia. Both mobilize people toward action while staving off important practical questions. Predictions of an imminent paradise are attempts to get people to act now, without spending time asking who is actually going to benefit from the changes. Similarly, if dystopia is imminent, then people have no time to get caught up in the details of who’s getting the money. This means we can expect a complete lack of hope to be an important tool in mobilizing political action.
Our situation might not be best described as stagnation, decadence, or decline. The monks who actually nurtured civilization through the Dark Ages had a word to describe the most pernicious sin against hope: acedia. This was one of the original deadly sins and was eventually replaced with the concept of sloth. It is similar to a spiritual description of what most today would categorize as clinical depression. It is a type of torpid indifference to the most important matters. The monks called it “the noonday devil” because it seemed to strike during the middle of the day, when time seemed to slow and the life of prayer seemed meaningless. This listlessness led to hatred of home and life itself and was said to inspire both listless fatalism and frantic action without purpose. Foundation is not a great show, but it uniquely draws attention to our civilizational acedia.
James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
