Sony won its option bid for the rights to develop Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Sony appears to have already tapped veteran producer and director Roland Emmerich to take the lead on this production, which already gives me positive feelings. Emmerich has plenty of big-screen experience including Stargate, Independence Day, and The Day After Tomorrow, but his work directing episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation gave him some real Sci-Fi chops.I’m still concerned about how Foundation will be treated. We’re not talking some pulp fiction 150ppg scifi rag here. We’re talking one of the more complex and wide reaching tales of a possible future. Having just re-read the first two books, I’m rather well placed to make observations.

Anyone who has read Asimov knows that most of his works are all intertwined in some fashion. Asimov didn’t dream of robots one night and then of empire the next. He mapped out what he felt would be a possible evolutionary path for humanity which settlements on other planets, political divides between classes, the interventions and changes robots would invoke on man, and how millions of planets of humans would operate. Asimov’s principle character in this is Psychohistory as created by his character, Hari Seldon. Asimov’s books are as much a treatise on what lies in humanities future as Hari Seldon’s mathematically derived predictions did for his fictional peoples.

Let me sum things up a little better than Variety did. Hari Seldon creates a way of predicting very large movements of millions of people using mathematical models which he calls Psychohistory. He and his team determine that the Empire will fall into chaos and sets up two “Foundation”, one at each end of the galaxy. He plans to reduce the chaos from hundreds of thousands of years to a mere 1,000 by being the repository of human knowledge, at least that’s what he tells everyone else. In reality, he sets the Foundations to the task of manipulating the kingdoms around them with technology, religion, and politics in a carefully choreographed plan to drive order out of madness. Let’s just pray Roland can pull it off.

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