>the stories seemed to be not more than sketches without richness or detail But that's part of the unique strength of the early Foundation books. What makes th

>the stories seemed to be not more than sketches without richness or detail But that's part of the unique strength of the early Foundation books. What makes the experience powerful is that the reader's imagination is left to fill in the gaps. The trick was to write a sufficiently epic framework, which succeeded because inspiration was drawn from Gibbon's famous account of the decline and fall of Rome. A TV series faces a different logic. Little is left to the visual imagination and one is left trying to imagine what the characters are thinking, yet as deng pointed out there aren't any main characters in Foundation (apart from Seldon, who's mostly a sort of narrator in any case).