6 ms·

Kim Stanley Robinson's description of a Martian space elevator falling and wrapping twice around the entire planet convinced me that they aren't a good idea. h

by seanc 1y ago

Kim Stanley Robinson's description of a Martian space elevator falling and wrapping twice around the entire planet convinced me that they aren't a good idea. https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/clarke https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/clarke

enraged_camel 1y ago
A version of this also happens in the first season of Foundation, the Apple TV series based on Asimov's novels.
- joenot443 1y ago
  Would you recommend that show to the HN crowd? The books are super well liked around here, for good reason. Apple's put out a staggering amount of content the last few years, I wasn't even aware this one debuted!
  - Frotag 1y ago
    It's pretty and scratches that scifi itch. I've only read a little of the books but it's supposedly an entirely different story that coincidentally shares character names. In terms of hardness, it probably on par with Expanse, so mostly technobabble with the magical tech only used when it's convenient for the plot. The abuse of "psychohistory" is particularly egregious. There's so many scenes where it's visualized a hologram of scribbles and they zoom in on more squiggles while divining the future. But again it's pretty, so if you're okay with drama in space, it's maybe a 8/10.
  - bananaflag 1y ago
    Not the OP, but that show is a severely dumbed down adaptation of the books. For example, each short story almost completely changes the cast (of course, with some descendants of characters appearing occasionally), as befits a saga that spans centuries. No producer was willing to run with that (as they didn't believe the audience smart enough to follow it would be big enough for the show to make a profit), so they introduced cryonics, clones, sorta-AIs (including robots out of their original context) to have some sort of continuing cast. Also, the books have a quaint 1940s (NOT 1950s as people usually say it) atmosphere, with excitement about "atomic" energy (changed to "nuclear" in the 1950s publication), distant descendents of the slide rule, and generally weird-sounding math and science, that the show totally drops in favor of a "contemporary" feel. And btw, the space elevator scene is lifted from Brin's Foundation's Triumph where it is described as a "future" event, part of Trantor's fall, predicted by Seldon's early team and trickled down to the general population.
    - Frotag 1y ago
      > For example, each short story almost completely changes the cast (of course, with some descendants of characters appearing occasionally) I wish directors were brave enough to kill off characters if it serves the plot. I get that there's IRL reasons that make it difficult (like contracts, scheduling, etc) but each new season accumulates more subplots to the point it's like a 30 minute episode is really a compilation of 3x 10-minute shows. This bugs me in multiple-protagonist books too. Just feels like an excuse to pad the page count with introductions and cliff hangers every POV switch.
    - rtkwe 1y ago
      It's definitely got problems as an adaptation of the Foundation series where it turns one of it's biggest themes on it's head by making a few people like Gail super special and having the answer to the crises where the books were more about setting up groups and organizations so that they as a whole had an advantage or edge that would be the answer to the crises he forsaw. I think it's mainly due to them wanting to have the same people across multiple seasons where the books were free to throw away the whole cast each time. Setting up new characters is much more expensive in shows/movies than books where you can just say what someone's 'deal' is and give them internal monologues to setup their internality where shows can't usually get away with that. I think separated from that there's a good enough show in there.
    - shagie 1y ago
      > Also, the books have a quaint 1940s (NOT 1950s as people usually say it) atmosphere ... The next day’s hearings were entirely different. Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick were alone with the Commission. They were seated at a table together, with scarcely a separation between the five judges and the two accused. They were even offered cigars from a box of iridescent plastic which had the appearance of water, endlessly flowing. The eyes were fooled into seeing the motion although the fingers reported it to be hard and dry. If you've got a copy of the ebook, search for "cigar". The use of tobacco as a way to demonstrate luxuries beyond the regular is there. In a recent re-reading of the series, I started having difficult with it in Second Foundation... and forced myself to finish Foundation's Edge. The amount of psionic ability and the... for lack of a better word "preaching" with the monologues was very much a science fiction of a different time. Foundation (the TV series) had to do updates for modern audiences and media. I'm not sure if trying to remain perfectly faithful to the books would represent them well. Foundation is a soft sci-fi about interactions between individuals and history and society. Trying to maintain the incidental harder parts of the written works that modern audiences expect to be somewhat consistent of far future technology with the 1950s lens on them would be quaint and a bit off-putting to people expecting future tech. He threw his cigar away and looked up at the outstretched Galaxy. “Back to oil and coal, are they?” he murmured—and what the rest of his thoughts were he kept to himself. They took the major points, and wrote to follow the general path from one point to another given the expectations of an audience consuming it often for the first time - 80 years after the original was written... and given constraints of the format and continuity of actors (60 minute episodes rather than as a chapter of a short story in Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction).
  - lelandfe 1y ago
    My friends who wanted an adaption of the series hated it. My friends who like sci-fi enjoyed it. It is regardless very striking and high budget.
  - Larrikin 1y ago
    It's the best possible adaptation of the books as possible. They made some changes to allow for having main characters. In my opinion they also lighten the down side of the Mule story line and how the world works.
  - tw04 1y ago
    I’ll give apparently a controversial take. The show is great. If you’re going into it expecting the books to be the guiding source material you’ll be severely disappointed. If you go into it assuming you’re watching a show that roughly takes high level concepts from the books but is its own thing and let it stand on its own, I think it’s worth watching.
    - georgeecollins 1y ago
      I'm fine with series not following the books. But the show bugs me because it has great production values -- particularly the third season -- and great actors. But the writing and plotting is all over the place ranging to very bad. It is a bit dumb and always pretentious. It's the 70's version of Battlestar Galactica of our age.
      - ajmurmann 1y ago
        I also found the pacing to be inconsistent at best.
        pavlov 1y ago
        The Lee Pacing is consistently great though.
        ajmurmann 1y ago
        Honestly the Cleons story line has been the only storyline I consistently enjoyed. All other ones suffered from both pacing and idiot plot issues at various times.
      - senkora 1y ago
        This is the issue that I have with many Apple TV+ shows. The production value is always very high, but it has no correlation with whether the writing is actually good.
        1y ago
  - hermitcrab 1y ago
    It's about 45 years since I read the books, but the whole idea of being able to predict the future of human societies accurately with maths seems rather silly. Especially since chaos theory became mainstream.
  - kingkawn 1y ago
    If you go into it looking for interesting sci-fi, especially the story of the Cleons, you’ll enjoy it. If you go into it looking for Asimov’s Foundation you’ll be disappointed
  - indoordin0saur 1y ago
    I greatly enjoyed the first season (haven't seen the others) and I'm usually a curmudgeon when it comes to modern TV shows.
    - noir_lord 1y ago
      I enjoyed the first season, for me the others aren’t remotely as good and I abandoned it halfway through the latest season.
- gilbetron 1y ago
  The Mars one is much more interesting and traumatic :)
indoordin0saur 1y ago
A fictional representation of a thing exaggerated for dramatic effect and to create plot tension shouldn't really convince you of many things at all. They're rarely accurate portrayals.
ben_w 1y ago
In adition to being fictional, what would happen on Mars does not reflect what would happen on Earth as the Martian atmosphere is so much thinner than ours.

by seanc 1y ago

enraged_camel 1y ago

A version of this also happens in the first season of Foundation, the Apple TV series based on Asimov's novels.

joenot443 1y ago
Would you recommend that show to the HN crowd? The books are super well liked around here, for good reason. Apple's put out a staggering amount of content the last few years, I wasn't even aware this one debuted!
- Frotag 1y ago
  It's pretty and scratches that scifi itch. I've only read a little of the books but it's supposedly an entirely different story that coincidentally shares character names. In terms of hardness, it probably on par with Expanse, so mostly technobabble with the magical tech only used when it's convenient for the plot. The abuse of "psychohistory" is particularly egregious. There's so many scenes where it's visualized a hologram of scribbles and they zoom in on more squiggles while divining the future. But again it's pretty, so if you're okay with drama in space, it's maybe a 8/10.
- bananaflag 1y ago
  Not the OP, but that show is a severely dumbed down adaptation of the books. For example, each short story almost completely changes the cast (of course, with some descendants of characters appearing occasionally), as befits a saga that spans centuries. No producer was willing to run with that (as they didn't believe the audience smart enough to follow it would be big enough for the show to make a profit), so they introduced cryonics, clones, sorta-AIs (including robots out of their original context) to have some sort of continuing cast. Also, the books have a quaint 1940s (NOT 1950s as people usually say it) atmosphere, with excitement about "atomic" energy (changed to "nuclear" in the 1950s publication), distant descendents of the slide rule, and generally weird-sounding math and science, that the show totally drops in favor of a "contemporary" feel. And btw, the space elevator scene is lifted from Brin's Foundation's Triumph where it is described as a "future" event, part of Trantor's fall, predicted by Seldon's early team and trickled down to the general population.
  - Frotag 1y ago
    > For example, each short story almost completely changes the cast (of course, with some descendants of characters appearing occasionally) I wish directors were brave enough to kill off characters if it serves the plot. I get that there's IRL reasons that make it difficult (like contracts, scheduling, etc) but each new season accumulates more subplots to the point it's like a 30 minute episode is really a compilation of 3x 10-minute shows. This bugs me in multiple-protagonist books too. Just feels like an excuse to pad the page count with introductions and cliff hangers every POV switch.
  - rtkwe 1y ago
    It's definitely got problems as an adaptation of the Foundation series where it turns one of it's biggest themes on it's head by making a few people like Gail super special and having the answer to the crises where the books were more about setting up groups and organizations so that they as a whole had an advantage or edge that would be the answer to the crises he forsaw. I think it's mainly due to them wanting to have the same people across multiple seasons where the books were free to throw away the whole cast each time. Setting up new characters is much more expensive in shows/movies than books where you can just say what someone's 'deal' is and give them internal monologues to setup their internality where shows can't usually get away with that. I think separated from that there's a good enough show in there.
  - shagie 1y ago
    > Also, the books have a quaint 1940s (NOT 1950s as people usually say it) atmosphere ... The next day’s hearings were entirely different. Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick were alone with the Commission. They were seated at a table together, with scarcely a separation between the five judges and the two accused. They were even offered cigars from a box of iridescent plastic which had the appearance of water, endlessly flowing. The eyes were fooled into seeing the motion although the fingers reported it to be hard and dry. If you've got a copy of the ebook, search for "cigar". The use of tobacco as a way to demonstrate luxuries beyond the regular is there. In a recent re-reading of the series, I started having difficult with it in Second Foundation... and forced myself to finish Foundation's Edge. The amount of psionic ability and the... for lack of a better word "preaching" with the monologues was very much a science fiction of a different time. Foundation (the TV series) had to do updates for modern audiences and media. I'm not sure if trying to remain perfectly faithful to the books would represent them well. Foundation is a soft sci-fi about interactions between individuals and history and society. Trying to maintain the incidental harder parts of the written works that modern audiences expect to be somewhat consistent of far future technology with the 1950s lens on them would be quaint and a bit off-putting to people expecting future tech. He threw his cigar away and looked up at the outstretched Galaxy. “Back to oil and coal, are they?” he murmured—and what the rest of his thoughts were he kept to himself. They took the major points, and wrote to follow the general path from one point to another given the expectations of an audience consuming it often for the first time - 80 years after the original was written... and given constraints of the format and continuity of actors (60 minute episodes rather than as a chapter of a short story in Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction).
- lelandfe 1y ago
  My friends who wanted an adaption of the series hated it. My friends who like sci-fi enjoyed it. It is regardless very striking and high budget.
- Larrikin 1y ago
  It's the best possible adaptation of the books as possible. They made some changes to allow for having main characters. In my opinion they also lighten the down side of the Mule story line and how the world works.
- tw04 1y ago
  I’ll give apparently a controversial take. The show is great. If you’re going into it expecting the books to be the guiding source material you’ll be severely disappointed. If you go into it assuming you’re watching a show that roughly takes high level concepts from the books but is its own thing and let it stand on its own, I think it’s worth watching.
  - georgeecollins 1y ago
    I'm fine with series not following the books. But the show bugs me because it has great production values -- particularly the third season -- and great actors. But the writing and plotting is all over the place ranging to very bad. It is a bit dumb and always pretentious. It's the 70's version of Battlestar Galactica of our age.
    - ajmurmann 1y ago
      I also found the pacing to be inconsistent at best.
      - pavlov 1y ago
        The Lee Pacing is consistently great though.
        ajmurmann 1y ago
        Honestly the Cleons story line has been the only storyline I consistently enjoyed. All other ones suffered from both pacing and idiot plot issues at various times.
    - senkora 1y ago
      This is the issue that I have with many Apple TV+ shows. The production value is always very high, but it has no correlation with whether the writing is actually good.
      - 1y ago
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  It's about 45 years since I read the books, but the whole idea of being able to predict the future of human societies accurately with maths seems rather silly. Especially since chaos theory became mainstream.
- kingkawn 1y ago
  If you go into it looking for interesting sci-fi, especially the story of the Cleons, you’ll enjoy it. If you go into it looking for Asimov’s Foundation you’ll be disappointed
- indoordin0saur 1y ago
  I greatly enjoyed the first season (haven't seen the others) and I'm usually a curmudgeon when it comes to modern TV shows.
  - noir_lord 1y ago
    I enjoyed the first season, for me the others aren’t remotely as good and I abandoned it halfway through the latest season.
gilbetron 1y ago
The Mars one is much more interesting and traumatic :)

indoordin0saur 1y ago

A fictional representation of a thing exaggerated for dramatic effect and to create plot tension shouldn't really convince you of many things at all. They're rarely accurate portrayals.

ben_w 1y ago

In adition to being fictional, what would happen on Mars does not reflect what would happen on Earth as the Martian atmosphere is so much thinner than ours.