Earlier this week we found out that Jared Harris and Lee Pace  have been cast in Apple TV’s adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s seminal science fiction trilogy, Foundation.

In Foundation, a band of exiles who discover that the only way to save the Galactic Empire from destruction is to defy it. Pace has been cast as Brother Day, the Emperor of the Galaxy and Harris as Hari Sheldon, a scientist who predicts the end of the empire through his theory of “psychohistory.”  

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Deadline has also announced that Rupert Sanders has come on board to direct the pilot of the series. This will be Sanders first foray into television. His films include Snow White and the Huntsman and Ghost in the Shell. 

Apple’s Foundation adaptation will be 10 episodes. Skydance Television is the production studio behind the series. David Goyer is serving as showrunner and executive producer. Also serving as executive producers are the late author’s daughter, Robyn Asimov, Josh Friedman, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Marcy Ross. 

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Here’s a description of Foundation’s plot premise from Wikipedia:

The premise of the stories is that, in the waning days of a future Galactic Empire, the mathematician Hari Seldon spends his life developing a theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematical sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a dark age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Although the inertia of the Empire’s fall is too great to stop, Seldon devises a plan by which “the onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little” to eventually limit this interregnum to just one thousand years. To implement his plan, Seldon creates the Foundations – two groups of scientists and engineers settled at opposite ends of the galaxy – to preserve the spirit of science and civilization, and thus become the cornerstones of the new galactic empire.

A key feature of Seldon’s theory, which has proved influential in real-world social science, is an uncertainty or incompleteness principle: if a population gains knowledge of its predicted behavior, its self-aware collective actions become unpredictable.

 

 

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