Foundation and Tolkien on Amazon Prime

A tale of two empires

In Apple TV’s Foundation series, the Galactic Empire, administered by an imperiously styled Lee Pace (or series of Lee Paces) sits on the brink of total collapse as terrorist entities seek to undermine it from the inside, and nefarious religious factions threaten to undermine its foundational belief in Peace and Unity, personified in the iron will of the Cleon ‘genetic dynasty’. As of this writing (end 2021), the scenes showcasing Pace’s ‘Brother Day’ emperor continue to feel the most compelling; the ‘action’, such as it is, on Terminus with the Foundation itself feels secondary, and almost besides the point.

Just as audiences tuned in to HBO’s Game of Thrones, at least in part, for a taste of political intrigue, so one of Foundation’s great strenghts as a TV adaptation is its willingness to explore the politics of decay, or as Ross Douthat might call it, ‘decadence’. In Game of Thrones, audiences were treated to the end of an era; the breakdown of one system and the generation of…well…the same system, actually, under the auspices of a different ruler, a ruler whose qualifications for the job remain illusive at best, and nonexistent at worst. As general consensus has it, the show’s final season failed utterly to live up to the promise of the first two (or three), and the show ended on a bland, creatively bankrupt note. But this should’t mask the accomplishment of those earlier seasons: the show deftly handled the politics of nations in a manner that was both appealing to a wide audience, and, strangely, comprehensible to viewers who would not otherwise have picked up the books or taken an interest in fantasy literature. In Apple’s Foundation, something similar is attempted, although here the writers are also faced with the challenge of adapting a novel (really a collection of interconnected novellas) whose characters are barely allowed to develop personalities on the page. The results are, at best, mixed.

Still, the attempt is noteworthy; along with Dune, the Foundation series of books, published between the 1950s and 1990s, were the creative forerunners of both hard SF and pulpy stuff like Star Wars (Galactic Empires, etc). The characters in the novel might not speak to us with tremendous verve, but the ideas certainly do, and it is for that reason that they remain a staple of the genre. There is another upcoming, show, though, which faces similar challenges: Amazon’s Lord of the Rings, Second Age extravaganza. The final title (or indeed setting) of the show remains, as yet, unclear, but recent revelations suggest that at least some of the show will showcase the final downfall of yet another ‘decadent’ civilization, that of Númenor.

Like Foundation’s Galactic Empire, or Thrones’ Seven Kingdoms, Númenor is an empire in decline, riven between (at least) two major religio-political factions, one of which, the ‘King’s Men’, is bent on the destruction of a persecuted minority who hold to the old (and, as it would happen, the true) faith. The former worship the literal Lord of Darkness and perform human sacrifices in his name, whilst the final, decadent king of the island nation builds an navy with which to invade the land of the gods and wrest immortality from their divine hands. This is all rather dramatic, but like Foundation Tolkien’s tale of Númenor’s decline and fall is told in hindsight, through a series of ‘found manuscripts’, as in some of Tolkien’s draft novels (The Lost Road, The Notion Club Papers) or, in others like the ‘Akallabêth’ story, appended to The Silmarillion, as though told as a story handed down from remote antiquity, not all the details of which were, or can, be recovered. This raises obvious and perhaps intractable hurdles for writers seeking to translate the story onto the screen: they must, first, actually ‘pin down’ the story; they must develop a series of plausible events which makes the narrative tractable and logically coherent. They must then, as in Foundation’s case, invent, or expand the role of ‘characters’, barely names on the page for whom few details are actually given. Some material contained in the aborted 1930s novels mentioned above might provide some meat; the character of Isildur, for example, appears in The Lost Road (as ‘Herendil’) as his father Elendil attempts to wrest him away from the Jordan Peterson-like charisma of Sauron the self-help guru. There is also some dialogue (from Sauron, especially) in ‘Akallabêth’, but this is sparse and the writers will be obliged to invent a great deal.

This raises the fundemental problem (as I see it) which is now facing the Foundation series, and will face the writers of the Amazon show. Do stories of social collapse, of decadence, lend themselves to characters at all? Put another way, is history ‘written in’ characters, or in events, trends and Hari Seldon’s psychohistory? This is where, in writing of the Foundation novels as a series of ‘vignettes’, Asimov seems to make exactly this point. Seldon is a looming presence in the books, but his ‘character’, such as it is; his moral outlook, the fundementals of his politics, his love life, are only tangentially approached and even there, only in the prequel novel from the 1980s. It is as though history is written in the ruin of a thousand worlds, and rarely in the ruin of individual lives. The ‘Foundationers’ as they come to be known, revere early Mayors of Terminus, like Salvor Hardin, but only as abstract historical figures; the particularities of their personhood such as these become evident to readers of a traditional realist novel are never described. Indeed, they are largely, or nearly, irrelevant, except perhaps in the rare circumstance where a character of supernatural dimensions like the Mule appears. In Tolkien, the character of Sauron is a Mule-like appearance in the politics of Númenor, but he is influential only to the extent that, like the Mule in Asimov’s story, he can exert almost literal mind-control powers over those he seeks to bend to his will. In the real world, no such beings exist, and so we might suppose that figures like Caesar, Mark Antony and Augustus are merely passangers carried along by the tide, noteworthy for their charisma but otherwise irrelevant to the trends they are merely party to, as we all are.

Perhaps this is what makes Asimov’s saga fundementally unadaptable. TV really shares more DNA with novels than with historical epics like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; for all they mention personages, someone like Aetius or Atilla are really bit-players; they are like Hardin or Marrow in Asimov. As characters, their beliefs, sex-lives, and eating habits are irrelevant. Tolkien’s Númenor saga might suggest something similar; its outcome is dependent on generations of conflict which no one character, regardless of their personal proclitivies, has the power to shift or change. In hindsight, the result seems, somehow, inevitable. In this sense the story is actually the anti - Lord of the Rings, which if anything suggests that history can be fundementally altered by the action of virtuous character (understood in the Stoic sense of virtue). By exercising qualities like temperance, justice, courage and pity, Frodo, Sam and Gollum succeed where (pertinently) the non-character of Isildur failed 3,000 odd-years earlier. And yet Amazon are going to have to make a character out of Isildur, and Elendil, and they will have to make it seem, at least, that the choices of individual people in the story actually make a difference, where (at least an argument could be made in favour of this position) in the story as we have it, the inevitability of the ‘decadent society’ of Númenor is never in doubt. Put another way, can the writers of the show make it seem like history is really a struggle of individual characters, as the writers of Foundation are trying, and sometimes failing to do? Or will all their efforts merely suggest that, in the end, the choices of individual persons serve only to garnish our egos and delude us as to the cosmic indifference of predetermined fate?

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