8 thoughts on “Hysteria”

  1. The Day After Tomorrow has exactly one thing going for it: it made possible William Hyde’s review. Maybe the Foundation Trilogy can somehow make possible an equally amusing review.

    From wikipedia: “Paleoclimatologist William Hyde of Duke University was asked, on rec.arts.sf.written, whether he would be seeing the film; he responded that he would not unless someone were to offer him $100. Other readers of the newsgroup took this as a challenge, and (despite Hyde’s protests) raised the necessary funds.”
    Here’s Hyde’s review: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/msg/6e52157aaf63775f

  2. Maybe the Foundation Trilogy can somehow make possible an equally amusing review.

    But who would be qualified to comment on its faithfulness to psychohistory?

  3. So, now Mark is panicking because a liberal director might be adapting the work of a liberal science fiction author???

  4. I was enthralled by the Foundation series in my teens (I blush to admit it), but surely no trope from classical SF has suffered more from our increasing understanding than the whole “psychohistory” malarkey. The whole idea for the series is bogus, and the concept itself seems designed to flop big-time for today’s audiences. How do you peddle a scholar’s 1000-year-future-history plan to lunkheads who don’t know who fought on what side in WWII? Or, on the other hand, to us middling-intellectuals who by now all grasp that events are ruled by chaos and not determinism?

  5. Actually isn’t psychohistory what we’re going to embark upon in the next two days, or history by pychos. The whole Trantor city as Planet, was done in the star wars
    prequels to a degree; one of the few good things about
    that benighted effort. The Roland Emmerich of StarGate
    and even Independence Day, I might have had confidence it; subsequently with Day after Tomorrow,
    FlyBoys and the psychotic 2012, not so much.

  6. My only beef with putting Asimov on film is that they’ll need to take massive liberties in order to make it even minimally watchable, and I liked Asimov’s work back in the day…Novel length conversations don’t film well.

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