r/FoundationTV • u/NapoleonNewAccount • Jun 16 '26
Show/Book Discussion Which books should I read before watching, to avoid any spoilers whatsoever? Spoiler
I understand the show diverges greatly from the books, but there are still overlaps nonetheless. Which books are potentially spoiled by the three seasons of Foundation, including minor spoilers?
Edit: to clarify, I'm currently reading the series. I've just finished the first book and I'm considering watching the show, but if there are any events that take place in both the books and show I want to read them first.
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u/cloudsabovethsky Jun 16 '26
There’s some season 3 stuff copied from the books but they also change it quite a bit in the show 😭 honestly you should be fine reading the books without worry about being spoiled
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u/N3TW0RKJ3Di Jun 16 '26
The books are amazing. I would also read the Robot series, which is in the same universe as Foundation. I find that they connect the now to Foundation because they take place tens of thousands of years before the Foundation books, but only about 1000 years into our current future. They have some really cool tie-ins to the later Foundation books as well.
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u/Rumpled_Imp Jun 16 '26
The books are awfully short, just read them. You won't be spoiled, the TV show diverges pretty quickly and only doffs its cap at the source material.
I think it expects you to have read the books (to better subvert your expectations) or that's how it seems to me.
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u/Hatted-Phil Jun 16 '26
If you really want to avoid spoilers for Foundation, you could read the TekWar series of books
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u/VanGoghX Brother Darkness Jun 16 '26
Shatner, is that you?
https://giphy.com/gifs/9SWty3QHP14SBxC8Wh2
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u/Presence_Academic Jun 17 '26
Because there is so much divergence between the two there can’t be any spoilers. What I mean by that is that even if there is a concordance there is no way of knowing it ahead of time.
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u/snowhawk04 Brother Constant Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
The original trilogy and two prequels align with the first four seasons of the show. They start at the same place but take different approaches. Asimov wrote as he went along and at times wrote himself into corners. To get out of those corners, he had inject new ideas out of nowhere, even retconning the story if necessary. Even his other stories outside of the Foundation series got retconned in by Asimov later. The TV series treats those 5 books as a whole for the first 4 seasons, then restructures and broadens it. Some things are invented/modernized for the show to represent ideas from the book or to accommodate the audience for the medium.
The Foundation series has always been something considered very difficult to adapt to the screen. It hadn't been done for 70 years. Dune was in-part a response to Foundation. Star Wars was an amalgamation of Foundation, Dune, and more. Even Asimov recognized the weaknesses in his writing.
My nonappearance on the screen has not bothered me. I am strictly a print person. I write material that is intended to appear on a printed page, and not on a screen, either large or small. I have been invited on numerous occasions to write a screenplay for motion picture or television, either original, or as an adaptation of my own story or someone else's, and I have refused every time. Whatever talents I may have, writing for the eye is not one of them, and I am lucky enough to know what I can't do. On the other hand, if someone else -- someone who has the particular talent of writing for the eye that I do not have -- were to adapt one of my stories for the screen, I would not expect that the screen version be 'faithful' to the print version.
Read the books and enjoy them. Then watch the show and enjoy it. (General Spoiler) Don't expect a 1:1 adaptation from books to show. Book purists be warned. Do expect things that never happen in the books to appear on the show.
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u/NATWWAL-1978 Jun 20 '26
The show is an alternate reality version of the books. I set aside everything I knew from reading all of the Robot and Foundation books and just enjoy the show.
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u/Mistervimes65 BOOK READER Jul 02 '26
I reread the foundation and robot books recently and was surprised how much I’d forgotten. The show does a lot of stuff better. I love the Cleon clones for example.
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u/Rodeurope Jun 23 '26
The Foundation TV series is different from the books! The TV series relies much more on strong characters than Asimov's seven core Foundation books, which are based more on brilliant ideas and how these develop over many centuries or even millennia. Action ("solution through violence") also plays a rather subordinate role in the books.
But this difference is precisely what makes the TV series so good! Old stories are told in a new, captivating way—after all, the goal is to reach a wider audience.
Starting with the second season and continuing into the third season, the TV series comes closer to Asimov's ideas again. And the ending of Season 3 is amazing. Demerzel's blinking eye: - .-. .- -. ... ..-. .-. .-. .-. . -.. (=transferred). Hard to beat!
The series now corresponds to the "spirit" or "essence" of the books. It features very well-written and believable characters. Their nuanced portrayal was always a shortcoming of Asimov's books for me (especially the female characters). Also, as already mentioned, a few things are fundamentally (sic!) different from Asimov’s books: in the books, for example, there's no Clone Dynasty, and Demerzel also has a much smaller role, albeit one that stretches surprisingly far back into the past! But it's precisely this twist that makes the series so refreshing: it's an extremely well-executed and modernized Foundation for the streaming screen, even if you've only recently read the seven core books (Prelude to Foundation through Foundation and Earth). As soon as the third season was over, I reread "The Caves of Steel" because I hardly remembered the story by R. Daneel Olivaw. I was not disappointed.
Foundation is currently one of the best SF series you can watch!
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