So the first two episodes of Foundation will drop tomorrow on Apple+ (seriously, guys, can’t you name a streaming service without a plus sign?), and not long ago, I was asked by my beautiful, brown-eyed, brunette daughter what I expect. The answer is easy enough:

I expect that it will be very good; and

I expect that it will be very different from the books.

And that’s okay. There’s always the issue of adapting from one medium to another, and a video series from the early 2020s has an entirely different audience from a pulp-sf-magazine reading audience in the 1940s with an entirely different background and entirely different expectations. I don’t object to the adaptors adding their own creativity to the series, so long as they keep the core intact.

(If you want a faithful adaptation, by the way, the BBC audio plays from the 1960s are readily available and, except for some scenery chewing towards the end, very good.)

At the same time, there is one big problem. I don’t care for the Foundation books outside of the first three very much, and the reason is simple enough: I read the first three when I was twelve.

Asimov believed that the 1940s was a “golden age” of science fiction because of John Campbell’s incredible skill at editing Astounding and grooming a large cadre of talented writers. At the same time, he believed that the real “golden age” of science fiction is twelve. Books, movies, and TV shows you first encounter around that age acquire a special magic that nothing else can ever capture. In particular, your emotional response to what comes later never has the patina of nostalgia and wonder that the earlier material has.

Oh, you can come to love material you encounter later, but it’s never with the same passion as what you meet at age twelve. I love Star Trek more than Star Wars, because I saw the former when I was around twelve and the latter when I was seventeen. And I love Second Foundation more than Foundation’s Edge for similar reasons. Indeed, because the Foundation books from Foundation’s Edge onwards involve some implicit retconning of earlier material, material from my own “golden age”, I tend to get very impatient with them. Again, that has nothing to do with their inherent quality; it’s a purely subjective response.

So the Foundation series may prove too frustrating for me to really enjoy. If that happens, it will likely be a shame, because it will be purely because of my own nostalgia; and that is an entirely illogical response.