David Selig

I bet a lot of viewers are checking the Wiki of Ice and Fire to understand better the Targaryen family tree and other things mentioned in the show. I have definitely checked it quite a bit while watching, because my memories of Fire and Blood are pretty vague.

IIRC there are humorous moments in most of Scorsese's serious dramas. You can have a serious drama and still have some humorous moments without that ruining the drama. The Wire is the best TV drama ever made yet it has plenty of funny moments. Mad Men has its fair share of humour. Etc, etc.

But this didn't happen in most of the world which had nobility and inheritable titles. China, the Muslim world, India, the Mongols, etc, all had legal polygamy and nobles practiced it widely.

Benioff and Weiss are clearly hack writers, they proved it with every single episode after they run out of book material. And yes, there are some good stuff here in there in the earlier seasons which is not from the books, but even hacks can have decent moments once in a while. Wasn't Rhaenys second in the voting for Jaeherys heir out of 14 claimants in the show meaning she got plenty of support ? Or am I misremembering the first episode? Anyway, Rhaenyra has been officially the heir for 6 months at this point yet not a single lord seem to be rebelling. Nobody is flocking to Daemon's side to offer support for his claim even after he took Dragonstone. And even if Rhaenyra had been a boy, Viserys would have been urged to remarry, because the Targs are pretty short on heirs.

It's not bad, but it's not good either, it's mediocre IMO, which for such a dialogue heavy and high budget show isn't good enough. Also, they need to add some humour soon, everyone on the show is deadly serious all the time, it's a bit too much.

The lack of dialogue in Fire and Blood is showing to be a serious problem for the show. The screenwriters have to invent almost all dialogue here, unlike in GoT's early seasons, and they are clearly nowhere near as good at this as GRRM which leads to a pretty mediocre dialogue for the most part. Pretty average episode to me. Some of the scenes were very impressive visually (i.e. the one in the sept), the actors were quite good, but the dialogue and plot were pretty weak for the most part. Rhaenyra serving as a cupbearer during the Couincil's meetings was weird, she seems too old for this. IIRC in the books this role was given to much younger kids. The heir of the realm being a cupbearer at 15 seems like a terrible idea. The dialogue between Rhaenys and Rhaenyra was really cringey. It really hammered home the whole "Westerosi men would never support a woman for the throne" idea, yet the whole basis of the plot of the series is that half the realm actually supported Rhaenyra's claim during the Dance of the Dragons. And the lines the characters said were so unnatural. Viserys doing nothing after Daemon took the Goldcloaks and seized Dragonstone makes no sense. This is a blatant rebellion. The show version of Viserys seems too old and sick to be seriously considering marrying a 12 year old and waiting years before consummating the marriage. How old is Alicent supposed to be here? The last scene was just silly, classic TV "surprising" twist that makes no sense. Viserys would have told Rhaenyra earlier for sure.

Exactly. Condensing was always inevitable, the problem is that it was done really poorly. So far the show has been a poor adaptation and a poor TV show, and that's largely because of the writing. The writers' steadfast refusal to include more than a handful of lines from the original dialogue in the whole season even when the plot has remained unchanged or close enough for them to fit is also quite annoying. Jordan was no Shakespeare, but when it comes to dialogue, he was way better than the average TV writer these days (low bar, I know) and the writers on this show have been worse than average so far.

I've read most short fiction nominees and my main takeaway is - what the hell were the voters smoking when they nominated O2 Arena? it's without any exaggeration one of the worst stories I've ever read. The plot would be a perfect fit in a straight to video action movie from the 80s, the characters couldn't be any more flat, the clumsy message of the story is hammered home with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and the worldbuilding is completely ludicrous. I hope it finishes below No Award. Elder Race is easily the best nominated novella and Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather easily the best short story, so chances are the Hugo voters will pick some schmaltzy Hugo bait instead for a winner (like Mr. Death or the Becky Chambers novella).

I wish we have had some negative reactions from the other astronauts about the Kelly's utter idiocy to get pregnant on freaking Mars. But no, everyone is happy for her as far as we know, and readily volunteers to remain stranded on Mars for years because of her.

So much stupid melodrama. I probably won't bother with next season.

I started watching this show about a month ago and finally caught up with the release dates yesterday. The gradual decline in the quality of the writing has been pretty blatant. I loved Season1 and mostly enjoyed Season 2, but the third season is so full of nonsense I don't know if I will watch Season 4. The latest episode was the cherry on top. It is a shame they are wasting the talent of the great cast with such ridiculous plotlines.

It's already included in two recent anthologies which have paper versions - Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 and The Best Horror of the Year Volume Thirteen. Also, nice to see that Luhrs's idiotic rant against GRRM didn't win. Too bad it didn't finish below "No Award" though.

The best news for me is that The Coode Street Podcast finally won, it is very well deserved and well overdue. Piranesi not winning any genre awards is a shame though not surprising. Also nice to see Two Truths and a Lie win, it's an amazing story. Apparently the nomination statistics will be released tomorrow, these are much more interesting to me than the final voting stats, I am curious to know which works were close to being nominated.

I gave up on this show midway through episode 7 when I realized I wasn't interested in any of the plotlines and couldn't care less about any of the characters. And it's not even entertainingly bad for me most of the time, just tedious and boring. A shame these impressive visuals were wasted by the utter ineptness of the writers.

The worst actor on the show is definitely Alfred Enoch (Raych), he's just laughably bad.

Glossing over this is one of the few good things about the show. The explanation in the books for the reasons for the fall of civilization and reverting to barbarism is completely nonsensical and becomes ever more nonsensical the more Asimov tried to explain it in the prequels. Anyway, the last episode was a bit better because at least some stuff happened, but it was still pretty bad. Hardin being a master sniper and killing bunch of mooks in two minutes flat out felt like Goyer was deliberately trolling the viewers who have read the novels. And they didn't even bother to cast older actors for the parts of the specialists the Anacreonians wanted to kidnap, so judging by their looks they must have been about 15 years old when they were chief engineers on the ship that took the Foundation colonists to Terminus.

He's had a very successful career as a writer for decades, so why bother trying to change and improve? Plus the powers that be in Hollywood seem to like clunky dialogue since 90% of the movies they release have it in spades.

I wonder how much of this plan will be realized. The show is certainly quite expensive to produce but it doesn't seem to have gotten much hype online. On Reddit there is way less talk about it than you'd expect about a big budget show based on a popular sci-fi classic. That AMA Goyer did had only 265 replies which is way less than you'd expect for such a show.

The pacing has been dreadful the whole season IMO, almost every scene takes way longer than it should. Wasting 20 minutes on Gaal's backstory which we already knew and is boring and implausible as it gets was an indefensible decision. The showrunner did an AMA on Reddit today, BTW - https://www.reddit.com/r/FoundationTV/comments/q8r4b0/david_s_goyer_foundation_showrunner_ama/

I thought it was another bad episode, though thankfully less boring than the previous one. All the production values are wasted by the horrendous writing.

I think it's supposed to be a space elevator.

I haven't reread most of the series in a long time, but I recently reread the first few short stories which made up the first novel. Right at the start of the first one it's stated "Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time". IIRC after that this is sometimes ignored or downright retconned later on, and the way hyperjumps work is described pretty inconsistently, but still the tech is there for instantaneous travel through the whole galaxy, at least in some circumstances. Also, even if travel usually takes weeks for whatever reason, the communication between worlds is always instantaneous thanks to "hyperwaves". This alone should serve as a great equaliser in the differences between the planets regardless of their location. The premise of the series is that without a single centralized authority ruling the whole galaxy with a population numbering in quadrillion there would be a widespread barbarism, misery, suffering and a long Dark Age. How is that not pro-authoritarianism? Seldon's plan was for a formation of a Second Galactic Empire. Not a Galactic Republic or 1000 smaller republics. And when people in-story talk about the problems in the Empire, it's almost always with the caveat that it wasn't that way in the good old days when the Empire was in its prime and the emperors controlled the whole galaxy. Demerzel in the prequels states explicitly that the Empire is a force for good and better than the alternatives and this is clearly presented as the correct view.

It always makes me laugh when Asimov is mentioned as a prime example of hard science fiction when so much of his work includes psionic powers as a key plot element. And this wasn't just something which he had to include in his stories in the Astounding early in his career because John W. Campbell loved this stuff (though this certainly played a role). When Asimov returned to the Foundation and the Robots settings in the 80s and could write whatever he wanted, there was more psionic powers, not less, even in the Robots novels, where until then they have been quite rare. IMO the Foundation is pretty bad as soft science fiction too. The sociological and historical ideas in it were quite absurd even back in the early 1940s and today are simply ridiculous. Asimov transported the fall of the Roman empire in space but he clearly didn't know all that much about Roman history when he wrote the early stories or made much of an effort to account for the differences in settings. This leads to absurdities like all the talk how different the Periphery is from the inner worlds when the Empire has a hyperspace jump technology which makes distances irrelevant and doesn't have any external enemies. The whole idea of 30,000 years of barbarism without a single Empire for all mankind is not not only nonsensical, but really regressive and pro-Authoritarianism.

I've read the books, it's quite contrived there too. But in the show the Terminus settlement looks so primitive and tiny that it would be much harder to buy something like this. Some people consider the books hard sci-fi, yes, which I've always thought is ridiculous. Not only is the psychohistory math basically magic, but also the whole plot of the series largely relies on

I thought the third episode was atrocious. A complete borefest throughout. The first 20 minutes almost put me to sleep, I couldn't care less about the melodrama of the cloned emperors and Eto "Platitudes only" Demerzel. The rest wasn't much better. The show is clearly setting up Hardin to be a Chosen one figure due to her "special" skills and it's just silly and boring. And the Foundation has been on Terminus for decades and they still only have a few buildings and nothing resembling industry or a an actual town. How are they supposed to become a galactic superpower? Besides, their scientists seem completely useless from the scenes they have shown of them.