There was no way I could not mention about the new Asimov movie on the Foundation Series. My childhood, game characters, and this blog has been influenced through the writings of Asimov’s many books, primarily the Foundations and Robots book series. And though oddly the plan is to make the Foundation Series movies first over the Robots and Empire Series (if at all), I actually made the same mistake and read the series in the reverse order as well.

Though Hari Seldon and Dors Venabili are the main and well-regarded characters from the whole series overall,  the one character that most fascinated me was the enigmatic humaniform robot by the name of R. Daneel Olivaw (seen in the picture to the left from the book Caves of Steel). In particular, it was in the Foundation Series with R. Daneel Olivaw as Demerzel that I empathize with from childhood and use for many of my game-playing characters around the net from playing chess on a Telnet FIC, to a mud-based text game called Sanity’s Edge, all the way up to World of Warcraft.

There are a couple of blogs out there with as much focus around the character of Demerzel (Demerzel’s Echoes), gaming profiles (Navigator Demerzel), computer names (computer Demerzel), social media profiles (Sphinn Demerzel), and art drawings (Eto Demerzel art).

I will be anxiously waiting to see who will make up the cast and of course who will be playing the role of the humanoid, R. Daneel Olivaw. I would not be surprised to see Will Smith in there somewhere as well as he seems to enjoy having roles in many of the latest science fiction movies.

SFF Media was the first on the scene with the news about having a movie on the Foundation Series and I am sure more will come as lately many sci-fi films from the major sci-fi writers have been doing well enough for sequels. Here’s the details so far:

New Line founders Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne are developing an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s 1951 novel Foundation, the first in Asimov’s classic space opera saga. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Shaye said, “our idea is to renew the worldwide audience’s appetite for the story” but he added that it is a complex novel, “this is not a script you can knock out in six months.” Shaye and Lynne plan to adapt the first book, but if the first Foundation movie is successful, aim to create an entire new Foundation movie trilogy just as New Line did with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Good things will certainly come from this as New Line knows what it is doing.

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I guess I’ll eventually add a page to explain this further, but I might as well explain in a post just “Who is Demerzel and why I am using it”:

Here’s the real basic info (the what/who) from Wikipedia.org–with no link love of course):

Daneel is a Robot built by Roj Nemennuh Sarton and Han Fastolfe, who are Spacer roboticists from the planet Aurora, in the year 4920 AD. Unlike many robots of the period, Daneel is constructed to be virtually indistinguishable from a human being (an android) and was the first of the humanoid robots.

[R. Daneel Olivaw] manipulates the galaxy with the help of his many robot allies. He sets up both the Galactic Empire and Gaia in order to create a society that does not need robots. Under the guise of Eto Demerzel, he becomes the first minister to galactic Emperor Cleon I and Stanel VI.

R. Daneel Olivaw is a common theme around Asimov books and I actually used Demerzel consistently instead of Daneel Olivaw since I read Asimov books out of order unfortunately (Foundation Series first followed by his Robot Series). Nonetheless, what I enjoyed about Demerzel/Daneel Olivaw is his concern for humanity as a whole (even if predicated entirely on mathematics) precisely on the Three Laws of Robotics (plus the Zeroth Law):

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Later, Asimov added the Zeroth Law: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm”; the rest of the laws are modified sequentially to acknowledge this.

These concepts are essentially what I grew up upon and oftentimes have a world view stemming from that.

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Now that I’ve finally got off my gaming rear to actually get a blog together (which I have been talking about doing for the past year or two), trying to figure out where I want to begin my first actual blog post seems rather tough (and silly at that). Therefore, for an actual blog post (the Hello World doesn’t count), I’ll give a list of the things I plan to write about:

• Gaming
  • That means games–mostly computer games as I see video gaming a waste of money when I have a computer already (Wii is an exception to hook my wife into playing games).
• Technology
  • Anything hi-tech, science, etc.
• China
  • Anything and everything related to that–my educational career has been all about China.
• Politics
  • I would probably have been voted in high school as most likely person to become a politician–turned out that I loved to talk and read about politics, but found politics itself to be too partisan.
• SEO
  • I work as a Search Strategist, so expect some odd posts here or there related to that field (eg: my company ranks 11^th on Google currently for that phrase).
• Random
  • It is what it is–things my friends talk about, cat or dog pictures, posts my wife wants me to post, etc.

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