Foundation and Star Wars

[Spindrift]

I am re-reading the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov (the first 3 books) for the first time in about 15 years.

I've noticed a few minor coincidences with the Star Wars universe and wonder if George Lucas didn't borrow some tidbits from Foundation.

There is a Wikipedia article that discusses some of it: Star Wars sources and analogues^WP

I noticed that capital planet of the Starwars Empire, Coruscant, is similar to the capital planet, Trantor, in the Foundation series.

In Foundation a couple of unusual first names pop up that appear in Star Wars. There is a captain whose first name is Han (Han Solo) and someone whose first name is Bail (Bail Organa, Leia's father)

No solid evidence there and as far as I know Lucas has never admitted the influence, but I found it interesting.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

Not unlikely. In case you didn't know, Star Wars is apparently at its core a composite of other films and stories and various popular culture. I think James Rolfe (who plays "the Angry Video Game Nerd") explains all this prety well in his SW review:

 

[CJW]

I remember thinking the exact same thing when I read the first Foundation book a few years ago. If I recall there was also a planet named Korel, or some variant of Corelia as well.

 

[Spindrift]

Not unlikely. In case you didn't know, Star Wars is apparently at its core a composite of other films and stories and various popular culture. I think James Rolfe (who plays "the Angry Video Game Nerd") explains all this prety well in his SW review:

I knew that Lucas drew on a lot of sources I just didn't know that Foundation was one of them.

 

[alfaniner]

I believe "Coruscant" was a Timothy Zahn creation (in name at the very least), in the book series that came out several years after the original.

 

[dudalb]

Coruscant in the Star War Prequels,though, sure as heck resembles Asimov's descriptions of Trantor...and I don't think that just happened.
Hey, Lucas stole from numerous sources for the Star Wars films.

 

[gnome]

I believe that Foundation was in some ways a trope-maker for a lot of Galactic Empire stuff... including particularly the idea of a densely-populated, mostly urbanized capital planet.

Whether George Lucas borrowed from Asimov specifically, or drew from the general culture of sci-fi, to which Asimov clearly made large contributions, may be a tough distinction to make.

Coruscant as we envision it now, is clearly mostly influenced by Timothy Zahn, the first to give it a name, and an excellent example of "expanded universe" material ascending to "canon". Being a sci-fi writer himself, I would consider it likely that he was specifically inspired by Asimov's Trantor.

An interesting thought is that if a movie were made in the Foundation universe, the appearance of Trantor would be perceived as derivative from Coruscant.

 

[cwalner]

I believe that Foundation was in some ways a trope-maker for a lot of Galactic Empire stuff... including particularly the idea of a densely-populated, mostly urbanized capital planet.

Not sure I quite agree that Foundation is the trope-maker, but that the trope is just an SF deriviate from actual human history. If you look at any historical human empire, the capital city is always a densely populated urban area in comparison to the rest of the empire (Alexandria, Rome, London, Tokyo, etc.) You even see this trope in fantasy (Minis Tirith, King's Landing, Ayindril)

The concept of making the city planet wide just seems like a natural progression for a galactic scale.

I too noticed this similarity when I read the Foundation novels, but never thought to much of it because of the above reasoning.

 

[gnome]

I forget the word for it, but perhaps a better idea for it would be one of the first prominent examples in sci fi of the trope. It is true that usually authors don't "invent" tropes as my words might have implied.

 

[cwalner]

I forget the word for it, but perhaps a better idea for it would be one of the first prominent examples in sci fi of the trope. It is true that usually authors don't "invent" tropes as my words might have implied.

I guess my point was that I don't really see this as fictional trope at all. This is essentially depicting the real world with appropriate extrapolations depending on the genre. There has never been a human empire that did not have a capitol city bursting at the seems with population due to all the politicians and administrators and those that serve them.

To me a planetwide city is just the logical extrapolation of this phenomenon for a galaxy-spanning empire.

 

[gnome]

Well now we're going to start nitpicking on what counts as a trope. Rather than go down that rabbit hole, I figure we agree that we agree aside from semantic detail and don't need to debate further

 

[JamesDillon]

I just read the first Foundation book for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Didn't see a lot of Star Wars in it-- I guess I can see the Coruscant analogy, but a wholly urbanized planet seems like the sort of idea that would frequently occur independently in the sci fi genre-- but I was struck by its clear influence on Frank Herbert's Dune series, most notably the somewhat naive expectation that a social science methodology with a sufficiently robust data processing apparatus could predict broad social movements with near-perfect accuracy centuries into the future.

 

[gnome]

Chaos theory wasn't properly understood at the time, I think. He deconstructed it in later installments by

requiring more and more intervention by the Second Foundation

in order to keep Seldon's plan on track.

It eventually wound up having a lot less to do with prediction and more to do with psychic intervention.