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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

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Shortly after launching the first season of its adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel Foundation, Apple announced that it’s renewed the series for a second season.

Set in the very distant future, Asimov’s story followed the efforts of a group of people to try and forestall an interstellar dark age after a long-standing Galactic Empire crumbled. The story has long been held up as one of Asimov’s most memorable series, but eluded adaptation until Apple picked up the project a couple of years ago.

The series kicked off in September, following a mathematician named Harry Seldon (played by Jared Harris) who pioneered a form of science called Psychohistory, in which he could predict the direction of the future, and claims that the Empire is about to fall—and that when it does, it’ll mean tens of thousands of years of chaos in the galaxy.

This revelation isn’t welcome news to the Emperor Cleon (played by Lee Pace, Terrence Mann, and Cooper Carter), who exile Seldon to a distant planet, where he begins to set up the seeds to keep civilization going.

The renewal is welcome news for fans of the show, and for the show’s creator David Goyer, who’s noted in interviews that he went to Apple with an eight season, eighty episode plan for the project, and that they’ve embedded stories that will play out over those coming seasons. In a statement, he noted that in this upcoming second season, “our audience will get to visit more of Asimov’s indelible characters and worlds, including Hober Mallow, General Bel Riose, and all the Outer Suns.”

Asimov initially wrote three books (made up of shorter novellas and novelettes)—Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation—before eventually returning to the series decades later with Foundation’s Edge, Robots and Empire (in which he brought his Robot stories into his Foundation universe), Foundation and Earth, Prelude to Foundation, and Forward the Foundation. Apple’s series has hinted at some of those deeper roots, and as the series goes forward, it’s clear that it will continue to draw on that longer storyline that Asimov set down.

There’s no word on when Foundation will return to Apple TV+, but we’ll have a bit to watch in the meantime: the streaming service is set to debut another science fiction series at the end of the month, Invasion, has a third season of its alternate history space drama For All Mankind coming at some point, and adaptations of Lauren Beuke’s The Shining Girls and Hugh Howey’s Wool coming as well.

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Andrew Liptak

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