Amazon to adapt Ian M Banks culture series into a series.

That's down to the fact that Culture life is basically idyllic and perfect, and that Minds are nigh on omnipotent; the stories always take place on the fringes or blurry edges of the Culture because that's where the interesting or moral grey-area stuff happens. It also makes the moments the Culture does go full on "don't *** with the Culture" more satisfying.
 
Somnambulist said:
That's down to the fact that Culture life is basically idyllic and perfect, and that Minds are nigh on omnipotent; the stories always take place on the fringes or blurry edges of the Culture because that's where the interesting or moral grey-area stuff happens. It also makes the moments the Culture does go full on "don't *** with the Culture" more satisfying.
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But then you look at the likes of "Player of Games" or "Excession", and they are very hard Culture. Even Consider Phlebas
which takes place right in the middle of the Culture's massive war with Irdians has very little Culture in it. I just wish more of the books were like "Excession" instead of "Look To Windward". That's not to say the non-Culture Culture books are bad, they are just not the SF space opera they are billed as.

My fear with the adaptations is that they take the basic idea of the Culture, and then use it for something worse than the high quality of Banks' stories.
 
Banks was staunch socialist and the idea of the MINDS working in harmony with humanity and life in general as positive rather than the negativity we get with AI in pretty much everything we read in the media. All society's problems were handed over to the MINDS and those special 1 in a billion people that could perform a task better than a mind ended up in SC. (Think it was a interesting problem for the minds that a human could do a task better than a MIND, but they just left as well its 1 in a billion)

But when the culture decides to go full on as mentioned it makes it all the so much more awesome and it generally does at some point(s) in the books,

I to have similar fears to yourself regarding the dramatisation of it all though.
 
Steampunk said:
But then you look at the likes of "Player of Games" or "Excession", and they are very hard Culture. Even Consider Phlebas
which takes place right in the middle of the Culture's massive war with Irdians has very little Culture in it. I just wish more of the books were like "Excession" instead of "Look To Windward". That's not to say the non-Culture Culture books are bad, they are just not the SF space opera they are billed as.

My fear with the adaptations is that they take the basic idea of the Culture, and then use it for something worse than the high quality of Banks' stories.
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Books like Look to Windward are really the heart of what the Culture novels are all about, which is humanity. They are much more about people and society, and not about the technology and science geekery itself.

I hope they do a decent job. If they do turn it into a explosions and lasers sci-fi extravaganza I am going to die inside. The only novel that could really stand up to that would be Excession...but there's so much potential for screen adaptations to be terrible....how they realise the Minds going to be key....
 
mid_gen said:
Books like Look to Windward are really the heart of what the Culture novels are all about, which is humanity. They are much more about people and society, and not about the technology and science geekery itself.
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They are really about Contact and Special Circumstances, and TBH I think those would make much better films than the difficulty of a woman doctor in a male-dominated fuedal country who used to be a member of the Culture. It seems a waste to have this massive background of the high tech Culture, and then have stories where it doesn't put in an appearance. It's like a Star Wars film where we just follow Luke subsistence farming and milking space cows for years. Blue milk does not a sci-fi movie make.

mid_gen said:
I hope they do a decent job. If they do turn it into a explosions and lasers sci-fi extravaganza I am going to die inside. The only novel that could really stand up to that would be Excession...but there's so much potential for screen adaptations to be terrible....how they realise the Minds going to be key....
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The Culture Minds are great characters in themselves, but how they are going to be portrayed when they are sending emails to each other, when they are avatars or disembodied voices of ships, etc. I don't know how you will get that across when they don't even have faces, let alone expressions. I think you'd better prepare for a disappointment, because I bet they put all that into the background. I wonder if the US market is even going to be able to deal with the names of the ships.

Edit: I tell you what would make a great couple of series. "Against A Dark Background" and "The Algebraist" - neither of which are Culture books.
 
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I just hope they use subtitles for communication between the minds, I think i would prefer it not to give Direct MIND to MIND communication a voice unless its via a Avatar of course, which you could have lots of fun with.
 
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,thank you. ( I just want to see a knife missle eviserate)

the ‘ culture’ is spread across the entire series of books in dribs and drabs. A bit like how the culture is in terms of its non centralised behavior.

A lot of the Star Trek stories worked in the ‘prime directive’ first contact/pre warp civ scenario. I always read those bits of the culture series with that kind of scenario in mind.

They may not even go that direction, I would like to see SC ‘referers. ( biologicals/humans with low intellect compared to Minds, but who can be as accurate in predicting as Minds) Especially now with the constant AI discourse in the media. Let them show what a godlike Mind would/could even imagined/remotely be like.

Minds could do the Avatar thing on screen.

Excession, would just be amazing as a 2nd/ 3rd series. Where something scares even the Minds after the build of omnipotence.
The ships guys all those ships!!!!!

Game of thrones has proven that high order storytelling can be done and sold to the general public.

I think Amazon is more than capable, look at Preacher.
 
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Look to Windward imo would be a great opening film/series.

It's got a good flow, building to the climactic final scenes.

It goes to the heart of what the Culture is about, the Minds, the hedonism and lifestyle in a post-scarcity spcoety, the desire to do good by the Galaxy, the scheming, SC interferences and occasional screwups with catastrophic consequences, against the backdrop of the supernovae remnants of the Idiran War. It's not too stuffed with different settings, mostly set on the orbital with the Mind interacting largely in Avatar form.

Epics like The Algebraist and Matter, makes my head hurt to think how you convert them to screen. Not to mention Feersum Endjinn!
 
mid_gen said:
Look to Windward imo would be a great opening film/series.

It's got a good flow, building to the climactic final scenes.
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I think they should go with Player Of Games. There's a lot of Culture in there, but it's not the all out craziness of Excession. It's a more personable story where you spend a lot of time with a member of the Culture, but a lot of it takes place outside the Culture. Drones and Minds show up, but it's more about the mission. You get a good introduction to what the Culture is and what it can do in the first part. The audience can learn about the Culture/Contact/SC as the main character does.

Maybe Amazon isn't interested in the Culture per se. Maybe they just want to adapt the stories regardless of whether they are space opera or not. In which case they could just as easily go by the order the books were written.
 
The only problem with the Culture novels is that the first book is awful. Consider Phlebas just reads like some trashy pulp sci-fi full of jargon, just a series of action scenes strung together. (I've only read it twice, unlike the 5-6 times I've read the others :P)

It does however, lay down the seeds for everything that follows. The quality of every other book that followed is in a different league.
 
There aren't really any duffers, once you get past Consider Phlebas which is a bit 'my first scifi' all the Culture novels are good.

Consider Phlebas
The Player Of Games
Use Of Weapons
Excession
Inversions
Look To Windward
Matter
Surface Detail
The Hydrogen Sonata

Plus a few short stories in State Of The Art.

Inversions is the only one that isn't very scifi, as it's mostly set on a medieval-era planet.

The Algebraist is a really good non-culture book, one of my favourites. Feersum Endjinn is good but it's a bit of a slog as half of it is written in a weird style (and it's pretty long anyway).
 
PinkFloyd said:
I never managed to finish Feersum Endjinn. The weird style of writing from one characters perspective just completely put me off trying to get through it. All the other books are cracking though!
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You and me both!
It was literally, see gibberish flick to legiable. I think there was a bird?
 
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