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While I explore recommendations for alternatives, Den of Geek still serves for news at least, and this news is immense - Amazon are to adapt, potentially, the entire 10-book series, beginning with Consider Phlebas. I'm not terribly familiar with the writer, but he at least seems to have some scifi experience.

This is perhaps the most exciting prospect for a TV adaptation ever, for me. The Culture novels have been part of my life since I could read and I've had a huge amount of respect for the author since I started paying attention to politics.

Please let it be good...Please let it be good...Please let it be good...Please let it be good...squeeee

Oooh ...

Colour me interested. Mind you, a few of the novels have some unusual plot structures - Excession, Use of Weapons and Look to Windward, for example. Hopefully they'll work on TV as well.

Oh my goodness..

Some of my favourite sci-fi books. Player of Games is probably one of the best books I have ever read (I think a must-read for any wargaming fan, regardless)

Think there is definitely enough depth there to make a series faithful to the source material (unlike say, Man in the High Castle, which went through a fair amount of adaptation), hopefully the series will capture the spirit and style (actually, also the sense of humour) that inhabited the books.

Banks is freakin' awesome - right up there with Asher for me in terms of 'modern SF', but even with as much money as Amazon makes, I can't see them funding this enough to do it justice.

Or with them making it all the way through all of his books either.

A lot of them are far from short books, and heavily literary with complicated plot lines, as mentioned by previous posters.

It will be interesting to see how they characterise the various Ships, who manifest themselves as screeds of bulletin board text, or small, cuddly animals, or as shop window dummy-like avatars and the like.

I think it can be done but it will take a lot of "dumbing down" compared to the original text. This may be acceptable to see the visualisation of the more spectacular elements.

Another point is that there are almost no characters who appear in more than one of the books.

Yiss. Please don't mess this up Amazon.

I refuse to finish reading The Hydrogen Sonata so there's always something of Iain M. Banks left unread for me.

 Yodhrin wrote:
While I explore recommendations for alternatives, Den of Geek still serves for news at least, and this news is immense - Amazon are to adapt, potentially, the entire 10-book series, beginning with Consider Phlebas. I'm not terribly familiar with the writer, but he at least seems to have some scifi experience.

This is perhaps the most exciting prospect for a TV adaptation ever, for me. The Culture novels have been part of my life since I could read and I've had a huge amount of respect for the author since I started paying attention to politics.

This could be great or terrible. If they feth up the utter scale of the Culture Universe, I will be displeased...

 Kilkrazy wrote:
A lot of them are far from short books, and heavily literary with complicated plot lines, as mentioned by previous posters.

It will be interesting to see how they characterise the various Ships, who manifest themselves as screeds of bulletin board text, or small, cuddly animals, or as shop window dummy-like avatars and the like.

I think it can be done but it will take a lot of "dumbing down" compared to the original text. This may be acceptable to see the visualisation of the more spectacular elements.

Another point is that there are almost no characters who appear in more than one of the books.

One series per novel should do it. Also, by the very fact of it being on TV, you can skip the pages upon pages of description and exposition. (I was impressed by The Algebraist, which managed to have two sentences fill an entire page!)

Whoa. Great or terrible is right, the potential is there to be a spectacular success but if it's done badly there are going to be a lot of us very unhappy about the sacrilege. I do find it interesting that they'd start with Consider Phlebas, one of the weaker books IMO, but maybe an adaptation can overcome the "first novel" problems. But it's a pretty fine line to walk between cleaning up the story enough to be successful vs. going too far and angering the fans who wanted a closer adaptation.

We're all going to have to set expectations accordingly right off the bat.

To expect anything close to the amount of detail that is the book would be...unwise!

 Peregrine wrote:
Whoa. Great or terrible is right, the potential is there to be a spectacular success but if it's done badly there are going to be a lot of us very unhappy about the sacrilege. I do find it interesting that they'd start with Consider Phlebas, one of the weaker books IMO, but maybe an adaptation can overcome the "first novel" problems. But it's a pretty fine line to walk between cleaning up the story enough to be successful vs. going too far and angering the fans who wanted a closer adaptation.

They're apparently intending to go with chronological order, so Consider Phlebas is still first. And tbh the main reason I'm optimistic about this is apparently Moneybags Bezos himself is a fan, which combined with the fact that this and LotR are evidently how Amazon Video intends to fully establish itself by proving High Castle wasn't a fluke makes me think they'll be going all-in on this financially, and the bigwigs will be watching to make sure it's done well.

And if not, well, there's always irrational rage

Consider Phlebas is probably the easiest to adapt. It was written as a deliberate attempt to outdo Star Wars, it's a pretty straightforward narrative, starts at the beginning, goes on until the end.

Player of Games is a similarly straightforward plot, but it'sless action-packed, so perhaps not such a good way to bring in the non-fans?

The opening scene of Consider Phlebas makes a pretty decent pre-title sequence, I think. Episode 1 could probably cover the scenes aboard the Hand of God 137 and end with Horza being picked up by the Clear Air Turbulence.

In the meantime ...

Well, it would allow to see the orbital and a big battle or two.

 Yodhrin wrote:
They're apparently intending to go with chronological order, so Consider Phlebas is still first. And tbh the main reason I'm optimistic about this is apparently Moneybags Bezos himself is a fan, which combined with the fact that this and LotR are evidently how Amazon Video intends to fully establish itself by proving High Castle wasn't a fluke makes me think they'll be going all-in on this financially, and the bigwigs will be watching to make sure it's done well.

On the other hand is Bezos, a billionaire with a huge stake in capitalism being the system, going to be willing to represent Banks' politics and the socialist/communist nature of the Culture? It would really suck to get a stripped-down version of the Culture series where the new point of it is how cool the orbitals look.

I have to say that's the first time I've read about Iain M Banks and Star Wars in the same sentence!

Definitely think the interpretation of the ships will be an important one to get right, both how their avatars are shown on screen but you'd like to think also that they'd employ some good voice acting talent for them.

Peregrine - I think just because Bezos has made his billions with the current political and economic system isn't going to stop him having an imagination of what humanity might aspire to in the future in something like the Culture? In any case, I'd hope that he'd just supply the money for the creatives to do what they need to do. And the estate of Iain M Banks would have something to say if the Culture suddenly became The Imperium of Man in the new series

 Peregrine wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:
They're apparently intending to go with chronological order, so Consider Phlebas is still first. And tbh the main reason I'm optimistic about this is apparently Moneybags Bezos himself is a fan, which combined with the fact that this and LotR are evidently how Amazon Video intends to fully establish itself by proving High Castle wasn't a fluke makes me think they'll be going all-in on this financially, and the bigwigs will be watching to make sure it's done well.

On the other hand is Bezos, a billionaire with a huge stake in capitalism being the system, going to be willing to represent Banks' politics and the socialist/communist nature of the Culture? It would really suck to get a stripped-down version of the Culture series where the new point of it is how cool the orbitals look.

That is my main worry, but honestly that would be my worry regardless of who was adapting the material. It's the same worry I have about the JMS-produced adaptation of KS Robinson's Mars Trilogy, if that ever actually materialises. Fact is, most of the entertainment industry is controlled by people who have a huge stake in capitalism being the system, and is mostly populated by people who's politics tend towards social liberal/economic centre-right(or at least, that's all they're willing to commit to in public); genuine anticapitalist polemics, or even more subtle condemnations of capitalism as a system, are vanishingly rare and the most you can usually expect to coax out of the entertainment industry is some wishy-washy Tony Blair-soundin' "we should aim for a more compassionate capitalism" nonsense.

But as Pacific says, a vested interest doesn't necessarily preclude someone having a bit of vision and optimism for the future - if nothing else, humans are brilliant at cognitive dissonance, hopefully Bezos is a true master

I find that the foremost thing in any billionaires mind isn't ensuring the moral superiority of their preferred economic system as much as making another billion dollars

I agree with Yodhrin but not so much because I think the entertainment industry will want to support capitalism or anything but rather because the entertainment industry like a billionaire is mostly interested in money.

Worse case scenario the "meat" of the series will be watered down in favor of cool effects, drama, and shallow platitudes that abstain from the adventurist attitude the books took with morality. I wouldn't put it past anyone to take these books and say "what we need is a story about individual man rebelling against an AI dictatorship because individuality, rebellion, and evil robot overlords sells." Extra points if some character mutters something along the lines of "the ends <don't> justify the means" cause that would be rich

Consider Phlebas should be a pretty easy adaptation compared to the rest. Cautiously optimistic that it'll at least be fun... right?

 LordofHats wrote:
I find that the foremost thing in any billionaires mind isn't ensuring the moral superiority of their preferred economic system as much as making another billion dollars

But that's exactly the problem. Will he get the moral/political parts of the setting well enough to do them right? Will he care enough about that issue to stick to Banks' original ideas, instead of dumping all that stuff in favor of something more friendly to mass sales and more money in his pockets?

Excited by the idea, worried about the execution.

Crossed fingers and waiting to hear more.

I'm firmly in the 'they can't do this justice' camp, but I'd be very happy to be wrong.

 avantgarde wrote:
Yiss. Please don't mess this up Amazon.

I refuse to finish reading The Hydrogen Sonata so there's always something of Iain M. Banks left unread for me.

I'm sorry for the thread necronization, but I wanted to post that I have got around to reading The Hydrogen Sonata having put it off for years for various reasons including the one given by avantgarde.

Without spoilering the book for anyone, I wanted to put down that I think if Mr Banks had not died when he did, possibly this would have been his last Culture novel anyway.

There is a feeling of the setting being played out in the author's opinion, which shows through in several aspects of the text which seem to me to acknowledge that there probably isn't anywhere else to go.

I would be happy to discuss this in more detail if people would like to.

The Hydrogen Sonata was set before his previous novel Surface Detail, wasn't it? IIRC, the previous novels were pretty much in chronological order (aside from flashbacks and the like, and the framing device of Consider Phlebas). That might support your idea, that the evolution of the Culture had gone as far as he wanted. It doesn't necessarily mean no more books, though - plenty of gaps to explore.

The Idiran War was the defining point of the entire series, I think. You can point to its influence in just about everything the Culture does in the subsequent novels, but at the moment, I'm not able to apply that to The Hydrogen Sonata - a sign of a changed attitude from Iain, or have I just missed it? The attitude of the Mistake Not... in its conversation with the Gzilt warship harks back to the war, I suppose.

I'd be interested in your thoughts, if you want to expand on them. In a different thread, if need be?

We can continue here.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

The rough chronology of the Culture novels is the same as the order of the books, I believe. However apparently The Player of Games says The Culture is 11,000 years old, and in The Hydrogen Sonata it's 10,000 years old. But this could be because Banks isn't obsessed by "canon".

I don't think Banks was dedicated to "canon" (any more than I am.) He just wrote stuff that seemed good and fitted with the broad sweep of what he wanted to tell. However there is a certain amount of progression of time and technology during the course of the books.

Without going back and re-reading it, I don't remember anything in Surface Detail which suggested it took place after The Hydrogen Sonata. It certainly takes place after Use of Weapons because Zakalwe appears in it in a later phase of his career.

The Idiran War (Consider Phlebas) is about 1,000 years before The Hydrogen Sonata.

Excession is a few hundred years before THS. (This is referred to by the Minds handling the Gzilt Sublimation Crisis discussion of the Interesting Times Gang. There's a gap in which nothing interesting happens. On a galactic scale, the events of Matter or Surface Detail are relatively minor. Look To Windward is 700 years ish after the Idiran War.)

The line at the end of THS that particularly struck me, was Vyr's thought about the Ships gathering for a mutual back-slapping session prior to listing the Gzilt Crisis as Another Terrific Thing The Culture Has Done (paraphrased.)

This seemed to me to express the thought that the stuff Minds do has become the core of the book series and they aren't doing very much of interest.

Secondly, the main human character in THS is a non-Culture person, like the main human in Consider Phlebas.

Thirdly, when you look at the results of the Gzilt Crisis, the Minds do a ton of planning and work, get a lot of people killed (not deliberately, but it happens,) The "villains" get away with it completely, and the Minds decide not to do anything with their new knowledge.

The end result of the book is a direct progression from the beginning. The Gzilt have Sublimed as intended. Vyr plays her music to the end and goes off to possible new adventures.

I don't think this is bad, and I don't imply I didn't enjoy The Hydrogen Sonata. I am trying to give some explanation of why I feel it was a kind of wrap-up of the whole Culture saga.