Amazon Is Developing a TV Series Based On Iain M. Banks' Sci-Fi Novel 'Consider Phlebas' (hollywoodreporter.com) 104
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."
I'd love to think it would work but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Fantastic dream however :-)
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Re:I'd love to think it would work but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
slincolne cautioned:
... Hollywood has a habit of hacking good stories to garbage to fit their perceived demographics, and the Culture novels are simply AWESOME !
I think it's important to note that Amazon is not Hollywood. It's equally important, IMnsHO, to note that this project would be a series (which is to say "a miniseries, potentially leading to a string of miniseries, each based on one of Banks' Culture novels").
I make those points, because Amazon's adaptation of PKD's The Man in the High Castle isn't garbage (it's a little slow getting started, but it's a good-faith effort to translate and expand the novel to a video series format that mostly succeeds), and the miniseries format doesn't require the kinds of compromise in storytelling that trying to cram a full novel into 2 hours or so (purely in order to satisfy theater owners' demands, so they can shuffle more people through their concession stands per day) for a feature film adaptation.
I first became convinced that the miniseries was the future of video adaptations of major novels when James Clavell's Shogun was broadcast. It's a truly great, extremely faithful adaptation of his massive book that kept me riveted from its opening scene through its finale. it benefitted from an enormous budget (for its time), a first-rate script, and superb casting and direction - and it made a believer in the form out of me.
In this decade, Game of Thrones has set a standard for fantasy/SF miniseries by which every new offering will and should be measured. For that, we should all be grateful. For instance, Netflix's adaptation of Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon - which my wife and I have been watching - has benefitted by that example, in terms of budget, casting, direction, and scriptwriting. It's good, damnit! So is Syfy's adaptation of The Expanse novels.
Finally, I'm pretty sure that Amazon is well aware of how many fans of Iain M. Banks' work there are, how protective we are of his vision, and the level of expectation they'll have to meet for this adaptation to succeed with that readymade audience. (And it would not greatly surprise me to learn that Jeff Bezos is one of us. After all, he's definitely a space geek - and almost all of us grew up on a steady diet of SF.)
I've been waiting for TV to take science fiction seriously for a very long time. Babylon 5 raised my hopes considerably - but, various iterations of Star Trek aside, it was pretty much an outlier in the realm of long-form SF storytelling in the TV universe until very recently. That someone is finally tackling The Culture - and that Banks' widow is permitting it to happen - is a long step in the right direction.
OTOH, Syfy's upcoming version of Stranger in a Strange Land has me really worried. After all, both RAH and Virginal Heinlein have been gone for a good, long while now - and it would be so freakin' easy for the wrong team to fuck that one up ...
Re: I'd love to think it would work but ... (Score:1)
We already have the shining example of hw screwing up a heinlien story.... Starship troopers.
If the author or their estate isn't around, hw will do a terrible job. Another example is John Carter.
Re:I'd love to think it would work but ... (Score:5, Funny)
Good point. Still there are some gaping plot holes in the French adaptation. I'd like to see those plugged in a new one.
The "Culture" books are freaking fantastic (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Let me know when it comes out on Netflix.
Re:The "Culture" books are freaking fantastic (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Have you read any of Neil Asher's novels, if you liked that about Banks' novels, you'll enjoy Neil Asher
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Wow, thanks for the tip! I've been dying to get back into reading but hadn't found anything awesome. Thanks!
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Well, I've read plenty of military fiction that will sufficiently stupid for the GP. I specifically recommend Out of the Dark by David Weber, because it combines military fiction with vampire novels.
Re: Will be another leftist multicultural SJW garb (Score:1)
Yes, Iain M Banks believed in social justice.
Weird, I can't seem to remember any passages in the novels in which the human characters tell the spaceships to "check their privilege". Could you quote one for me?
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In the eyes of the alt-right idiots, anybody who does not violently oppose compassionate behaviour is considered a "leftist SJW libtard".
There are similar idiots on the left, but they are still mostly kept safely locked away in their echo chamber media.
Re: Will be another leftist multicultural SJW gar (Score:3)
If by "alt right" you mean the literal white supremacists who adopted that label, then you might be right, if hyperbolic. Even they are capable of some compassion.
If by "alt right" you mean the huge number of people who adopted that term as a rejection of both the far left and far right, then you're just an idiot.
There are similar idiots on the left, but they are still mostly kept safely locked away in their echo chamber media.
Far from it; the far left has influenced and implemented all sort of policies in both private enterprise and government policy, and their rhetoric permeates the public sphere. They are currently much more dangerous than the far right.
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Some of my best friends are civic nationalists.
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Re:Will be another leftist multicultural SJW garba (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org]
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... [wikia.com]
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... [wikia.com]
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... [wikia.com]
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
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> 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.
That is an extreme simplification. And I have no idea how you define post-capitalist to come to the latter conclusion. But in the Culture series it is not that anyone can just get whatever they want (except basic things like food), they generally have to earn it.
It is post-capitalist only in so far as you don't earn and pay with money to get
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But in the Culture series it is not that anyone can just get whatever they want (except basic things like food), they generally have to earn it.
I don't remember that. Can you cite some examples?
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Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and sequels seems in some ways to be a critique of Starship Troopers
I have a vague recollection that "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman was the response to Starship Troopers.
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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.
Heinlein actually despised the idea (except for him getting as much nookie as he wanted), and ended up coming up with inane contortions that basically had him masturbating over his nigh-immortal mother in one of his last books.
You obviously didn't know him very well.
On the other hand the left said the book was crypto fascist [wikipedia.org] 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.
Heinlein is dead. So it would be thought, not thinks. The Neo-Fascists who are slavishly in love with everything they can regurgitate of Starship Troopers and who were fervently disappointed with Verhoeven's blatantly satirical version, howeve
Like social justice and SJW are in any way related (Score:1, Insightful)
The SJW have poisoned the term to a point where it is actually more the opposite of social justice than anything. They are exactly the same as tht which they claim to despise. Bullies and morons. Just with the opposite polarity. Like polarity matters when you get an electric shock...
Like everything discussed between Americans, as always, it is reduced to rigid one-dimensional binary extremes of complete and utter galopping Lovecraftian insanity.
Both of your sides are completely retarded asshole horseshit.
SJ
Re:Will be another leftist multicultural SJW garba (Score:4, Insightful)
Social justice is pretty much baked into the entire sci-fi genre
That doesn't really compute. There's no reason for that.
Re:Will be another leftist multicultural SJW garba (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
I preferred sci-fi over her fantasy stuff, and found her long-winded and boring. There just wasn't a story there that I cared enough about to continue reading yet another descriptive paragraph about something that had little to do with anything. Some people seemed to like her at the time, much like in the recent past Tom Clancy was a popular writer, and suffers from similar short-comings based on long ago impressions.
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Social justice is pretty much baked into the entire sci-fi genre
That doesn't really compute. There's no reason for that.
I guess if you're wanting to see everything through an SJW lens, I guess everything will have an SJW slant. Personally, I see most sci-fi as falling into the "moving towards or utopia under fire" or the "falling into or fighting against" dystopian genres. On the utopian side, you'll have equality and justice, by definition. Not social justice, because there's no need for it. On the dystopian side obviously there can be SJW superiority, because dystopian outcomes are where SJWs are headed.
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Heinlein was into social justice?
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Social justice is pretty much baked into the entire sci-fi genre,
Yeah, I remember how all the classic scifi novels are full of affirmative action and stuff. Good times!
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Social justice is pretty much baked into the entire sci-fi genre,
Yeah, I remember how all the classic scifi novels are full of affirmative action and stuff. Good times!
When is that freakin' Lensman film coming out?
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Re:Will be another leftist multicultural SJW garba (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Starship Troopers the film is a parody of Starship Troopers the book. This is something people who like the book tend to ignore.
I'm perfectly aware that Starship Troopers the film is *advertised* as a parody of Starship Troopers the book. The case that it actually *is* a parody would be stronger if the director had read the book. Or if it weren't an unrelated script ("Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine") that received a new title and a few renamed characters when the studio got the rights from Heinlein's estate.
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Exactly. The director did not read the book. He / the studio was however happy to rip-off Heinlein's name, by stealing the S.T. name. That fact says much more about the director, and the studio and their lack of honesty.
To me, Starship Troopers came across as "thought experiment" in a pragmatic way of dealing with basic economics. Humans value things that cost them something.
Having a bunch of people who have zero "skin in the game" choose policies; which may ultimately end up in conflict has some real
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One of the interesting things about the book is an objective and agreed-on morality. At one point in History and Moral Philosophy, Juan Rico is told to prove a moral issue using symbolic logic. A lot of conflict in the real world is about differences in ethical systems, with many people thinking they've got the only reasonable one.
The difference between Heinlein's government and Sparta's is that, in Heinlein's, a resident can sign up for service at any time, and leave the Helot class. That's pretty mu
Please don't make it political (Score:4, Interesting)
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Of course it will be political. The whole book series was a not-at-all-subtle progressive vs reactionary allegory. It's named the Culture series for heavens sake, how could you miss it?
Re:Please don't make it political (Score:4, Insightful)
Politics belong in SF stories, and the best ones often hold up a mirror to our own world. But Hollywood often turns that mirror into a parody narrated by a preacher.
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I don't think I agree with you. Having sufficiently advanced technology to change gender at will and enhance mental and physical characteristics on the fly by its very nature forces a reevaluation of gender norms, but that doesn't make it progressive.
Hell, Use of Weapons explores the Culture's need for someone that is pretty fucking clearly not progressive.
Or are you arguing that the supreme benevolent communist utopia is reactionary?
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V for Vendetta the book was 'fascists vs anarchists' with neither side being purely good or purely bad. As Alan Moore put it the film 'recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism' which he didn't approve of at all :
http://web.archive.org/web/200... [archive.org]
Alan Moore: At the time when I wrote it, it was of course for an English alternative comic magazine around about 1981. Margaret Thatcher had been in power for two or three years. She was facing the first crisis of her, by then, very unpopular government. There were riots all over Britain in places that hadn't seen riots for hundreds of years. There were fascists groups, the National Front, the British National party, who were flexing their muscles and sort of trying to make political capital out of what were fairly depressed and jobless times. It seemed to me that with the kind of Reagan/Thatcher axis that existed across the Atlantic, it looked like Western society was taking somewhat a turn for the worse. There were ugly fascist stains starting to reassert themselves that we might have thought had been eradicated back in the '30s. But they were reasserting themselves with a different spin. They were talking less about annihilating whichever minority they happened to find disfavor with and talking more about free market forces and market choice and all of these other kind of glib terms, which tended to have the same results as an awful lot of the kind of Fascist causes back in the 1930s but with a bit more spin put upon them The friendly face of fascism.
So V for Vendetta originally came out of the fact I'd been asked to write a strip for David Lloyd to illustrate. We'd originally been talking about doing a 1930's noir strip and Dave had bolted that because I think he'd had enough of digging out '30's reference. We thought maybe we could get the same effect by rather than setting it in the near past, to set it in the near future. So it all evolved from several different sources, but it was playing into the fact that over here in England we've got quite a good tradition of villains and sociopaths as heroes. Like Robin Hood, Guy Fawkes and all the rest of them. And in our fiction, in British children's comics, there were as many sociopathic villains who'd got their own comic strips as there were heroes. Possibly more. The British have always had sympathy with a dashing villain.
So I decided to use this to political effect by coming up with a projected Fascist state in the near future and setting an anarchist against that. As far I'm concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they're just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we're fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries. It seemed to me the two more absolute extremes were anarchy and fascism. This was one of the things I objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. There wasn't a mention of anarchy as far as I could see. The fascism had been completely defanged. I mean, I think that any references to racial purity had been excised, whereas actually, fascists are quite big on racial purity.
The Beat: Yeah, it does seem to be a common element.
Moore: It does seem to rather be a badge they wear. Whereas, what I was trying to do was take these two extremes of the human political spectrum and set them against each other in a kind of little moral drama, just to see what works and what happened. I tried to be as fair about it as possible. I mean, yes, politically I'm an anarchist; at the same time I didn't want to stick to just moral blacks and whites. I wanted a number of the fascists I portrayed to be real rounded characters. They've got reasons for what they do. They're not necessarily cartoon Nazis. Some of them believe in what they do, some don't believe in it but are doing it any way for practical reasons. As for the central character of the anarchist, V himself, he is for the first two or three episodes cheerfully going around murdering people, and the audience is loving it. They are really keyed into this traditional drama of a romantic anarchist who is going around murdering all the Nazi bad guys.
At which point I decided that that wasn't what I wanted to say. I actually don't think it's right to kill people. So I made it very, very morally ambiguous. And the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think, and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history. I was very pleased with how it came together. And it was a book that was very, very close to my heart.
I.e. it's a typical Hollywood thing where they find something, suck its political brains out, replace them with the simplistic political message they want and and claim they've made a faithful adaptation.
Incidentally if they'
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Give it up; the entire entertainment industry is political now. Celebrities get harassed [politico.com] when they *don't* denounce Trump, movie writers get harassed [washingtontimes.com] when they *don't* have every permutation of gender/race/religious identity represented on-screen...
With the Chinese loyally turning every flaming turd of a movie ever released into a multi-hundred-million dollar profit and liberals queuing up to throw money and eyeballs at anyone that can reassure them of their smug righteousness on a nightly basis, they have
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In the original series, they weren't all that honorable. That was more Next Generation on. The Romulans were honor-bound.
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Your own link doesn't say that the Klingons are a metaphore for Trump supporters. It says that the political divide in the US inspired some aspects of the Klingons, which is rather different.
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You may not have to worry too much about this one being too
political in the sense of pushing the Culture's ideals. As I recall
most of the action takes place in a region where the culture
has little influence.
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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.
It won't be made political, but, of course, it'll be interpreted as such, and then selectively quoted to support any side.
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No we don't.
"Don't make me think about what I'm doing! And I'm not going to pay any attention anyway, which is why you should ensure that this TV show caters to my will instead of the interests of those already watching..."
Tough.
80s retro? (Score:4, Interesting)
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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I consider that a goos thing. (Score:1)
Movies were way more fun in the 80s.
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I love love love all the Culture novels but I agree with this. Consider Phlebas was his first Culture novel and it feels like a bit of a mishmash of ideas and action.
I can see why someone would want to make it a TV series because of the varied action components but I'd much rather see one of the other books made into a series; one with more Culture presence instead of a background force like it is in Phlebas.
Still - any step that gets more Culture in my face. Hopefully it's the first of many.
Re:So... which side will be the USA analog? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Hu? (Score:3)
What is the Trade Surplus? Is there any Profit Margin in this?
Re:Hu? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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I Blame My Mother
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I'm trying not to get too serious about this argument but Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath.
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Don't get stroppy mate, because <sub>I Said, I've got a Big Stick</sub>.
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That's what all smatter outbreaks say before they consume your home orbital. "Oh, don't mind me. I'm not a hegemonist swarm. Just a distributed consciousness wandering the galaxy, not hurting anyone. Oh, by the way, mind if I break you down into your constituent subatomic particles and integrate you into my matrix? You do? Well, I do feel bad about this but I'm going to have to insist..."
"Progressives" vs. "KKKonservatives" (Score:2)
"Progressive"? Uh-oh... Something tells me, the adaptation will lose the book's subtlety and end up being a story of enlightened Democrats fighting the evil RethugliKKKan war-mongers. Despite "Culture" being, if anything, a Libertarian society.
Bezos, though, may have a better motive than petty politics — the entire "Culture" series describes, how AI, despite displacing (a.k.a. "d
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Listen up, fool. Since Nixon's "Southern Strategy" the Republican Party and the Right Wing have been embracing white racism, and by now they are the de facto American White People's Party.
But things change, and the buzzards are coming home to roost. Your whining is pathetic, as a
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If you have a post-scarcity economy (whatever that means) where people can just get what they need, without messing up other people, a libertarian society looks a lot better. The problems with it now are that people don't necessarily get what they need, and have to resort to other measures, and that economic activity often steps on other people's rights (pollution, for example).
One of the few books I quit in the middle (Score:2)
I'm sure part of the reason was that reddit/r/printsf is so enraptured with the Culture series and call it "uplifting". Just couldn't stomach it.
Difficult book to start with in the culture series (Score:2)
uh-oh (Score:2)
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
just make sure it doesn't look anything like, say America fighting radical Islam, right guys, because that'd be totally unacceptable to modern standards of social indoctrination...
Saying that, its going to look like Americans fighting extremist Islam isn't it.
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The Idrians look a lot like Islamists to me. Considering when the book was written, this is almost certainly a coincidence.
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Been watching Babylon 5 recently... the Narns look quite different today!