For anyone who’s watched Tom’s monthly recommendation videos (you should!), there’s been a silent co-host: Joseph M and his choice of Consider Phlebas. I always hope it gets picked, but it sadly never does.
Bezos has taken notice of this glaring injustice and decided to make it into an Amazon series.
Huh. I hope they manage to do this well.
Damn, this could be amazing, or absolutely terrible.
I have no idea how they’ll pull off the ship AIs, which are my favourite part of the Culture novels, but I’m eager to see them try!
They’ll be reimagined as smarmy Androids used for comic relief, voiced by people such as Gilbert Gottfried and Pauly Shore. Fran Drescher will guest star in one episode!
If they also manage to lock down Wallace Shawn, then I’m OK with that.
By the way, is my sci-fi nerd cred in question due to my inability to enjoy the Culture books, despite reading 3-4 of them twice over? Everyone seems to love them but I’ve found them to be such a chore. Maybe the TV series will, against all odds, somehow break the barrier for me?
Yes.And fuck discourse.
This is probably my favorite science fiction series, so I’m really glad to see Amazon have a go at it. I wonder where they will start?
There’s a reason they’ve been working on Alexa.
“Of Course I’ll Be Here In The Morning, set a boiling potato timer for 30 minutes!”
Makes sense.
I’m excited, but this needs insane production values that I not sure if are feasible.
Also, I hope they do not start with Consider Please. Player of Games or Use of Weapons would make much better TV seasons.
That is awesome, and pretty scary, news.
Its nice to see that the superhero craze seems to be over (Nice for me, that is - Its probably a glutton issue), and we get more scifi, and hopefully also more thoughtful scifi, based on books with some thought in them.
How do you figure?
Just that the last few marvel shows have been rather poor in quality, as have quite a few superhero movies, and are quickly cancelled, and we see more and more sci fi shows than before, instead of everything having to be superheroes. Its a personal bias, which has no more scientific analysis in it than personal observations.
I’m with @KevinC, I love SF but I cannot get into the Culture books and I can’t really pin down why. I’ll give the series a shot though, right after I get through The Expanse and Star Trek Discovery. That’s a joke, son, you’re supposed to laugh.
I hope you’re right. I’ve been suffering from Superhero fatigue for at least a decade at this point!
This is the most fraught and difficult to read of the books in the series. I doubt they are capable of telling the story accurately in a video production. Most likely they won’t even try but will come up with something only vaguely similar. But it does have some very grand cinematic scenes they will undoubtedly touch on to sort of anchor the production to the book.
Me too…
I’ve read all of the Culture books. I’m a bit ambivalent about them. I think they have a bunch of great ideas and memes, but the plots can be a bit dissatisfying. I think a TV series in the Culture setting but not being tied to the plot of any particular book could be great.