Amazon planning to do Iain M Banks "Consider Phlebas "

[andrewc]

http://variety.com/2018/tv/news/consider-phlebas-iain-m-banks-amazon-novel-dennis-kelly-1202706327/

Ooof !  That's going to be a lot of CGI.  And who will play Horza ?

[PaulF]

....And who will play Horza ?

Well obviously several different people

[andrewc]

Will they do  the scene at the beginning where the Gerontocracy are slowly drowning  Horza by pissing & shitting into his tiny cell ?   That might be a bit much for a family audience, as might Fwi-Song & the Eaters....

[mrcharly-YHT]

Will they do  the scene at the beginning where the Gerontocracy are slowly drowning  Horza by pissing & shitting into his tiny cell ?   That might be a bit much for a family audience, as might Fwi-Song & the Eaters....

Don't forget the games of Damage, with orgies + people being electrocuted.

It is a pretty grim book, with a grim ending.

I liked it so much that when a loaned copy didn't come back, I bought another one.

[Wascally Weasel]

I read somewhere once that this was the first book that Banks wrote - I don't mean published but it was the first one he completed.

[mrcharly-YHT]

I read somewhere once that this was the first book that Banks wrote - I don't mean published but it was the first one he completed.

Seems unlikely

He completed his first novel The Hungarian Lift-Jet at 16 and his second novel TTR (aka The Tashkent Rambler) during his first year at Stirling University in 1972.

[andrewc]

William Gibson's comment on it.  I wonder if we'll ever get any decent adaptations of his stuff.  Bigelow's "Strange Days" got the vibe right, even though it wasn't based on any of his books.  "Johnny Mnemonic" was awful.


https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/966383211843543040

[Mrs Pingu]

I'm pretty pissed off that I watched American Gods only to find out it wasn't finished and there's no immediate prospect of them filming the next series, so they can just bally well finish that first befors they go dicking about with anything else.

[Kim]

Well, there ought to be some nice big bangs, anyway.

Presumably Amazon doing Surface Detail would be too ironic?

[Peter]

Let's see if it happens.  At the moment it's just phleba of the month.

[Wascally Weasel]

William Gibson's comment on it.  I wonder if we'll ever get any decent adaptations of his stuff.  Bigelow's "Strange Days" got the vibe right, even though it wasn't based on any of his books.  "Johnny Mnemonic" was awful.


https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/966383211843543040

Strange Days is an unfairly neglected film.

[andrewc]

Cancel Culture 


https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/26/amazon-tv-adaptation-of-iain-banks-culture-series-is-cancelled

[Nick H.]

Good decision. The story is best left to one's imagination. The scale of it, the weirdness, the horrors. Any screen version would be a come-down. I doubt Banks would be pleased, if he were alive to see it.

[Mr Larrington]

Banks was on record as calling some aspects of the TV adaption of The Crow Road “annoyingly better than the novel”, but trying to adapt The Culture was always going to be asking for trouble.

[ElyDave]

I can't see any of these really translating well, imagine trying to CGI a Shell World, and I'm sure we all have our own idea of what an Iln or an Idiran look like, I'd rather keep them in my imagination.

My experience is that very few books translate well or are translated without compromise - Dune being a prime example