I honestly don't care if there is a "sinister" purpose behind the good scifi I've read. Fund the next Iain banks please. In fact - throw me $50k to live for a year and you've got yourself a book - or I can at least guarantee some words on pages mentioning spaceships / robots, etc.
Speaking of whom - a friend and I were the other day wondering Just Why On Earth none of his SciFi appears to have been optioned for conversion to other media. I can imagine scope, complexity and presumably huge budget leaving prospective optioners with slightly soiled breeks, but all the same — not even a hope of one of the tales in The State of the Art?
Same question for a ton of science fiction and fantasy. Some things that could be excellent on the silver screen, or as a television series:
• Fritz Leiber's "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser".
I've not seen anything indicating anyone has ever even started development on a movie for this.
• Richard and Wendy Pini's "Elfquest".
Warner Brothers announced this in 2008, but canned it because they thought it might compete with another project of theirs, "The Hobbit".
• Larry Niven's Known Space series.
One Known Space short story made it to TV: "The Soft Weapon" was adapted to the Star Trek universe and became the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "The Slaver Weapon", with Mr. Spock taking the place of Nessus the Puppeteer.
Ringworld has been in planning as a movie or miniseries at least three separate times, but never got past development.
• Anne McCaffrey's Pern series.
This actually got so far as casting and set building, and was within a few days of starting shooting for a pilot for a TV series for Warner Brothers Network, but when the showrunner presented the final pilot script to Warner Brothers for approval, they sent it back with so many changes it no longer resembled Pern (the changes have been described as turning it into something like a cross between Buffy and Xena). The showrunner, Ronald D. Moore, was a fan of the books and quit rather than accept the changes, and the project died.
There have been a couple of announcements since then, but as far as I know none ever went past announcing hiring a screenwriter and maybe an executive producer and then never being heard from again.
I've had problems with Niven — his scope is grand and majestic, but I've often found his narrative a little bit clunky and paint by numbers, if that makes any sense?
I've jotted down your other suggestions for further reading, thanks!
Niven's short story characters always seemed to be celibate men with no friends who owned a spaceship for some reason, vs. a high school physics problem. (see Neutron Star)
Did have a pretty good run around Ringworld or Integral Trees, which could be good with rewrites, though I think he went on to become such an "I'm so smart" skeptic type he turned into a global warming denialist?
It would be difficult to do Wolfe justice in a film? Maybe something self-contained like Pirate Freedom or The Fifth Head of Cerberus, but everything in the "Solar Cycle" has such bizarre complications and connections to everything else that a movie couldn't avoid making many cruel cuts.
> Probably lacking the ratio of explosions to character development that modern scifi movies and tv audiences demand.
To be fair, in the collection of stories I would have expected never to be adapted, "Story of your life" is high up there, and yet "Arrival" was a deeply thoughtful film that, despite a few strange adjustments, was faithful in many important ways to its source. (OK, it did have one explosion.)
I don't remember all of the stories in State of the Art, but I'm finding it hard to see the ones I do working as a movie for people not already immersed in the Culture universe.
I could see Consider Phlebas or Player of Games as a miniseries though.
It's a long (long) time since I read state of the art, but I think you could mangle the tale of the benevolent super culture visiting Earth and eating meat made from the DNA of world leaders :)
I think SotA was the third Banks book I read, after The Crow Road and The Wasp Factory, and I don't recall there being any gulf of appreciation from not having being previously immersed in The Culture.
Special Circumstances is a reference to the "totally not a military but we happen have found this incredible amount of fire power just lying around" non-military section of the Culture culture.
It's Bank's wink towards that while you might have an enlightened view of universal peace other parts of the universe would quite like you in pieces.
Essentially the Culture's attitude to violence is that it should be used as a last resort, so named because once resorted to it lasts as an example.
