this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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@cstross @sneerclub I dislike how AI hell is something that actually is a thing in the Culture universe that mattered. (badum-tish)
Frankly one of the weakest Culture novels tho.
I remember liking it a lot, but I need to start that read through all of Banks’ sci-fi sometime and see if it still holds up
So do I, it's been a while. I'll keep quiet about it though so I don't get comments like "oh it's those books that Musk and Bezos love!". Fuckers ruining SF for me.
oh bezos tried to posthumously claim Banks too? musk saying he was a socialist because he liked the Culture novels still pisses me off, and the bad taste from the tech assholes in my life just nodding along to that probably contributed to me not returning to the novels
they are Veppers and think they're the Minds
There was a Consider Phlebas TV series in planning at Amazon, which was canned, thankfully.
Banks would have pissed all over these people (or rather written a non-M novel skewering them).
Anyway tech-adjacent people are terrible at SF, or the SF they like is terrible. Do NOT read any HN discussions of SF you like if you value your faith in humanity (but if you do, why are you reading HN???).
@gerikson @self
Amazon’s The Expanse seems to have been mostly successful.
Good point! I've read 2.5 Expanse novels and found them ok. I've watched 2 eps of the series and liked it too. I believe the team behind the novels planned for it to be a TV series (or it started as that) so that makes sense[1]
The Rings of Power seem to have been a flop, but maybe it was due to a lack of good source material.
Consider Phlebas is a great space opera, but there's a TON of backstory you need to shoehorn in. How do you explain why Bora Horza Gobuchul is on the side of the "bad guys" (the Idirans are xenophobic zealots) instead of the fun-loving Culture? I dunno, I'm no screenwriter. Maybe it could be made to work.
[1] I could be totally off base tho, just recollection
@gerikson
That's why I think Against a Dark Background would be better for a series. It’s stand-alone but has some of the flavor of the Culture novels (the Lazy Gun, androids, etc), and it’s structured as a series of heists, and the whole time the protagonist is being hunted by a cult that also killed her mother.
I agree Against a Dark Background would be better! Who would make it though? Banks is still kinda unknown, even if his work is probably as well known as Gibson's (probably the most mainstream SF author writing now), and Gibson only recently got a TV adaptation with The Peripheral. So marketing Banks without using his "signature IP", i.e. the Culture, would be hard.
Practically speaking it would be easier to make a new IP only loosely based on the idea of a woman being targeted by a cult for a year and a day, and filing off the serial numbers so to speak.
Anyway, I'm not a huge fan of A/V adaptions of the works I like. I've not seen The Peripheral show, but then I didn't think The Peripheral was that good as a book (and the second book was terrible).