Amazon wants to adapt Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas

Amazon is taking another swing at adapting Iain M. Banks' long-running space opera series, The Culture. Deadline reports that Prime Video is developing an adaptation of Consider Phlebas, the first installment of the series that Banks published, with Interior Chinatown author Charles Yu set to write and serve as executive producer, and with director Chloé Zhao (who directed Marvel's The Eternals) also tapped to serve as executive producer.

This isn't the first time that Amazon has taken a swing at the series: it announced that it was developing an adaptation of the novels series in 2018 with Dennis Kelly (creator of Channel 4's Utopia) as part of a broader mandate from Amazon's then-CEO Jeff Bezos to find "big shows that can make the biggest difference around the world." Part of that push included Prime Video's adaptation Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (which was just renewed for a third season.) That attempt came to a close in 2020 when the Banks estate opted to pull out.

At the time, Kelly noted that he thought that "the estate didn’t want to go through with it. It wasn’t the material. They hadn’t seen anything [he had written], it was just because I think they weren’t ready to do it, for whatever reason." Banks' estate told The Guardian that the “timing wasn’t quite right,” and that it’s “hugely grateful for all the care and creative energy that went into the early stages of the project.”

Fast forward six years, and it looks like the timing might be a bit better. The 40th anniversary of the series is coming up in a couple of years.

The Culture is an enormous space opera series that Banks wrote between 1987 and 2012. The first book out of the gate was Consider Phlebas, and he followed up every couple of years with nine additional installments: The Player of Games (1988), Use of Weapons (1990), The State of the Art (1989), Excession (1996), Inversions (1998), Look to Windward (2000), Matter (2008), Surface Detail (2010) and The Hydrogen Sonata (2012). Banks died in 2013, and in 2023, his estate released a book of the drawings that he created while writing the series. He was also a prolific author of literary fiction, distinguishing his genre and non-genre work with his middle initial (he published his SF works as Iain M. Banks, literary as Iain Banks.)

The series is set in a post-scarcity future, in which the people within live on giant space habitats called "Orbitals" and enormous space habitats, largely governed by artificial intelligences known as Minds. Banks set out to create a world that really went against most conventional space operas at the time, imagining a future where conflict isn't driven by resources.

In Consider Phlebas, we follow a character named Horza, a shape-shifting mercenary as he's hired to track down a Mind that escaped in the midst of a war between The Culture and their adversaries, the Idirans. The Mind ended up on a planet run by beings known as the Dra'Azon, who won't allow either side onto the planet, and the Idirans task him with retrieving it, along with a captured Special Circumstances agent, Perosteck Balveda. The book is a tremendous, action-packed read, with space pirates, strange worlds, heists, and quite a bit more.

There's no guarantee that this'll be made: development is just one early step in the process, and as we've already seen, this work might not end up going anywhere. I'm a big fan of Yu's work: he's an excellent storyteller and novelist, and I'd be really interested in seeing what he and Amazon have planned for it. Hopefully, all of the pieces will line up this time.