As part of a report about the first films coming from a production partnership between director Dominic Murphy (White Lightnin’) and Film and Music Entertainment, THR says that they’re planning to make an adaptation of sci-fi author Iain M. Banks’ short story, A Gift From The Culture.
Originally appearing in Interzone and since collected in the book, The State Of The Art, the story is part of Bank’s massive Culture series, about a futuristic, socialist-anarchist interstellar utopia that has overcome death and disease and where there’s enough wealth and creature comforts for practically everything. As that doesn’t sound like it would provide much drama, most of Bank’s Culture stories are about people on the edges of the society.
A Gift For The Culture is just such a tale, about someone who has exiled themselves from The Culture civilisation, but is blackmailed into using a special Culture-only weapon to shoot down a military starship. Only time will tell whether the film version keeps the fact that the main character is a woman who became a man and now has a boyfriend.
It’s great news for fans of Bank’s sci-fi society, and suggests that if successful, we could see more of the Culture novels and stories headed for the big screen. However at the moment it’s still at the script stage, with Murphy writing it alongside Shane Smith, and they may well have difficulty finding the money to make such a complex deep-space set tale. Let’s hope it does get made though, as Banks’ Culture tales are some of the most interesting and intelligent stories in modern sci-fi.
Murphy and Film and Music Entertainment are also developing an Untitle Bronte Project, and Jesus Christ Airlines, set during the Biafra Airlift, although it is A Gift From The Culture that they’re looking at as their key movie.