I watched Guardians of the Galaxy II a little while ago, and Thor Ragnarök a bit before that, and it won't be long until the new Star Wars. There are so many sci-fi movies these days, and TV series – with actual spaceships and stuff – that it's no longer necessary to go see them all just because it's a special occasion. I felt so spoiled for choice after deciding NOT to follow a Netflix series about space bounty hunters. There are so many sci-fi series I don't even have time to watch all of them! Awesome! And hardly a week goes by without the announcement of another sci-fi book inspired series (I'm somewhat excited about Altered Carbon, even if it does not have spaceships).

GotG, btw, is delightfully designed. The Deep Dream inspired buildings on Ego' planet are wonderful, and generally the whole movie has got plenty of original design ideas. It was not long ago that all sci-fi leaning movies followed the same highly perfected but predictable concept art style. Also, there was an uniform blueish-greyish-greenish colour palette, as if it was embarrassing to even acknowledge the existence of, say, colour yellow. Now thanks to GotG and some Marvel movies, we are seeing a saturated rainbow colour range for a change.

But anyway. So many movies and TV series and still no one has made one of late Iain M Banks's Culture. Youndu's arrow in Guardians of the Galaxy was an obvious knife missile, but how come we haven't seen inspired-by or honest homages to everyone's favourite morally ambguous space utopia?

Banks's Culture novels are quite cinematic, and yet as far as I know no-one has ever seriously pushed to get even one of them filmed. But I guess even if the writing inspires awesome visuals on the inner silver screen, the stories themselves are hard to adapt to the sort of easy-to-digest streamlined movie experience which goes hand-in-hand with special effects budget big enough to cover the huge scale of orbitals, GSVs and interstellar war.

The Wachowskis would be prime candidates for producing and directing a Banks movie. They could handle the scale, the style and the politics – they lean passably left. What they miss is a good script. I mean I only survived Jupiter Ascending by blocking the dialogue and forcing my brain to parse the happenings on the screen as a lost Culture story. It was not all bad, actually, though it required quite heavy intentional self-deception. But Wachowskis are at some root level technophobes and Banks was a technophile (or consciousness-egalitarian, in which biological consciousness awarded no special merit). Wachowskis would no doubt interpret Minds and drones as something else than friendly, and what fun would that be? Perhaps there just isn't anyone in movie business right now to whom this dream project would be perfectly suited.