Altered Carbon won’t be re-sleeved: Bank’s Culture TV series won’t even be born (TV news: cancellations).
The pandemic isn’t just canceling jobs, lots of fantasy and science fiction TV series – existing and in-the-works – are now being canned as corporations re-trench and trim their budgets.
Netflix is, they now say, zapping the 3rd and future seasons of their cyberpunky streamer Altered Carbon, as analysis has shown it has stopped bringing in new fans to the platform and is now coasting along on its existing audience – a key audience metric for the ruthless Big N., it seems. Hey, at some point you are going to run out of fresh bodies in the world, right?
This was based on the dark SF novels by SFF author Richard K. Morgan and met a mixed reaction from the novels’ existing fans as to how true to the books it ran.
Meanwhile, the Iain Banks Estate has released the sad news that the Amazon Prime TV series based on the Culture space opera novels of Iain M. Banks is also for the chop before it is even out of the gate. Ah, well, we can but dream, right? It sounded too good to be true at the time.
In Banks’ series, the Culture was composed primarily of sentient beings of the pan-human variety, artificially intelligent sentient machines, and a small number of other sentient ETs. The Culture’s post-capitalist luxury communist economy is run by its non-sentient machines, with government entrusted to the Minds, which allows its humanoid and drone citizens to indulge their passions, romances, hobbies, or other activities.
Many of the series’ protagonists are humanoids who choose to work for the Culture’s diplomatic or espionage service and interact with alien civilizations whose citizens hold different ideologies.
We could do with a bit of that Culture culture right now, in our locked down economically crumbling dystopia.
The froth has gone out of the economy. What remains will be… resilient!
