I could see Consider Phlebas or Player of Games as a miniseries though.
I think SotA was the third Banks book I read, after The Crow Road and The Wasp Factory, and I don't recall there being any gulf of appreciation from not having being previously immersed in The Culture.
To be fair, in the collection of stories I would have expected never to be adapted, "Story of your life" is high up there, and yet "Arrival" was a deeply thoughtful film that, despite a few strange adjustments, was faithful in many important ways to its source. (OK, it did have one explosion.)
• Fritz Leiber's "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser".
I've not seen anything indicating anyone has ever even started development on a movie for this.
• Richard and Wendy Pini's "Elfquest".
Warner Brothers announced this in 2008, but canned it because they thought it might compete with another project of theirs, "The Hobbit".
• Larry Niven's Known Space series.
One Known Space short story made it to TV: "The Soft Weapon" was adapted to the Star Trek universe and became the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "The Slaver Weapon", with Mr. Spock taking the place of Nessus the Puppeteer.
Ringworld has been in planning as a movie or miniseries at least three separate times, but never got past development.
• Anne McCaffrey's Pern series.
This actually got so far as casting and set building, and was within a few days of starting shooting for a pilot for a TV series for Warner Brothers Network, but when the showrunner presented the final pilot script to Warner Brothers for approval, they sent it back with so many changes it no longer resembled Pern (the changes have been described as turning it into something like a cross between Buffy and Xena). The showrunner, Ronald D. Moore, was a fan of the books and quit rather than accept the changes, and the project died.
There have been a couple of announcements since then, but as far as I know none ever went past announcing hiring a screenwriter and maybe an executive producer and then never being heard from again.
I've jotted down your other suggestions for further reading, thanks!
Have you read "The Book of the New Sun" by Gene Wolfe? It is really really good.
But I dream about making a graphic novel out of New Sun...
Wolfe's work is very literary, for lack of a better word. ;-)
Did have a pretty good run around Ringworld or Integral Trees, which could be good with rewrites, though I think he went on to become such an "I'm so smart" skeptic type he turned into a global warming denialist?
If you don't care, and encourage initiatives like these, you will never get it.
It's Bank's wink towards that while you might have an enlightened view of universal peace other parts of the universe would quite like you in pieces.
Essentially the Culture's attitude to violence is that it should be used as a last resort, so named because once resorted to it lasts as an example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_in_the_Cult...
I think I'm up for a re-read of the whole series now. Cheers!