A number of the books (Use of Weapons, Surface Detail for example) would make fantastic series by themselves. The grander ones like The Algebraist are begging for a mega budget treatment with a brave, independent minded and intelligent director.

For the books to work, the director and the writer must be able to depict "greater than human" intelligence, thinking a step ahead of the viewer and not hobbling the human heroes to make a weak plot work (since SC are supposed to be the best of humanity). Too simplistic a depiction of the characters is my greatest fear in a Banks adaptation.

Much as I thought American Gods (the series) was badly written in terms of weaving the story together cohesively and of timing (it was fine as a visualisation of the book for people who have read it), many of the characters were well depicted in their full ambiguity and their evolution had the sense of direction otherwise lacking from the series itself.

Everyone is ragging on American Gods here, I must be the only one who liked it. If we're talking about painful tv adaptations how about preacher?

I'd love to see a culture mini series, maybe of Player of Games or Use of Weapons

The world needs more high-quality utopian sci-fi TV. Everything's so "dark" these days. It gets a bit boring.

Rather than strictly utopian or dystopian, I just want to see more nuanced sci-fi. Where's the sci-fi counterpart to The Wire, following socially and economically diverse groups of characters in realistically complex, interconnected stories? (Actually, The Expanse isn't that far off from this.)

I was about to say, The Expanse handles that very well for you, and it sticks fairly close to the books as well.

It's easily the best Sci-Fi on TV right now.

Hmm, it’s pretty good, but I’m not sure I would say it’s the best. Westworld is better in my opinion.

All the recent Star Trek films and TV shows have been lazy prequels or rehashes of the early Federation days. I'd like to see some new Trek, such as transition to a post-scarcity society between ST:TOS and ST:TNG or something a thousand years in the future. I want to see the speculative fiction that Geordi La Forge reads. :)

I always thought that Consider Phlebas would make a great movie. Although it has enough going on (including the history of the war) that it could easily work as a series too.

I seem to remember that Banks even offered to rewrite the ending to make it a bit less gloomy if that would help the chances of it being made.

Any kind of upopian sci-fi would be great. Like many, I do have a soft spot for dystopia, but what $people seem to be lacking lately seems to be some positive [outlook|vision] for the future.

Against a dark background could make a good series - you could expand it to say 13 1 hour episodes.