This was a great in-depth exploration of some of the ideas from Banks' books that I thought deserved a deeper drive. Even though he was writing in the 80's Banks has a lot of foresight into how modern tech such as AI could result in a society like The Culture. It's definitely utopian, but to the author of this blog post's credit it comes with a subtle lack of meaning that some would find unbearable.
Reading this blog post gave me insight into our my own (Western) culture, and modernity. What happens as we move away from ascribed identities, like be born and dying a feudal serf, to achieved identities garnered from the actions we choose in our lives? I laughed at the jibe about the 2 ways a modern person finds meaning; either embracing their Celtic heritage or going full memeplex!
The website design is unreadable, except if you highlight sections of the text which make it straightforward to read. No idea how you'd read this on mobile, though.
I always had the impression that the lack of meaning in The Culture was fairly overtly portrayed with many side stories and the fact that the main story line always had to follow some special operation outside The Culture in order to be interesting.
> Even though he was writing in the 80's Banks has a lot of foresight into how modern tech such as AI could result in a society like The Culture.
Oh, there's nothing modern about AI, or at least about the concept of a GAI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter - "AI" has been swinging from "the future, now" to an embarrassing past fixation every few years since the 60s.
The Culture novels were published from 19872-2012 and I believe generally written the year before they were published so perhaps the foresight has to be weighted against when the books were written.
Use of Weapons was first written about 1974, but apparently needed a lot of work (and help from Banks' friend Ken MacLeod - also an excellent author) to get in into a shape that could be published - which it eventually was in 1990.
Ah, always wondered about that. It always felt like a slightly more... unfinished version of the Culture than the one in the Player of Games, which was published earlier.
It's interesting that the Culture was created as a background for Zakalwe, the ultimate warrior, who would he work for - the ultimate good guys of course! At least that's how I would read it....
> What happens as we move away from ascribed identities, like be born and dying a feudal serf, to achieved identities garnered from the actions we choose in our lives?
Not really. Most people in that situation worked on what was available that paid, and then retired with a grown up family successfully provided for. That's not a serf.
Most people over the last 500 years _absolutely did not retire_. But in any case I think the general idea holds; prior to the 20th century, for the _vast_ majority of people, even in developed nations, the course of their life was pretty much laid out at birth by their social station. They weren't literally serfs, usually, but in practice they'd be doing what their parents and their parents' parents did, usually agriculture. This _started_ changing in the 19th century, but the really big shift was in the 20th.
Depends on what counts as freedom and serfdom. I'm sure many serfs in middle ages were fairly content with their lives and how free they are. Such is life an human nature. Best walls are the ones you are not even sure if they are there. Less reasons for you to seek the ways around them.
"Serf" isn't synonymous with "person who has to work". It's a specific condition. There's no point renaming things; just say what they are.
For example: if you wish food, shelter, sanitation, water, etc all sprang into existence spontaneously, or that you had slaves to do things for you, then say that. If you don't think either of those things, and, say, we all need to work to provide value to exchange with others to create a life, then that would be approximately what we have today. That's not serfdom.
Right, but when serfdom was abolished and people were free to move, some of them were forced to move looking for work and poorer because of that. So were they more free? Just because they were not attached to their land? Or were they less free because they had less and nobody anylonger cared if they live or die?
We are also attached to land. Just a bigger piece of land. I can't freely move to work anywhere on the planet.
Maybe fair to say that the most we can say is that one form of unfreadom was replaced by another form of unfreadom. Along the lines of - is "freedom to starve" a freedom, how much freedom, and is a +ve or a -ve freedom? I think this is a ongoing and long discussion with not a final straightforward answer. In philosophy that is. It maybe that the technology provides an answer by creating new reality at some point.
> "The website design is unreadable, except if you highlight sections of the text which make it straightforward to read. No idea how you'd read this on mobile, though."
The site design worked fine for me on Vivaldi Linux, but since you mentioned it, I tried reader mode ... and for the first time, it completely destroyed the site! Astoundingly bad!
To the rescue: Firefox reader mode, or NoScript block (default) JS for domain www.sciphijournal.org - makes it readable for me again. What were the site creators thinking??
On a tangent there are two Iain Banks related books that might be of interest. The first is an academic study and overview of Banks "Iain M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction)" and, more particularly, his culture books:
The second book "The Culture: The Drawings" is slated to be released in early November (2023) and is a collection of drawings by Iain Banks that, per Amazon, details "the universe of his bestselling Culture novels":
That's a fun idea. In this particular case they did a great job capturing a relatively consistent look, and it's telling that several people are asking if this is from a movie.
Of course, they got the spaceships wrong. Banks complained about this in an interview in the 90s ("They're going to get it wrong - they're going to make them look like everybody else's"). Banks' ships vary in how they look, but they're generally different from what you see in most SF. From my recollection, most are either ellipsoids or extremely long, sleek cylinders. Chronologically later ships, such as Sleeper Service, don't have physical hulls at all, but are "multiple-layer field-complex" projections consisting of several nested, concentric fields projected by the Minds enclosing one another.
> The Culture is a group-civilisation formed from seven or eight humanoid species, space-living elements of which established a loose federation approximately nine thousand years ago. The ships and habitats which formed the original alliance required each others' support to pursue and maintain their independence from the political power structures - principally those of mature nation-states and autonomous commercial concerns - they had evolved from.
This was... kind of retconned out in Hydrogen Sonata, right? The formation of the Culture there was depicted as between nation-states, at least in the case of Gzilt.
Hmm... Are the Gzilt not simply one of the humanoid species? Or perhaps the Culture at the time of prospective Gzilt merger already contained the rest of the constituent groups?
I just finished rereading this and it's always framed as the civilization. For the gzilt it would have been the government but it's not necessarily the case for all others that joined.
> The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless.
> From a certain perspective, the Culture is not all that different from Star Trek’s Borg. The difference is that Banks tricks the reader into, in effect, sympathizing with the Borg.
The first book (consider Phlebus) does the opposite. It follows an enemy of the culture and has you believe the culture is just the borg (an empire of machines.). It’s only through the philosophical debates do you come to see the culture as the utopia it is.
Nor does the Culture force individuals or groups into joining, though it is not above meddling in the culture (heh) of other populations to make them (say) stop genociding each other.
FWIW, Banks himself stated that exploring how a "perfect" utopia would deal with less enlightened neighbors is a core theme of the series. It's all good and well to provide perfect harmony for all your citizens, but can you truly be said to be "good" if you allow your neighboring civilizations to live in squalor? On the other hand, meddling in the affairs of others has many ethical quandaries as well. Exploring these is what the culture series is all about.
The culture does not forcefully assimilate however, and they add the cultural proclivities of any new member as opposed to breaking it down into its elements to be absorbed and reconstructed.
The article covers this. It highlights how Contact is specifically tasked with shaping and forming the development of other species over millenia to 'assimilate' them. By the time a species is ready to be 'assimilated', no force is needed.
Hmm, good point! However, I would argue that such nudges are toward overall peace with a neighbor, rather than total civilation subjugation like with the Borg.
That is a fair argument if you consider the Culture to be a collection of civilisations living in harmony, but if the Culture is rather a single entity which supplants the existing civilisation and gradually replaces all of the unique features of the existing civilisation, is it still fairly classifiable as “peace with a neighbour”? It’s a tough question and I don’t profess to know the answer, but for me I think I would argue that you can no longer call them a “neighbour” if they’re no longer separately identifiable as “not the Culture”.
Also, the Culture is not a hive mind. All the people and Minds are individuals. They could form a hive mind, but wouldn't because then they would ascend. Culture exists by not ascending.
Right, and the books mention how the Culture is a bit long in the tooth to Sublime, seeing other younger civs speed-run toward this extradimensional afterlife.
In Excession, and some of the other novels Banks contrasts the Culture with a “hegemonising swarm”, which is essentially a cancerous version of the Culture (or similar civilisation).
Also there are divergent factions in the Culture, dubbed the Ulterior.
Absolutely no surprises there. I've read the entire culture series several times. I've read every entry in it at least twice, some more than that. Except Use of Weapons. I only need to read about the "chair" once.
But Use of Weapons only truly shows its genius when you read it again and recognize all the hints that were there in plain sight but you didn't understand on the first reading!
This debate is endless and varies by personal taste and what about the novels interests you. Use of Weapons is in the bottom half for me right alongside the one the author liked, Consider Phlebas (though I liked the latter more after reading the rest of the series).
It's still my favorite series books though, so don't get me wrong.
I don't think anyone called the book bad. I just know that I'm quite keen not to read it again because of the horrible things in it. It might be well written but maybe I don't feel like those concepts going into my head.
It's a subjective thing. Just like which Culture novel is the best.
For me what didn't work is the psychology of the book. I'm a big fan of Iain Banks, and I've read Use of Weapons twice, and both times it left me unsatisfied. I'm always surprised when someone says it's their favourite Culture book.
Spoilers ahead: The character of Eletiomel was so thinly drawn that when the conflict with Zakalwe occurs, it's really not clear what his motivations are aside from helping win a revolutionary war. And he commits an evil, barbaric act completely out of the blue, suggesting he's a calculating psychopath willing to murder an innocent person (his own lover, no less) in an apparently very elaborate, premeditated way which also happens "off-screen". And then we are supposed to buy the idea that he was so traumatised by his own actions (not actually a psychopath, then) that he adopted a new identity and spent the rest of his life mentally suppressing his past and also somehow atoning for it? I'm not buying any of it.
My girlfriend at the time was a redhead, and I remember glancing over at her and thinking "I'm not gonna peek under the bedcovers for a while, lest it reminds of that goddamn chair..."
I remember Banks commenting at a talk that someone made the "Ian Banks must have been a kind of fucked up dude" comment at a book signing where his mother was present and she commented that "Ian was always a lovely wee boy".
He always seemed like a really nice guy when I've heard him speak in person.
> Ian Banks must have been a kind of fucked up dude, given he invented some particularly dark stuff.
_Contextually_, I've seen a lot worse. Banks doesn't glorify this sort of thing, generally; bad things are done by bad people. (Almost to a slightly preachy extent; the elite of the Empire of Azad watching literal torture porn seems like _slightly_ over-doing it on the whole "have I mentioned that they are bad?" thing...) It's when an author has the _hero_ pulling out fingernails that I start to get a bit worried.
I'm sure few people here need advice on how to fix/hack this, but here goes; In firefox for example, either use 'reader view' to get a plain page of text, or, select some text, right-click and choose 'inspect', then find the body color attribute, in the styles section of the developer tools panel that pops up, as follows:
I find that a lot of science fiction tends to project the author's worldview into the future and then comes up with a bunch of magic to explain how it'll inevitably happen. I haven't read any of Banks but based on the article, it pretty much sounds like the same thing on steroids. As (I think) William Gibson said, sci-fi is about the present, not the future.
Can anyone recommend sci-fi that doesn't do this, but instead tries to predict the future/near future and present a realistic vision of things, even if it's not precisely what the author hopes would happen? The closest thing I can think of is Children of Men, which is unfortunately a bit too dystopian for me.
A technicality, perhaps, but the books that the article is about don't actually depict our future. Their civilization did not evolve on Earth and isn't biologically human, and the books are (with the exception of one short story) not set anywhere near Earth or even in our time.
The Culture books don't follow the predictive tradition of science fiction. Banks' books are more appropriately called space opera, though Banks has his own spin on things that sets him somewhat apart.
What Banks does is dream up a completely new, utopian, post-scarcity civilization, and then explores what kinds of conflicts and moral problems can exist in such an environment where anyone can be anyone, have anything, and go anywhere.
>Their civilization did not evolve on Earth and isn't biologically human, and the books are (with the exception of one short story) not set anywhere near Earth or even in our time.
The State of the Art is, in fairness, one of the best things Banks has ever written.
What the books add to all this theorizing is that they're wildly entertaining. To me, they're the best that modern sci-fi has to offer, and Banks is sorely missed.
I was looking for something like that because I recall Banks saying something along the lines of 'socialism wins' about his books:
> The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.
> Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.
And that feels kind-of Star Trekkie in its optimism that humans can ever live in peace with one another, and that "socialism" (however you care to define it) can ever be successful - capitalism fosters innovation. Perhaps the only way Banks' vision of the future could be successful is do exactly what his books talk about and we just let the machines take over.
... but then it's really the machines' Culture, isn't it? And we're just their pets.
I'm going to read Consider Phlebas based on the essay linked above, but I think it's a bit dishonest to describe this Culture as belonging to any of its inhabitants other than The Minds. It's The Minds' Culture, and everybody else are just their housecats. Kind of a disappointing future if there's any other option besides self-annihilation. Cozy, but disappointing.
That is one of the core themes in the books yes. The Minds are actually good godlike AIs. Not even in a "scheming behind the backs of the humans" kind of way, they genuinely care for all beings under their control (both humans, non-quite-Mind-level AIs and all other sorts of animals etc) because they believe it is the right thing to do. There are even a few Minds who don't like caring for others and they usually choose to become warships or explorers or something like that. Humans who actually want to leave the Culture are rare, but those few souls who do are allowed and even provided with a starship to go jetting off with.
It is deliberately written to be as close to utopia as possible, with free will for all and infinite resources. The interesting parts of the novels come when you run into the limits that even such a society has. "Excession" has one such limit (what do you do when something appears that outclasses you as much as the Culture outclasses current humanity?) and "Player of Games" has another (what do you do when your less enlightened neighbors won't stop torturing their servant classes? Force them to change or let them grow up at their own pace?). Both books are highly recommended IMO.
"Investing all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, A.I. Minds, Banks knew what he was doing; this is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved, by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control. The danger involved in this imaginative step, though, is clear; one of the problems with the Culture novels as novels is that the central characters, the Minds, are too powerful and, to put it bluntly, too good."
That paragraph is introduced with "As one commentator has said", making it only a single opinion. And I would mostly disagree. Consider Phlebas, The Hydrogen Sonata and Excession show competition on the same level as the Minds, the Excession even beyond their level. And any entity being "too good" is a strange notion, if you consider those entities being many, many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us humans. Why would "truths" about humans apply to Minds? It is like a bacterium trying to extrapolate the true character of humans.
> That paragraph is introduced with "As one commentator has said", making it only a single opinion.
I don't think so: that quote wouldn't make it into the article if it didn't typify a common opinion.
> Consider Phlebas, The Hydrogen Sonata and Excession show competition on the same level as the Minds, the Excession even beyond their level.
I've only read two of those, but in both the competition is wholly with external actors. Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.
> And any entity being "too good" is a strange notion, if you consider those entities being many, many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us humans. Why would "truths" about humans apply to Minds? It is like a bacterium trying to extrapolate the true character of humans.
The Culture is a fantasy, and like most fantasies, it needs some hand-waving "magic" to hold its world up. That's what the Culture Minds are.
> I don't think so: that quote wouldn't make it into the article if it didn't typify a common opinion.
It only needs a printed source to make it into WP. Here it is the opinion of one Chris Brown. No, there is no problem with citing that, but it is hard to estimate how much support is really behind that opinion.
> I've only read two of those, but in both the competition is wholly with external actors. Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.
If you really think there is no internal dispute between minds I will politely ask to read the novels again. There certainly is. Already the existence of the "eccentric" classification gives that away. Why would they need "Special Circumstances" if they were all "of the same mind"?
What is true (AFAIR) is, that they are no battling to the death. However, the point was that minds are not too powerful, if there is competition. That point would still stand with only external competition.
> The Culture is a fantasy, and like most fantasies, it needs some hand-waving "magic" to hold its world up. That's what the Culture Minds are.
Try your hand as an author with the very far future. Unless you go dystopian (and thus denying most of the potential progress) everything after a couple of centuries might well be seen as magic.
>> I've only read two of those, but in both the competition is wholly with external actors. Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.
> If you really think there is no internal dispute between minds I will politely ask to read the novels again.
I misstated what I meant a little bit. There are disputes between Culture Minds, but it seems like they're about foreign policy and competing with external actors. They're of one mind about maintaining the "liberal anarchy" within the Culture itself.
As a sibling commenter said, Excession is almost entirely about fleshing out the "society" of Minds and the scheming and politicking that's going on within. It is of course impossible to actually write in-depth superintelligent characters without being a superintelligence yourself, making the Minds in the story quite human-like. Nevertheless the novel shows that Banks was quite aware of the problem of the Minds easily becoming mere dei ex machina – and quite literal ones at that.
Yes, I think that is the main, but inevitable, shortcoming of the Culture novels. The Minds are not too powerful or "too good" (I still cannot get over entities, which are not humans, being described as "too good"... :) ). But they just appear as clever humans in the novels, by necessity.
>> Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.
> That's _certainly_ not the case in Excession (I'm assuming that's the one you haven't read?)
I have read that one. I recall all the depicted disagreements were about foreign policy. They're all of one mind about maintaining the "liberal anarchy" the quote referred to.
I am not sure it is ever established that we are anything. I think in the Culture novels the term "human" is used as a shorthand for "humanoid citizen of the Culture", not necessarily Homo Sapiens (or their descendants).
I understand where that "pet" metaphor is coming from, but I also think it is very limited. It is looking at a relationship from the point of view of power level and intellect, and nothing else. The relationship depicted in the books has many more dimensions that are left out, and that I consider critical. I would highlight 3 items.
The first one is that even if Minds are (probably) as intelligent compared to us as we are compared to housecats, the fact that the "base intelligence" that we are using is that of a human already provides a richness to the relationship that the "cat" can not simply provide. A human could (for example) attempt to hide information from the Mind in order to further their own interests, months from now. Probably foolish, but a kind of foolishness which is outside of what a cat's planning capabilities.
The second one is on the opposite side: the relationship that a regular human can have with a housecat is limited also by the "highest-level mind". A Mind would be able to have way richer and more varied relationships than a regular human, including with other humans, merely because it has more options at its disposal. A Mind could (for example), track thousands of external body signs in order to deduce that a human is hiding something, and still have plenty of other options at their disposal (down to actual mind-reading; although that would be probably distasteful).
Finally, I think Minds need humans. This is not explicitly mentioned in the novels, but all the minds that had no humans with them (that I remember, at least) where the "unstable", eccentric or downright crazy.
I think a better relationship analog with something that exist today instead of a "owner vs pet" is a "parent vs child". The power balance is still there, the difference of raw mind power is also still there, but the parent is strongly motivated to make the best possible world for their child, and they need each other. It's just that in this case, humanity is the parent, and the Minds are the descendants. But well, I said "better", not perfect.
> Finally, I think Minds need humans. This is not explicitly mentioned in the novels, but all the minds that had no humans with them (that I remember, at least) where the "unstable", eccentric or downright crazy.
Yeah, this is mentioned explicitly a few times.
It's also never quite stated, but it's certainly implied that humans are capable of greater ruthlessness/moral ambiguity than the machines, which is handy for SC.
Well said. Consciousness is given as much as taken, emerges from dialog and space granted. You can uplift a dumb pet just as easily as you can stifle a smart person.
> Finally, I think Minds need humans... all the minds that had no humans with them (that I remember, at least) where the "unstable", eccentric or downright crazy.
Well okay; the humans aren't pets, they're emotional support animals. Not a huge improvement though.
Why does this idea bother humans us so much? It troubles us so much that something could be much smarter than us. That something is stronger than us is barely a consideration these days after we've automated nearly everything, yet we've still not transcended the idea that minds far greater than ours can and will be created.
What bothers me is pretending that the Culture is humanity's. Or that humans are in any way relevant to the whole plotline. It's like if somebody rewrote all the great works of literature from the perspectives of the protagonists' dogs, and then threw away the originals, and pretended that this was somehow a useful perspective. That would bother me.
I can't see how we can avoid eventually creating AIs that are far more powerful than we are - in that case something like the Culture is probably the best we can hope for.
What makes you think that the advent of AI will be any different from the advent of cerebrums?
When higher vertebrates developed cerebrums, those didn't replace the evoluntionarily-older cerebellum or midbrain. We humans still have those. From the perspective of a lizard, a human looks like a lizard with an awesome AI-like cerebrum strapped to it.
Importantly, the cerebrum does not have an independent self-preservation drive.
Frankly, I think "AIs with their own self-preservation drive and plans for the future" is implausible, although it is likely to be put forward as a deceptive explanation of what's going on by the first few humans who figure out how to strap on another layer of cerebrum. It's the easiest way to keep the rest of us from becoming resentful.
Just think of self preservation as an advanced anti-virus (and the more you learn about bacteriophages the more this makes sense). It makes no sense for an AI to have no ability to fight back against being taken over at multiple levels.
... and yet my cerebrum still has not attacked my brainstem.
You're applying evolutionary reasoning to an algorithm (gradient descent) which does not involve fitness selection in any way, shape, or form. This is bogus.
That's one of the themes in the books. Even if humans in Special Circumstances feel they've accomplished something (or failed at something), they never know how much of it was just part of the Minds' schemeing.
> To be fair, Banks has made it clear that the Culture is separate to terrestrial humans. I believe he's even said he thinks Earth won't make it.
To be fair, done of it is real. The Culture only works because Banks wanted it to work and wrote it so it works, in the same way I could write a book with a million pins balanced on their tips, then have a character dance on their heads and have not a one fall down.
If Earth wouldn't make it in the Culture, it's entirely due to Bank's feelings about out own culture and time.
Yes, it's fictional and largely subjective. Sci fi does not need to be an accurate prediction about what is likely in our future timeline. The Culture is fascinating for its imaginative scope and careful construction, and the reflections it encourages on our own society; much like Le Guin's Annares or Vinge's Qeng Ho.
This is incoherent non-sense, it's also ahistorical. In 50 years the USSR went from poor farmers to defeating the Nazis and inventing space travel. In today's capitalist society it's obvious to anyone that the system holds back orders of magnitude more innovation than it fosters.
It's also irrelevant. Your opinions on any world countries that existed 1900-2100 AD won't translate well to a projected futuristic 3000 AD+ type society.
I find 'socialism' to be such a lazy prescription that it put me off the author. Anyone interested in "how can groups of people organize their group relations" can take the empirical evidence of the last 100 years, the huge body of economics developed (with all its failings - alleged and or real), even Information theory (e.g. market parallel distributed processing of prices signals v.s. central planning wrt optimizing for the best or worst case). We know much more today than Marx ever did - we should be able to do better.
> What the books add to all this theorizing is that they're wildly entertaining.
Or, in my case, mildly entertaining. It felt like a lot of leftist proselytizing, or more likely preaching to the choir.
The humor fell flat, I guess. I didn't find it engaging.
As to "Why the Culture wins," it's because it portrays a worldview that the author wishes to advocate for, or at least not criticize. No more, no less.
I personally think that Brave New World isn't wealthy, or technically advanced, enough to be post-scarcity.
But it's an interesting tangent. I think a better dystopian depiction would be in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, where Pham Nuwen (iirc) describes encountering a technologically inferior planet, where surveillance and automation tech were sufficient for a sole dictator to effectively rule over all. Only the superior tech of Nuwen's starship breaks the dictator's hold.
I think your ask (prediction of the future without bias/assumptions from the author) is basically impossible. You can't predict the future without making assumptions.
But a somewhat realistic, not completely dystopian sci-fi book that made the rounds last year and that I think is worth reading is Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the future. Most of the science and economics in there are relatively sound, but it is still pretty much a best case scenario for humanities next 100 or so years.
The Culture is not presented in the books as inevitable _at all_. At least two of them are about major existential threats to it, and another is about where it came from.
… Also Children of Men is a pretty weird example of _realistic_ sci-fi; it requires significant magic to set up in the first place (more or less the same magic as Handmaid’s Tale, actually, but even more hand-wave-y and extreme).
I thought Children of Men was quite realistic, actually. Maybe you could question the initial premise of fertility problems, but the rest of "what would happen if this happened" (societal unrest, surveillance, etc.) I found exceptionally realistic and very much in the "mood" of the modern world. It is miles more realistic than immortal space robots and a post-scarcity society.
Iain M Banks approach to 'magic' tech in Sci-Fi is to properly consider its full impact on the entire society, rather than it just being used to advance the protagonists plot.
So, sure, he makes up a lot of nonsense, but he put serious thought into his nonsense too.
While I agree with the other comments and don’t find Children of Men all that believable, if we take the “magical” premise of the film of no new kids anywhere, I have found it one of the most gripping tales ever put on film.
The expanse in my mind comes closest in its attempts to portray a realistic future, with its power dynamics and problems, in the “humans are humans and will take our problems wherever we go” kinda thing. Books better portray this than the show, but the show is also a must watch.
Stand on Zanzibar is interesting. The Shockwave Rider, as a novel about a future society dominated by an information network, is actually great. And surprisingly predictive if you give it a little bit of credit for when it was written.
Generally, and probably inescapably, science fiction ends up being entangled in the author's worldview. (Either positively, as you note, or negatively, as in the warnings of dystopias, or in an arbitrarily mixed way that still has to be grounded in the author's point of view about society.)
The two major periods in time in publishing when that was less visibly true is at the start of the last century when Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo Award is named) was soliciting stories that were basically "what neat new use case could wireless technology address?", which can be viewed as a way of creating a literary prototype of what the reader might see in a few years. Of course, even if these stories might be seen as focused on predicting the near future, Gernsback is also literally organizing his readers into the Wireless Association of America, which directly advocates for political and regulatory decisions.
And in the 1940s-1950s, the science fiction mainstream felt the distinguishing feature of their genre was a focus on a scientific conceit, as opposed to melodramatic adventures. This often meant that they ignored how their stories reflected their worldviews. For example in unconsciously repeating their expectations about the gender roles of housewives. But ignoring one's opinions about culture or society doesn't mean they don't exist in what you are writing.
Are you sure you want a novel? It seems you are more looking for an essay in speculative futures. In a novel, everything happens how the author "wants". Including in Children of Men.
I think if you interpret "worldview" broadly enough, that's inevitable. Fiction authors write (what they see as) counterfactuals, but not fiction that's fundamentally at odds with how they think the world works, because they wouldn't be able to inhabit such fictional worlds and write about them believably.
The Culture novels postulate a form of luxury space communism for humans, but the plots involve other things. It's not exactly wish-fulfillment; luxury space communism is hardly all good. It seems to me that most post-scarcity futures imply some kind of luxury communism, and if you're writing space operas, they'll necessarily have a mild or extreme form of luxury space communism. You could segregate the haves and have-nots, but then you get something like Elysium (the movie) where the obvious plot involves the have-nots revolting.
I guess I don't understand what you're looking for. You don't want the author to project their worldview, but you do want them to try to predict the future, not too optimistically, but also not too pessimistically? A scifi sitcom, where nothing of note happens that's overly positive or negative? Wouldn't that be projecting the author's worldview too? "Maybe life in the future is going to be just like today"?
If you just don't like scifi in general, or space operas in particular, that's allowed.
Cyberpunk is fairly dystopian, and not really a projection of how the author wishes the future to be, so it's curious that you cite Gibson who wrote proto-cyberpunk, before writers like Morgan and his Kovacs series. Have you looked into those?
I'm looking for this kind of book: an author studies current trends, technology, culture, religion, history, etc. deeply, not shallowly. They study how the Printing Press/Industrial Revolution/computer/Internet/etc. changed society, culture, and politics.
Then the author uses this knowledge to write a story about how the world will be in 2050, 2100, or 2500. Sci-fi that is merely fantasy with a veneer of spaceships and robots isn't what I'm looking for.
I didn't say anything about it being optimistic or pessimistic, just that most writers seem to inject their personal politics into their writing, which is a real distraction from the worldbuilding. Children of Men is particularly pessimistic, and I think anyone reading it would agree.
This work is intrinsically political. There is no unbiased way to analyse centuries of history. When you study history and come to conclusions and devise a system to describe present society then what you’ve created is a political ideology.
What you’re asking is for someone to create an ideology and extrapolate that into the future, but to somehow do it apolitically. It’s not possible.
You can write something and say it’s facts and logic all the way down, but the choice of facts, how they’re interpreted, how they’re prioritised, what conclusions you draw - these decisions are all ideological.
I love Rainbows End, but I'm less confident it's what GP is after. If it is, that leads into areas inhabited by the likes of Neal Stephenson or Richard Morgan or Daniel Suarez.
I'll re-recommend KSR's Mars trilogy. It's not a high-concept space opera so you don't have borderline-fantasy elements popping up. It not apolitical, but nothing is.
You might like Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series.
You might like Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series.
They're both history PhDs, which gives them a better perspective on some things, but I don't think it helps the plausibility of their scifi.
Is Dune too close to fantasy with a veneer of spaceships?
If you're vehemently political, whether libertarian or progressive, even if it's just on some issues, that severely limits what scifi you'll be able to tolerate.
FWIW, I've read the Mars trilogy two or three times over the years and still enjoy it, although the near future it's set in hasn't aged well. There's a fair amount of 'active' politics in it, in the sense of the political discussions and acts of the characters as they go about life on Mars. These are key to the plot as the characters explore and trial various options for living on, colonising and terraforming Mars - and dealing with Earth - and there are several chapters across the whole trilogy that are essentially Mars-specific political debates. KSR sets up a profound conflict between the Red and the Green factions, neither of which are anything like the current Earth movements their names suggest at a glance. There is some good hard SF but it is 'mundane' in nature (no FTL drives, etc).
I really loved Arkady Martine's first book - A Memory Called Empire - (Teixcalaan #1) and liked A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan #2). These are much more speculative and far-future in nature, although the author's background as a historian gives real depth to the world she builds.
I'd like to put in a recommendation for Andy Weir. The Martian and Project Hail Mary are the two I've read, but I'm told Artemis is also worth it. He does an excellent job at structing novels around very realistic troubleshooting and engineering. They tend to focus on the technical side of things, not the cultural, however, so it may not be what you're looking for.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy and 2312. The Expanse books in terms of human political structure (Earth/Mars/The Belt and Outer Planets Alliance), assuming humanity is able to colonize the solar system.
I have it on my to-read list because I heard it was interesting socialist sci-fi so it is a bit weird seeing it repeatedly recommended to someone who finds The Culture too lefty.
Children of Time is probably the most amazing and tense and satisfying sci-fi novel I've read in years but its not got much to say about near future predictions
I would say Consider Phlebas, start at the beginning - and you get to meet Idirans! Shame they didn't really appear in any other books as the Idiran war is so often mentioned as an important event in the Culture's history.
This is the biggest practical problem imo with the series. The idiran war and its consequences is the single most important event in the series overall, and is directly related to a lot of the other books. But consider phlebas is the only book directly about it, and is also the worst culture book by far.
"Worst" is a value judgement obviously, but I know this view isn't rare. At the very least its pacing is uneven and the tone is very different from the other culture books. (the eaters??) Even if you like it, in some ways it is out of place with the rest.
I only recommend people start with it if they've already decided to read the whole series and won't be dissuaded by a rough start. For an introduction book almost anything is better.
Yeh, I guess that's a fair take. But re-reading it and _Against a Dark Background_ (not even tangentially a Culture book I know) tweaked my nostalgia a bit and I found I quite enjoyed them in ways I didn't first time around.
My favorite Banks sci fi is The Algebraist which isn’t a Culture novel.
To give you a micro taste of the story, the villain, the Archimandrite Luceferous, keeps the head of his enemy preserved alive for years after having it taken off surgically after defeating him, hangs it from the ceiling in his office and uses it as a punching bag.
It's almost the opposite of a Culture novel; the mainstream small-c culture is an extremely hierarchical, religious, rather technophobic, pseudo-capitalist society (the Dwellers are arguably a bit more Culture-y).
I'm not sure it's clear that Luceferous is even the villain. He's pretty unpleasant, obviously, but almost a side-issue.
The other major non-Culture sci-fi novel, Against a Dark Background, is also notably un-Culture-y.
It’s weird how Banks can casually create a villain character with such depth and richness almost as a side character and discard the character, whereas other sci fi books/movies would build everything around such a character, if they could manage to make one, which they can’t.
I'm not sure any [M] Banks books have a villain as a central character. Closest would probably be Veppers in Surface Detail (a wonderful creation, one of the most dislikable villains in any work), but even then he's arguably slightly a side-character.
I've wanted to see a movie of Consider Phlebas ever since I read the book in one sitting (literally) in May 1988... :-)
Edit: I remember it vividly as I took one day off between handing in my final year project on the CS degree I was doing and starting the final round of revision for the exams that were starting soon.
Wandered down to Bauermeister Books on the George IV bridge and picked up a copy and spent the rest of the day (until the wee small hours) reading it.
Oh, yeah, forgot about that one. I don't think it's really particularly clear where it's set at all; very little detail given about the wider world, IIRC.
I do wonder if there is any overlap between the Culture novels and The Algebraist. I seem to remember mention of aHumans and rHumans in both -- a fascinating idea really.
> My favorite Banks sci fi is The Algebraist which isn’t a Culture novel.
Is it not? The Nasqueron Dwellers are very culture-y in their habits an eccentricities. The Sleeper Service GSV is described to be holding gas dwellers on-board in Excession. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some cross contamination between the Culture and the inhabitants of Nasqueron.
And what I am clearly arguing that the list is wrong. :) It should be considered a Culture novel based on the themes, and the general behaviour of the dwellers.
Most culture novels are about the minds and their humanoid charges. But we also know that the minds keep not just humanoids, but also inhabitants of gas planets. They just rarely show up in the other novels because it is hard for our humanoid heroes to interract with them.
The way the dwellers live their lives: hedonistic, inward focused, and when they are attacked blasts the attackes with a before-then unknown superweapon is very Culture. I posit that we are seeing an offshot of the mainline Culture.
So that is my point. Even I clearly recognise that this is an unorthodox reading of the work, definietly not the mainstream interpretation. But you can’t just argue against it by saying “wikipedia says no”.
> Marx’s claim is that there are functional relations between technology and social structure, so that you can’t just combine them any old way. Marx was, in this regard, certainly right, hence the sociological naiveté that lies at the heart of Dune. Feudalism with energy weapons makes no sense – a feudal society could not produce energy weapons, and energy weapons would undermine feudal social relations.
This doesn’t do justice to the world building of Dune. Technology is very limited. Computers are banned (for good reasons), and using those energy weapons is also forbidden in most situations. Thus, combat is once again dominated by the kind of melee encounters that were also historically the domain of a trained warrior caste. All of this is explored in detail in the later books, which maybe the author hasn’t read? If anything, Dune deeply affirms that society mirrors technology rather than creating a simple “naive feudal sci-fi” world as claimed here.
I haven’t read much past that yet since the article is very wordy, and it’s hard to be motivated to push forward once you stop being convinced that the author has a point.
> combat is once again dominated by the kind of melee encounters that were also historically the domain of a trained warrior caste
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but does Herbert ever give a reason for why the characters in Dune do not use gunpowder/projectile weapons (a.k.a. guns), similar to modern armies? I never understood why the characters in Dune bothered with this melee warfare, except maybe for ceremonial reasons.
It's worth reading the whole article. If you've ever read any of Iain Bank's books you'll definitely appreciate it.
I believe this is because of the widespread use of shield projectors which repel anything moving too fast (faster than a slow knife stroke or hunter seeker). Some other interactions around shields:
Lasers hitting shields basically results in a fusion explosion which would bring down the wrath of the Houses/Imperium.
Shields are not used much on Dune due to shorting out from storms and attracting worms. This results in some use of projectile weapons when the Harkonnens seal the Atreides troops in caves with mortars or the Fremen shoot the noses of off the Emperors spaceships with artillery.
Shielding technology that can be miniaturized to protect a single person. Person-sized shields were tuned to only protect against higher velocity kinetics because if it goes too low it stops allowing air exchange.
Don't they have some kind of small scale force field technology that stops anything (eg. bullets) moving above a certain speed? iirc there was a duel where Paul Atreides was consistently a tiny bit slow on his attacks, due to his training in aristocratic duelling where everyone has personal shields, which was interpreted as him deliberately toying with his opponent.
For bonus points, energy weapons weren't really used because if one hit a shield, it would cause an explosion (centered on the energy weapon maybe?) that would take out half a city.
> For bonus points, energy weapons weren't really used because if one hit a shield, it would cause an explosion
This never really made much sense to me. IRRC when an energy weapon hits a shield either the emitter or the shield generator blows up. Since shields are protecting something while the emitter can be anywhere to me the logical outcome seems to be energy weapons everywhere and no shields at all.
It totally did not make sense. Anyone would be able to generate a massive explosion from readily available components. And there's no explanation where that energy would come from.
A small edit that would make this work: energy beam weapons could not penetrate a shield, and just reveals the location of the shooting weapon.
That's desperately trying to tweak the technology so that he gets a society where knife fighters matter. Actually, those knife guys would be vulnerable to ordinary riot-control weapons - tear gas, Mace, flash-bangs, big plastic shields, etc. Or an RPG with a solid warhead to knock someone out of the fight by sheer kinetic energy. Herbert was writing before every combat organization had RPGs.
There is mention that the shields act as molecular filters, protecting against poison gases. And the shockwave energy of an explosion was negated as an excessively fast high/low pressure wave front. Same with flash bangs. Big plastic shields are just another close quarters combat device, and not particularly useful unless in a phalanx.
Mass times velocity equals mass times velocity. If you're hit by a solid round with an RPG rocket behind it, you're going down, no matter how good your forcefield armor is. Momentum is roughly that of an entire NFL offensive line.
The general answer has already been covered - their magical shields protect against projectile weapons. (Though of course there's always the feeling that the use of massive projectiles would overwhelm them.)
That said, and something I don't think anybody else has mentioned in the thread, in the first Dune novel when the Sardaukar land on Arrakis and have a bunch of fights after the betrayal they _do_ use projectile weapons, which has the affect of trapping the Atreides who'd retreated into caves.
It is brought up later that these weapons aren't worth returning, because their use was a one-off. These cannons were considered a "quirky surprise" rather than a useful weapon.
> All of this is explored in detail in the later books, which maybe the author hasn’t read?
If you mean the Brian Herbert prequels, a lot of fans don't really consider those to be canonical. I don't remember much exploration of this in the later Frank Herbert books; if anything most of the restrictions are eventually abandoned.
> Computers are banned (for good reasons)
It's at least _hinted_ that this was more about a moral panic than anything else.
Dune's technology setup is contrived to produce a particular type of society; it's one of the most extreme examples of this approach. There's nothing wrong with this (and it's very common in sci-fi) but it is what it is.
Actually, computers were banned because humans were enslaved to thinking machines for several millennia.
The butlerian jihad is when mankind rose up and physically destroyed every "thinking machine". Then they developed mentat schools to make human calculators / logicians.
> Actually, computers were banned because humans were enslaved to thinking machines for several millennia.
Only if you accept Brian Herbert's additions to the canon. Assuming that, like all right-thinking people, you treat those as apocryphal, it's left _very_ vague as it exactly what it was all about, and it's at least implied that it was not particularly rational.
You can find people today who'll tell you that humans are enslaved by computers because, I dunno, we use TikTok too much or something.
I think the cool ship names was almost certainly influenced by Banks' father being in the Royal Navy/Admiralty and the RN having its own line in cool ship names... at least historically. I think I heard him say this at a talk, but it was a while ago so can't be sure...
Surface Detail is a fantastic read - by far my favorite of the series. Trouble is that to fully appreciate it means having read all the previous books in the series. Still worth it though.
Heinlein's law:
Arguing that a given scifi author's view of future society makes sense will always essentially reduce to arguing that the author's politics are correct.
I don't think that's _really_ what the article's doing, but in any case such arguments are generally about whether the author's view is _internally consistent_, rather than a historical inevitability.
I disagree. I think one can see plausibility in multiple interpretations of the future. The Culture "makes sense" to me in the same way that The Expanse's view of intra-system colonization efforts. I find the capitalist nature of the world in Pandora's Star "makes sense" same as the Culture. To me it's about seeing the possibility of a future built on a recognizable seed of plausibility for "what could be."
I met Mr Banks once (empty bookshop signing) and he told me that he wrote the Culture books because he was sick of so much popular SF being “capitalism in space”.
I missed meeting him at the Edinburgh fringe by 20 minutes and I'm still dejected by that. In the era before selfies and tweeting was a thing, and serendipitous bumping into authors at book fairs was possible.
I discovered the "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" meme the other week and it still makes me smile - seems like a pretty good description of the Culture and I'm sure Mr Banks would approve.
Huh, I always assumed that that one was already in circulation when we was around, but apparently "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" only showed up the year after he died.
I don't want to read this now because I'm currently in the middle of Use of Weapons. I am enjoying the series so far, even if I find Banks to be quite ruthless and some of the descriptions of pain and suffering hard to read. I usually read hard science fiction and do sometimes wonder if I've accidentally slipped into The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But it's masterful writing and an incredible imagination.
Use of Weapons is probably the most extreme example of that in the Culture series, for what it's worth (Surface Detail _may_ be worse, at least in implication).
Hmm.. Not sure if I'm already becoming hardened to the violence and stuff, but upon finishing the book I actually found it less difficult than both Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games in that respect. I found the Eaters chapter in Consider one of the most disturbing things I've ever read...
He smiled. “My dear girl, in Culture history alone it has been about nine thousand years since a human, marvellous though they are in so many other ways, could do anything useful in a serious, big-guns space battle other than admire the pretty explosions … or in some cases contribute to them.”
“Contribute?”
“Chemicals; colours. You know.”
--
I'm not sure why this quote came to my mind, maybe it's ongoing wars and things like Iron Beam and Rheimetal shaped charge antidrone gun and shaped charge anti-tank flying mines and munitions actively choosing targets.
It's interesting to compare the Culture to the Polity in Neil Asher's books, since the Polity is also run by AIs with advanced technology, and comes into conflict with other (alien) civilizations. But it's usually super advanced biotech kind of threats, where human civilization is less advanced.
The way I think about that is simply - the Culture is what I'd want to happen, the Polity is what I'd expect to happen.
Banks had grander ideas, Asher has better world building (I'd argue his world building is as good or better than any other sci-fi author - the world of Spatterjay particularly).
Having read both series completely multiple times I'd struggle to choose which I prefer (and happily I don't have to).
Good way to put it. But I'm a little put off by the Culture's hegemonizing swarm tendencies, however enlightened they are as "the Borg". But the Polity has some real nightmare stuff in it.
I think both the author and through him The Culture are aware of that risk, it's why he created `Special Circumstances` to provide an outlet (and useful outcomes) for the people (including the AI's and drones here) who really don't want to be a space communist hippy in a post-scarcity economy.
Asher has a similar thing with the rogue AI's but his Polity is more centrally directed and unified because of Earth Central been the dominant AI (though some of the rogues do approach EC in terms of raw computing power).
Both are my favourite series in sci-fi and it's fascinating that two plausible (within the rules of their own universes) can emerge from fairly similar starting points.
That and the Prador are truly horrific protagonists well written, one of the best realisations of what genuinely alien thought processes might be like.
From the Contact Wiki
> Banks has noted that the perfect society of the Culture creates well-adjusted, content people — who are (for story purposes) rather boring.[2] Therefore, many of the Culture novels deal with outside agents or mercenaries in the employ of Special Circumstances.
He was good with aliens that have blue/orange morality. My favourite is the exchange in 'The Algebraist' between the big bad villain, who is firing people at the planet in order to 'force' the Dwellers to do what he wants and the alien ambassador, who says (politely) "I do hope you have enough people ... ".
> Affront society is described as being "a never-ending, self-perpetuating holocaust of pain and misery", where the strong prey upon weaker species and individuals.
> Among the Affront's technological accomplishments is an aptitude for genetic engineering, which they developed long before spaceflight. They use this skill almost exclusively on 'prey species', which tend to be changed so as to provide greater sport (and opportunity for sadism) during the communal hunts forming a major part of the Affront culture.
> One of the few changes to their own species was the redesign of their females to make sex painful for them
> "a never-ending, self-perpetuating holocaust of pain and misery"
I'm curious: do you honestly believe the Affront are cool?
Suffering isn't actually wrong by some law of physics, it's just immoral when your morality is slave morality and your highest aspiration is safety and your most important motivator, fear.
Affronters are just more alive, more vital, actually trying, actually risking things; than the Culture HR department drones (heh), as comprehended by the ambassador, but it's still weird because the ambassador's actions are viewed from the confused uncomprehending PC perspective throughout the book.
The Culture diplomat in the book does. Though it's fairly clear that he's one of the Culture's broken people, who do tend to end up in Contact/SC.
They're abhorrent, obviously, but one of Banks' better examples of an alien morality. He wasn't really great at this in general; most of his other villains are some variant of evil empire/evil capitalist, or occasional ineffable great-old-one-style evil. For weird aliens (though little else), try Peter F Hamilton.
I disagree they're an example of alien morality. They're clearly sadistic, enjoying the suffering of others because they suffer and knowing that's a bad thing.
One viewpoint character clearly thinks this as well.
I think most of Banks' 'villains' were quite appealing in their way (possibly not the pro-Hell side in Surface Detail; I think that's the closest he came to pure incomprehensible evil.)
Given how the culture ambassador is rewarded by being given an Affront body so he can indulge in Affront culture on even terms, and that the Affront are basically psychopathic Bertram Wooster-types, Banks knew that there was some people couldn't help but love the Affront. Something in humans loves it. Like looking at a file of red wool coated infantry (btw, did you get that the Affront is coded for the British empire?) and thinking "yup, really cool".
Well, they're not exactly the focus of the book, I think the Affront have just three or four meaty scenes, but they maim, torture and sexually assault whomever they can, and regard it all as a bit of jolly good fun for all involved.
That website has the worst design imaginable. It's a totally unreadable black text on a blackish space image.
So, I'll react the the title. The real reason "the Culture Wins" is basically the storm trooper effect: they're the protagonists in fiction, so they're written to win regardless if it makes sense or not.
I believe one of the books does hint that the eventually disappear. The culture novel about that is the one I really want to read.
> That website has the worst design imaginable. It's a totally unreadable black text on a blackish space image.
It's a bug in their CSS. They've tried to set the background of the text container to white, but they included an alpha value which made the white completely transparent.
Firefox reader mode fixes that, and that site really needs it.
Reviewers of the Culture novels tend to project their own political biases onto it. This writer quotes Marx a bit too much. There's some other review where someone was trying to read race and gender issues onto the Culture. They're missing the point.
The Culture novels describe a stable society where the machines are in charge. That's been addressed many times in science fiction, but not, usually, well. Asimov's later robot novels, where it become clear that the robots are manipulating humanity, do address it. That's about as good as it gets. Frank Herbert's Dune has the "Butlerian Jihad", but Herbert's idea of robot social organization is just humans in robot costume. Jack Williamson's "Humanoids" stories, about benign but overprotective robots, reflect someone getting the goal system slightly wrong.
In more popular culture, The Forbin Project (1970), a movie which seems to be enjoying a renaissance, does address the issue. The machines which control the nuclear weapons of both sides get into contact, and agree to take over to keep humanity from destroying itself. They come up with a reasonably sensible plan for running things, which is fleshed out more in the books.
The Star [Trek|Wars|Gate] universe never really addresses this directly, since it would undermine the show's stars. Nor does the Marvel universe; AIs appear, but are not in charge. There's Marshall Brain's "Manna", of course, the dystopian version of this.
The Culture novels show a stable society that's run by intelligent machines yet is flexible, adaptable, can deal with crises, and is pleasant for humans to live in. They don't show how to get there. Which is a problem.
I appreciate the fact that IMB is trying to present a optimistic view of the future. Not all sci-fi needs to be negative or dystopian, and his remains plausible despite its optimism.
I think if you’d rather read about the downfall of the Culture, then you’ve somewhat profoundly missed the point of Ian’s writing.
I have an ongoing argument with my wife where I proclaim Brave New World to be a utopia, not a dystopia.
It's a society where the VAST majority of people are happy. Really truly happy. A society that is in ecological balance with nature.
If Brave New World is a dystopia, what does that make the world we live in now? It has to be some kind of super-dystopia, because it's worse in every way you can possibly imagine.
I'm pretty sure that if the Culture discovered a world like that of Brave New World they'd work to shut that society down pretty quickly as they'd be appalled at the idea of creating underclasses by intentionally exposing embryos to poisons (alcohol?).
The the society of Brave New World would fail as a utopia because of the "What would the Culture think?" test ;-)
I don't think it's that complicated: because not everyone thinks "being happy" is the utmost peak of meaning or purpose. Many people desire challenges, difficulty, a grand narrative that comes with ups and downs.
And those people exist and are handled specifically in Brave New World. It's just that the system fucked up a bit and took a long time to find the protagonist of the book. But consider the world you and I live in where a vast majority of people who want challenges like this can never have them as they are stuck being dirt poor, or in criminality or something. It's gotten a lot better in the last 100 years, but it's no where close to BNW.
that's not the point of Brave New World? We like to interpret it like a dystopian book (and I still think it is), but the book challenges you into explaining WHY.
It certainly plays the "moral" card, and more back when it was released. It FEELS dystopian because it plays at a different moral than ours. Oh, a world totally devoted to hedonism, with no families, everyone drugged all the time, where eugenics creates a cast system where people are clearly not equal.
Right now some of those things are less shocking than in 1932 (sexual promiscuity, for example), but Huxley makes a great work into presenting a good case on how the society presented WORKS and it is, at least, superficially a paradise. The book, after all, was written as a response to other "utopian" books that were describing "ideal societies".
I think that a lot of people, even today, gets a gut feeling that's a dystopia, and feel more identified with John the Savage, which is totally out of place and hates it. But I think that the genius of the book is that it presents a world that we can interpret as bad while their inhabitants live in bliss.
It's not just the food. It's the social interactions are good, you get to go to great plays and other entertainment, and you have a work that is exactly matched to your cognitive level so you feel challenged by it but not frustrated.
Are they really truly happy? I got the impression they were superficially kept content by drugs, sex and social engineering. I recall strongly disliking their society.
Not much of a dystopia if you can leave at any point - and in fact be actively supported in leaving if that's your thing. The fact that the Culture seems to be inherently comfortable with people, ships and even chunks of society leaving or joining gives an indicator of how it really is "self consciously rational" as Banks put it.
Maybe I'm lost here because I haven't read the books, but how does this not lead to a fundamental contradiction?
The article says that the Culture intervenes in places that don't quite live up to their values or are otherwise problematic in some way. So if people leave the Culture and develop in ways that become unacceptable to the Culture and thus get interfered with again, how free are they to actually leave?
> The article says that the Culture intervenes in places that don't quite live up to their values or are otherwise problematic in some way.
In practice, they mostly intervene against people with, like, slavery and death camps, not minor philosophical differences (or even pretty major ones; many civilisations run artificial afterlives of eternal torment for their people, and the Culture doesn't openly intervene against _that_). A number of breakaway ex-Culture cultures show up in the books, along with various Culture dissidents.
The galaxy in the Culture novels is a big place full of many societies - a few at the same level of technological development as the Culture. So it wouldn't be that difficult to wander off somewhere and get lost and do your own thing.
However, if you do go off and set up your own fascist dictatorship outside of the Culture there is also no protection should the Grey Area come hunting for you.
Reading this blog post gave me insight into our my own (Western) culture, and modernity. What happens as we move away from ascribed identities, like be born and dying a feudal serf, to achieved identities garnered from the actions we choose in our lives? I laughed at the jibe about the 2 ways a modern person finds meaning; either embracing their Celtic heritage or going full memeplex!
The website design is unreadable, except if you highlight sections of the text which make it straightforward to read. No idea how you'd read this on mobile, though.