I (who submitted of this article to HN) have this problem as well: on one hand, it's great that he's gotten rid of the tired trope of AI as and technology as a pathway to dystopia or of too-overt celebration of warfare that exists in a lot of military sci-fi.
I'll also post a limited defense of why most of Culture novels take place outside the Culture (note that first third of "Player of Games" is a pretty big exception to this): to paraphrase Banks quoting Niven, "stories about happy people are boring".
On the other hand, is the hypersadism needed? The levels are simply numbing, beyond gratuitous, so a few books on it simply fails to shock. On the other hand, Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" featured a much smaller amount of violence (as done by Emergents) it did happen to be realistic and managed to create great amount of empathy (at several points, I was close to simply putting the book down due to the bleak and hopeless situation of some of the characters) with the characters (who -- both humans and aliens -- seemed a lot more alien than culture's non-Homo Sapiens Pan-Humans). Of course comparing "hard SF" to Banks is quite a stretch, but the "non-alien aliens" and "hypersadism" aspects subtracted rather than added to Banks.
On the other hand, Banks' manages to do what very few can: the characters are great, multidimensional, and show development; the big ideas are big, and yet story-telling and plot aren't sacrificed. There are very few other SF writers who are able to do this (Gene Wolfe, Stan Robinson come to mind).
I'm going to stay out of the discussion of libertarianism (there's a corollary to Godwin's law: unless a certain German leader -- not Frederich the Great or Angela Merkel -- is mentioned first, any online conversation will ultimately end up becoming a debate about libertarianism), but I'll leave these few links out there:
http://a.b.i-b.tripod.com/html/faq_text.htm -- see the question about "Top Ten" SF novels according to Banks, the first is quite explicitly libertarian "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (there's debate as to whether Heinlein himself was a libertarian, but it's undeniable that at least some of his works are libertarian fiction; OTOH "Beyond the Horizon" is quite Culture-ish in terms of describing a post-scarcity society).
There's also "The Dispossesed" amongst those books which describes an non-property owning anarchist society ( I haven't read it, although it's on my list). For an example of very well written anarcho-capitalist SF, I strongly recommend Vinge's The Peace War, The Ungoverned, and Marooned in Realtime. The Ungoverned goes as far as describe private ownership of nuclear weapons, and yet the novels/novellas avoid the "shill political screed" feel some of the other explicitly "libertarian SF" works have.
I'll also post a limited defense of why most of Culture novels take place outside the Culture (note that first third of "Player of Games" is a pretty big exception to this): to paraphrase Banks quoting Niven, "stories about happy people are boring".
On the other hand, is the hypersadism needed? The levels are simply numbing, beyond gratuitous, so a few books on it simply fails to shock. On the other hand, Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" featured a much smaller amount of violence (as done by Emergents) it did happen to be realistic and managed to create great amount of empathy (at several points, I was close to simply putting the book down due to the bleak and hopeless situation of some of the characters) with the characters (who -- both humans and aliens -- seemed a lot more alien than culture's non-Homo Sapiens Pan-Humans). Of course comparing "hard SF" to Banks is quite a stretch, but the "non-alien aliens" and "hypersadism" aspects subtracted rather than added to Banks.
On the other hand, Banks' manages to do what very few can: the characters are great, multidimensional, and show development; the big ideas are big, and yet story-telling and plot aren't sacrificed. There are very few other SF writers who are able to do this (Gene Wolfe, Stan Robinson come to mind).
I'm going to stay out of the discussion of libertarianism (there's a corollary to Godwin's law: unless a certain German leader -- not Frederich the Great or Angela Merkel -- is mentioned first, any online conversation will ultimately end up becoming a debate about libertarianism), but I'll leave these few links out there:
http://reason.com/archives/2013/09/15/the-endless-lives-of-i... (a positive libertarian review of Banks' work, which acknowledges Banks' explicit rejection of libertarianism)
http://a.b.i-b.tripod.com/html/faq_text.htm -- see the question about "Top Ten" SF novels according to Banks, the first is quite explicitly libertarian "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (there's debate as to whether Heinlein himself was a libertarian, but it's undeniable that at least some of his works are libertarian fiction; OTOH "Beyond the Horizon" is quite Culture-ish in terms of describing a post-scarcity society).
There's also "The Dispossesed" amongst those books which describes an non-property owning anarchist society ( I haven't read it, although it's on my list). For an example of very well written anarcho-capitalist SF, I strongly recommend Vinge's The Peace War, The Ungoverned, and Marooned in Realtime. The Ungoverned goes as far as describe private ownership of nuclear weapons, and yet the novels/novellas avoid the "shill political screed" feel some of the other explicitly "libertarian SF" works have.