> given utopias are, almost by definition, pretty tedious.
By definition, if they're tedious, they're not utopias. It's more that writing convincing utopias is hard and people are lazy.
> given utopias are, almost by definition, pretty tedious.
By definition, if they're tedious, they're not utopias. It's more that writing convincing utopias is hard and people are lazy.
How so? In this context, “tedious” clearly means “not very exciting for the reader.” Were you hoping for more relationship drama, or romance? I’d be down for that. Though, it doesn’t seem to be what Banks was most interested in writing about.
It is often remarked, by those who may be assumed to have some insight into it, that the difficulty in writing Superman is to convey his perfection and goodness, but that for people who do not understand Superman well the difficulty is that he is too perfect and unbeatable and thus boring.
I put forward thus that in the same way Superman can be tedious so can Utopias, and Utopias can be interesting in the same way that Superman can.
> Were you hoping for more relationship drama, or romance? I’d be down for that
It’s tedious to a modern audience. Hemingway but in space isn’t really an improvement. (The closest we have is Ted Chiang.)
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Certainly one of my criteria for a utopia would be that some of the beings in it are engaged in intriguing or exciting activities with meaningful consequences. I'd require more than Special Circumstances to meet this criterion -- they are too small a piece of the total system.
In Player of Games we see a corner of a gaming culture which partly meets this criterion but it does not have meaningful consequences outside the gaming participants (unless you count the ways the Minds use it to manipulate Gurgeh).
Maybe by this criterion utopias are impossible, since the disruption caused by exciting activities with consequences conflict too much with the optimality of the society. But I don't think anyone now can prove this would be the case.
Tedious to narrate, euphoric to experience.
> if they're tedious, they're not utopias
The original blueprint - Thomas More's book - made the New England Puritans look like a wild bunch. Phalansteries and communal dining, oh my.
>By definition, if they're tedious, they're not utopias
Utopias are by definition tedious because a utopia is an end to history and as such an end to meaning or negotiation of how to live. A utopia is always an end to a story or Freedom with a capital f. As Dostoevsky points out in Notes from Underground, on man in utopia:
"[he] would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it!"
Another way to phrase it. If you are in a utopia, you cannot be in a democracy that entails the possibility of ending it. Which is to say, you can't govern yourself at all. And that is why Ian M Banks culture is nothing of the sort. It's a society literally controlled by "perfect minds" using a Sapir-Whorf like language to manage the behavior of its people. Even Banks who tried to write a positive utopia and that's not his fault, couldn't imagine a utopia that entails the possibility of rebellion.
The Culture is an anarchic democracy: if all but one single GSV had voted to disband, or to become a dictatorship, that lone GSV could disappear elsewhere without anyone stopping them.
They were up for, and welcoming of, even quite extreme changes; compare with humanity today, where being transgender is considered controversial by a significant percentage of the population of a nation that likes to self-promote on the idea it is the beacon of liberty and freedom, versus the way Culture bodies are written to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will, with most people being expected to try it, and with some couples flipping gender while pregnant and pausing the pregnancy just so both can give birth together.
Even species changes are, for them, easy and of no great consequence or dispute. While you may be seen as weird if you choose to give up the visual accuity of an owl and the cerebral resliliance to survive decapitation in order to live out your life on this quaint rock recently discovered to be hosting an atomic age civilization, the Mind won't refuse to change you into a mere human just because you found Jesus.
> to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will
a constant hedonic self modification and individual reinvention is obviously no sign of extreme change but the opposite, banality and powerlessness. As Augusto de Noce used to point out about the sexual revolution of the 60s, the sexual dimension became an obsession precisely because all other revolutions had been rendered impossible by an atomized society. There was nothing radical at all in it.
It's no accident that the Culture puts so much emphasis, and in that it reads ironically enough like satire of modern consumer society, on choice only at a level of reshuffling your sexual organs or bodily characteristics. The minds in the culture are by no means just a sort of voting mechanism that summarize the attitudes of the population of the Culture. They control the culture which we even get to learn in the books in the series that delve into the minds as characters.
> only at a level of reshuffling your sexual organs or bodily characteristics
"Only"?
In the sense that your freedom to enact change ends at the boundary of your skin.
People leave the Culture, and you can form communities of various sorts, you just can't force people to not leave them. In a world with unlimited abundance, no disease, optional death, and more or less unlimited morphological freedom and the ability to form any consensual voluntary community you like with freedom of exit for all members, what possible change could one be demanding?
"You're not allowed to do what you want because I believe in this old book" sounds a lot more trite to me.
>couldn't imagine a utopia that entails the possibility of rebellion.
When The Culture voted on the Idirian War, the Peace faction splintered from The Culture. Other groups seceded (or join all the time), such as the AhForgetIt Tendency and the Zetetic Elench.
Rebellion exists only in the framework of an oppresive power structure, where you can't just leave if you want.
In the Culture Series history hasn't ended, and the members of the Culture can and do leave and live in ways the Culture would find repugnant. Also there are marginal participants (such as the Mind known as Meat Fucker) who are more or less in the Culture but act in ways the Culture finds repugnant, but are not punished or controlled.
So according to your definition the Culture is not a utopia.
Again, this is lazy, topsy-turvy thinking. It's conjuring up a purely academic definition of utopia as a corpus of texts and saying that since they're all boring, that must mean utopia is by definition boring. The point of utopian thinking is precisely to identify those failure modes as such with respect to the utopian project. Thus, if something is "tedious", it can only ever be a failed attempt at utopia.
For the specific case of Banks, Yudkowsky has some interesting ideas about why it fails. [0]
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwnSPgwtmLjvTK2Wa/amputation...