This is not the first time I've read articles attempting to paint the Culture as a dystopia. I think the best counter is to quote the author's own words, describing how he felt about it, from an interview he did with CNN [1]:
CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture [the society he has created]?
Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it's my secular heaven ... Yes, I would, absolutely. Again it comes down to wish fulfillment. I haven't done a study and taken lots of replies across a cross-section of humanity to find out what would be their personal utopia. It's mine, I thought of it, and I'm going home with it -- absolutely, it's great.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/05/15/iain.banks/ind...
That quote from Banks only tells us that The Culture is his personal utopia. Fair enough, but Banks does not have authority over interpretations on his work. One man's heaven is another man's hell.
> That quote from Banks only tells us that The Culture is his personal utopia
Idk, post-scarcity immortal FTL-wielding techno-democracy with benevolent artificial superintelligence doesn’t strike me as some hell.
And the Culture isn’t a galactic monolith. If you want a more traditional existence, there are other societies you can fuck off to.
The Culture intervenes in and steers those other societies and species even when unprovoked. Essentially a neoconservative utopia as envisioned by a young Irving Kristol. Yes, it would be a heaven for all who are pleased to take on its espirit de corps and live in it, casual and decadently low-pressure such might be, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is a healthy influence in the long run on a universe that it is arrogantly homogenizing. There is such a thing as unintended consequences, and The Culture is not yet one of the more advanced, wiser "Sublimed" civilizations.
> and The Culture is not yet one of the more advanced, wiser "Sublimed" civilizations
I got no indication that Sublimation was a marker of advancement. More just a different state.
The Culture is absolutely not "neoconservative". I don't think modern political terms can meaningfully apply to a post-scarcity civilization with benevolent AI Gods.
We do what we must because we can.
Words are a means of communication. An author can clarify what was intended to be communicated.
in the Culture universe, you don't have to stay in the Culture - you can get defanged and slum it out on some backwater hell hole like the rest of us.
Right. Just because the universe is post-scarcity, doesn't mean you can't build items, and entire production chains. Just because you can live to near immortality, doesn't mean you have to do things to prevent natural aging.
One guy became a member of the alien race the Affront, so named because they they have culturally and socially ingrained traits for exploitation, sadism and brutality.
Yes. Even today, one mans garbage is another's gold.
Sci-Fi is full of 'Utopias' that can also be viewed as 'Dystopia', depending on the view point. And in a lot of movies, that shifting view point is the story.
I told a Christian recruiter once that I don't want an afterlife. Their mind basically broke down trying to process it.
What makes physical death so special that you do want to exist before it happens, but don't want to after? Why not pick some other arbitrary event, like say, the next New Years?
Living _forever_ seems like... not necessarily that attractive an idea.
(Also most of the afterlives on offer don't seem particularly attractive.)
As someone who doesn't believe and never has believed that there was an afterlife, there is something kind of horrifying about the _inescapable, eternal_ nature of such a thing. I think this may be different if it's a concept that you've been sold on as a kid, but from the outside, it's really kind of unsettling.
The fact that somebody doesn't want afterlife doesn't imply that death is a special moment for them that separates wanting to exist from not wanting.
They could have "picked" another moment. It might be next New Year or a moment in the past or even a moment before they were born. The moment of death is simply the "earliest convenience" to end unwanted existence.
for me it's the fact that I could theoretically end it (modulo quantum immortality, my worst nightmare). the afterlife is usually sold with "guaranteed forever". I've been in so many situations that you might think "oh I wish this could go on forever" and then regretted it, that I want to make sure there's a way to pull the plug.
Spending the rest of eternity with other human beings is not very appealin.
What if you could spend it with cats? What if it didn't have to be forever - if you could end it any time you chose, like after 1000 years or whenever? It seems what you don't want is only a very specific version of an afterlife.
Does any major belief system actually have an afterlife in which you can _die again_?
I suppose various types of reincarnations might be that. Or afterlife is just temporary state in between. I suppose reincarnating just to die again is something in some belief systems. Sometimes with goal of being liberated from the cycle.
Some people enjoy playing games in 'Hardcore' mode (see e.g. Subnautica) where if you die, instead of respawning, the game ends and your save file is deleted.
If you REALLY think hard about it truly eternal life is just as scary as none.
I would even say it is lot more scary. After your non eternal life ends you know no better. On other hand if you are aware of the eternal life for rest of entire eternity... I will pick up non-eternity each and every time.
SCP-7179 is simply being trapped inside a 10km cube filled with a tropical island for eternity. And I find it one of the scariest ones of them all. This is one of the entries in the timeline
[1,000,000,000,000 years]: Hiddleston ceases physical activity, as no experience is able to provide him with new stimuli.
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-7179
exactly; in fact I encountered that quote years ago, shortly after reading Player of Games and Consider Phlebas and found it so shocking, and annoying, that he intends the Culture to be actual Heaven and not a criticism of how certain utopic ideas can be perverse (which I would have found far more compelling, since the Culture is horrifying to me in various ways), that I stopped reading the rest of the series.
The reframing of the Culture as his ideal society turns the whole series into boring political propaganda, in a way, like a very long leftist version of Atlas Shrugged
fucking snore
1. "Utopia turns perverse" is established enough to be a tired trope. Brave New World is the canonical example here.
2. The Culture books are critical of the utopia. More than half of them are directly about the difficulty of reconciling the ideals of that utopia while coexisting in a universe with other people. The subgenre the Culture books belong to is literally called "critical utopia" fiction.
3. All (good) sci fi is political. You should find a different genre if you don't want politics in it.
> All (good) sci fi is political. You should find a different genre if you don't want politics in it.
I think you are reaching one of the limitations of the English language here. Machiaveli's Prince and John Knox's Monstrous Regiment of Women are both "political" books, but in a very different sense. The former is an exercise in trying to understand the nature of power and society in specific circumstances (in particular, the Prince is a study of autocratic power by a committed republican). The latter is just a polemical weapon, designed to advance some political goal. When people complain about politics in literature, it's usually because they don't like reading the second sort of book. That sort of books are seldom good, whatever their genre may be.
(I'm intentionally using Renaissance examples here, to avoid any unproductive discussions on more modern books.)
I'm using "political" in the way it's commonly applied to literature: social relationships involving power. This encompasses both your examples, as well as the Culture books.
Kameron Hurley has a longer piece on what it means for writing to be political:
https://locusmag.com/feature/kameron-hurley-the-status-quo-i...
And honestly, you can pick the "good" writer of your choice from Asimov to Zelazny. Their politics come through in their writing. Foundation and Lords of Light are both obviously political works. I don't need to get into Heinlein or Bradbury, or poul and it comes through the space between in the lines in Wolf and Pohl. Le Guin and Clarke wore their politics on their sleeves. Etc.
I'm not making some pedantic point here. Science Fiction is a deeply, inherently political genre and always has been.
Yeah, I'm really struggling to think of a major work of sci-fi that is _not_ in some sense political. Possibly Robert Forward's stuff, but as I think he admitted himself those were mostly an excuse to play with weird physics.
> The reframing of the Culture as his ideal society turns the whole series into boring political propaganda
If it was criticism of the utopic ideas, it would be just as much political propaganda, just for different ideas.
Just read Look to Windward to see how wrong you are. Banks knows very well that hell is paved with good intentions.
See also Use of Weapons and Excession.
I too was so surprised by that Banks quote that I still wonder if maybe he was lying or being deliberately provocative.
(I wouldn't call The Culture "leftist" exactly, as it seems to be a space version of liberal imperialism, which the international Left always opposed. Though it is "left" in the American Fox/CNN-tier sense.)
If I choose to believe Banks' quote, then I have to interpret The Culture as merely the best possible society, in a universe where human nature severely constrains what societies are possible. To me it seems to be a world full of pointlessness and barely-suppressed existential angst -- so perhaps he is saying: "Imagine that we can solve death and supply unlimited entertainment and pleasure. Even then, you will not be able to escape a kind of background noise, an omnipresent drone, in a minor key -- because that's inevitable to existence."
Now I imagine a back-story: The people of The Culture, the Minds, everything -- they are actually in Hell. Their universe is Hell. They are incredibly clever; they have outwitted the gods (to the extent possible); they have ended the tortures, chained Satan (or whoever used to administer), and found ways to roast marshmallows over the lakes of fire. It is a tremendous triumph. And yet they are still in Hell, and no matter the palaces they build there or the drugs they take, there is pain beneath the surface.
I read The Culture books as a subtler version of that story, where it is never spelled out clearly where they are.
At the same time, don't take this to mean that I want to force some religious meaning onto the books. My meaning is also secular. Hell is a metaphor of some kind. The meaning I am suggesting is more existentialist than religious.
> If I choose to believe Banks' quote, then I have to interpret The Culture as merely the best possible society, in a universe where human nature severely constrains what societies are possible.
I'm not sure why you wouldn't just take what Banks says at face value. Living in the Culture would for the majority of people on on Earth be far preferable.
But I do think you're close to correct about what Banks was saying on the darker side of the message. Every book of his that I've read (including the non Culture novels) has a darker side. It always seems to be about the inevitably of conflict in the presence of the human condition. And the terrible cruelty this can result in.
Nevertheless, try as I might, it confounds me how anyone could look around at the state of life on Earth today and think "yeah, much better than the dystopia of The Culture".
That’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure how well hell maps to Banks’ books in terms of choice though.
In most religious depictions, one of hell’s predominant characteristics is its inescapability—either logistically or by the mental limits of its inhabitants. Tons of Banks’ work, on the other hand, has a through line of “people could choose to leave the Culture, they’re fundamentally in their situation by (extremely unconstrained!) choice”. This comes up in the idea of Subliming, being Stored, many characters’ choices to commit suicide/decline immortality, or just plain leaving the Culture as many do.
Plenty of his characters are in hells of their own making/choosing, or are tortured by other people, which I think is definitely a commentary on the sources of suffering being behavioral rather than just environmental, but I’m not sure it follows that “therefore the Culture is hell”.
Most of the founding intellectuals of neoconservatism, especially Irving Kristol, came from secular socialist backgrounds and imagined their ideal society to be eerily similar to The Culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
Anyone who really thinks the Culture is hell is not mentally healthy.
I wouldn't use those words, but I agree with the sentiment.
I'd go and live as a culture citizen in a heartbeat.
I'm not sure how else to phrase it.
Perhaps, anyone who considers The Culture universe to be hell thinks incomprehensibly different to me.
Absolutely agree.
That's arguably the worst argument given that the author has no special authority over the interpretation of the work. Heinlein with his increasingly militaristic views wrote Starship Troopers as a sincere story, but Paul Verhoeven showed quite compellingly that it might make for better satire.
That's actually an ironic example, seeing how so many (maybe most) viewers took the intended satire at face value, essentially looping all the way back to Heinlein's intent.
The best satire is always convincing to its targets, because it doesn't misrepresent their positions. The Prince may be satire; who knows what was in Machiavelli's head.
Doesn't the guy have another book - The Discourses on Livy, that confirms the general gist of The Prince? (i.e. autocracies are horrible, to be a successful autocrat you need to be brutal and ruthless)
Exactly. Even today, a lot of satire aimed at the 'right', viewed from the 'right's perspective is not realized as satire and is viewed like someone is trying to make a real point. They can't tell it is satire.
You could only think Heinlein had militaristic views if that was the only book of his you read.
Read another book of his and you'd think he was a communist, another an anarchist, et cetera.
He liked to explore ideas. If there's one thing that's reasonably consistent across his work, it's his belief in individual agency.
Didn't Verhoeven famously not read the book? Hard to call it "satire" then, "straw man" might be more accurate.
Perhaps less famously, Edward Neumeier wrote his screenplay.
I hadn't heard that before but I agree with you, it doesn't qualify as satire if he didn't even bother to consume the source material. At least not in the literary sense.