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