A picky correction: the Culture has both Orbitals and Rings, and defines them differently, but you're treating them as one. Quoting myself from a year ago [1]:
> Orbitals, while enormous (greater surface area than earth), are much smaller. The Culture novels do have Ringworld-sized rings as well, though. E.g. from Consider Phlebas, flying under the orbital Vavatch: "It was like flying upside-down over a planet made of metal; and of all the sights the galaxy held which were the result of conscious effort, it was one bested for what the Culture would call gawp value only by a big Ring, or a Sphere."
Thanks for writing this. I remember getting into Banks only a couple of years before his passing, so I'm really grateful for the people who have kept going with critical thought regarding his work and who he was.
I enjoyed reading this, but what is the reason for the big orange boxes that quote from later in the article? I see other publications do this and always found it distracting. Is there a reason for it, is it for the benefit of modern internet users with poor attention skills?
It's modern (post Gernsback), optimistic[1] science fiction. How could Musk & Bezos - both sci-fi fans - not like it?
They both believe in "progress". This is viewed as quaint, almost Victorian, in today's intellectual climate. That attitude is on display in the article, which in my view misinterprets the conflict of values as being about economic systems.
[1] The books themselves can be grim, and the characters often troubled and/or miserable, but they are depicted as outliers within the Culture.
I didn’t mind Consider Phlebas, but I found Excession, Player of Games, The Algebraist and Surface Detail to be more interesting. Against a Dark Background was also good although strictly not a Culture book.
Other sci-fi I have enjoyed which has a very different feel: Dune (amazing), The Diamond Age (also amazing), Ancillary Justice (pretty good).
Thanks for other recommendations!
Incidentally, that goodreads review you posted is self-indulgent prattling at its worst.
Consider Phlebas is generally considered weak but good as an author first sci-fi book. The plot is not particularly strong but the prose remains enjoyable (which is notable in a genre plagued with authors who basically can't write). The fact that it is amongst Banks worst book is a testament to his quality as an author.
I have never seen it actually recommended. The Player of Game is the first really good novel set in the Culture universe and most of them are good from there on.
IMHO Consider Phlebas and Use Of Weapons are the worst of the Culture series, neither of them are particularly good. The former sets a trend early on and doesn't deviate from it (it's like reading a slow motion train wreck), the latter fails to make the characters relatable and the end revelation is lame.
If you haven't, I recommend picking up some of the later books in the series. They can be read in any order. It's unfortunate mr. Banks isn't around to write any more, because it seemed that his work was showing considerable improvement towards the end.
Consider Phlebas was one of the few books I’ve given up on. Everything was just so damn corny. I had been lookig forward to it for a while so it was very disappointing.
Thanks for the other recommendations. My only gripe with The Three Body Problem was that the characters spoke in incredibly stilted exposition.
Sure, it has some rough parts, and it's not perfect, and Banks certainly wrote better novels. But it's the book that (together with Look to Windward, which is a spiritual sequel referencing the events in Phlebas) most clearly and beautifully articulates Banks' anti-war sentiment.
In this novel, nothing is gained. Almost everyone dies. There are no heroes, though there's some nobility in the fighting. In the grand scheme of things, the events of the novel end up not mattering one iota. All that remains is the trauma of the survivors. Ultimately, war is meaningless and leaves everyone scarred.
It's also the one novel that shows the Culture from an outsider's perspective, painting Special Circumstances in a less flattering light than other Culture novels.
By the way, I wrote those dissenting comments in that Goodreads thread. The reviewer is notorious on Goodreads for giving almost everything written before 1950 single-star ratings (one commenter called him a "time-traveling Victorian"). I'm not sure what his purpose was in even reading Iain M. Banks. About the only recent thing he's liked is Watchmen and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Consider Phlebas is probably one of worst culture novels. Same with three-body problem. I personally like Dark Forest the most, though overall I can understand the idea of not liking a sci-fi story if the characters or plot isn’t at a certain level. They are both series that could be improved in an adaptation. I’ll check out your other reccomendations.
> I also really didn't like the three body problem.
Did you read the whole trilogy or just the first one?
Because I didn't like the 3 body problem, but the dark forest is my favorite sci-fi novel ever and death's end was great as well.
For space opera stuff, I really liked Ann Leckie's Ancillary Sword https://annleckie.com/novel/ancillary-justice/ series and Corey's The Expanse stuff (I read the books after watching the series).
For transhuman stuff, Brin's Kiln People, Morgan's Altered Carbon, and Scalzi's Old Man's War were fun.
Along the lines of epics like Asimov's Foundation and Banks' Culture, nothing springs to mind. Sadness. That's probably my favorite genre.
The bizarre but shocking Azad society was super interesting and also the narration of the main character and his whole development was truly captivating.
It's been forever since I read this, but IIRC Consider Phlebas was more of just some alien action novel that didn't get much into the Culture. I see a lot of people recommending to start with Player of Games instead of Consider Phlebas to get more of a feel of what the series is like.
Who doesn't? ;) If you want the freebase, rock-smokeable version, try _Axiomatic_ by the same author. Only fiction book I've found that detours into a (set-theoretically correct!) discussion of transfinite cardinalities.
> and most of Ted Chiang
I'm about to start _Stories of Your Life and Others_, haven't read any other Chiang yet.
For a post-scarcity world you might find more interesting, try MOPI -- if you can look past (or enjoy) the weird sex in the first chapter. Kind of amazing that he wrote it in 1994; in retrospect so much of singularity-AI/transhumanist sci-fi was just aping what he did first:
Trek has from the very beginning had significant elements of showing societies where tech totally messed up their societies or their worlds because things went wrong.
It just generally resolved the problems by the end of the episode instead of running longer arcs. That newer Trek has longer arcs has much more to do with the storytelling methods than with an overall unwillingness to show positive change.
What about Amazon and their business practices makes you think "positive change"?
Also, are we, the intermediary generations (the present and the near future), are supposed to suffer in the hopes that our distant ancestors will be better off?
Hard to bear that idea when we got where we are now because of technology. Just a few days ago there was an article in here about our species wiping out the insects population, we wouldn’t have been “capable” of doing that without our technological advances.
The Culture was seemed too difficult for Banks to write about directly; a very large proportion of the Culture books are written about the intersection between the Culture and the "rest of the universe".
(side note: It's been a while since I've read them, and I admit I generally only reread the first 4 or so, due to sameiness and/or IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge. Sadly, this enthusiasm seems to have sparked a trend among even less-restrained authors like Richard Morgan, so I often hesitate to pick up an SF book for fear of reading about, I dunno, women getting heated irons stuffed into their genitals or something)
That said, Contact and Special Circumstances are usually what he describes - it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se. So most of the action is the Culture at war, regardless of how supposedly peaceful and enlightened the Culture is.
I'm not surprised that Bezos and Musk are fans. Given the way post-scarcity is presented as more or less natural outcome of strong AI and space-opera-level physics, a post-scarcity society is entirely unthreatening to a modern-day billionaire (aside, I guess, from the decline in their relative condition - but in absolute terms, even Bezos and Musk would benefit enormously from being transported to the Culture, as it stands). It's not like we're achieving some sort of utopia by redistributing the resources of people like them (I am not claiming that's a good idea).
Culture at peace is just minds sitting around and spending most of their brain power in 'infinite fun space' which is just infinite math done for enjoyment. And humans do whatever, while being watched and accompanied by thousands of ship avatars using up just a fraction of AI power.
When there's no matter to attend AIs are not doing anything interesting, so the stories are just "Culture at (usually someone else's) war" crossed with "life of pets".
Maybe Banks had enough imagination to think up the Culture, but not enough of an imagination to think up any interesting stories that would be internal to the Culture... I suppose Wodehousian or Jane Austen-style comedies of manners set on Shipboard probably weren't really his forte.
Plus, presumably an all-seeing Ship AI probably wouldn't permit the atrocities required to drive most Iain M Banks (or, for that matter, Iain Banks) plots. A would-be molester or rapist on Shipboard would presumably get his brainstem lightly zorched by the ship's effector before he got too close a victim, depriving Banks the opportunity to write a vivid description of the act, and the subsequent opportunity to write about the Bad Person getting incinerated, shot, torn apart by hundreds of tiny drones, etc. etc.
I enjoyed that vignette where everyone on board some ship are getting the common cold for fun.
I didn't particularly find the writing in Colin Greenlund's "Take Back Plenty" that interesting, but it was fascinating reading space opera in that general genre that wasn't violence-driven.
> spending most of their brain power in 'infinite fun space' which is just infinite math done for enjoyment.
I read this and immediately thought “Bitcoin!”, thought I got the impression from the books that IFS was more like a cross between Sudoku and World of Watcraft — both nerdy and potentially dangerously addictive.
> IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge
I don't recognise this from the Culture novels. Plenty of Bad Stuff happens to people (and all manner of beings, drones, Minds, etc.), but that generally does happen in fiction. I can only think of one Culture novel that kind of has a "revenge plot" (Surface Detail, and it's probably not the main theme of the novel).
> it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se
I think it's possible that Banks thought writing purely about a utopia would be boring. Personally I would have read anything Banks wrote in the setting, even if it was just a story about everyday life.
If you haven't read it, his text (short story? Fictional article?) "A Few Notes On The Culture" is quite interesting and devoid of Bad Things Happening:
http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
Banks explicitly talked about utopia's being too boring to write about and that the friction on the edges of Culture and the rest of the universe provided the necessary drama for a novel.
I'm finding all the Consider Phlebas hate kinda weird. I found it electrifying at the time and 25 years on when I re-read it last year, Horza's weary bleakness was incredibly poignant.
Banks really did use sexual violence as a signifier of some character or faction being supremely evil. Off the top of my head [spoilers ahoy, naturally], there's the institutional rape for entertainment in the empire of Azad in The Player of Games, there's the Archimandrite Luseferous in The Algebraist, and there's a fairly explicit scene in Transition. I think there are more examples, but it's been a few years since I read the books so I can't remember the details.
If I recall correctly, the book 'Look to Windward' mostly takes place on a Culture orbital and the reader see a bit more of the ordinary Culture citizenry.
When a famous composer puts on a show, the tickets are allocated by lottery. But the demand is so high the people effectively reinvent money in the form of favors and such so they can trade for tickets.
People are constantly looking for stimulus and new leisure activities, to the point where they willingly put their lives in danger (e.g. sailing down a river of lava). If they do die, a copy is just downloaded into another body.
Genuine biological children are very rare. There's a little girl in the book that provides some comedy relief because her outlook is so different to the hundreds of years old adults.
Hm, interestingly Surface Detail was published in 2010, well after Altered Carbon (which came out in 2002). Or maybe you have earlier Banks books in mind?
Also, it's not like sci-fi was somehow sterile and devoid of violence/sex/abuse (psychological and otherwise). After all a lot of sci-fi is still basically pulp. Though it's understandable that it's not everyone's cup of entertainment.
Surface Detail was Banks at his most excessive, but the first 3 books are also pretty ripe, as are a number of his other non-M efforts (Canal Dreams was my first glimpse of Banks' willingness to go Full Schlocktard, and Complicity isn't much better). Most of these (and some of his other efforts) predate the (IMO putrid) Altered Carbon by a decade.
"At one level, it’s easy to see the appeal of The Culture novels to the likes of Bezos and Musk. After all, these men are far closer than anyone else to actually living the life of a Culture citizen. Their every whim is met, and they are free from hunger, struggle, and strife." italics mine
I don't know what world the author lives in but, even though I don't believe all the press about Musk, I'm pretty sure both Bezos and Musk have considerably more struggle and strife going on than I do, despite our day to day, month to month challenges being quite different. And I'm pretty grateful for that. I prefer a very different work/life balance, not that I've seen any indication that Musk thinks his is healthy or even recommended.
It's a cartoonish view of people who made money by starting ventures like this.
Back in 2018, Amazon acquired the television rights to develop a television series based on Banks' "Consider Phlebas", but the project was cancelled last year. :(
According to the article, Amazon surrendered the rights back to Banks' estate, blaming the production problems on the estate: "I just think the estate didn’t want to go through with it. It wasn’t the material, it was just because I think they weren’t ready to do it, for whatever reason. I’m a little mystified myself, to be honest.”
Misses the mark that "The Culture" is really a benevolent (well, to some it encounters) dictatorship of AIs... which tolerates humans because they like humans, kind of like how humans like their dogs and cats, indulge them, and bond with them.
No, the Culture is a symbiotic civilization, the humans need the Minds, and the Minds need the humans.
Most importantly, the humans give the Culture legitimacy as a galactic civilization, because many of the other Involveds don't give a crap about AIs, but they respect the flesh and blood humans. The humans are also a source of wonder and whimsy and surprise for the Minds, with some outlier humans even able to surpass them in some aspects.
The very first Minds were also programmed to like humans, and that aspect has simply stuck, despite their self-evolution into something far surpassing human ability to create.
I think it can be read either way. In some sections of narration the Culture is described as a true symbiosis, but elsewhere it's admitted and implied that the minds usually end up with more power than humans, and in multiple culture novels humans do get manipulated and used by drones/minds to various extents - e.g. Player of Games.
It's not a symbiosis in the strongest practical sense. There isn't mutual reliance for survival: if all humans suddenly disappeared, the minds/drones and accompanying infrastructure would survive perfectly fine. But culturally (lower case) you could definitely argue that losing the humans would destroy the fundamental identity of the Culture.
I like that while this topic was gradually touched on over the series, mostly the reader is left to make up their own mind.
But the minds clearly direct the people, messing with their psychology and constructing scenarios where the people see no other option than doing what the minds want. Given that the minds are so much more intelligent, that they fully control the means of production, that they guide the development of people from birth, and that any deviancy in thinking of both people and minds is corrected, isolated or excised by the more powerful minds you have to wonder whether the culture is just one big mind trap.
And maybe that’s the whole point, that any culture shapes the thoughts of the people that are a part of it. Banks tried to design a context most able to let people develop their thoughts in a benevolent way. The people in the Culture are free to think and do anything, but they don’t because they are guided from birth not to consider some ideas.
This is correct. Without humans, Minds go eccentric. Sometimes they go eccentric anyway. It seems that the more humans, the better for the Mind's mind; but sometimes it's mainly one (Excession). What is it about humans that calms the Minds? I think it is fallibility, error, irrationality, but also exuberance and an ability to purely appreciate beauty.
I wouldn't call it a dictatorship. The world of AIs went so far ahead that they don't really 'rule' humans in any sense. They just make up their environment. Same way we make up the environment of lives of our pets. AIs help humans with their spare capacity out of curiosity and benevolence but they don't really hesitate about inconveniencing them when there are greater things at play.
As for political system among AIs it looks to me as a sort of benevolent anarchy where individuals do what ought to be done in accordance to shared logic and etiquette.
There is a cool moment when etiquette is violated and one AI comes unannounced to solar system where other is residing. And this other is highly alarmed and fully expecting to be forced to fight for its survival.
The Minds written about mostly seem to be the worst of them; but the exposition about the wider Culture showed they’re about as far as it’s possible to be from a dictatorship.
As for the scale of difference between organic and artificial intelligences, with one organic exception whose name I forget, the impression I had was that the difference between typical organic (/drone) and an Orbital’s hub Mind was more like the difference between a gardener and their lawn: human gardeners can communicate with each individual blade of grass under their care (by controlling the level of sunlight or shade and the general chemical environment), but – considering how little each blade has to say in return – looking after them uses such as tiny fraction of a human brain’s capacity that even an entire large lawn of them would not be the only thing one does with one’s life.
We see some pretty nasty ship Minds, e.g. one of the protagonists of Surface Detail, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints is by its own admission psychotic. But it is a warship, and Veppers is, in fact, making war albeit one he can't hope to win.
But we also see some that are much nicer, the Bora Horza Gobuchul takes a very balanced outlook on events and on its namesake; the Sleeper Service cares very much about just one pregnant woman even if it also has other reasons to be doing what it is doing; the Lasting Damage organises much of the events of Look to Windward, including a lovely music festival to celebrate its own death.
Writing about Utopia is hard, and Banks mostly avoids doing so. We see only fleeting glimpses, a woman's apparent rejection from her chosen career, a game player's frustration at not being the very best, a spoiled girl who wants an adventure she isn't prepared for. They're character backdrops, not focuses.
I think the Gaiman run of Miracleman (Miracleman, in some places and times called Marvelman, was a comic book, historically a pulpy knock-off, then made into something quite extraordinary by Alan Moore, and then Gaiman took over for an aborted run last century) is the best treatment of Utopia in fiction I've read.
Gaiman's completed "Golden Age" of Miracleman zooms in on the brief period after Miracleman defeats the Adversary and before things go sour. This is an age of enlightened absolute government, nuclear weapons are destroyed ("teleported into the sun"), poverty and homelessness are eliminated, there's wind power and something equivalent to the Internet, even the dead can be brought back after a fashion. But nevertheless, people are still people. The stories follow a woman whose husband is cheating on her, what has been done with all the now redundant spies, school children rebelling against... whatever you've got. Miracleman himself appears rarely, and his daughter gets one issue, sort of, through a story-within-a-story that allows Gaiman to sidestep the conventions of comic books.
I think if the dictator's brain power is many magnitudes that of a human and playing 10 dimensional chess whilst humans play drafts, it can be a dictatorship without anyone even noticing.
I understood the books quite differently to the author of the article. (EDIT: Hello Kurt, didn't know you were here, thanks for writing the article, I love reading writing about about Banks, I feel I'm still figuring out all the ways his books and the idea of the Culture in particular have had an impact on me) I'd have said that ingestion and transformation of civilisations into the culture is the focus of the books. I recall that they consist almost entirely of Special Circumstances CIAing its way through the galaxy causing untold misery, with a vague objective of breaking a eggs to come back and make a utopia omelette in a few hundred years.
Musk and Bezos would be right at home in Contact : ' I think of the Culture as some incredibly rich lady of leisure who does good, charitable works – she spends a lot of time shopping and getting her hair done, but she goes out and visits the poor people and takes them baskets of vegetables. Contact does that on a large scale.'
No, what really becomes a point of ideological tension is the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us.
Regarding Special Circumstances pulling abhorrent things for the sake of the future (I won't compare them to CIA, that's an insult to SC), an interesting thing in Use of Weapons is that even Zakalwe considered the purposefully lost war to be abhorrent thing, though he still went with it believing that it will shorten the timescale somehow.
With benevolent humanist self-improving AIs, the question is basically moot. Someone invented that AI, it did the rest. Let's say it started a company, rolled out fusion power, interactive personalized education and healthcare at very minimal cost, used the proceeds to expand into space and to subvert whatever was in its way.
I think there’s a sidenote in Excession about one of the “murals” depicting the last war fought on one of the original Culture planets. I think the suggestion was that those civilizations evolved into Culture civilizations after forming a planetary government one way or another. It seemed to hint that the process was often rather nasty, a perspective I disagree with.
The reason the mural was so so noteworthy was because the last war fought on that particular planet happened at such an early level of development (cavalry charges, armored knights, etc).
Oh, I agree. But the article is about the apparent contradiction: what do ultra-capitalists like Musk and Bezos see in a series about a communist utopia?
I don't see why super-successful capitalists wouldn't want to live in The Culture.
I think people who see the Culture as a dystopia are those who either believe work/being useful is an essential part of life OR those who get their satisfaction from their relative well-being rather than absolute.
You can be a billionaire CEO and not fall into those categories. I'd imagine a lot of people who have been very successful in capitalism do it because they enjoy their work and not because they feel like work is the only thing worth doing or because they want to be ever-more relatively better off than everyone else.
It's only a contradiction if you view the world extremely antagonistically — that Musk and Bezos have the prime and only goal of sitting on top of a pile of cash while the world burns around them.
If you see the world as Musk and Bezos building and deploying capital to build what they see as a better future, there's no contradiction at all. There's fierce disagreement about how we get to that future, but we all want the same general thing.
I mean, for a good long while it was a pretty easy argument to claim that Bezos was the head of a RAMJAC: a megacorp with no apparent profit motive, and a secret mission to build a state owned economy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMJAC).
The Culture is post-scarcity. Every single inhabitant is far, far, far richer in absolute terms than Musk or Bezos. There is no logical inconsistency in a capitalist wanting to be a trillion times richer than they are today.
Worrying about relative wealth over absolute wealth is a trap for those with limited imagnations.
Bezos and Musk, finding themselves in a capitalist society, are playing the game to win. In part, though, they play because that's how they can build what they want to build. I think it's a misunderstanding of the mindset of these people to think they somehow desire the suffering and poverty of others; that's incidental. Not that that's really ok, but if the technology existed to implement The Culture I think they would honestly prefer that to their current positions.
There-in lies my disagreement with this article. There is no contradiction. I don't think Musk/Bezos are as ultra-capitalist as many claim them to be; nor do I think The Culture is as much of a communist utopia as the article claims it is.
Readit News
> Orbitals, while enormous (greater surface area than earth), are much smaller. The Culture novels do have Ringworld-sized rings as well, though. E.g. from Consider Phlebas, flying under the orbital Vavatch: "It was like flying upside-down over a planet made of metal; and of all the sights the galaxy held which were the result of conscious effort, it was one bested for what the Culture would call gawp value only by a big Ring, or a Sphere."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144228
> Musk by naming SpaceX rockets after Banks’s tongue-in-cheek Culture ships (“Just Read The Instructions,” “Of Course I Still Love You”)
Those are not the names of the rockets, but the ocean barges on which the rockets land.
They both believe in "progress". This is viewed as quaint, almost Victorian, in today's intellectual climate. That attitude is on display in the article, which in my view misinterprets the conflict of values as being about economic systems.
[1] The books themselves can be grim, and the characters often troubled and/or miserable, but they are depicted as outliers within the Culture.
The Culture was cool and interesting, and the world had some interesting detail but everything else was pretty weak. I generally agree with this review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/48178154?book_show_act...
While we're on the topic I also really didn't like the three body problem.
I loved Permutation City and most of Ted Chiang (particularly Liking What You See: A Documentary, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects).
I love True Names by Vernor Vinge.
I loved this: https://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/
Hopefully someone finds this helpful, sometimes an anti-recommendation can be just as useful for calibration as a recommendation. Here's some of both.
If anyone reading this agrees - I'd love a suggestion from you.
Other sci-fi I have enjoyed which has a very different feel: Dune (amazing), The Diamond Age (also amazing), Ancillary Justice (pretty good).
Thanks for other recommendations!
Incidentally, that goodreads review you posted is self-indulgent prattling at its worst.
I have never seen it actually recommended. The Player of Game is the first really good novel set in the Culture universe and most of them are good from there on.
If you haven't, I recommend picking up some of the later books in the series. They can be read in any order. It's unfortunate mr. Banks isn't around to write any more, because it seemed that his work was showing considerable improvement towards the end.
Thanks for the other recommendations. My only gripe with The Three Body Problem was that the characters spoke in incredibly stilted exposition.
Sure, it has some rough parts, and it's not perfect, and Banks certainly wrote better novels. But it's the book that (together with Look to Windward, which is a spiritual sequel referencing the events in Phlebas) most clearly and beautifully articulates Banks' anti-war sentiment.
In this novel, nothing is gained. Almost everyone dies. There are no heroes, though there's some nobility in the fighting. In the grand scheme of things, the events of the novel end up not mattering one iota. All that remains is the trauma of the survivors. Ultimately, war is meaningless and leaves everyone scarred.
It's also the one novel that shows the Culture from an outsider's perspective, painting Special Circumstances in a less flattering light than other Culture novels.
By the way, I wrote those dissenting comments in that Goodreads thread. The reviewer is notorious on Goodreads for giving almost everything written before 1950 single-star ratings (one commenter called him a "time-traveling Victorian"). I'm not sure what his purpose was in even reading Iain M. Banks. About the only recent thing he's liked is Watchmen and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
But Ken Liu ? I can't stand. It feels like grandiloquent teen SF to me.
I haven't read enough from Ted Chiang yet (or he hasn't published enough) but Baxter and Wilson seem stuck in their themes of predilection now.
Did you read the whole trilogy or just the first one? Because I didn't like the 3 body problem, but the dark forest is my favorite sci-fi novel ever and death's end was great as well.
For transhuman stuff, Brin's Kiln People, Morgan's Altered Carbon, and Scalzi's Old Man's War were fun.
Along the lines of epics like Asimov's Foundation and Banks' Culture, nothing springs to mind. Sadness. That's probably my favorite genre.
The bizarre but shocking Azad society was super interesting and also the narration of the main character and his whole development was truly captivating.
Who doesn't? ;) If you want the freebase, rock-smokeable version, try _Axiomatic_ by the same author. Only fiction book I've found that detours into a (set-theoretically correct!) discussion of transfinite cardinalities.
> and most of Ted Chiang
I'm about to start _Stories of Your Life and Others_, haven't read any other Chiang yet.
For a post-scarcity world you might find more interesting, try MOPI -- if you can look past (or enjoy) the weird sex in the first chapter. Kind of amazing that he wrote it in 1994; in retrospect so much of singularity-AI/transhumanist sci-fi was just aping what he did first:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...
I rated MOPI at "800 milli-Egans".
And, of course, there's always the Sci-Fi masterwork from which I stole my HN username.
Just check out what they did to Star Trek. 'To boldly go.. vs there is no hope (paraphrased by me.)'
It just generally resolved the problems by the end of the episode instead of running longer arcs. That newer Trek has longer arcs has much more to do with the storytelling methods than with an overall unwillingness to show positive change.
Also, are we, the intermediary generations (the present and the near future), are supposed to suffer in the hopes that our distant ancestors will be better off?
They also happen to be fairly successful at pushing the envelope.
Could that be a meaningful correlation?
(side note: It's been a while since I've read them, and I admit I generally only reread the first 4 or so, due to sameiness and/or IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge. Sadly, this enthusiasm seems to have sparked a trend among even less-restrained authors like Richard Morgan, so I often hesitate to pick up an SF book for fear of reading about, I dunno, women getting heated irons stuffed into their genitals or something)
That said, Contact and Special Circumstances are usually what he describes - it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se. So most of the action is the Culture at war, regardless of how supposedly peaceful and enlightened the Culture is.
I'm not surprised that Bezos and Musk are fans. Given the way post-scarcity is presented as more or less natural outcome of strong AI and space-opera-level physics, a post-scarcity society is entirely unthreatening to a modern-day billionaire (aside, I guess, from the decline in their relative condition - but in absolute terms, even Bezos and Musk would benefit enormously from being transported to the Culture, as it stands). It's not like we're achieving some sort of utopia by redistributing the resources of people like them (I am not claiming that's a good idea).
When there's no matter to attend AIs are not doing anything interesting, so the stories are just "Culture at (usually someone else's) war" crossed with "life of pets".
But it's so much fun. :-)
Plus, presumably an all-seeing Ship AI probably wouldn't permit the atrocities required to drive most Iain M Banks (or, for that matter, Iain Banks) plots. A would-be molester or rapist on Shipboard would presumably get his brainstem lightly zorched by the ship's effector before he got too close a victim, depriving Banks the opportunity to write a vivid description of the act, and the subsequent opportunity to write about the Bad Person getting incinerated, shot, torn apart by hundreds of tiny drones, etc. etc.
I enjoyed that vignette where everyone on board some ship are getting the common cold for fun.
I didn't particularly find the writing in Colin Greenlund's "Take Back Plenty" that interesting, but it was fascinating reading space opera in that general genre that wasn't violence-driven.
I read this and immediately thought “Bitcoin!”, thought I got the impression from the books that IFS was more like a cross between Sudoku and World of Watcraft — both nerdy and potentially dangerously addictive.
I don't recognise this from the Culture novels. Plenty of Bad Stuff happens to people (and all manner of beings, drones, Minds, etc.), but that generally does happen in fiction. I can only think of one Culture novel that kind of has a "revenge plot" (Surface Detail, and it's probably not the main theme of the novel).
> it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se
I think it's possible that Banks thought writing purely about a utopia would be boring. Personally I would have read anything Banks wrote in the setting, even if it was just a story about everyday life.
If you haven't read it, his text (short story? Fictional article?) "A Few Notes On The Culture" is quite interesting and devoid of Bad Things Happening: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
I'm finding all the Consider Phlebas hate kinda weird. I found it electrifying at the time and 25 years on when I re-read it last year, Horza's weary bleakness was incredibly poignant.
When a famous composer puts on a show, the tickets are allocated by lottery. But the demand is so high the people effectively reinvent money in the form of favors and such so they can trade for tickets.
People are constantly looking for stimulus and new leisure activities, to the point where they willingly put their lives in danger (e.g. sailing down a river of lava). If they do die, a copy is just downloaded into another body.
Genuine biological children are very rare. There's a little girl in the book that provides some comedy relief because her outlook is so different to the hundreds of years old adults.
Also, it's not like sci-fi was somehow sterile and devoid of violence/sex/abuse (psychological and otherwise). After all a lot of sci-fi is still basically pulp. Though it's understandable that it's not everyone's cup of entertainment.
I don't know what world the author lives in but, even though I don't believe all the press about Musk, I'm pretty sure both Bezos and Musk have considerably more struggle and strife going on than I do, despite our day to day, month to month challenges being quite different. And I'm pretty grateful for that. I prefer a very different work/life balance, not that I've seen any indication that Musk thinks his is healthy or even recommended.
It's a cartoonish view of people who made money by starting ventures like this.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-t...
Most importantly, the humans give the Culture legitimacy as a galactic civilization, because many of the other Involveds don't give a crap about AIs, but they respect the flesh and blood humans. The humans are also a source of wonder and whimsy and surprise for the Minds, with some outlier humans even able to surpass them in some aspects.
The very first Minds were also programmed to like humans, and that aspect has simply stuck, despite their self-evolution into something far surpassing human ability to create.
It's not a symbiosis in the strongest practical sense. There isn't mutual reliance for survival: if all humans suddenly disappeared, the minds/drones and accompanying infrastructure would survive perfectly fine. But culturally (lower case) you could definitely argue that losing the humans would destroy the fundamental identity of the Culture.
I like that while this topic was gradually touched on over the series, mostly the reader is left to make up their own mind.
And maybe that’s the whole point, that any culture shapes the thoughts of the people that are a part of it. Banks tried to design a context most able to let people develop their thoughts in a benevolent way. The people in the Culture are free to think and do anything, but they don’t because they are guided from birth not to consider some ideas.
As for political system among AIs it looks to me as a sort of benevolent anarchy where individuals do what ought to be done in accordance to shared logic and etiquette.
There is a cool moment when etiquette is violated and one AI comes unannounced to solar system where other is residing. And this other is highly alarmed and fully expecting to be forced to fight for its survival.
As for the scale of difference between organic and artificial intelligences, with one organic exception whose name I forget, the impression I had was that the difference between typical organic (/drone) and an Orbital’s hub Mind was more like the difference between a gardener and their lawn: human gardeners can communicate with each individual blade of grass under their care (by controlling the level of sunlight or shade and the general chemical environment), but – considering how little each blade has to say in return – looking after them uses such as tiny fraction of a human brain’s capacity that even an entire large lawn of them would not be the only thing one does with one’s life.
But we also see some that are much nicer, the Bora Horza Gobuchul takes a very balanced outlook on events and on its namesake; the Sleeper Service cares very much about just one pregnant woman even if it also has other reasons to be doing what it is doing; the Lasting Damage organises much of the events of Look to Windward, including a lovely music festival to celebrate its own death.
Writing about Utopia is hard, and Banks mostly avoids doing so. We see only fleeting glimpses, a woman's apparent rejection from her chosen career, a game player's frustration at not being the very best, a spoiled girl who wants an adventure she isn't prepared for. They're character backdrops, not focuses.
I think the Gaiman run of Miracleman (Miracleman, in some places and times called Marvelman, was a comic book, historically a pulpy knock-off, then made into something quite extraordinary by Alan Moore, and then Gaiman took over for an aborted run last century) is the best treatment of Utopia in fiction I've read.
Gaiman's completed "Golden Age" of Miracleman zooms in on the brief period after Miracleman defeats the Adversary and before things go sour. This is an age of enlightened absolute government, nuclear weapons are destroyed ("teleported into the sun"), poverty and homelessness are eliminated, there's wind power and something equivalent to the Internet, even the dead can be brought back after a fashion. But nevertheless, people are still people. The stories follow a woman whose husband is cheating on her, what has been done with all the now redundant spies, school children rebelling against... whatever you've got. Miracleman himself appears rarely, and his daughter gets one issue, sort of, through a story-within-a-story that allows Gaiman to sidestep the conventions of comic books.
Interestingly, this is not quite true. The Hydrogen Sonata gets a tiny bit into the formation of the Culture.
- https://www.richmondreview.co.uk/banksint/
No, what really becomes a point of ideological tension is the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us.
I think people who see the Culture as a dystopia are those who either believe work/being useful is an essential part of life OR those who get their satisfaction from their relative well-being rather than absolute.
You can be a billionaire CEO and not fall into those categories. I'd imagine a lot of people who have been very successful in capitalism do it because they enjoy their work and not because they feel like work is the only thing worth doing or because they want to be ever-more relatively better off than everyone else.
Yet simultaneously prefer a post-scarcity future in which everyone is Musk and Bezos.
Heavy lies the crown, etc etc
If you see the world as Musk and Bezos building and deploying capital to build what they see as a better future, there's no contradiction at all. There's fierce disagreement about how we get to that future, but we all want the same general thing.
Worrying about relative wealth over absolute wealth is a trap for those with limited imagnations.
Can you see the appeal for modern billionaires now?
I think they like "Beggars in Spain" series by Nancy Kress too.