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Imo it's Banks' attempt to portray "as close as you can get to utopia, whilst still having humans". What stops it short of perfection is the Minds (especially S
by n4r9 3y ago
Imo it's Banks' attempt to portray "as close as you can get to utopia, whilst still having humans". What stops it short of perfection is the Minds (especially Special Circumstances) and their power to direct events. They never directly limit the freedoms of Culture citizens, but they happily use them as unwitting pawns in their galactic power games (e.g. the subtly titled Player of Games). The imbalance of intelligence and strength between humans and Minds means that the Minds are effectively dictators, albeit benevolent ones.
- GeoAtreides 3y agoI mean, there's always the choice of splitting from The Culture and taking with you non-sentient AIs... In one of the books there's a guy who did just that, but he keeps talking to the air, perfectly convinced the Minds were still monitoring them (which they might or might not do). As for Special Circumstances... it's Special Circumstances.
- subtlepseudonym 3y agoI would argue that the Minds enable The Culture's utopia. Special Circumstances may theoretically have the capacity to direct events within The Culture, but their efforts are near-exclusively directed without and in the only example to the contrary, those efforts fail rather spectacularly (Excession).
- GeoAtreides 3y agoSpecial Circumstances was not involved in the Excession mess, that was a sub-group of Minds who had _ideas_ and _principles_ (I somehow agree with them, the Affront are, well... an affront) I was going to bring up the Chelgrians (as a fuck-up), but that was Contact fault, if I recall correctly.
- n4r9 3y agoBeen a while since I read Excession but SC was definitely involved to some degree. > The Interesting Times Gang (ITG), an informal group of Minds loosely connected with Special Circumstances, try to manage the Culture's response to the Excession. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession > Whilst it appeared that the Sleeper Service had been Eccentric for 4 decades, it had in fact been a dedicated, if secret, military resource acting on behalf of a sub-set of Special Circumstances Minds known as the Interesting Times Gang https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Sleeper_Service https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Sleeper_Service
- n4r9 3y agoHow I'd put it is: you can't get humans this close to utopia without Minds, and you can't get to perfect utopia because of the Minds.