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The culture was a dystopia.
by worik 2y ago
The culture was a dystopia.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoHow so?
- GeoAtreides 2y agoThe Culture makes really obvious there's no real purpose, no great struggle, no sense to the universe. When everything is provided, when everything is safe, when there is no more effort, then what's the purpose of life? A lot of people when confronted with these revelations/questions have an existentialist crisis. For some, the solution is to deny the Culture. Long story short, the Culture is a true Utopia and some people just can't handle utopias
- worik 2y agoIt is interesting to read the books in the order they were written. The earlier novels (I am going completely from memory here) "Use of Weapons" and "Consider Phlebis" The humans are pets of the machines. The machines are vicious, and righteous. They use extreme, and creative, violence when they feel it is in their interests. In the later novels I feel Banks lost his way a bit, got too attached to the characters. In the later Culture novels the main characters are invulnerable, he does not let any of them die. Whereas in consider Phlebus (spoiler alert) Horza dies at the end and his whole race is genocided.
- Barrin92 2y agoIt's not a dystopia, which is a maximally negative state, but I also always found it pretty comical to call it utopian. A decent chunk of the stories has the reader follow around Special Circumstances, which is effectively a sort of space CIA interfering in the affairs of other cultures. The entire plot of Player of Games, spoiler alert for people who haven't read it, is that both the protagonist of the story, as well as the reader by the narrator, have been mislead and used as a pawn to facilitate the overthrow of the government of another civilization which afterwards collapses into chaos. To me you can straight up read most of the books as satire on say, a Fukuyama-esque America of the late 20th century rather than a futuristic utopia.
- worik 2y ago> It's not a dystopia, which is a maximally negative state, but I also always found it pretty comical to call it utopian. Well, better, put
- LeroyRaz 2y agoI think it is pretty clearly a utopia. It's a post scarcity society, where humans still live meaningful lives (despite being outclassed completely by AI). It's about as best as one can do in a post scarcity society with super intelligence. The interesting and unique aspect of the series, is that Banks manages to write interesting stories about a utopia.
- Ekaros 2y agoI wonder could you even write post scarcity utopia that was actually utopia... Culture might remove lot of freedom, but also it also does allow comfortable living for those who don't care.