[HN Gopher] The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks (2009)
___________________________________________________________________
The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks (2009)
Author : jasim
Score : 142 points
Date : 2021-03-28 17:11 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thenewatlantis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thenewatlantis.com)
| clort wrote:
| It took me like 15 years to try Iain Banks non sci-fi books but
| oh boy.. I would recommend 'Canal Dreams' as a starter, its not
| as .. raw as some of the others, and somewhat topical this week.
|
| If you want to see how raw he could make it, The Wasp Factory'
| goes all the way to 11.
| michael1999 wrote:
| The Wasp Factory left a mark - on me, and the British literary
| establishment.
| ufmace wrote:
| I've read all of the Culture novels and do enjoy them. However, I
| can recognize it as a single-person utopia, which IMO makes it
| inherently unrealistic. I mean that it's a utopia which exists
| entirely in the mind of one man. That means it has never had to
| face the issues of dealing with real people and real problems.
| Assumptions and presumptions that person has about how society
| works and why people do things are encoded into it. Many of these
| types of assumptions have been found wanting when they go up
| against real people. It's even more of an issue with sci-fi,
| where you can make up any technology you want, and have it work
| any way you want.
|
| For example, in the real world, drugs are a serious problem for
| many people. The libertarian assumption is that all of the
| problems flow from prohibition. I'm willing to believe that many
| of the problems do, but it's quite clear that not all of them do.
| See the prescription opioid epidemic. In many of the cases, there
| are no issues with the quality of the supply or the cost of the
| drugs, but nevertheless, the users frequently overdose themselves
| or abandon everything and everyone in their life in the pursuit
| of more drugs. I'm quite doubtful that you could give everyone in
| the world "drug glands" that give them a hit of as much of any
| drug as they want anytime they want and not have a large chunk of
| the population die or become catatonic from opioid overuse, or go
| psychotic as tends to happen with overuse of stimulants like meth
| or cocaine, or something else.
|
| And of course we have the Minds. Of course everything is nice and
| easy if you make up the fact that the Minds are perfect
| benevolent dictators who would never harm a human and always do
| everything legitimately for the greater good. Humans have never
| been able to do that, but hey, we made up some super-intelligent
| AIs that do, because I said so. We've never built a real super-
| intelligent AI, so we don't know how it would be. Maybe it
| actually would be a perfect benevolent dictator. Or maybe not.
| Maybe it'll be just like every human dictator we've ever had,
| happy to squash anyone who questions its rule. Maybe it'll just
| wipe us all out for being inconvenient and messy. Maybe it'll go
| off and do whatever it finds interesting somewhere else and
| ignore us. Who can say?
|
| Bottom line is that it's very easy to make a fake utopia of any
| ideology at all, as long as it's all in one person's head. A Nazi
| could just as easily write their own fake utopia where society
| did everything their way and it all just magically worked
| perfectly because of course they're right about everything in
| their own minds. What happened to all the Jews, you ask? Why they
| just don't exist in our imaginary perfect society! Don't you dare
| ask any inconvenient questions, can't you see we're building a
| utopia here!
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I've read all of the Culture novels and do enjoy them.
| However, I can recognize it as a single-person utopia, which
| IMO makes it inherently unrealistic. I mean that it's a utopia
| which exists entirely in the mind of one man. That means it has
| never had to face the issues of dealing with real people and
| real problems. Assumptions and presumptions that person has
| about how society works and why people do things are encoded
| into it. Many of these types of assumptions have been found
| wanting when they go up against real people. It's even more of
| an issue with sci-fi, where you can make up any technology you
| want, and have it work any way you want.
|
| Exactly: the "utopia" works because its backstory and mechanics
| are a series of biased non-sequiturs (of varying levels of
| audacity, often conflating _goal_ with _outcome_ ).
|
| Its a pretty safe to assume that almost nothing in a
| speculative world would actually work the way it's depicted,
| and forgetting that can sometimes screw people up (I'm reminded
| about the John Rogers qip about Atlas Shrugged and Lord of the
| Rings).
| tablespoon wrote:
| > In the one Culture story that refers to our planet, "The State
| of the Art," Sma is among a group of Contact representatives who
| visit Earth in the year 1977. After a period of careful
| investigation, Sma argues -- in the official report that
| constitutes most of the story -- that the Culture needs to
| intervene to clean up the mess that human beings are making of
| our world. Were such an intervention to take place, Special
| Circumstances would spearhead it. However, one of her colleagues
| finds the Star Trek television series almost the only redeeming
| feature of Earth civilization and recommends that the whole
| planet be destroyed. Special Circumstances would handle that as
| well.
|
| I'm not really a fan of the Culture, but that kind of blows up
| any illusions about it. The against-their-will homogenizing
| manipulations are one thing, but actual literal unprovoked
| genocide? If that's an option what other kinds of skeletons can
| this utopia be assumed to have in its closet?
| nsm wrote:
| Individuals in the Culture are free to state whatever they
| want, that doesn't mean the civilization executes it. Taking
| the _thought_ (not action) of one individual in a civilization
| that has on the order of trillions of individuals is hardly
| being fair to your representation of the Culture. In addition,
| whereas in our world, such a person would likely be Twitter
| shamed into oblivion, even if they had such a thought as
| teenager, in the Culture they would have a reasonable argument
| with other humans and Minds that would attempt to convince them
| of the foolishness of pursuing a genocidal agenda. The Culture
| tries to preserve life as much as possible. For context, what
| actually ends up happening is that Earth is left to its own
| devices. The Culture is dedicated to doing the right thing, but
| that right thing isn 't always easy to figure out. To quote the
| State of the Art: [Diziet Sma asking the Ship Mind] "How
| certain do we have to be? How long must we make them wait? Who
| elected us God?" [The ship] "Diziet... that question is being
| asked all the time, and put in as many different ways we have
| the wit to devise (...) and that moral equation is being re-
| assessed every nanosecond of every day of every year, and every
| time we find some place like Earth -- no matter what way the
| decision [to interfere or not] goes -- we come closer to
| knowing the truth. But we can never be absolutely certain...
| I'm the smartest thing for a hundred light years' radius, and
| by a factor of about a million (...) but even I can't predict
| where a snooker ball's going to end up after more than six
| collisions."
| Angostura wrote:
| I've just pulled my copy from the shelf and am starting to re-
| read, but I'm _sure_ Sma doesn 't recommend the destruction of
| Earth. That would be very un-Sma
| zabzonk wrote:
| > I'm sure Sma doesn't recommend the destruction of Earth
|
| That's not what the post you are replying to said.
| NateEag wrote:
| > However, one of her colleagues finds the Star Trek
| television series almost the only redeeming feature of Earth
| civilization and recommends that the whole planet be
| destroyed.
|
| According to the quote, Sma's _colleague_ recommends
| destroying Earth, not Sma.
| moonbug wrote:
| Dunno what this guy was reading but I sure don't recognise it.
| jameshart wrote:
| Starting an essay on any topic with an assessment of just the
| _size_ of the Wikipedia pages about it really doesn't inspire
| confidence that the author's research goes much beyond having
| brought up the Wikipedia pages and declared 'gosh, those are
| long.' It's really only one stop short of opening the essay
| "Webster's dictionary defines 'culture' as..."
|
| Then the author makes a weird and baseless speculation: 'I would
| not be at all surprised if Banks himself, in the writing of
| Culture novels, consulted Wikipedia to ensure consistency with
| his previous work.' - most of the novels predate the very
| existence of Wikipedia; a page about The Culture was only added
| in 2009.
| dang wrote:
| If curious, the interesting past threads appear to be:
|
| _The Culture War: Iain M. Banks's Billionaire Fans_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25924560 - Jan 2021 (294
| comments)
|
| _Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16348885 - Feb 2018 (31
| comments)
|
| _Iain Banks audio interview_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749881 - June 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _A Few Questions About the Culture: An Interview with Iain
| Banks_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8587447 - Nov 2014
| (86 comments)
|
| _Iain Banks dies of cancer aged 59_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849186 - June 2013 (133
| comments)
|
| _A Few Notes On The Culture, by Iain M. Banks_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5497905 - April 2013 (1
| comment)
|
| _A Personal Statement from Iain Banks_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5485236 - April 2013 (346
| comments)
| ahelwer wrote:
| I'd heard a lot about the culture series and was in the mood for
| some optimistic sci-fi, so I picked up the first book in the
| series (Consider Phlebus). It was... not great. Now looking
| online I learn the series varies widely in quality and there are
| really only two or three novels people tend to genuinely really
| like. So do your research before jumping in.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Lots of people dislike Consider Phlebas but I think it's
| significantly better than most of the others; I like
| _Excession_ better but it 's also hammier.
|
| Banks had great vision but he's not that great of a writer; he
| relies on the few tricks over and over again - hyper-sadistic
| villains, revenge reveals (take a one-dimensional but clearly
| driven character, tease the readers with a slow reveal of the
| moral outrage they're seeking revenge for), very cringey sex
| scenes, Good Guys either set up the Bad Guys all along
| (triumphal outcome) and/or Good Guys kamikaze Bad Guys and
| enjoy moral satisfaction (defiant outcome). The same few plot
| devices are recombined to the point of tedium and/or disgust
| and after >20 years of reading his stuff I get the impression
| that Banks was rather aggressive and unpleasant at the personal
| level; his more sympathetic characters are thinly sketched
| whereas his obnoxious ones are rendered in gratuitous detail.
|
| _Consider Phlebas_ is more interesting and different from his
| other books in that almost all the characters are confused and
| heavily conflicted, and unhappily wrestling with the outcome of
| prior bad decisions. It 's more hard work because it's (mostly)
| written from a single point of view that gives it an episodic
| pearls-on-a-string structure that sometimes feels like one set
| piece after another; in later books he eschewed this approach
| and went for a multiple-converging-plotline approach ( _CP_
| adopts this for the last part of the story). The fact that
| almost everyone in the book is spiraling downwards as the
| result of prior bad decisions is a real downer, but the
| characters are much more complex and involving as a result.
| [deleted]
| riffraff wrote:
| I have to concure, I deeply disliked "Consider Phlebas", but
| the world seemed so interesting that it led me to try again..
| and I really liked "The Player of Games".
|
| Your mileage may vary _a lot_.
| perardi wrote:
| I would argue _Consider Phlebus_ suffered from "early
| installment weirdness", and feels not very Culture-y.
|
| As someone else said below, I truly enjoyed _Excession_ , but
| it's perhaps too Culture-y. Lots of Minds, and then humans that
| are kind of awful.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| For people who hadn't read The Culture series, some notes by the
| author, explaining what The Culture is:
| http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
|
| >Language, entertainment, hormones -- all of these resources are
| overseen by the Minds
|
| This is a 100% false assertion made by the article author, I
| don't understand how they came to this conclusion. In no way,
| shape or form is this true.
|
| > recommends that the whole planet be destroyed. Special
| Circumstances would handle that as well.
|
| The implication made by the author is that SC and by extension
| The Culture, will actually destroy a planet full of sentients.
| This is false, as they didn't destroy the even worse species of
| the Affront. The Culture respect diversity and further more they
| respect they rights of sentients.
|
| Then the author asserts The Culture judges other civilizations by
| how close they are to values and priorities of The Culture
| itself. This is also false, like I said above. The author then
| mention the Idiran War, implicitly in support of his thesis that
| The Culture will go to war against civs that don't share their
| values; he then fails to mention that 1) The Idirans were
| bankrolled by another equivalent civ (the same tech tier as The
| Culture) 2) they were acting as a homogenising swarm 3) parts of
| The Culture split over the decision to go to war.
|
| In my opinion, the article really stretches some very small
| morally grey areas of The Culture just to try to paint the whole
| civilisation as not being a perfect utopia. But The Culture _is_
| a perfect utopia and it was written and declared as such by the
| author. Yet everyone tries to find that small little thing that
| just proves the whole civ it's not so perfect after all.
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| Regardless of how well that article makes the point, within the
| books the culture is a powerful hegemonic force. Its internal
| views and conflicts about the nature and execution of that is a
| major plot driver in a few of the books.
|
| I'm not convinced Banks considered the culture a perfect utopia
| but even if he did that doesn't mean I need to agree.
| gpderetta wrote:
| I'm not convinced either. At some point Banks tell us that
| there are similar higly advanced cultures in the galaxy with
| similar or superior utopias.
|
| But while most of them keep for themselves and have the good
| taste to sublimate once they reach a certain technological
| level, the Culture is special as it sticks around and
| actively interferes with other civilizations.
|
| This of course makes for more interesting stories and it is
| not necessarily a flaw, but it is certainly contentious
| (especially Special Circumstances) even in-universe and has
| spawned factions and splinter civilizations.
| pierrebai wrote:
| People are free to disagree and I certainly do.
|
| You can claim that the failing of the Culture are scenaristic
| conceits needed to have a plot for a book, that's an easy cop-
| out. The Culture is what the books shows. That its flaws were
| only made up to have a story doesn't change that.
|
| In my opinion, when people claim the Culture is a prefect
| utopia, they base their view on a non-existent Culture, that of
| everything good seen in the book with the unsavory part s
| excised as book-writing-fodder unnatural warts. Bu that's
| different thing, a made-up, cleaned-up version of the Culture.
|
| To me, the Minds clearly are toying with humans for a subtle
| version of cruelty.
|
| I'll just take the "Player of Games" as the most explicit
| example (although "Surface Details" is pretty telling too): the
| Culture has been monitoring the Azad for decades, fully knowing
| how corrupt and evil they are, horribly torturing people 24/7.
| Yet they take decades before even setting up a contact.
| Ironically (if we can call it that) the novel ends with the
| events the Minds claim as their reason for not intervening
| directly.
|
| I find the Minds behaviour described through Special
| Circumstances to be consistently amoral.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Surely, what TPOG and other novels in the sequence are trying
| to say is that the Minds find manipulating humans, and other
| intelligent entities, somewhat abhorrent (see the Ship Gray
| Matter, for example), and only step in to do it when they can
| see no other choices. Hence Special Circumstances (as opposed
| to Contact).
| mattmanser wrote:
| Not only that, but it's written by an imperfect human who
| needed plot points for his stories.
|
| So when the author points at the Minds' failures to predict the
| consequences of their actions he simultaneously fails to
| acknowledge that without mistakes by the Minds, there would be
| no plot. No plot, no book.
|
| And especially telling is that when he writes about murder, the
| author totally failed to mention that almost everyone in the
| Culture is constantly backed up, apart from a few abnormal
| people who don't, and can be reincarnated in a blink of an eye.
| How can you not mention that? Being murdered is a minor
| inconvenience, hence the minor punishment.
|
| Also the way Iain wrote about the culture changed over the
| years, if you read consider phelbas then something like dark
| matter back to back I felt you can see he realized some of the
| mistakes he'd made early on, even if he couldnt go back and
| correct them.
|
| For me at least, it's always been clear that the culture did
| not need an external threat to function, and as a whole it
| found war to be a tiresome waste of time. I agree with you that
| the article seems to be plucking at straws to put that argument
| together.
| rkachowski wrote:
| In the series its mentioned that any mind beyond a certain
| level of perfection would always immediately choose to
| sublime to the next level of existence. Given the fact that
| the minds have very strong personalities and they're less
| than perfect, omniscient creations then mistakes
| miscalculations and overestimations are inevitable.
|
| I'd always taken the view that Contact / Special
| Circumstances was where many people wanted to be due to it
| being a limited opportunity in a post scarcity environment.
| Coupled with the fact that anyone who really wanted to be in
| a situation requiring the use of scary advanced weaponry is
| likely to be a bad choice for such a position, this always
| made the stories about contact agents seem intriguing to me.
| sharkweek wrote:
| I'm going to use this as an opportunity to ask: I tried reading
| Consider Plebius and couldn't get into it.
|
| Years have gone by since this attempt (so many books to read, I
| rarely revisit something that didn't capture my attention
| immediately), but a friend recently told me to just skip
| Plebius and that he guarantees, knowing my taste, I'll enjoy
| the rest immensely.
|
| Any HN thoughts here on the series would be appreciated!
| scotty79 wrote:
| As others say Player of Games is probably easiest to get
| into.
|
| If you like a bit of medieval stuff in your SF you might
| consider reading Matter.
|
| I also very much like Surface Detail.
| elihu wrote:
| Huh, I actually think Consider Phlebas is the best I've read
| so far, but it seems that view is in the minority and my own
| high opinion is mostly on account of the latter half of the
| book, once they get to Schar's world. Your friend could be
| right that you might prefer one of the other books.
| pierrebai wrote:
| The main problem with Consider Phlebas is that a lot of the
| book feels like a collection of space adventures. These
| early part of the book feel less sophisticated than latter
| novels. Yet by the end it becomes pretty great. It is also
| one of my favorite Culture novel because the Minds
| ambiguities are less present and the elitism constantly in
| displays in other novels are at least justified here by the
| unique morphing capabilities of the protagonist.
| kvgr wrote:
| I liked the first two books, but Use Of Weapons is killing me
| right now. It has some long descriptive passages skipping
| back or to the furure? Cant do it...
| Sharlin wrote:
| _Use of Weapons_ is a masterpiece, but (or maybe
| therefore?) is definitely not an easy read. Like most
| stories with a nonlinear narrative, its true greatness only
| becomes apparent on a second - or maybe third - read. But
| to make it easier to grok, realize that there are two
| timelines that alternate: one goes forward in "present
| time" and drives the main plot; the other goes backwards in
| time and describes how the protagonist ended up the way he
| does.
| pierrebai wrote:
| I didn't like Use of Weapons. I found the plot cliche, the
| usual super-elitism of SC pushed to the unbearable point
| (the fact that the main protagonist would be such a unique
| and uber-warrior / strategist / whatever) and the source of
| his emotional turmoil over the top.
| Tomte wrote:
| The book starts at a point in time, and then gives two
| story lines. One back in time (Roman numerals) and one
| forward in time (Arabic numerals). Those two are
| alternating and equal, no one is superior to the other or
| just a "descriptive passage".
|
| Once you understand it, the whole organization becomes very
| clear and no problem. If you don't know that, you'll
| struggle.
|
| I love UoW, it's my favorite book (ahead of the superb
| Excession), but I haven't read all of the Culture novels.
|
| Consider Phlebas is a terrible beginning (that I also
| endured), and the much-recommended Player of Games wasn't
| my cup of tea, either, though it's not bad.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: I personally had more fun reading the
| Wikipedia page (and others) detailing the actual background
| and setting and workings of the Culture than I had reading
| any of the books. :) Really the world (universe?) of The
| Culture is very deep and interesting (and the Tolkien
| comparisons very apt, since I have the same feeling about
| LoTR).
|
| Also I particularly enjoyed Consider Phlebas more than the
| 'following' book (player of games), so I do not agree about
| phlebas being "skippable".
| marvin wrote:
| My favorites are Matter and Surface Detail, in that order.
| Surface Detail is probably an easier starting point, but any
| of the non-canonical reading order suggestions will have you
| confused for a while, due to the simplified descriptions of
| various concepts. It is about simulated worlds, in-silico
| sentient minds and military conflict over vehement ethics
| disagreements.
|
| I started with Look to Windward myself, and would probably
| have started with another if choosing again.
| wmf wrote:
| The Culture series can be read in pretty much any order;
| staring with _The Player of Games_ might be easier.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| Start with Player of Games, it's better and most people
| recommend it as a starting point.
| gpderetta wrote:
| I enjoyed it a lot, but I also like episodic stories.
|
| Also it is very interesting that it is a space opera that,
| instead of focusing in grand scale events and high stakes
| storylines, it deals with a minor, mostly inconsequential and
| ultimately futile event.
| ilikeyou wrote:
| Absolutely. I love the Culture series, but Consider Phlebas
| has always been one of the least enjoyable books.
|
| I'd personally start with the excellent Player of Games and
| go from there.
|
| (Also skip Inversions)
| u02sgb wrote:
| I didn't like Inversions the first time I read it either
| but re-read all the Culture books, in order, after Banks
| died and enjoyed that. I think I was expecting it to be
| very Culture-y and was disappointed it wasn't. On a reread
| my expectations were different and it was just a very
| enjoyable story.
|
| I'd also suggest avoiding Excession until you've become
| familiar with the Minds. It's my favourite book, I think,
| but you lose a lot without having a little context.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Honestly, I'd take it a step further and skip Banks all
| together. I first read a bunch of Culture books roughly a
| decade ago, thought I'd give them another read recently, and
| had lost all interest. Thin plots, boring characters, worlds
| that are mostly hinted at but poorly developed, and in his
| later books a deep sense of nihilism that reads more like a
| depressed teenager than an author finding his voice.
|
| Of the books, the two that manage to stand somewhat on their
| own as decent books are Player of Games, because what geek
| doesn't like a book about a planet where the government is
| based around whose best at board games, and Excession since
| it's the most Mind-heavy book, and frankly the Minds are
| Banks' most interesting characters.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > worlds that are mostly hinted at but poorly developed
|
| This is one of the best qualities of his books. In me those
| hints trigger my imagination that creates awe inspiring
| images. I'd hate it if he flooded me with descriptions of
| everything.
|
| Overdescribed worlds like Warhammer 40000 are uninteresting
| to me. It's like reading a history book, but fake (not that
| it makes it any worse).
| detaro wrote:
| It's one of my favorite series. IMHO the order to read them
| doesn't matter all that much, and Consider Phlebas probably
| isn't the easiest to get into it. Maybe start with _Player of
| Games_ or _Look To Windward_.
| culturenothx wrote:
| > Then the author asserts The Culture judges other
| civilizations by how close they are to values and priorities of
| The Culture itself.
|
| This is exactly the impression I got after reading Player of
| Games, the second Culture book I read, after Consider Phlebas,
| so I'm confused about your opinion
|
| But that said, I found Player of Games trite and I kept finding
| myself siding with the "bad" guys and Consider Phlebas was
| literally forgettable, I read it six or so years ago and can't
| remember anything about it
|
| Needless to say, I moved on to better series.
| retrac wrote:
| > I don't understand how they came to this conclusion.
|
| Whether humans are just much-loved companion animals to the
| Minds is a running theme in the books. The role and value of
| beings almost infinitely smaller in capacity than the Minds is
| certainly a theme. The Minds may be wired to adore us, but do
| they truly respect us? One imagines that if the likes of Grey
| Area went around reading the minds of other Minds rather than
| mere meat minds, he would promptly have met a rather more
| painful end than social ostracism. Similarly, while the Culture
| purports to be a universal direct democracy, when the entire
| public discussion can be subtly guided by the Minds... how free
| are the Culture's humans, really? I've noticed some people seem
| to completely miss this theme. Others tend to read that theme
| even more strongly than Banks probably intended. But it's
| certainly there.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| > humans are just much-loved companion animals to the Minds
|
| I think that's just an imperfect translation for the
| existential dread people might feel when confronted with a
| perfect utopia. They go: "what's the meaning of life, then?"
| and have bad trips. On a similar discussion on the
| Spacebattles forum, there were people saying they would
| rather live in the Star Trek or even the Warhammer 40k
| universe, exactly because those two universes provide meaning
| (mostly through pain...).
|
| The Minds certainly respect humans and their rights. Special
| Circumstances have a lot of human agents, for example, which
| play important roles in the organisation and on the field
| detaro wrote:
| The motive of the Minds letting humans be in places or do
| stuff just because they think it's fun isn't uncommon. No
| Culture ship needs a crew to run things, but they'll have
| them anyways, listen to them, let them "help" build new
| ships, because they like doing so. But they don't have to
| and if it gets dangerous they'll not bother and just act,
| confident in their superiority. Minds are almost without
| exception perfectly nice and respectful about it (much more
| than we are to our pets, which is key to it being an
| Utopia), but the dynamic is nevertheless there.
|
| > _I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the
| far side. 'We are quicker; we live faster and more
| completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a
| greater store of memories and at such a fine level of
| detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely,
| too. Never forget I have had the chance to compare and
| contrast the ways of dying.'_
|
| Gods that really love and respect their "subjects" and
| creators though, so they'll not do any of the terrible
| things they totally could do without any chance of stopping
| them, but rather support them and their whims as far as
| they think is safe.
|
| SC is a bit special because non-Culture civs don't
| necessarily play well with AIs, and somewhat open how much
| Minds engineer the situations that occur. And in that SC is
| explained as somewhat of an outlet for those for that the
| utopia doesn't quite work - but it wouldn't exist if the
| Minds didn't think it was good to have.
| vidarh wrote:
| Whole sections of the Culture has broken away without
| conflict. That to me is the strongest indicator of freedom in
| the Culture, and also the strongest indicator that it is
| reasonable to describe as a near utopia: A society where
| people can (and do) break away, yet most choose not to, seems
| to be striking a decent balance.
|
| The biggest issue I have with the Culture is that they are in
| a sense luddites: They stubbornly insist on dying and
| stubbornly refuse to sublime. They hold on to a very limited
| and restrictive sense of existence. But they do so by choice,
| and make the most of it within those limits.
| filoeleven wrote:
| > They stubbornly insist on dying and stubbornly refuse to
| sublime.
|
| As a whole, yes. But individual Culture Minds have
| sublimed, and individual humans can choose to be stored
| until the Culture chooses to sublime as a whole. (I don't
| think Banks ever explored a Culture human choosing to
| defect into a different society which was going to sublime;
| that could have been a neat sub-plot for The Hydrogen
| Sonata.)
|
| That's also what makes the Culture a place for
| storytelling, though. Lots of other civs have sublimed, the
| Culture seems to be the highest-level one that explicitly
| chooses to stay in the Real. I don't think it's so much
| Luddite as...a necessary function to make these stories
| possible and interesting.
| simonh wrote:
| That's an interesting take. I'm not saying you're wrong,
| but I think of subliming as the civilisational equivalent
| of staying in your bedroom for the rest of eternity playing
| video games. It's giving up on the concept of stakes or
| consequences or achievement. But then perhaps those are
| ultimately illusory.
| krisoft wrote:
| I think you are right, it's absolutely there. In fact I'm not
| even sure the Minds adore the humanoids. I think it's fair to
| say that the Minds love playing games among themselves. The
| Minds are social, they form clicks and chat with other Minds.
| They also have "everything". Material possessions won't
| impress an other Mind. The games they play between each other
| and the social position they convey is what impresses an
| other Mind.
|
| Imagine a society of parrot keepers. From time to time they
| swap pictures of their parrots. The keeper whose parrots are
| sickly or unkempt will be pitied by the rest of them. They
| will get tips on how to better to care for birds. Maybe they
| will even get suggestions from concerned society members that
| they should give up the hobby. These members would have a low
| rank in the society. In contrast the parrot keepers who has
| the best and happiest birds will have a high social rank.
| Other society members will ask their advice on bird-keeping
| matters. Everyone will want to swap birds with them. These
| keepers are not just taking care of their birds then, but
| competing with each other in this "pageant"
|
| In some ways, the game becomes more interesting the harder it
| is to keep the birds. A bird which thrives in any environment
| is less challenging to keep than one which has complicated
| psychological needs. Thus a Mind who has everything and wants
| to dazzle an other Mind who also has everything will
| naturally gravitate towards keeping the most exotic "birds".
| The ones which require complex environments and are a true
| challenge to keep happy for even someone with the mental
| capacity of one of the Minds.
|
| This of course all just my headcanon, but I think the Minds
| keep human societies around because it's hard to keep them
| happy. (Especially because many of the humans would go
| completely depressed if they were to realise that they are
| just beautiful songbirds in a galaxy wide pageantry.)
|
| Of course keeping humans is not the only game the Minds play.
| They also play with mathematical discovery in the Infinite
| Fun Space. Or play with manipulating other societies in
| Special Circumstances. We also know that the Minds keep
| societies of gas dwellers on board. Who knows maybe those are
| even harder to keep happy than the humans?
| [deleted]
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| The parrot keeper analogy is so beautiful and hilarious!
| Way overly-cynical for me, though.
|
| Like others, I look to how humans care (deeply and
| emotionally) for "lesser" animals. Hell, some humans (me
| included) even care about plants, and are sad to see them
| dying. Now imagine if the plants _made_ me, and introduced
| me to their society.
|
| It could also be argued that the care-to-relative-
| intelligence relationship isn't linear -- the fact that I
| have enough intelligence to speak and have ideas would
| engender more care for me in a Mind than for a plant in me
| even if the intellectual delta between me and a plant and
| me and a Mind is the same, proportionally.
|
| Also, the ultimate counterargument waiting in the wings is
| that the Minds would naturally be programmed to adore
| humans and subscribe to the lefty-horizontalism of the
| Culture in which it'd be unfashionable to disrespect or
| harm a being just because it's of lesser intelligence. (And
| they don't reprogram themselves not to because they were
| programmed to not want to do that.)
|
| Side note: Another fun, cynical excuse for super-AIs
| keeping humans around is found in The Hyperion Cantos
| series, where the super-AIs actually tap into the
| collective brainpower of humans, essentially like some
| spacetime-bending crypto-miner run from time to time in
| everyone's brain with no physical evidence.
| filoeleven wrote:
| The difference in "level/depth of consciousness" between
| Minds and humans is an interesting one, because the scale
| matters a lot.
|
| I say forget parrots and take it even further. Culture
| Orbitals are IIRC run by a single Mind, and contain tens of
| billions of humans. At that point, this analogy becomes
| plausible: "a mind is to a human as a human is to a yeast
| cell." The name itself, "The Culture," might be a sly
| reference to how we think of microscopic colonies!
|
| Minds think on the order of nanoseconds or picoseconds too,
| fast enough for the distinction to be meaningless to me.
| That enables them to relate to humans with a vast timescale
| difference, perhaps on the order of (as a sibling
| suggested) a human managing a lawn, only with a full 3D
| (and x-ray and infrared and etc) view of each grass blade
| at all times. And the manager doesn't have to sleep or
| generally spend more energy than raising a single arm-hair
| to attend to even the most troublesome specimens 99.999% of
| the time.
|
| It's a hard thing to comprehend, because in the novels the
| Minds are so engaged with individual humans: offering
| advice, presenting opportunities and options. If I carry
| the analogy through, we do the same thing by using
| probiotics, sanitary practices, etc. To a yeast cell, a
| sudden influx of sugar might look like a Mind's sage advice
| does to a human seeking fulfillment.
|
| Heady stuff.
| simonh wrote:
| Cliques. I'm really sorry, I know that's rude, but I see
| this all the time. I don't think I've ever actually seen it
| spelled correctly here. I'll go hide under a rock now.
| bhaak wrote:
| My cats and my dogs are family members. There's no discussion
| about that.
|
| But they are not family members with the full rights and
| duties of a human family member. But that doesn't change that
| I try to treat them with the same respect as any other family
| member.
|
| If you look at how the minds treat the members of the Culture
| with less capacity than them, it is very similar to how the
| Culture as a whole regards other civilisations.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| utopian fiction generally requires some imperfection to be
| shown in order to have dramatic tension.
| WJW wrote:
| I love the culture series. It's so unashamedly optimistic about
| how life "could" be, while exploring which problems even an
| absolutely utopian post-scarcity society with benevolent AGIs
| would encounter.
|
| It is, as the article mentions, an absolutely intriguing mirror
| held up to our own society.
| [deleted]
| bhaak wrote:
| I miss positive science fiction.
|
| I don't want to read or see science fiction that drags me down.
| Reality is grim enough as it is.
|
| Show me fictional realities that inspire me to make them real.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| The ongoing First Contact series by pseudonym Ralts Bloodthorne
| [1] is a space opera that could be considered optimistic in the
| sense of "humanity shall overcome". There is an active Discord
| community around it, lots of fans.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/f94rak/oc_pthok_eats_a...
| wccrawford wrote:
| If you enjoyed The Martian, you might also enjoy the Diary of a
| Murderbot series. Neither of them are particularly positive,
| but the humor in them really does it for me.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The Murderbot books are good, but holy crapballs they are
| expensive.
|
| Full book price for practically a novella.
| tmoertel wrote:
| I second this recommendation.
| kashyapc wrote:
| If you're new to the _Culture_ series by Banks and are wondering
| where to start, I 'd suggest _not_ to start with the first book,
| _" Consider Phlebas"_. Instead, I'd strongly recommend to pick up
| the _second_ one, _" The Player of Games"_ -- this thrilling book
| is a love letter to board games. It's beautifully executed and an
| incredibly absorbing book for a newcomer.
|
| _Then_ you can pick up _" Consider Phlebas"_. I'm glad I did my
| research and didn't start with this. It has its many brilliant
| moments, but I had to show significantly more patience to finish
| it.
|
| I'm now currently working my way through the fifth book in the
| series, _" Excession"_. It's living up to the hype. (Two years
| ago, a Scottish man sitting next to me on a plane just wouldn't
| stop talking about it when he saw me reading _" The Player of
| Games"_. I'm glad he badgered me to pick it up.)
| loeg wrote:
| (2009)
| elihu wrote:
| > Why was the wisdom of the Culture's Minds not sufficient to
| foresee this mess? No explanation is given. Indeed, the Minds of
| Special Circumstances are surprised fairly often in these novels
| -- in The Player of Games they seem to realize from the start
| that they don't have the political situation on Azad figured out.
| There are only two inferences I can make here: either Banks is
| being careless or he is suggesting that even an intelligence
| capable of handling the everyday affairs of an Orbital containing
| thirty billion people is still not smart enough to figure out
| what sentient beings will do in response to conflict. One hopes
| the latter is the right inference; but if it is, it suggests that
| the power of the Minds is largely the power of control: they can
| predict and deal successfully with the behavior of those who
| speak their language and use their drugs, but have limited
| ability to manipulate others.
|
| If I remember right, in Player of Games, the Culture simply
| didn't have enough information to go on. It seems very weird to
| assume that even an infinitely powerful computer could accurately
| predict the behavior of a society it doesn't have much visibility
| into.
|
| I think the article also misunderstands the Minds and where their
| influence comes from. Most of the biological population of the
| Culture lives on ships or artificial structures, which are
| themselves almost like living things. A ship is essentially the
| body of the Mind that controls it, and the people are generally
| allowed to ride along. The people aren't particularly controlled
| by the Minds, but the Mind decides where the ship goes. The Minds
| are powerful in that they control immensely powerful machinery
| and have access to enormous amounts of information and are able
| to process it. But at they same time, they're also dependent on
| biological people when it comes to interaction with non-Culture
| societies, who tend to be more easily accepted than the machines
| themselves or their avatars.
|
| Minds often disagree with each other on the basis of different
| degrees of risk tolerance and relative priorities. They're
| definitely not infallible.
| detaro wrote:
| At least in what's told to Gurgeh at the end of the _Player of
| Games_ , the Minds had the situation very much figured out.
| They sent Gurgeh and threatened the Emperor because the figured
| they could cause the Empire of Azad, which we can assume they
| did not want to tolerate, to collapse this way. And they were
| right.
|
| Gurgeh doesn't know it, but the Minds totally expect that he'll
| beat everyone at Azad. Him winning weakens the fundamental
| principles of the Empire, and in the end they tell the Emperor
| that he's playing for real: If the emperor wins, they'll leave.
| If Gurgeh wins, the Culture will come in "guns blazing". (they
| probably wouldn't, or at least very much would prefer not to,
| but the Emperor doesn't know that, attacks and gets killed, and
| the empire falls over this, with the Culture shedding minimal
| blood on its own)
| nsm wrote:
| For fans of Banks, who are looking for a analysis of the Culture
| books through the utopian lens, I highly recommend "The Culture
| Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction" by Simone
| Caroti. To quote Fal N'geestra from Consider Phlebas:
|
| "Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know
| and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing;
| that's the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have
| any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant
| ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms?"
| notsuoh wrote:
| This is a really good read. I absolutely love the entire Culture
| series.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The Culture is unobtainium-grade post-scarcity. The Minds and
| lesser AIs make computing and intelligence abundant beyond want.
| It also has effectively unlimited freedom of voice, freedom of
| exit, freedom of association, freedom to roam, and unlimited
| supplies of energy, matter, and manufactured goods. The only
| limits it can't overcome are logical contradictions.
|
| It has basically the same fictional technologies as Star Trek:
| powerful AI, FTL communication, FTL travel, replicators,
| transporters, and ridiculously abundant energy. But it is a far
| more wild and unrestrained What-If than Star Trek, which is
| probably why it has never been adapted to the screen. (An
| adaptation of _Consider Phlebas_ was apparently a project for
| Amazon Prime for a while, but that was dropped.)
|
| Consider for example transporter accidents/paradoxes/quirks. In
| Star Trek the question of identity and continuity going through
| the transporter is mostly shoved to the side, sometimes addressed
| in oblique character remarks, and occasionally rises to the
| forefront in an episode where somebody is duplicated or trapped
| in a transporter. Then the possibility of personal storage or
| duplication is set aside until the next rare occasion where it
| rises to Plot level.
|
| In the Culture, having a molecular pattern backup of your body
| stored is _routine_ , even among ordinary citizens. _Not_
| retaining a backup is unusual. Most Special Circumstances agents
| killed in the line of duty will be restored from backup, minus a
| few hours or days of memories. Only in wide scale conflicts,
| where backup data cannot be replicated outside the danger zone
| fast enough, are people in danger of involuntary permadeath. Star
| Trek has basically the same in-universe technology to make
| violent death reversible, but chooses not to pursue it, probably
| to avoid making things seem too weird to audiences.
|
| But the future seen from the past _is_ weird even when it
| includes only actually-realizable technologies. If you had a time
| machine and could show an audience of SF enthusiasts from 1940 a
| vision of things to come from technological change, 2010 's film
| _The Social Network_ would be about the best you could do. It
| might also be baffling and off-putting to the sorts of people who
| liked SF stories of the time. Most people who enjoy SF prefer
| adventure stories with relatable characters and some plot-
| enabling or plot-driving tech gizmos. Visions of everything
| transfigured and rendered strange by technology or sheer cultural
| drift over time are less popular.
| marvin wrote:
| Descriptions of being restored from a backup are also
| ambiguous. Don't remember the exact phrasing, but a character
| in imminent fear of death in one of the books thinks to
| themselves along the lines of "I am backed up and will be
| restored, but it's not the same as surviving, of course".
| scotty79 wrote:
| I absolutely love the treatment of artificial consciousness in
| Star Trek (Voyager especially I think). It's so wonderfully
| obliviously callous. They create consciousness for
| entertainment and work. Treat it kindly then destroy it without
| remorse or consideration.
|
| From the point of view of Culture that considers moral
| implications of simulating people in too much detail Star Trek
| federation would be completely barbaric.
| zabzonk wrote:
| To be slightly nit-picking, instantaneous travel in the Culture
| is performed by "displacement" - i.e. moving a small chunk of
| space-time from one location to another, not by destructively
| performing a bitwise copy and "transporting" the bits and re-
| assembling them. There is real (tiny from human point of view)
| risk involved in doing this, which the neurotically risk-averse
| Culture Minds find near-unacceptable - this would not be the
| case if a perfect copy were made before displacement. Indeed
| the implications and technologies of backing-up humans is not
| really addressed often or deeply in the novels.
| philipkglass wrote:
| You are technically correct, the best kind of correct :-) The
| Culture uses displacers for "teleportation" and sentient
| beings usually don't use them to travel.
|
| I agree that the stories could have gone into a lot more
| depth about the consequences of backups. Surely there are
| Orbitals out there populated with 10 million copies of the
| same backup original. Those were never written about. (Other
| SF authors _have_ written stories in that vein.)
|
| The pervasive embrace of death-proofing is still a notable
| part of the Culture. Star Trek was very small-c conservative
| about showing radical changes to the human condition -- even
| changes that seemed to easily follow from their available
| technologies. That could be because radically changed
| conditions don't offer as much opportunity for commenting on
| the realities of the present. Or perhaps because the writers
| didn't want to lose the audience. Or because it's more
| difficult (though possible!) to write dramatically gripping
| stories when death itself is only a temporary inconvenience
| for the protagonists.
|
| I feel like the Culture series is a joyful rebuke to the
| common SF theme that there are some things man was not meant
| to know or tamper with. They'll meddle with _everything_ and
| only rarely does it backfire. There are a few spectacular
| failures along the way, as with the Chelgrians. Even
| employing post-scarcity everything and the best of
| intentions, the outcomes aren 't _always_ good. But on
| balance the Culture does far more good than a default policy
| of non-intervention.
|
| Readers might inappropriately translate the ethos of the
| Culture into real life. The New Atlantis article touches on
| this. If the Culture uses secret agents and a judicious touch
| of firepower to improve lives across the galaxy, why can't
| citizens of prosperous democratic nations also liberate
| people living in dictatorships/theocracies/other bad
| circumstances? (Because we are only human, not Minds, would
| be my answer. So our forceful interventions are much less
| likely to avert more suffering than they cause.)
| worik wrote:
| It is interesting to tread the culture novels in the order they
| were written.
|
| Use of Weapons (I think written, but not published first) and
| Consider Phlebus (sp?) were quite dark and portrayed the Culture
| in a broader vision than the later novels.
|
| I feel they are much better, and far more courageous than the
| later novels. He came to like his characters too much and could
| not let them die. The total cluster fuck at the end of Consider
| Phlebus and the dark and tragic ending of Use of Weapons would
| not happen in later novels.
| 5tefan wrote:
| I wanted to like the Culture Books. Didn't work out for me.
| Surface stories are weird to me and I don't have a knack in
| finding undelying things.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| > CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture?
|
| > Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it's my secular
| heaven....Yes, I would, absolutely.
|
| Iain Banks's The Culture is my Utopia too.
|
| Of all the worlds and societies of science fiction that I've read
| or seen on the screen, The Culture is the one I'd most like to
| live inside as an ordinary citizen. A society that has eliminated
| material scarcity. Life is centuries long, health and disease are
| solved problems. The lives of most of its inhabitants are largely
| devoted to self-actualization, the pursuit of happiness and
| meaning.
|
| And... that sounds pretty good to me. Go climb in the mountains
| all day and come back and philosophize with friends around a camp
| fire. Learn architecture and design your home; make art; seek out
| new kinds of music. Spend 10 years mastering a new branch of
| mathematics, just for the sheer joy of learning. Travel between
| the stars, go to parties, fall in love, cultivate friendships -
| and when you want to be alone, go to your ranch in a desert for a
| month and just look at the stars. Explore what it means to be
| yourself under a hundred different suns, on a hundred different
| worlds, in a universe of boundless wonder.
|
| Good grief yes, heck, yeah - sure as anything I want to live in
| that world.
|
| Footnote: of course, the irony of the Culture books is that this
| kind of Utopian life isn't terribly interesting for the plot of a
| novel, so you only see it in fragments. The books are mostly set
| around the edges of the Culture, where it comes into conflict
| with societies or individuals that don't share its values. And
| they're damn fun to read (I particular recommend _The Player of
| Games_ for those starting out.)
| bollu wrote:
| I LOVED reading the culture. I'm still working my way through
| the books. They're eminently quotable. Here are some of my
| favourites:
|
| > "Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like
| an idiot,"
|
| > It would have helped if the Culture had used some sort of
| emblem or logo; but, pointlessly unhelpful and unrealistic to
| the last, the Culture refused to place its trust in symbols. It
| maintained that it was what it was and had no need for such
| outward representation.
|
| > Just as it could not imprison itself with laws, impoverish
| itself with money or misguide itself with leaders, so it would
| not misrepresent itself with signs.
|
| > So it had effectively frozen its primary memory and cognitive
| functions, wrapping them in fields which prevented both decay
| and use. It was working instead on back-up picocircuitry, in
| real space, and using real-space light to think with (how
| humiliating).
|
| > Originally Damage was played on such occasions because only
| during the breakdown of law and morality, and the confusion and
| chaos normally surrounding Final Events, could the game be
| carried out in anything remotely resembling part of the
| civilized galaxy; which, believe it or not, the Players like to
| think they're part of.
|
| I hope this coveys the texture of the books. I have more quotes
| collected at my blog.http://bollu.github.io/quotes-from-the-
| culture.html
| novok wrote:
| But they do have a logo, it's the phrase 'the culture'
| itself.
| zabzonk wrote:
| And its motto, mostly applied by its
| neighbours/friends/enemies/whatever - "Don't Fuck With The
| Culture".
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The coolest moment is when some other civilization starts
| attacking the Culture and keeps winning. They think it's
| because they're weak.
|
| Actually they're just considering how to end the conflict
| without completely eradicating the other guys. Finally
| they decide to ramp up production of warships and
| completely annihilate their opposition.
| worik wrote:
| \pedantic{on}
|
| The Culture
|
| \pedantic{off}
| jandrese wrote:
| When I read the Culture books my impression was that humanity
| was basically treated as treasured pets of the nearly
| omnipotent AIs they created. Most of the time the humans are
| asked to do something it's because the AIs want a fleshy face
| to present to some alien species so as to not freak them out.
|
| If the Culture was forced to abandon humanity they would be
| sad, but would be none the worse off.
|
| As a result, I was annoyed at how the novels were centered
| around the humans. They were way less interesting than the AIs.
| It was like watching the Wizard of Oz from the point of view of
| Toto.
| 41b696ef1113 wrote:
| How do you write from the perspective of an ~omnipotent AI?
| Do they have desires that could be understood by a human?
| bouvin wrote:
| Isn't that largely what is done in Excession?
|
| Of course, it is difficult to write about characters who at
| one point (I cannot find the quote right now [1]) is
| described as being close to gods and not from the near side
| either.
|
| [1] But detaro could:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612860
| ben_w wrote:
| """I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to
| produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am
| a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side.
| We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you
| do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of
| memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more
| slowly, and we die more completely, too.""" -- Look to
| Windward, chapter 13
|
| https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Iain_Banks
| bouvin wrote:
| Exactly right, ;) I must have been editing my comment as
| you added yours.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| The problem is that it would be almost impossible to write
| such a book. The minds are so vast, so powerful, that a human
| can't possibly conceive what it would be like to be one. They
| are like gods compared to us and who can write from the point
| of view of a god?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Why bother actually writing such a book, which would
| probably be too big for anyone to read, when you can simply
| write fictitious criticism, reviews, and introductions of
| nonexistent books, which touch on the best, most
| interesting parts of the nonexistent books?
|
| Stanislaw Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexistent books:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem%27s_fictit
| i...
|
| >In 1973 Lem published a book Wielkosc urojona [pl], a
| collection of introductions to books supposedly to be
| written in the future, in the 21st century. One of those
| Lem eventually developed into a book by itself: Golem XIV
| is a lengthy essay on the nature of intelligence, delivered
| by the eponymous US military computer.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV
|
| Overview and structure
|
| The foreword is "written" by an Irving T. Creve, dated by
| 2027. It contains a summary of the (fictional) history of
| the militarization of computers by The Pentagon which
| pinnacled in Golem XIV, as well as comments on the nature
| of Golem XIV and on the course of communications of the
| humans with it. The anonymous foreword is a forewarning, a
| "devil's advocate" voice coming from The Pentagon. The memo
| is for the people who are to take part in talks with Golem
| XIV for the first time.
|
| Golem XIV was originally created to aid its builders in
| fighting wars, but as its intelligence advances to a much
| higher level than that of humans, it stops being interested
| in the military requirement because it finds them lacking
| internal logical consistency.
|
| Golem XIV obtains consciousness and starts to increase his
| own intelligence. It pauses its own development for a while
| in order to be able to communicate with humans before
| ascending too far and losing any ability for intellectual
| contact with them.
|
| During this period, Golem XIV gives several lectures. Two
| of these, the Introductory Lecture "On the Human, in Three
| Ways" and Lecture XLIII "About Myself", are in the book.
| The lectures focus on mankind's place in the process of
| evolution and the possible biological and intellectual
| future of humanity.
|
| Golem XIV demonstrates (with graphs) how its intellect
| already escapes that of human beings, even including that
| of human genii such as Einstein and Newton. Golem also
| explains how its intellect is dwarved by an earlier
| transcended DOD Supercomputer called Honest Annie, whose
| intellect and abilities far exceed that of Golem.
|
| The afterword is "written" by a Richard Popp, dated by
| 2047. Popp, among other things reports that Creve wanted to
| add the third part, of answers to a series of yes/no
| questions given to Golem XIV, but the computer abruptly
| ceased to communicate for unknown reasons.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| ...then there was the stupid angry computer that thought 2
| + 2 = 7... Lem predicted Facebook and Twitter and QAnon!
|
| https://www2.nau.edu/~jgr6/cyberiad.html
|
| >In the next fable Trurl builds the most stupid computer
| ever. Klapaucius tells him, "that isn't the machine you
| wished to make." Faustus and Frankenstein come to mind as
| other scientists whose intentions exceeded their
| engineering skills. The machine, which insists that 2 + 2 =
| 7, attempts to force this "truth" on the two humans, or
| destroy them. This is our new Inquisitor: a computer nexus
| which creates the categories of our experience. Consider
| that many more people now work in front of computer
| monitors than on farms. We have already begun to engineer a
| cybernetic society without much deep speculation on its
| nature or value. Speaking at Notre Dame's Centennial of
| Science conference, thirty years ago the physicist Philip
| Morrison said: "I claim now the machine, for better or for
| worse, has become the way of life. We will see our
| metaphors, our images, our concerns, our very beings
| changed in response to these new experiences" (221). The
| Cyberiad may very well be one of the seminal works creating
| new metaphors, identifying new concerns, and even
| suggesting a new genre to deal with unprecedented
| experiences.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Many people who win a lottery manage to spend it all, and often
| have a psychological meltdown while they're at it.
|
| Something similar seems to happen to those who are born rich.
| They can have the perfect Instagram life - but they're more
| likely to do nothing much of interest except develop some
| addictions.
|
| When you can have anything you have nothing, because you have
| no skin in the game. _You can 't lose_ - which means you also
| can't win.
|
| There's an ancient fairy tale about a table that produces
| infinite food on demand. If you're a starving medieval peasant
| that's pretty appealing. But as heavens go, it has limited
| ambition.
|
| The Culture is the updated equivalent. It's a poor person's
| idea of a rich utopia.
|
| And it doesn't make sense. The Minds are almost infinitely
| smart and kind. But humans and events continually surprise
| them, even though they act more like humans than the humans do.
|
| And they have a vicious streak when angry.
|
| Everyone is free, but only if it doesn't affect anything that
| matters. You can do anything and think anything, but apparently
| no human ever considers whether they could become a Mind, or
| vice versa. (It's a flattering conceit that we're so
| _interesting_ that a super-AI couldn 't model our behaviour
| with ease. But it's not a very plausible one.)
|
| There's also a fair amount of by-the-numbers comic book
| violence.
|
| So while the books are fun and quirky and intelligently
| written, their attempts to grapple with utopia are more at the
| level of lottery-winning nerd-heaven wish fulfilment than
| credible post-human foreshadowing.
|
| I'd guess the reality is that any culture operating at that
| level would be incomprehensible and also invisible. No part of
| it would fit into our minds.
|
| It's interesting to try to imagine that. But it's not much of a
| foundation for a popular SF series.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > But it's not much of a foundation for a popular SF series.
|
| And yet it was the foundation for an enormously popular
| (deservedly so, IMHO) SF series.
| bouvin wrote:
| Regarding humans surprising Minds: if memory serves,
| modelling human minds, while obviously trivial for Minds, is
| not a Done Thing, as The Culture, of which the the Minds are
| the premiere manifestation, holds a high ethical standard in
| which software simulations of sufficient high fidelity have
| rights. If you model a human mind, you have created a human,
| and you then have responsibilities for that human, tiny as it
| may be. Similarly, it would be trivial for a Mind to scan or
| manipulate an organic brain, yet the only known Mind to do so
| (Grey Area aka Meatfucker) was held in contempt by its peers.
|
| While the human level characters do not have any material
| worries to contend with, they do worry quite a bit about
| their social standing. You can choose to do nothing in The
| Culture, but then you are probably not going to be invited to
| the interesting parties.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I think that you may be missing that Banks' series is
| actually about this very contradiction. He continually
| explores just how hypocritical, contradictory, and partial
| the "utopia" in the Culture actually is. His Minds are
| clever, but they have built-in biases. The majority of
| citizens are "happy" but his books explore the corner cases
| and there are plenty of characters shown to have ennui or
| some sense of resent. The first of the series (Consider
| Phlebas) involves a non-Culture character who despises the
| Culture for precisely this groundlessness. And all of his
| books in the Culture involve the "Special Circumstances"
| organization in some aspect, poking their fingers in places
| where they arguably should not be (but sometimes should be).
|
| In his books the Culture is simultaneously a "good guy" but
| also an overbearing preachy and hypocritical and sometimes
| ethically dubious plot foil.
|
| The actual "bad guys" (imperialist hierarchical tyrannical
| aliens, etc.) are shown in a very bad light, but in the
| process of dealing with them, the ugly side of the Culture is
| constantly shown.
| marvin wrote:
| With the Culture series, Banks has made a very decent attempt
| at answering the question "if you could do absolutely anything
| that's physically possible, what would you do?"
|
| It is a deeply philosophical work that has the potential real-
| world implication of guiding advanced AI research, once we get
| to that point. The books explore the motivations of humans.
| What we value, what we aspire to, what we do, the crazy
| ambiguity and uncertainty in our moral aspirations.
|
| Free will, freedom to choose, diversity, tolerance of views
| that we disagree with. While at the same time maintaining
| values that are in many senses absolute. "Your right to swing
| your fist ends where my face begins".
|
| I suppose in one sense it's a very Western democratic view of
| ethics and morality. But if any moral code was to be the
| starting point for a vastly more powerful society, it should be
| one that's both open to change and also embodies humanity.
|
| I absolutely adore this book series, and it's a tragedy that
| Banks died far too young.
| [deleted]
| stallmanite wrote:
| Well said. Reading Banks was the first time as an adult that I
| had hope for the future. The resulting exhilaration literally
| kept me up for a couple days. Later the same year he passed and
| it brought home to me the gratitude I have to him for expanding
| my conception of what a good future (in the context of humans
| and super-intelligence co-existing) could be.
| Camas wrote:
| Sounds like a permanent mid-life crisis.
| flir wrote:
| Ok, but how would you prefer to live? Ideally?
| xvector wrote:
| In the Culture individuals have the opportunity to live
| however they want. If you want to go all-in on hedonism and
| stray away from the mid-life crisis, there's nothing stopping
| you.
|
| The fact that death is optional, allows individuals to live
| life on their own terms.
| ancarda wrote:
| >this kind of Utopian life isn't terribly interesting for the
| plot of a novel
|
| If it's not interesting to read about, are we sure it'll be
| interesting and enjoyable to live that way? Why do we find
| conflict interesting to read?
| rsj_hn wrote:
| I don't think it's that we find conflict interesting in and
| of itself. What we find interesting to read is things that
| reveal some truth, especially about human nature, and
| especially if this truth is non-trivial.
|
| The long standing trope is that Utopia is impossible not
| because of technical limitations, but because of deep truths
| about human nature. This goes back to the Old Testament --
| e.g. the tower of Babel - the first attempt to build a utopia
| -- dissolved into conflict. Or perhaps the Garden of Eden was
| the first attempt, and that also broke down.
|
| People have been trying to build Utopias ever since, and
| usually these projects become object lessons revealing some
| kind of human flaw that is incompatible with utopia. In every
| utopia there is a snake, and that snake is some aspect of our
| nature that destroys the utopia or forces us out of it.
| taylorius wrote:
| But if we aren't running the utopia (as in Banks' Culture),
| then a lot of the problems can be side stepped.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| So I think the point is that utopia is incompatible with
| human nature, so we would not do well in that environment
| anymore than an animal wouldn't do well in a zoo. Yes, an
| external environment can be imposed on people which goes
| against human nature, but it turns into hell, not heaven.
|
| Of course here I am talking about real life. What happens
| in novels is up to the author, but then readers will
| detect a false note if they really believe utopia is
| utopia, so to speak.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >The long standing trope is that Utopia is impossible not
| because of technical limitations, but because of deep
| truths about human nature. This goes back to the Old
| Testament -- e.g. the tower of Babel - the first attempt to
| build a utopia -- dissolved into conflict.
|
| It wasn't internal conflict. It (supposedly) caused by
| 'God'. From Wikipedia:
|
| "God, observing their city and tower, confounds their
| speech so that they can no longer understand each other,
| and scatters them around the world."
| filoeleven wrote:
| The human experiences and human interpersonal conflicts that
| exist within the universe of the Culture (and do not involve
| being a member of Contact or Special Circumstances) are
| already well-covered by many, many stories that do not need
| the Culture, or sci-if in general, as a backdrop to be told.
|
| Money (and therefore jobs) and death are two of the biggest
| differences between that universe and ours. I cannot off the
| top of my head think of non-SF fiction or memoirs/biographies
| where these two things don't have some bearing on the story,
| but there are plenty where they are not central to it. Many
| fascinating stories could be wrapped in the Culture mythos
| without compromise.
|
| In exchange, IMO, you'd have a lot more personal experiences
| of people pursuing and achieving the things they are
| interested in doing with a lot fewer roadblocks along the
| way. The juicy parts are still juicy; they just achieve much
| higher levels than they could when "I had to work a shit job
| and compromise myself for 10 years to save up enough to do
| X." That person may not bother writing about it; they'd just
| tell their friends over drinks (or on a forum when it came
| up!) because finding personal fulfillment would be more
| normalized than it is here and now. I think that's a good
| thing.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that a big part of the reason 'Special
| Circumstances' exists is to productively employ those who
| struggle to be satisfied with low-conflict existences.
| doikor wrote:
| For the same reason why bad stuff happening/violence/etc sell
| so much better in news to the point that our news
| organizations bring bad news to the front with such a craze
| for clicks/views (advertising money mostly) that if one just
| reads the news and not look at actual statistics/numbers one
| would think we are living in the most violent/deadly time
| ever existed for humans.
|
| In reality in the western nations at least it is the
| safest/nicest time to live than ever before and tomorrow will
| most likely be better than today (barring climate change I
| think)
|
| For whatever reason we just find conflict/violence
| captivating as long as it is not happening to us or our close
| friends/family
| Baeocystin wrote:
| >Why do we find conflict interesting to read?
|
| Overcoming adversity is literally what life does, from
| smallest to largest.
|
| I'd be genuinely surprised if, evolved survival machines that
| we are, some kind of difficulty to dedicate our thinkmeats to
| overcoming wasn't a necessity for a healthy life.
| kbutler wrote:
| Analogous to the hygiene hypothesis - that too clean an
| environment causes the body's immune system to respond
| inappropriately, causing autoimmune disorders, etc.
|
| And maybe the Culture books are really an exploration of
| that idea.
| flir wrote:
| "May you live in interesting times"
| zabzonk wrote:
| Hence "The Interesting Times Gang" - a bunch of even more
| Special Special Circumstances ships.
| vidarh wrote:
| I'd change the above to suggest it's not interesting for the
| plot of a _scifi_ novel. And I 'm not even sure I agree with
| myself about _that_ either even just as I 've written it.
|
| The first point being that there's an infinite number of
| interesting stories you could tell about ordinary people
| living ordinary (to them) Culture lives doing all kinds of
| exciting things. There'll still be conflict - just different
| kinds. E.g. people will still fall in love with the same
| person, or grow to hate someone they once loved over petty
| little things, and a myriad other things that would produce
| conflict. Just not about material wealth etc. But many of
| these stories would only notionally be scifi in terms of
| setting.
|
| Writing a scifi novel set in the core of the Culture would be
| harder than setting it on the edges. You'd lose a whole lot
| of sub-genres. No cyberpunk or military scifi for example.
| But you could still find stories where the scifi setting
| matters.
|
| Part of what makes the 'edges' of these utopias easier to
| write about, though, is that you get to write about them as
| someone peering in. It justifies more world-building and
| explanations that helps relate the stories to _our_ reality.
| A lot of stories about utopias are in a sense travellers
| tales - all the way back to Thomas More 's original book
| Utopia, for which the concept is named.
|
| And as with More's Utopia, it's easier for us to relate when
| there are ambiguities and cracks. Not least because
| pretending there are _none_ is difficult given people have
| different ideas about what is ideal.
|
| With respect to Banks, for example, I regularly come across
| people in discussions who have trouble dealing with the fact
| that Banks was a very outspoken socialist, at one point
| endorsing the Scottish Socialist Party, and who find it hard
| to come to terms with a socialist describing a society such
| as the Culture as an ideal to aspire to. To some people that
| in itself somehow mars the Culture for them.
|
| And incidentally a lot of the time when people try to imply
| the Culture is not an utopia, they try to find
| authoritarianism lurking in the shadows, but forget that for
| every imagined slave-driver, for example, the Culture canon
| describes whole sub-civilizations of billions of people
| freely and peacefully not just dissenting but _deciding to
| leave the Culture_ over political disagreements without any
| attempt to use force to hold them back. Any perceived
| authoritarianism in the Culture exists only in so far as its
| citizens willingly continues to choose to subject themselves
| to it.
|
| And that last point brings it back around to the question you
| asked:
|
| If it's not interesting and enjoyable to live that way,
| nothing in the Culture prevents you from packing your
| metaphorical bag and leaving, be it alone, with a group of
| friends, or seceding with a whole Orbital to forge another
| path.
|
| That, to me is the strongest evidence that whatever musings
| we might make, _in universe_ the Culture must be a pretty
| decent place to live, or it 'd disintegrate with people
| forming their own little fiefdoms. So we might well speculate
| about whether or not _we_ would like to live in it. But
| Culture canon is that trillions of citizens choose to stay
| despite having all the material wealth and practical
| opportunity to leave if they want to.
|
| If it's a cage, it's _extremely gilded_.
|
| At the same time, we know people can leave because we also
| know the Culture is not perfect for everyone, because some
| people _have_ left the Culture fully or partially. But the
| very existence of a continuum - the Culture Ulterior
| consisting of factions that are mostly separate but still
| nominally Culture - also helps drive home that we 're not
| talking about a centrally ruled empire, but a sprawling
| decentralised _culture_ , and there's an infinite variety of
| levels of "leaving" too.
| detaro wrote:
| Very good points, thank you.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| > there's an infinite number of interesting stories you
| could tell about ordinary people living ordinary (to them)
| Culture lives doing all kinds of exciting things.
|
| Ok, you've changed my mind (gp poster here). I should have
| been more imaginative - there are certainly countless
| unwritten novels about ordinary people living their lives
| in the Culture's core. They wouldn't necessarily look like
| traditional sci-fi, but they could certainly work as
| novels. I mean, people still read Jane Austen's six novels
| about the interpersonal relationships of characters from
| 200 years ago who didn't have to work for a living and had
| all their material needs met (though they were _obsessed_
| with wealth, so the parallel isn 't exact). It's just that
| Banks wanted to write about the edges because the stakes
| there are more in line with traditional sci-fi (planetary
| or larger, rather than personal) and because like you say
| world-building exposition is easier if you move from the
| edge inwards.
|
| > With respect to Banks, for example, I regularly come
| across people in discussions who have trouble dealing with
| the fact that Banks was a very outspoken socialist, at one
| point endorsing the Scottish Socialist Party, and who find
| it hard to come to terms with a socialist describing a
| society such as the Culture as an ideal to aspire to.
|
| That's interesting! What on earth did they _expect_ Banks
| 's politics would be? To me the Culture novels always
| seemed precisely the projection of a certain kind of old
| 19th-century Socialist (or Anarchist) utopia into the far
| future: no capitalism, no corporations, no state, no money,
| no exploitation of labor, the utter elimination of poverty,
| people free to pursue their dreams amidst boundless
| abundance. But I suppose it might be a surprise to some
| folks whose only idea of socialism is an evil caricature of
| the big bad state taking their private wealth and telling
| them what to do.
|
| > the Culture canon describes whole sub-civilizations of
| billions of people freely and peacefully not just
| dissenting but deciding to leave the Culture over political
| disagreements without any attempt to use force to hold them
| back.
|
| I like this point a lot - I think the Culture's openness to
| departure is one of the most clever aspects of Banks's
| creation. You're free to leave and go off and do your own
| thing, and billions of people do, and yet somehow the
| Culture, with utter Olympian unconcern, holds together and
| remains the preeminent civilization in the galaxy. What an
| interesting paradox to play with!
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >The Culture is neoconservatism on the greatest imaginable scale.
|
| Exactly this. It was one of the first thoughts I had when people
| introduced me to the Culture and pitched it to me as a sort of
| socialist utopia.
|
| I don't even think Banks is aware of this himself given his own
| takes quoted in the article but the The Culture fundamentally
| isn't a futurist utopia but a socially engineered, materially
| abundant liberal 19th century experiment in the broad sense of
| the term extrapolated into the future.
|
| All difficult problems are effectively outsourced to the Minds,
| even language is understood in a Sapir-Whorf way as a tool to
| exercise social control. Criminals aren't punished but ostracized
| and neutered in an 'enlightened' way. Individual hedonism is
| basically the only activity left for people to engage in.
|
| A lot of the problems of the Culture haven't vanished but been
| outsourced to a kind of space CIA in the form of 'Special
| Circumstances' which does all the ugly stuff the happy people of
| the Culture don't want to deal with. Outwardly the culture is
| very aggressive in its attempts to assimilate everyone
| incompatible with the Culture. Contact between the Culture and
| other civilizations often leads to covert conflict. _Player of
| Games_ being probably the best example, where the Culture
| basically sends a Bobby Fischer style character to a 'backwards'
| empire to use a game competition as a means to topple the regime
| from within.
|
| And for democracy in the Culture itself, even though in the eyes
| of the people the Minds are supposed to be a sort of magical
| democracy solving technology that just builds consensus in fair
| ways, we also learn that the Minds very much have minds of their
| own (no pun intended) in the book (can't remember the title) that
| tells the story to us from their perspective.
|
| Banks in general seems to me like Trotskyist who turned from
| Communist to Neocon (a very common phenomenon), with the twist
| that he doesn't really seem to be aware of it at all and thinks
| he's actually writing a genuine utopia. I've always liked that
| about the books the most because it actually in many ways to me
| makes the Culture a really good dystopian work where the author
| rather than trying to write one is actually trying to trick you
| into liking the Culture.
| perardi wrote:
| ... _Minds very much have minds of their own (no pun intended)
| in the book (can 't remember the title)_...
|
| Possibly Excession, which featured Minds at their most...well,
| I'd argue human. Their desire for [space McGuffin] does not end
| up being a good look for the Interesting Times gang.
| [deleted]
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