[kurtschiller]

I didn't go into it much in the article but the Culture are very much not humans, although many of the species that went into them are human-ish - in the story where they encounter Earth, they mention having fewer toes and more finger joints than Earth-standard humans.

Also Banks would agree with you that the Culture does not fit with human nature - he has talked elsewhere (I think it's in the CNN interview I cite for one, but elsewhere too) about how fundamentally different they are in behavioral norms (partly due to extensive genetic engineering to change basic aspects of their cognition, which people may peg as dystopian but which Banks viewed as a positive thing).

[mike_hearn]

Thanks. Yes, I guess if the book isn't about humans at all then he has the ultimate get-out clause with respect to the plausibility of utopia. It would be less interesting to me though. The interesting thing about post-scarcity utopias, to me, are questions like "would it work", "if yes how do we get there" and so on. Whether utopia would work for theoretical beings is ... well, it's sci-fi, so fine, whatever. But I guess it wouldn't have any relevance to questions of politics or ideology.

[kurtschiller]

I think the question the series most addresses is "How do you manage a utopia?" and not "How do you get to a utopia for us, here, on Earth?" For instance there is a lot of thought given to how they resolve differences, how they deal with people who don't really like the utopia they live in, how do they deal with people's autonomy and freedom without harming others around them, etc. And so from that POV I think it is an interesting exploration of how and if people can live up to their ideals - how does the Culture justify taking action against neighbors in light of this radical view of freedom and autonomy? Can you ever truly live and let live, or is there a point where you NEED someone willing to get their hands dirty, etc.? I think all of those are things explored in the series.

But so much of our own politics and ideology is about the question of allocating resources - and that does not come up, because they have essentially an infinite amount. Nobody has private property, sure, but they have as much public property as they want, and so much of it that there's almost never any drive to compete for anything - attention, sure; favor, sure; but property, or money, or things, not really.

None of which is true in the real world, of course, and so yes I agree a lot of it does not really translate to "well, what do we do here and now?". It's more "What would we do if we got there?" I guess

[mike_hearn]

Thanks again. I suppose in that case I'll read one of the books based on the recommendations in this thread.

I often think that in the west we're actually closer to a post-scarcity society than people tend to imagine. Yes I know, that seems radical and heartless: what about the poor? Well, there sure is still a gap between rich and poor, but when you drill in to the material gap between rich and average, it starts to look less interesting. Bill Gates wears the same clothes as the average middle class person, he uses the same technology, eats the same food, he has basically the same access to mobility (private jets and yachts being a small increase in convenience but not an increase in access to locations which is what really matters), he probably takes one or two vacations a year like an ordinary person and so on.

The big differentiators between the life of a reasonably well off middle class person and a billionaire are the size/quality of their house, possibly the education of their children (but even that's a rather nuanced question given the prevalence of scholarships and state funding), and ownership of private vehicles. Maybe a bit of jewellery or art that nobody can really tell apart from much cheaper pieces unless they're for some reason an expert. And of course how they spend their time: investing and philanthropy, but let's say that's not in and of itself a big change in quality of life.

In most other respects you wouldn't know the difference and certainly the number of ways the lives of the average person differs from those at the very top have shrunk dramatically since, say, the middle ages or the 19th century.

In this worldview current trends are a predictable consequence of post-scarcity society: the rise of things like Instagram influencers, a huge class of aimless 'elites' who invariably claim to have expansive yet vague social goals, the frequency of purity spirals and so on. When your material needs are all met, your society has failed at elevating other cultures to your levels of wealth (thinking here of "bringing freedom" to Iraq/Afghanistan etc), and your society has nowhere remaining to explore physically, what is there left to do than fight over power and attention? To the extent the Culture novels explore these themes, then I guess they would interest me indeed.

[nuncid]

The elevator pitch for the Culture (the society the books are based around) is that it's a hyper advanced society governed/managed by Culture Minds (equally hyper advanced AIs) that are powerful enough to pay individual attention to each and every citizen. Citizens are just being sentient enough that call themselves "Culture citizens".

There's no centralized power stricture, or even a clear definition of what counts as Culture or not. If a certain society within the Culture thinks their ideals drifted too much, they can just pack up and declare "independence".

For individual citizens, they can pretty much do anything if they can convince someone (and only if they need resources). If they think it's not really a utopia, they're free to leave and join another society.

Most of the conflicts in the book happen because, in contrast to the Federation in Star Trek, the Culture actively tries to "improve" other civilizations they have a fundamental disagreement with, and how they try to not screw it up when there are equally powerful civilizations on the other side of the ideological divide.

So while you don't get the story of how the Culture came to be, you do see it contrasted with a bunch of societies they try to improve.