[Others]

I appreciate the fact that IMB is trying to present a optimistic view of the future. Not all sci-fi needs to be negative or dystopian, and his remains plausible despite its optimism.

I think if you’d rather read about the downfall of the Culture, then you’ve somewhat profoundly missed the point of Ian’s writing.

[keiferski]

I don't know how the world described in the article is utopian. If anything, it's dystopian, in the vein of Brave New World.

[boxed]

I have an ongoing argument with my wife where I proclaim Brave New World to be a utopia, not a dystopia.

It's a society where the VAST majority of people are happy. Really truly happy. A society that is in ecological balance with nature.

If Brave New World is a dystopia, what does that make the world we live in now? It has to be some kind of super-dystopia, because it's worse in every way you can possibly imagine.

[arethuza]

I'm pretty sure that if the Culture discovered a world like that of Brave New World they'd work to shut that society down pretty quickly as they'd be appalled at the idea of creating underclasses by intentionally exposing embryos to poisons (alcohol?).

The the society of Brave New World would fail as a utopia because of the "What would the Culture think?" test ;-)

[boxed]

I'm not saying it's the best possible utopia.

[keiferski]

I don't think it's that complicated: because not everyone thinks "being happy" is the utmost peak of meaning or purpose. Many people desire challenges, difficulty, a grand narrative that comes with ups and downs.

[boxed]

And those people exist and are handled specifically in Brave New World. It's just that the system fucked up a bit and took a long time to find the protagonist of the book. But consider the world you and I live in where a vast majority of people who want challenges like this can never have them as they are stuck being dirt poor, or in criminality or something. It's gotten a lot better in the last 100 years, but it's no where close to BNW.

[KingMob]

In the Culture, those are the people who join Contact/Special Circumstances, so they get what they want too.

[KSteffensen]

Ursula K. LeGuin's 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' deals with this

https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

[jaimebuelta]

that's not the point of Brave New World? We like to interpret it like a dystopian book (and I still think it is), but the book challenges you into explaining WHY.

It certainly plays the "moral" card, and more back when it was released. It FEELS dystopian because it plays at a different moral than ours. Oh, a world totally devoted to hedonism, with no families, everyone drugged all the time, where eugenics creates a cast system where people are clearly not equal.

Right now some of those things are less shocking than in 1932 (sexual promiscuity, for example), but Huxley makes a great work into presenting a good case on how the society presented WORKS and it is, at least, superficially a paradise. The book, after all, was written as a response to other "utopian" books that were describing "ideal societies".

I think that a lot of people, even today, gets a gut feeling that's a dystopia, and feel more identified with John the Savage, which is totally out of place and hates it. But I think that the genius of the book is that it presents a world that we can interpret as bad while their inhabitants live in bliss.

[boxed]

Yea.. I mean it's a dystopia FOR HIM. But that's not a statement of the society as a whole.

[tivert]

> I have an ongoing argument with my wife where I proclaim Brave New World to be a utopia, not a dystopia.

> It's a society where the VAST majority of people are happy. Really truly happy. A society that is in ecological balance with nature.

If you're locked up in prison, but the food is really, really good, aren't you living in a utopia?

[boxed]

It's not just the food. It's the social interactions are good, you get to go to great plays and other entertainment, and you have a work that is exactly matched to your cognitive level so you feel challenged by it but not frustrated.

[pharmakom]

The book tackles this directly.

[goatlover]

Are they really truly happy? I got the impression they were superficially kept content by drugs, sex and social engineering. I recall strongly disliking their society.

[arethuza]

Not much of a dystopia if you can leave at any point - and in fact be actively supported in leaving if that's your thing. The fact that the Culture seems to be inherently comfortable with people, ships and even chunks of society leaving or joining gives an indicator of how it really is "self consciously rational" as Banks put it.

[keiferski]

Maybe I'm lost here because I haven't read the books, but how does this not lead to a fundamental contradiction?

The article says that the Culture intervenes in places that don't quite live up to their values or are otherwise problematic in some way. So if people leave the Culture and develop in ways that become unacceptable to the Culture and thus get interfered with again, how free are they to actually leave?

[rsynnott]

> The article says that the Culture intervenes in places that don't quite live up to their values or are otherwise problematic in some way.

In practice, they mostly intervene against people with, like, slavery and death camps, not minor philosophical differences (or even pretty major ones; many civilisations run artificial afterlives of eternal torment for their people, and the Culture doesn't openly intervene against _that_). A number of breakaway ex-Culture cultures show up in the books, along with various Culture dissidents.

[tivert]

> many civilisations run artificial afterlives of eternal torment for their people, and the Culture doesn't openly intervene against _that_

Key word: openly.

[rsynnott]

It can probably be assumed that the Culture does meddle to some extent with the Elench, Peace Faction and other ex-Culture offshoots, too.

[arethuza]

The galaxy in the Culture novels is a big place full of many societies - a few at the same level of technological development as the Culture. So it wouldn't be that difficult to wander off somewhere and get lost and do your own thing.

However, if you do go off and set up your own fascist dictatorship outside of the Culture there is also no protection should the Grey Area come hunting for you.

[varjag]

It really isn't though, if you read the actual novels.