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by johnnyjeans
644 days ago
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Banks' Culture isn't capitalist in the slightest. It is however, very humanist. If you want a vision of the future (multiple futures, at that) which differs from the liberal, humanist conception of man's destiny, Baxter's Xeelee sequence is a great contemporary. Baxter's ability to write a compelling human being is (in my opinion) very poor, but when it comes to hypothesizing about the future, he's far more interesting of an author. Without spoilers, it's a series that's often outright disturbing. And it certainly is a very strong indictment to the self-centered narcissism that the post-enlightenment ideology of liberalism is anything but yet another stepping stone on an eternal evolution of human beings. The exceptionally alien circumstances that are detailed undermine the idea of a qualitative human experience entirely. I think the contemporary focus on economics is itself a facet of modernism that will eventually disappear. Anything remotely involving the domain rarely shows up in Baxter's work. It's really hard to give a shit about it given the monumental scale and metaphysical nature of his writing. |
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I’m curious to check it out. But in terms of what I’m trying to say, I’m not making a point about economics, I’m making a point about the human experience. I haven’t read these books, but most sci-fi novels on a grand scale involve very large physical structures, for example. A sphere built around a star to collect all its energy, say. But not mentioned is that there’s Joe, making a sandwich, gazing out at the surface of the sphere, wondering what his entertainment options for the weekend might be.
In other words, I’m not persuaded that we are heading for transcendence. Stories from 3,000 years ago still resonate for us because life is just life. For the same reason, life extension doesn’t really seem that appealing either. 45 years in, I’m thinking that another 45 years is about all I could take.