I'm not sure I would describe the Culture as "monolithic" - they have factions and splits and seem to accept these things as quite natural - even to the point of supporting individuals who want to leave the Culture.
Just so long as BFRs are given Culture ship names everything will be fine.... ;-)
> a post-scarcity, hedonistic society where you could create your own drugs in your own body, change gender at will and where freedom was the highest and noblest sign of a civilisation.
This sounds great, why can't we have it without all the bad stuff? The wonderful Ian M. Banks had to add conflict so it would make a page-turning novel: real-life isn't so constrained.
Back in 1965, Stanislaw Lem wrote in his Cyberiad about a sadistic king who was given a virtual world to rule over. The king gleefully proceeded to torture its virtual inhabitants. Lem has a lot to say on the ethics of this.
You can read this remarkable story and Douglas Hofstadter's and Daniel Dennett's commentary on it here:
I've read all of Banks' SF and for one thing it's silly of the article to criticize based on specifics, he created quite a large, complicated world so obviously Elon can't agree with every specific.
On the points which are most attention-grabbing and wrong or misleading:
To say that "vast intelligent machines oversee..." is true but inside Banks' book/philosophy there doesn't seem to be any "are robots alive" debate. He seems to view any form of sentience equally, it's never a question. So giant intelligent machines are just another form of sentient life created in the image of their creators. They're just powerful characters, not malign overseers.
Also to call it totalitarian is absolutely wrong. There are splinters in the Culture, there are several semi-independant or outsider groups which are tolerated. They intervene in politics but they don't really pick fights, the Idirans came after them and declared war, it wasn't the Culture being intolerant of their religion that's ridiculous. The Affront are a species perpetrating an eternal internal super-holocaust. They're not just "brutal".
The way this is written totally misrepresents the works, I don't think the author misunderstands them it's just poor attention grabbing dishonest journalism.
I wonder if the writer of the article read the same Culture novels I did. Or read them at all. "In each novel, the Culture faces an enemy that does not agree with their values." I recall that mostly the Culture reacted to aggression. Further, stuff like "for the Gzilt, they wanted them not to 'sublime', or transcend the known universe" is just plain wrong. In the case of the Idirans, the war was put to a referendum and not decided by the Minds.
I suppose creating an interventionist near-utopia won't be so bad if we don't run into any other intelligent life. The ethics of intervention are complicated enough between humans, so I'm happy to defer worrying too much about the ethics of interfering with other intelligent life until we find it. And other than that, the Culture's post-scarcity near-utopia sounds pretty great, especially compared to the current state of humanity.
12 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 32.8 ms ] thread"Money implies Poverty" -Ian M. Banks
Just so long as BFRs are given Culture ship names everything will be fine.... ;-)
This sounds great, why can't we have it without all the bad stuff? The wonderful Ian M. Banks had to add conflict so it would make a page-turning novel: real-life isn't so constrained.
So maybe one day we could?
That's an interesting idea. What book was that described in? I've only read a couple of the Culture books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail
It was in his notes from '94 but mentioned in books along the way too, see the section starting with "megalomaniacal".
You can read this remarkable story and Douglas Hofstadter's and Daniel Dennett's commentary on it here:
https://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-18-seventh-sal...
On the points which are most attention-grabbing and wrong or misleading:
To say that "vast intelligent machines oversee..." is true but inside Banks' book/philosophy there doesn't seem to be any "are robots alive" debate. He seems to view any form of sentience equally, it's never a question. So giant intelligent machines are just another form of sentient life created in the image of their creators. They're just powerful characters, not malign overseers.
Also to call it totalitarian is absolutely wrong. There are splinters in the Culture, there are several semi-independant or outsider groups which are tolerated. They intervene in politics but they don't really pick fights, the Idirans came after them and declared war, it wasn't the Culture being intolerant of their religion that's ridiculous. The Affront are a species perpetrating an eternal internal super-holocaust. They're not just "brutal".
The way this is written totally misrepresents the works, I don't think the author misunderstands them it's just poor attention grabbing dishonest journalism.