Brgp12
25d ago
Yeah the Culture is definitely a very small-l liberal society. The gender stuff jumps out the most in that sense, but to me it never comes off as making really political points - it just presents a post-scarcity society with super high levels of technology where doing whatever you want all the time is accepted.
To some extent I guess I'm just shoehorning my own beliefs into the books. It never struck me reading Player of Games that the market economy was the fundamentally bad thing about that society. The greed, hate, warlike nature, and as you point out, all the other - isms. But to read that as fundamentally leftist seems to need to to either connect these things to an anti-capitalist message (which I see the fans do a lot) or I guess just have knowledge of Banks intent - otherwise to me it just comes off as a crooked-timber-of-humanity sort of thing. That scene in Player of Games where they go through the slums of the city could just as easily have been some kind of failed socialist nightmare.
I'm guessing Banks was pretty vocal about his liberalism tho. I get annoyed by that stuff sometimes. People were talking about Watchmen here recently - to me Moore has such a silly take on his own character Rorschach!
Brgp12
26d ago
Ian M. Banks Surface Detail.
Any others here read the Culture books? It's interesting to me the way fans of the series read them as so overtly anti-capitalist and generally liberal/progressive works. This is the fourth or fifth I've read and I'm just getting a depiction of a post-scarcity society where market economies don't exist. Maybe I just haven't read the right book yet though or I'm missing it.
It's been a few years since I read Player of Games - that's a good point out, good quote, more overtly leftist than I remember it being.
Just read my first Pratchett last month. Look forward to reading more of his stuff totally blind to his political or philosophical views - Small Gods was... interesting, but also a really entertaining read, somewhat reminiscent of Culture novels to me.
Anyway thanks for the responses!
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