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Notes -
I think they're well-written. They're anti-capitalist in the Star Trek sense where they have a set understanding of what the author pretty clearly considers to be a good-if-not-perfect future, that future happens to be extremely left-liberal, and the works are really trying hard to imply that it's so obviously the correct and inevitable answer that Marx would be proud, but they're also not waving Ferengi in your face all the time, and The Culture is at least presented with some level of warts-and-all.
Player of Games is the most (early-TNG-) Ferengi-esque one. The villains are bad in more ways than just beingfake meritocratic capitalists, and there's a bit of a twist about how they're bad, but they're the pretty standard grab-bag of sexism and racism and all the other isms that Ian Banks both didn't like and wanted to paint non-leftists as operating under.
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!
Most of Azad's slums wouldn't be out of place in an Ayn Rand novel, but the treatment of medical care is one of the big tells, especially for when and where Player of Games was written, as is the drone informing Gurgeh that "it all boils down to ownership, possession; about taking and having." That's not fundamentally leftist, but it's still also not how the red tribe equivalent would put things, or even universal among the left side of the branch (contrast, for example, Pratchett's "Evil starts when you begin to treat people as things").
Agreed that it's still pretty subtle and a fairly reasonable extrapolation of the technical assumptions Banks is making for the world he wants to build.
And oh, boy, do I have a take on Moore.
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!
Patchett's an absolute blast. Hope you enjoy his books.
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I was kinda put off by the villainy in Player of Games. It would be nicer if their "extreme meritocracy through McGuffin" concept have been addressed on merits, instead Banks just goes for "but akshually they are all liars and don't do what they profess at all, and instead just do evil things and hypocritically hide it". This is easy - of course people that use plausible sounding concepts to hide being bad are actually bad, especially if the author demonstrates to us that they are bad and then asks "aren't the people I just showed you being bad actually bad?!" Of course they are, you wrote them this way, what do you expect! This just feels lazy to me. I like my villains to be a bit more chewy, to require at least some work to figure out why their position - in which they see themselves as righteous - is untenable, or at least unacceptable to me. Even Ferengi have been given more fair treatment than that (remember, they reached pretty high level of developed society without any wars or atrocities like slavery. For an obvious caricature, it's pretty decent achievement).
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