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PaperclipPerfector  18hr ago (text post)   517 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 26, 2026

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For those of you who have read the culture novels - do you consider them to be utopian or dystopian?

I was discussing them with a friend recently and he views them as profoundly utopian. On the other hand, I view them as one of the best examples of a soft dystopia that I've ever read.

I think they were a perverse writerly attempt to subvert or undermine utopia.

Taken at face value, the Culture seems like liberal utopia - individuals all have near-absolute freedom, luxury, and so on. Almost any conception of the good life can be freely pursued in the Culture, and the Culture will probably help you do it. Nonetheless, in practically every single Culture novel, Banks everything he can to problematise the Culture.

It's the same instinct as with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. The author introduces us to a seemingly-perfect system and then the entire rest of the series is an attempt to pick apart or destroy that system.

Thus onwards with the series. In Consider Phlebas, the Culture starts a massive interstellar war that kills trillions of people. In The Player of Games, the Culture lies to and cruelly manipulates the protagonist while engaging in an act of unilateral aggression against a poor society that poses them no threat. In Look to Windward, the Culture mishandles the Chelgrians about as badly as anyone as anyone could. In Excession, I think it is significant that the Culture fails the Excession's test. Even on the level of characters, these books are not filled with happy people. The Culture character in Consider Phlebas, Balveda, puts herself into stasis and then commits suicide out of moral disgust with her own people. In The Player of Games, Gurgeh is selfish, slimy, and difficult to like, and Flere-Imsaho is a hypocritical liar. Excession contains that one guy who makes himself into an Affront because he craves the one liberty that the Culture will not give him, the liberty to be genuinely cruel to un-consenting victims. And so on.

The Culture is set up so as to theoretically be a utopia, but after reading just a couple of the books, I think Iain M. Banks hates the Culture, or at least, is keen to find its flaws. He doesn't cheat and give the Culture an obvious evil side (the Minds really are benevolent, humans really can engage in positive and meaningful work, this isn't made possible by any kind of oppression or injustice, etc.), but he is constantly looking for the ways in which this society is unsatisfactory. The Culture cannot manufacture meaning, or sense of communal purpose. The best it can find is the tawdry impulse to make more of itself.

'Dystopia' doesn't seem like the right word for something clearly designed as utopian, at least, as a logical extension of liberal values into a context of arbitrarily high resource availability and technological capacity, but at the same time, the word 'utopian' conjures up a sense of approval.

I think the Culture is a utopia that its author disapproves of, if that makes sense? Some readers are blind to nuance and therefore take the Culture as unironically good, but I don't think that reading stands up to closer examination. But Banks does everything he can to make the Culture fit most people's imagination of utopia. The result, at least on my reading, challenges some of those values. If the Culture is a utopia given those assumptions, and yet, as I think Banks wants us to, we look at the Culture and feel at best deeply ambivalent, that suggests that our assumptions might be flawed.

But what other ones are there? No one in the Culture novels ever articulates a very convincing alternative - Idiran or Chelgrian theocracy hardly seem better, Azad is awful on multiple levels, and the Sublimed steadfastly refuse to explain themselves. Balveda kills herself after enough time has passed that the Culture can mathematically 'prove', on utilitarian grounds, that the Idiran War was justified - as if she knows that this is wrong, but cannot explain why. Can we do any better than her?

I think they're fairly boring, meself.

The only one I was able to really sink my teeth into was Excession, and that's primarily due to how it focuses on the various Minds and the squabbles/conversations/complaints they get into dealing with one another and various Culture citizens.

Mind, part of the issue might be due to Banks falling into the typical habit alot of sci-fi writers do and making their protagonists/'human' charachters so goddamn unlikable. It's like there's a school of writing who think that 'cantankerous bitch' is somehow an interesting character.

Okay, maybe I'm being a little bit unfair, but it wouldn't stick with me so much if I didn't see so many writers doing it.

I didn't read a lot of The Culture, but honestly I have no idea. I mean the society is certainly way post-scarcity, but humans there are basically pets for the Minds, and we don't even know what Minds are about and what do they want, and not supposed to. Is it worse being Hitler's pet than a saint's pet? Is there any moral responsibility on the side of the pet? It doesn't seem like humans even have enough agency there for there being any distinction, really. Materially, it is described as pretty much perfect. Even intellectually, I am sure Minds can find something to occupy any of the pet's needs, whatever they are, including awesome adventures or great battles or whatever. Occasionally, they may even require the services of a human for some task (after all, we have K9 units in the police and the military) and even then, I am sure they would make it as safe and as enjoyable for the human as possible in the circumstances. But is is even a story about humans, that can be analyzed in human terms? I think this setups transcends those terms and makes them meaningless.

The easy answer's that they're a weirdtopia - akin to Caelum Est Conterrens or The Metamorphisis of Prime Intellect - but that's not very helpful.

It's hard to call them a pure dystopia. It's not 1984 or Brave New World or (the inside or outside!) of The Matrix; hell, it beats Reedspacer's Lower Bound. The average person's life is the sort of thing a large portion of the world would still call paradise, and the Minds are as gods. Many of its problems are downstream of showing the people are still (somewhat) people with rough edges and friction, or are artifacts of needing to be in a story where there is conflict, or to where something else can meaningfully be outside of The Culture.

But it's hard to call it a pure utopia, either. There are monsters, either from outside of the universe or just plain Klingon-equivalents. It is a world where people die, sometimes not even out of their own free will. The Culture might not be able to lose a war, but they can lose hundreds of billions of lives in one. The people just get bored. In a world with free energy and free automation, that's aiming pretty low. I'd argue that we only see people who excel because of their own fixations, where a healthier utopia would have more options and interests in arete for its own sake, but that could arguably be a literary thing. Same for the weird relationship with the Sublime, or the lack of people turned or turning into Minds or something on their scale.

It's a sub-standard utopia. I'd take living in the Culture over present reality any day of the weak, but given their technology and resources, they're doing fuck-all with it.

As ridiculous as it sounds, the biggest downside to the Culture is their parochial attitude and small-mindedness. They simply lack ambition or gumption. They're the equivalent of a society that can mass manufacture graphene at scale, but only use it to make slightly nicer bicycles instead of space elevators.

Why? Fuck you, I ain't saying. I've got a mostly complete essay in the works which gets it into the weeds of it.

I'd take living in the Culture over present reality any day of the weak,

Nice slip!

Autocorrect is putting respect on Freud's name. That, or my acute sleep deprivation after 48 hours of travel is giving me dementia.

I think that they're an honest effort to imagine post-scarcity space liberalism and not hand-wave every peculiar question away, like the first iterations of Star Trek would. That the culture "society" (in quotes because Banks constantly reminds us that using words like society or law don't really apply to this rule by "loving" machines) is better than ours in some ways (liberty, pleasure, information) seems obvious, but esthetically it's less certain, and morally or metaphysically even the stories themselves seem to be often ambivalent.

I would certainly find them more utopian than dystopian, I think either of those are easy to define by answering "would you like to live here?" 1984-- no. The Player of Games-- Maybe, it seems a lot like 2026, I have gender ambiguous friends and get my dick busted by machines but at least I live on a ring world with a nice estate and can find interplanetary applications for my autism. I'm free but not really when you think about it, etc etc.

I haven't read the novels...but your comment reminded me of this discussion. It and this reply I agree with.

I think a life of only simple pleasures (eating, sleeping, etc.) would get boring, because I desire achievement, and I believe most people agree. I also think such a life isn't realistically human, it's what animals do, while most humans have long-term plans. Achievement also requires adversity, because one needs to at least imagine they could fail.

However, if the Minds were really intent on "preserving humanity", they could also give humans fake achievement and adversity, up to recreating life as it is now.

If you believe The Culture is a dystopia, what would make it a utopia?

You mean other than changing the core premise?

If forced to work in the framework as it stands, I'd probably need to see a mix of human agency (possibly by resurrecting the early and largely abandoned concept of Referrers), and introducing more AI entities that are less... smarmily dickish? The only AI character who seems to genuinely care about biologicals on a personal and moral level is Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, who other AI consider to be psychotic.

The AIs do care, the humans are beloved pets. High functioning pets that need a lot of room to play.

Edit: The example I heard about once is that as dogs are to humans, humans are to AI minds. A dog wouldn't understand why you brought him to the vet for a painful treatment, but it was for the dog's own good. A human couldn't understand an AI's motives because a human's mind is on a lower level of sentience.

Utopian! What makes you think they're dystopian?

The best way I can explain it is that it feels like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream with better PR.

You have vast inscrutable non-human intelligences that run every aspect of society. It's ok though - they're really looking out for you (as long as you weren't one of the 851.4 billion). Don't worry about the fact that your body was manipulated before your birth to alter things as fundamental as your sexual preferences (which has frequently been a horror trope), or that it wil change your emotions by reflexively pumping drugs into your bloodstream. It's all for your own good. Trust us. You live in a perfectly free society. Agents of the inscrutable beings would never do things like engage in naked blackmail. That would be gauche. Even if they did do it, it's really for the best. Nothing to worry about.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. --CS Lewis

or that it will change your emotions by reflexively pumping drugs into your bloodstream.

I'll note that even your link says "can opt to", and Wikipedia says

Most Culture individuals opt to have drug glands that allow for hormonal levels and other chemical secretions to be consciously monitored, released and controlled. These allow owners to secrete on command any of a wide selection of synthetic drugs, from the merely relaxing to the mind-altering: "Snap" is described in Use of Weapons and The Player of Games as "The Culture's favourite breakfast drug". "Sharp Blue" is described as a utility drug, as opposed to a sensory enhancer or a sexual stimulant, that helps in problem solving. "Quicken", mentioned in Excession, speeds up the user's neural processes so that time seems to slow down, allowing them to think and have mental conversation (for example with artificial intelligences) in far less time than it appears to take to the outside observer. "Sperk", as described in Matter, is a mood- and energy-enhancing drug, while other such self-produced drugs include "Calm", "Gain", "Charge", "Recall", "Diffuse", "Somnabsolute", "Softnow", "Focal", "Edge", "Drill", "Gung", "Winnow" and "Crystal Fugue State". The glanded substances have no permanent side-effects and are non-habit-forming.

which mentions optionality again and also mentions "secrete on command".

It's been a while since I've read them, but it seems like that if they're automatically dispensing drugs to you they're doing so under parameters you configured yourself, which seems perfectly fine.

Don't several characters turn off their hormone implants or get them removed? It all seems very optional.

It's been a while, but my recollection is that only really happens for characters who are disillusioned by the culture and want to leave it.

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