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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2677 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 just finished Matter the other day.

The Culture is utopian, even though it’s built on two great injustices.

You can’t compete with the Minds. This is a fact of the setting, rather than a societal choice or a zero-sum game, so it doesn’t move the needle into dystopia.

You also can’t manufacture meaning, even from unlimited material wealth. As a consequence, the Culture chooses to mine it from weaker civilizations. Half the books interrogate the morality and practicality of doing so; the other half elaborate on what kind of mythology lets a society justify it. But at no point does this abuse fall upon the citizens. It is an externality.

No downsides for the citizens, no dystopia.

You can’t compete with the Minds. This is a fact of the setting, rather than a societal choice or a zero-sum game, so it doesn’t move the needle into dystopia.

I disagree and proclaim the opposite. If I write a dystopia about an oppressive one-party state, but then add a lot of statements into the story that in this world it has been scientifically been proven that this is the logical endpoint of any and all societies, does this suddenly make it not a dystopia? If anything it would make it even more dystopian since there's no getting out.

It's the same with the Minds. Humans factually being glorified pets is horrifying, and moreso if the Minds are truly unbeatable. It being a societal choice would make it less dystopian, since that means there's hope yet for humans.

Maybe I confused the issue.

I wanted to say that unfairness in the setting doesn’t imply unfairness in the society. It’s unfair and unsettling that humans have to share a universe with superior artificial intelligences, but they’ve managed to construct a utopian society in spite of it.

If the Culture were the only game in town, I would be more inclined to call it dystopian. But leaving/schisming/self-effacing is a large part of their appeal. I think that forgives a lot of the paternalism.

How do you know we’re not already glorified pets in some societal experiment and/or universe simulation?

I think your first point is stronger. The author asserts “the Minds are correct” but can’t prove it’s coherent with reality and general humanity. If I define Society A as “a utopia where humans are in constant agony”, is it a utopia? It’s self-contradictory.

How do you know we’re not already glorified pets in some societal experiment and/or universe simulation?

Strictly speaking I don't, but in the same way as I don't know whether there is a invisible teapot floating somewhere in space. I've never considered arguments along these lines particularly convincing; No matter how omnicient and omnipotent a being might be inside it's perceivable universe, you can always claim that it's all just an elaborate fake orchestrated from beyond. The possibility should be kept in the back of one's mind, but unless there is particular evidence in its favour, I'm fine with just dismissing it.

If I write a dystopia about an oppressive one-party state, but then add a lot of statements into the story that in this world it has been scientifically been proven that this is the logical endpoint of any and all societies, does this suddenly make it not a dystopia?

It's a dystopia because of the "oppressive" downside, Culture Minds are not oppressive, just superior.

That may be another avenue of argument, but netstack's claim that I was contesting was that inevitability does (not) overrule a dystopia.

To your point, I might prefer to have a gracious owner as opposed to a hostile one, but not being a pet in the first place takes precedence.

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?

The problem to this view is that, as far as I have read Iain M Banks own comments on The Culture, he seems at least positively inclined, and he definitely is the kind of leftist that could plausibly like a society such as The Culture. So the most likely conclusion to me is that it is his best attempt at the kind of utopia he personally would want to live in, but with enough intellectual and moral integrity that he tries to seriously challenge it over and over again, as opposed to choose the easy way and give it challenges tailor-made to look good against..

I disliked and dislike The Culture as a utopia, but now I wonder if Banks was writing his own version of Omelas. Here is someplace where you can have anything you want (within certain limits). But you, as a human, are a pet. You'll never be a Mind, and indeed there are references running through the books about how the wet meat brain level of processing is the very, very lowest even a drone falls back on only in absolute emergency. Humans just are not built for it, no matter how altered they may be.

The Culture is also hypocritical and doesn't care about it. They preach liberty and nobody should interfere with anybody else and the rest of it, but in order to maintain their hegemony, if the Minds even imagine any rival civilisation might become a threat at some undefined time in the future, they set out to undermine that civilisation. And, as pointed out in other comments, they'll use blackmail and manipulation to get the human agents to work for them. They don't engage with other civilisations on a level with them, so they play nicely there, but if you're not as developed (by the Culture norms) then expect to have your entire world turned into a game piece for the aim of "more influence, more safety, more existence" for the Culture (and if that destroys your world, well they'll cry prettily about it then decide it was the right thing to do in the end).

So the Culture resembles Omelas in that it's an utopia on the surface, but don't look too closely at the grimy underbelly. And some do try and walk away from it (the various characters who leave for other civilisations or who end up so damaged by their work for Contact or Special Circumstances that they can't fit back in).

For me the most surprising thing about reading the Culture novels was the tone of them. I had mostly experienced the Culture beforehand through people excitedly talking it up as a utopia, or describing it as what they want to build after the Singularity. To then read the books and find that, even just on the level of the basic prose, Banks doesn't like the Culture was striking. He does not describe it with the kind of enthusiasm that you would expect a utopia to merit. His characters often spend most of the story trying to escape the Culture only to fail. After all, most of the alternatives to the Culture on offer are plainly worse than it.

The Culture novels are mostly from the 1990s (the first, Consider Phlebas, is from 1987, and the last, The Hydrogen Sonata, is from 2012; but I think the most significant ones are probably The Player of Games (1988), Excession (1996), and Look to Windward (2000)), and I think reflect the angst of a kind of end-of-history ascendant liberalism. Have we won history? Liberalism wins, everything else falls by the wayside? And while liberal polities in the 90s had problems, suppose we extend this trajectory into the future so that all those temporary problems are solved. Endless material prosperity, endless personal freedom. What now? What is left to do? And if you find this in some way insufficient - why? What's missing? To me the series seems to be grappling with that question, and it struggles to articulate a clear answer. There's this restless discomfort with the Culture, a feeling that this isn't enough, and yet the Culture is still the least-bad thing.

I feel like the Culture doesn't so much celebrate the triumph of liberal values as it does mourn their triumph. The Culture is pretty clearly its setting's stand-in for America or for the West more broadly, and it reflects a kind of pre-2000s angst about American intervention.

Thus with Idir, Azad, the Chelgrians, the Affront - the stories keep coming back to the question of when and how it is desirable for an ostensibly more enlightened, compassionate society to intervene in a weaker one.

The case the Culture could often make for themselves is twofold. Firstly, they can 'prove', in a mathematical, utilitarian sense that they are making the galaxy a better place. The Culture are good effective altruists in that their interventions reduce suffering and increase sapient welfare. They show this 'with apologetic smugness' but show it all the same. Secondly, their principles of individual sovereignty can justify many of their actions. Special Circumstances violates them a little, as with Gurgeh, but because the Culture is an anarchy that only recognises individuals, not the rights of states or communal political organisations, they can resort to this to explain their inventions.

Okay, Azad never attacked the Culture. But Azad is not a monolith - Azadian society is a strict and oppressive hierarchy, and Emperor Nicosar is not the incarnation of the will of the people. In fact the Culture itself never attacked Azad. The Culture deliberately engineered a political crisis that would cause an Azadian revolution and which, they predicted, would set Azad on the path of becoming more Culture-like. But the revolution would never have happened if the Azadian people had not wanted it. The Culture refuse to accept Nicosar's or the Azadian elite's description of what Azad wants. They speculate, probably correctly, that if you gave a secret poll to every single Azadian, most of them would want their government to be overthrown. The destruction of Azad is something like an idealised American intervention in the Middle East - the Iraqis/Iranians/Azadians will greet us as liberators. How would you make the argument against this? Azadian state sovereignty ought to prevent that? Why? Should the Culture behave more selfishly, in light of the fact that Azad posed no threat? One of the Culture's own justifications is precisely the fact that they have nothing whatsoever to gain from intervention. It proves their selflessness and the purity of their own motives.

One of my temptations would be to turn the argument back on the Culture. There wasn't a general poll of the Culture. Contact and Special Circumstances function like conspiracies. There is no group that is 'the Culture', which expresses a unified will. The Azadian intervention was the work of a small group of committed individuals within an organisation, Special Circumstances, that we are told most Cultureniks think of as sketchy and morally doubtful. So in what way are SC different to Nicosar or the Azadian elite they seek to destroy? Their answer may be as simple as, "We are selflessly acting to reduce suffering; Nicosar is selfishly acting to increase it". Is that enough?

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 setup 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.

Same for the weird relationship with the Sublime

The Sublime seems to resolve most of your complaints it seems to me.

It's a process any collective group can go through that takes them to a realm where it's proven nothing can die nor get bored (in fact, realspace is so boring in comparison most people never return) and there's endless discovery and growth.

It's more democratic than realspace since non-Minds can have it and apparently all sapient races can achieve it.

Man, reading up on Caelum Est Conterrens reminded me, despite my many sympathies for their basic attitude, how many rationalists seem to be dedicated to fulfilling the worst stereotypes about the scientifically minded. See this discussion's gem:

So, apparently there's something I'm not getting. Something that makes an individual's hard-to-define "free choice" more valuable than her much-easier-to-define happiness.

There's this idea among the other-ways-of-knowing crowd that science can only ever talk about what we can currently define and measure, and that it is in particular obvious that there are things we will never be able to measure well, so science is limited to only a specific sliver of reality. This leads to the silly caricature of the scientist as a person who is only obsessed with measurable and entirely dismisses the immeasurable. Whereas I'd say most scientists have not only no issue admitting the limited scope of our current knowledge, they actively work on increasing that scope, precisely because they do not dismiss these concerns.

But no, this person just unironically dismisses caring about free choice (even putting it in scare quotes) as opposed to happiness, because the latter is easier to define.

Stereotype accuracy, indeed.

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.

One parapraxis is a sign of dementia...?

Well, there has to be a first one. It's probably not going to be the last.

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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