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Notes -
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 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.
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