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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 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.
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