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Notes -
Ian Banks (one of my favorite authors, whereas Aurora makes me despise KSR) had characters switching their phenotypical sex on a whim in the Culture novels written in the late 80s and early 90s.
I don't think he was a trans ideologue, it simply makes sense in a setting where people can trivially become post-biological, and external sex is just as much of a choice as one's hair color.*
Now, if today, we miraculously had a pill that swapped genders quickly and reversibly, I think the majority of people would try it, yet switch back to their original after the novelty wore off. I'm perfectly content being a man, even if I have no particular sense of "gender identity" as some claim to possess, yet I think I'm better off as a man than a woman, all else being equal.
*Changing sex is something most Culture denizens do throughout their lives, as a sort of loose cultural expectation. They often opt to child bear, swapping genders with their partners if necessary. Then again, they can just upload into computers or change their species outright, so they'd look at you askance if you thought that one's choice of gonads was a particularly defining feature. I suspect it would take time for our society to get to a similar point, but it seems inevitable enough to me over long enough timescales.
I find myself in the likely unique situation of writing my own novel in a similar setting, including the near-term colonization of Mars.
Mars is a backwater, an insignificant ball of rusty dirt colonized more for the cred (and countries simply aping Elon rather than any true economic incentive), rather than any concrete benefit. Terraforming is stupidly wasteful, the same time and effort could let you make exponentially larger volumes of permanent space habitats, and cater to far larger numbers of people. Thus, there's no effort to do so there, at most people build massive biodomes that cordon off chunks of the surface, and combined with an artifical magnetosphere from a fusion plant hooked up to an asteroid at a Lagrange point, means you can walk around on the surface in some places with only mild physiological or pharmacological augmentation. Add in VR, and the sheer inconvenience of options like smashing water rich comets into an inhabited planet, and barring a few kooks, nobody takes it seriously.
It's also set close enough to our time that people don't regularly swap sexes, at least outside of say, VR, in a more involved manner than modern equivalents like a weeb using an anime girl avatar in VR Chat. Transgenderism as we know it is still mostly dead, because anyone who feels that strongly about it has availed of opportunities to get far better treatment than we have today.
Your post about Aurora was the inciting incident for this post. Is all you've read of KSR Aurora? Because I'm sure the context would be rather lost on someone new to him given it's essentially KSR meta-critiquing himself by reversing all his usual tendencies. It's not really his best work, especially given that it is so inward-focused.
I've read about half the Culture books (whenever I come across one in the library), and I really should start hunting down the rest.
Indeed, Aurora is all I've read, and it was bad enough to put me off him, albeit I am considering reading the Mars trilogy since it seems less odious.
I think describing it as "meta-critique" is being overly generous to the man, from what I've heard about his politics he's an environmentalist wingnut, and that shows in spades in Aurora.
The only gripe I have about the Culture books is that Banks had the temerity to die instead of spending the next few centuries writing more of them haha, let's see if GPT-5 is good enough to write pastiche. I've read every one, and most of his other works, barring The Wasp Factory, which isn't particularly scifi, and which I didn't enjoy.
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