The Culture was cool and interesting, and the world had some interesting detail but everything else was pretty weak. I generally agree with this review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/48178154?book_show_act...
While we're on the topic I also really didn't like the three body problem.
I loved Permutation City and most of Ted Chiang (particularly Liking What You See: A Documentary, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects).
I love True Names by Vernor Vinge.
I loved this: https://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/
Hopefully someone finds this helpful, sometimes an anti-recommendation can be just as useful for calibration as a recommendation. Here's some of both.
If anyone reading this agrees - I'd love a suggestion from you.
Other sci-fi I have enjoyed which has a very different feel: Dune (amazing), The Diamond Age (also amazing), Ancillary Justice (pretty good).
Thanks for other recommendations!
Incidentally, that goodreads review you posted is self-indulgent prattling at its worst.
I have never seen it actually recommended. The Player of Game is the first really good novel set in the Culture universe and most of them are good from there on.
If you haven't, I recommend picking up some of the later books in the series. They can be read in any order. It's unfortunate mr. Banks isn't around to write any more, because it seemed that his work was showing considerable improvement towards the end.
Thanks for the other recommendations. My only gripe with The Three Body Problem was that the characters spoke in incredibly stilted exposition.
Sure, it has some rough parts, and it's not perfect, and Banks certainly wrote better novels. But it's the book that (together with Look to Windward, which is a spiritual sequel referencing the events in Phlebas) most clearly and beautifully articulates Banks' anti-war sentiment.
In this novel, nothing is gained. Almost everyone dies. There are no heroes, though there's some nobility in the fighting. In the grand scheme of things, the events of the novel end up not mattering one iota. All that remains is the trauma of the survivors. Ultimately, war is meaningless and leaves everyone scarred.
It's also the one novel that shows the Culture from an outsider's perspective, painting Special Circumstances in a less flattering light than other Culture novels.
By the way, I wrote those dissenting comments in that Goodreads thread. The reviewer is notorious on Goodreads for giving almost everything written before 1950 single-star ratings (one commenter called him a "time-traveling Victorian"). I'm not sure what his purpose was in even reading Iain M. Banks. About the only recent thing he's liked is Watchmen and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
But Ken Liu ? I can't stand. It feels like grandiloquent teen SF to me.
I haven't read enough from Ted Chiang yet (or he hasn't published enough) but Baxter and Wilson seem stuck in their themes of predilection now.
I'll give it another try, thanks.
Did you read the whole trilogy or just the first one? Because I didn't like the 3 body problem, but the dark forest is my favorite sci-fi novel ever and death's end was great as well.
One aspect was just too much space commissars for me (a former Soviet citizen). The science behind it is also bad; the view on social dynamics is simplistic. Some of the characters are, uh, not even cardboard.
I had it recommended as hard SF so maybe it set my expectations wrong.
Simpleton depiction of social dynamics? It has nothing to do with Chinese intellectuals; Strugatsky brothers and Stanislaw Lem did nuanced social commentary while living in similar regimes.
And seriously am a bit at unease with the implication that it have to be flawed because it's from China. There are great, eloquent Chinese authors. Do read Folding Beijing (also not a hard-SF), it's simply in a different class.
I've read that this style is typical of Chinese novels, but I can't confirm it.
For transhuman stuff, Brin's Kiln People, Morgan's Altered Carbon, and Scalzi's Old Man's War were fun.
Along the lines of epics like Asimov's Foundation and Banks' Culture, nothing springs to mind. Sadness. That's probably my favorite genre.
Also Greg Egan's Diaspora is very large scale space opera.
The bizarre but shocking Azad society was super interesting and also the narration of the main character and his whole development was truly captivating.
Who doesn't? ;) If you want the freebase, rock-smokeable version, try _Axiomatic_ by the same author. Only fiction book I've found that detours into a (set-theoretically correct!) discussion of transfinite cardinalities.
> and most of Ted Chiang
I'm about to start _Stories of Your Life and Others_, haven't read any other Chiang yet.
For a post-scarcity world you might find more interesting, try MOPI -- if you can look past (or enjoy) the weird sex in the first chapter. Kind of amazing that he wrote it in 1994; in retrospect so much of singularity-AI/transhumanist sci-fi was just aping what he did first:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...
I rated MOPI at "800 milli-Egans".
And, of course, there's always the Sci-Fi masterwork from which I stole my HN username.
Because I have read the other of your recommendations (you and the gp), and I agree with them, I want to add my two cents (in not special order):
"Recursion" by Tony Ballantine, "Counting Heads" by David Marusek, "In the mouth of the whale" by Paul McAuley, "House of Suns" by Alistair Reynolds, "Diaspora" by Greg Egan,"The Collapsium" by Will McCarthy, "Signal to noise" by Eric S. Nylund, "Stations of the tide" by Michael Swanwick, "Schismatrix" by Bruce Sterling
To the greater conversation, my relationship with sci-fi is on-and-off but I really enjoyed A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. This one got me back into it. I recently finished the Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space trilogy which was amazing except for the third novel which was a little tiresome and ultimately unsatisfying.
Thanks, I will check that.
If you like Vinge, there is a little gem that it's, I think, not very known: "Marooned in Realtime" (1). It's the second in a series but it can be read alone without problem.
Also the short story by Vinge, "The cookie monster" is very good (recommended going blind for this one, not spoilers)
By Reynolds, my favorite, it's "House of Suns", I get a 50's Science Fiction vibe from it, and, at the same time, it's modern Science Fiction.
(1) - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167847.Marooned_in_Realt...
I intended to read House of Suns because it both comes highly recommended, and it is only a single novel (this is very important). A trilogy is pushing the limits against my priorities at the moment. But I accidentally started reading Revelation Space - easy to do on an eReader, especially when otherwise completely unfamiliar with the author - and before I realised my mistake I had already read half the book. And down the rabbit hole I went.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe#Book...
I particularly recommend his short fiction books if you don't want to get into Dune-lenght series.
For Stories of Your Life and Others the first short story (while entertaining) is not really representative so don't let it discourage you if you don't like it.
My favorite in the collection was the last story, but a lot of them are interesting.
I think Permutation City was also 1994 - I was impressed how correct he got AWS.
Just check out what they did to Star Trek. 'To boldly go.. vs there is no hope (paraphrased by me.)'
It just generally resolved the problems by the end of the episode instead of running longer arcs. That newer Trek has longer arcs has much more to do with the storytelling methods than with an overall unwillingness to show positive change.
It sounds like Star Trek has a lot of similarities with the Culture novels. Both depict an imagined communist utopia in which everyone is flawless, that butts up against or sometimes interferes with other flawed societies.
In Star Trek (as written by Roddenberry) the Federation is a society that doesn't use money, there is no internal strife, virtually everyone is moral and good with Picard being the apex human, the Federation is vaguely democratic but the show is basically uninterested in that aspect of things, and they all exist in a sort of post-scarcity world. The communist nature of Star Trek TNG/Voyager is quite obscure until you see it, and then you can't unsee it anymore. This is no surprise because Roddenberry's views changed in the decades between TOS and TNG until by the 1980s he was an avowed Maoist.
I've actually written an essay about the communist nature of Federation society, along with some of the inevitable contradictions and problems this caused for the writing team:
https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-tre...
Obviously it's not a very serious essay but at the end I do wonder why there are so few optimistic depictions of the future. Even though the arc of human history has been solidly upwards, very little fiction is willing to extrapolate that forwards, and when it does happen the authors are always communists so we get weird, implausible takes on human nature that make humans feel more alien than the aliens. I guess it's because Marxism requires at its core an explicitly utopian prediction of the future to offset the rather less utopian consequences of bloody revolution. Whereas capitalism - being not so much an ideology as a thing that springs up naturally even when governments are trying to suppress it - doesn't have any kind of view on what the future will look like.
Also Banks would agree with you that the Culture does not fit with human nature - he has talked elsewhere (I think it's in the CNN interview I cite for one, but elsewhere too) about how fundamentally different they are in behavioral norms (partly due to extensive genetic engineering to change basic aspects of their cognition, which people may peg as dystopian but which Banks viewed as a positive thing).
But so much of our own politics and ideology is about the question of allocating resources - and that does not come up, because they have essentially an infinite amount. Nobody has private property, sure, but they have as much public property as they want, and so much of it that there's almost never any drive to compete for anything - attention, sure; favor, sure; but property, or money, or things, not really.
None of which is true in the real world, of course, and so yes I agree a lot of it does not really translate to "well, what do we do here and now?". It's more "What would we do if we got there?" I guess
I often think that in the west we're actually closer to a post-scarcity society than people tend to imagine. Yes I know, that seems radical and heartless: what about the poor? Well, there sure is still a gap between rich and poor, but when you drill in to the material gap between rich and average, it starts to look less interesting. Bill Gates wears the same clothes as the average middle class person, he uses the same technology, eats the same food, he has basically the same access to mobility (private jets and yachts being a small increase in convenience but not an increase in access to locations which is what really matters), he probably takes one or two vacations a year like an ordinary person and so on.
The big differentiators between the life of a reasonably well off middle class person and a billionaire are the size/quality of their house, possibly the education of their children (but even that's a rather nuanced question given the prevalence of scholarships and state funding), and ownership of private vehicles. Maybe a bit of jewellery or art that nobody can really tell apart from much cheaper pieces unless they're for some reason an expert. And of course how they spend their time: investing and philanthropy, but let's say that's not in and of itself a big change in quality of life.
In most other respects you wouldn't know the difference and certainly the number of ways the lives of the average person differs from those at the very top have shrunk dramatically since, say, the middle ages or the 19th century.
In this worldview current trends are a predictable consequence of post-scarcity society: the rise of things like Instagram influencers, a huge class of aimless 'elites' who invariably claim to have expansive yet vague social goals, the frequency of purity spirals and so on. When your material needs are all met, your society has failed at elevating other cultures to your levels of wealth (thinking here of "bringing freedom" to Iraq/Afghanistan etc), and your society has nowhere remaining to explore physically, what is there left to do than fight over power and attention? To the extent the Culture novels explore these themes, then I guess they would interest me indeed.
There's no centralized power stricture, or even a clear definition of what counts as Culture or not. If a certain society within the Culture thinks their ideals drifted too much, they can just pack up and declare "independence".
For individual citizens, they can pretty much do anything if they can convince someone (and only if they need resources). If they think it's not really a utopia, they're free to leave and join another society.
Most of the conflicts in the book happen because, in contrast to the Federation in Star Trek, the Culture actively tries to "improve" other civilizations they have a fundamental disagreement with, and how they try to not screw it up when there are equally powerful civilizations on the other side of the ideological divide.
So while you don't get the story of how the Culture came to be, you do see it contrasted with a bunch of societies they try to improve.
For the most part Banks never writes a novel about the mainstream of Culture society because he admits in his own forewords and interviews that he can't imagine it (because humans may even be incapable of imagining true utopia) and what he can imagine wouldn't be a useful premise for the drama of a novel.
The novels are almost all entirely about exploring the flaws and the outskirts, the outsider perspectives on the Culture, the people that aren't happy inside the Culture and are looking for adventure or to leave or to fix something they found was broken about the Culture or at least a small part of it.
The difference between optimism and pessimism is that even in trying to find flaws, exploring the outskirts and the possible problems in intermediate spaces, Banks doesn't set out to tear down or destroy the Culture (though some of his unsuccessful protagonists may have that as a goal), but wonders how it enriches the Culture and how they would learn from their flaws/mistakes/imperfections, how they would use the loners and outcasts (as weapons, as players of games, as excuses and chances to grow and be better) that they don't always see eye to eye with, culturally speaking, but tolerate in their own strange ways.
A lot of the same applies to Star Trek, though often less intentionally self-aware as the Culture (but the Culture also has the benefit of learning from Trek and its flaws/mistakes). A lot of Star Trek is still a drama about how does a utopia confront its frontiers, its edges, its loners/rebels/outcasts, and most importantly its own flaws, and how does it use those conflicts to grow. (Even TNG/Voyager despite most of the problems being resolved by the end of a single episode, still have many great episodes about how the Federation isn't perfect/has room to grow.)
I think this description is flawed both with respect to Star Trek and The Culture. Nobody is flawless in either one of them. On the contrary, the stories very often focus on the flaws of people in these societies, often exposed in the intersection of these societies and a messier outside world, but also within.
> In Star Trek (as written by Roddenberry) the Federation is a society that doesn't use money, there is no internal strife, virtually everyone is moral and good with Picard being the apex human
TOS had a federation scientist introduce nazism on a planet because he thought it'd make them advance faster. DS9 showed a coup on Earth. There's been plenty of both internal strife and immoral behaviour showcased in Star Trek. A lot of the stories focus on overcoming their flaws, ranging from minor personality flaws, to outright bigotry (not just in the nazi example).
> The communist nature of Star Trek TNG/Voyager is quite obscure until you see it, and then you can't unsee it anymore. This is no surprise because Roddenberry's views changed in the decades between TOS and TNG until by the 1980s he was an avowed Maoist.
Any post-scarcity society will look like communism/anarchism unless it is intentionally keeping part of its population poor for no good reason. And if it intentionally refuses to share, it will look cruel and oppressive.
The distinction between a "communist utopia" and capitalism falls apart the moment you posit near-or-full post-scarcity.
So the choice then becomes one of whether the society you show is post-scarcity or not.
> https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-tre...
Consider that libertarianism started on the very far left: Joseph Dejacque, the founder of libertarianism, was an anarcho-communist who cheered on Proudhon's "property is theft" but denounced Proudhon for being a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian", because a vision of maximal freedom that is positive and founded on an idea of eventually being capable of meeting all human needs will tend towards depicting a future where those needs are met for everyone.
> Obviously it's not a very serious essay but at the end I do wonder why there are so few optimistic depictions of the future. Even though the arc of human history has been solidly upwards, very little fiction is willing to extrapolate that forwards, and when it does happen the authors are always communists so we get weird, implausible takes on human nature that make humans feel more alien than the aliens. I guess it's because Marxism requires at its core an explicitly utopian prediction of the future to offset the rather less utopian consequences of bloody revolution. Whereas capitalism - being not so much an ideology as a thing that springs up naturally even when governments are trying to suppress it - doesn't have any kind of view on what the future will look like.
The challenge is that it gets harder and harder to create a positive depiction of a future with more and more material wealth that still chooses to leave some portion of society behind in scarcity. If everyone is "rich" then the distinguishing elements of such a society between socialism and capitalism becomes fewer and fewer until they become invisible.
TNG was definitely the peak of this. The crew of the Enterprise in that show don't turn on each other, make mistakes or do dumb stuff. This was an explicit rule by Roddenberry: in his utopia Federation officials never fought each other. The writers called it "Roddenberry's Box" because it was such a limiting rule, and the Box is why so many episodes feature mind-controlling aliens of various kinds.
Any post-scarcity society will look like communism/anarchism unless it is intentionally keeping part of its population poor for no good reason
I don't think this is true, see my other comments on this thread. Trek-style post scarcity where material things are non-scarce still doesn't cover anything non-replicable like people's time and attention, and by implication, service industries.
Until there is sci-fi that explains how a society eliminates scarcity of non-physical things like status, power and attention, the future will remain capitalist by default.
I think this stems from an idea of what socialism involves that even Marx would have dismissed as irrelevant and utopian.
In fact, Marx railed relentlessly against the notion of socialism/communism ending all inequality. One of the more famous cases of that being in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he criticises what became the SPD for even talking about "equality" without defining it precisely. This is where the (Bolshevik) distinction between socialism and communism comes from, though Marx talked about the "lower" and "higher" stages of communism, and argued that the lower would explicitly retain a lot of inequality, and that anything else would be unfair because people have different needs, and so inequality is according to Marx a pre-requisite for a fair society.
The point he made was that the goal was not to give everyone everything for free - instead he explicitly pointed to a then well established slogan: "from each according to ability, to each according to their need". The point being that his expectation - one he stated explicitly in the Critique - was that there would very much still be an exchange where peoples access to that seemingly endless material wealth is contingent on their participation in doing their bit keeping society running. He did not expect a true post-scarcity society, but one that met sufficient needs to eradicate class struggle, but which at the same time still had a need for people to work.
In that respect, the Federation strongly imply it goes further than Marx, in work being implied to be fully voluntary, and I do think we can agree there are plenty of unaddressed issues there. Though I think it's not that substantial, in that there's are many other ways of providing rewards than through material wealth, and there's nothing incompatible with socialist thinking in that.
My point, though, is that you have socialism and communism long before you get to that stage. Eradicate class struggle by eradicating the ability of anyone to monopolise production, and you have communism, irrespective of the specific details of how allocation of resources is arranged. Which is why you'll find communist ideologies that advocate for free market models and the like as the best means of making such a system work.
Will there still be exchanges of value? Sure. But those exchanges will necessarily look very different when everyone has the ability to access sufficient material wealth to be able to walk away from any transaction without fear of starvation or not having anywhere to live. That freedom is the point, not some notion of absolute equality in all things or entirely eradicating money.
And that is why I'm arguing that any sufficiently utopian/post-scarcity society will seem socialist. Not because there's no exchange of value at the margins, but because it's a small enough part of the lives of the typical person that being constrained by resources rarely comes up.
Also, are we, the intermediary generations (the present and the near future), are supposed to suffer in the hopes that our distant ancestors will be better off?
Tech is everything and everywhere. Good and bad.
s/technology/business/. Technology doesn't have a mind of its own. Yes, it can be more conductive to good (vaccines) or bad (fighter jets), or neutral (knives), but it doesn't go out there doing things on its own, it doesn't hurt or disenfranchise people through its own existence, it doesn't pollute the Earth by virtue of being pictured on a blueprint.
No, it's people making these decisions to commission and use particular technologies for ill. Sometimes they make them in full understanding of the bad consequences. Sometimes they only learn too late, but they still make a decision to not retract the use of a technology.
Technology is a red herring. The real issue is the usual problem of people being selfish, living in a system that doesn't regulate the selfishness away, but instead amplifies it, consequences be damned.
They also happen to be fairly successful at pushing the envelope.
Could that be a meaningful correlation?
They both believe in "progress". This is viewed as quaint, almost Victorian, in today's intellectual climate. That attitude is on display in the article, which in my view misinterprets the conflict of values as being about economic systems.
[1] The books themselves can be grim, and the characters often troubled and/or miserable, but they are depicted as outliers within the Culture.