Iain Banks wrote searing social commentary set in the more-or-less present day.
Iain M. Banks wrote searing social commentary and soaring space opera set in (thanks to a short story we know) more-or-less present day, plus or minus a few thousand years.
The Culture is a post-scarcity galactic society where people are free to do pretty much whatever they want most of the time. But utopia is boring, so there are other civilisations which the Culture has to deal with who aren’t always so enlightened. (The Affront comes especially to mind.) And because utopia sometimes needs people who will get stuff done, it has Special Circumstances.
Also, the Minds (the various AIs, so complex they can’t fully operate while limited to normal spacetime) and their interactions are glorious, from their names on up.
But also, Use of Weapons is as dark as anything he wrote without the “M”.
This! Great book but a difficult read for me. The other Culture books are not nearly so dark. I love the Minds.
I don’t believe a single one of those broligarchs idolizing the Culture novels actually understood them. They just skimmed over all the parts about how it is the Culture’s tolerance, empathy, and ability to work together that makes them stronger than all their neighbors.
They are fundamentally unable to grasp how the Culture society works.
They all think they’d be in Special Circumstances, missing the point that pretty much everyone in SC was drafted, because no-one who wants to do that work should on any account be allowed to do it.
We tried to watch it. Got 10 minutes in and we pulled the plug.
The actors said a bunch of boring shit that the screenplay writers thought was clever. Much like actual billionaires. They think they’re clever and funny, but they’re really not. I wonder if the writers used AI? It was that bad.
Watched it last night, even made it all the way through, which was a slog. Maybe that was the point, though? An attempt to show just how tedious they are, other than, you know, that they control … everything. As Kiddo would say, it was “kinda mid.”
