We don’t call them guillotines any more. They’re freedom machines.
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(Insert shocked, not shocked gif.)
Billionaires don’t become billionaires from being empathetic; they’re usually screwing over workers. So it totally tracks.
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Like giant, bloated ticks.
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Hi Bill, I still haven’t forgotten how you fucked over the global south during COVID by insisting that the vaccine patents developed with taxpayer money could not be transferred freely to them to allow them to create their own vaccines, instead they had to wait like Oliver Twist with their plates out for the largesse of western corporations…
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This makes it sound like I need to read some Banks… 
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I was thinking the same thing this year, but the only Banks my library had was The Wasp Factory. Heads up, that book is not socialist utopia scifi.
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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Everyone should be able to afford their own senator.
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