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Captain Monkey posted:You can create and work without being exploited for your labor. Tahani did not become an architect for the pay, and her decision was not somehow more fulfilling than Jason’s decision to meditate for a thousand years or Chidi and Eleanor‘a decisions to die. I'm aware that you can create and work without being exploited for your labor. In the Culture novels one of the sayings is that money implies poverty. In a true post-scarcity society, poverty would be eliminated and so therefore would go the money. I'm saying that in some FALC style society our relationship to labor would change in a way that humans as a whole haven't experienced before and I'm not sure how well we'd deal with that. 17776 looks amazing though. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Mar 6, 2021 |
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Mar 6, 2021 22:11
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Rich people seem to cope with not actually having to work, I'm sure the rest of us could figure it out too given time
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Mar 6, 2021 22:16
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General Battuta posted:I think you can view it as triumphant in that we presumably made the Minds, and they both capture and retain human values rather than turning into unknowable and uncaring elder gods. Agreed. Humans are always going to be limited by the evolutionary forces that made us. Getting beyond those flaws either requires that we transform into something no longer recognizably human, or create something that was never recognizably human to begin with that shares enough of our values to be trusted with black-box decision-making. From that perspective, creating Culture Minds was the greatest achievement of humanity, a form of apotheosis. It's not perfect, but that universe posits pretty convincingly that it's better than anything they would achieved on their own. Star Trek's post-scarcity utopia is probably about as close as you can get to "recognizably human civilization continues to chart its own course into a brighter future" - at least as posited up through TNG, before they decided that writing optimistic sci-fi was for rubes and everything should be awful forever.
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Mar 6, 2021 22:19
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My impression from reading the Culture novels was that if there's a practical reason for keeping humans around, which there isn't, it's that functioning as a habitat for organic life helps keep all the Minds orbiting around the same social baseline instead of becoming unfathomably alien to each other.
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Mar 6, 2021 22:23
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Humans will always want for something that they cannot have, it is an essential component, and the central tragedy, of the human condition.
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Mar 6, 2021 22:30
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Then you have the other side of the coin in terms of post scarcity AI civilisation in Asher’s polity series, where AIs are perfectly fine with millions dying for the common good. With regards to banks and socialism , one should remember he grew up while Soviet Russia was still a thing, which ended 30 years ago and in many ways is ancient history. Suffice to say, socialists of that age are different from the socialists of today, mostly since the world is drastically different.
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Mar 6, 2021 22:33
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Qwertycoatl posted:Rich people seem to cope with not actually having to work, I'm sure the rest of us could figure it out too given time Some do. Some don't. A lot of wealthy become bored and hedonistic when they can't deal with beating capitalism. They get on that hedonic treadmill and frequently become bizarre, enabled by capitalism to just be weird by being disconnected from ordinary people. And in the worst cases they become decadent and depraved. You know, the Epstein crowd. People unfettered by law or social taboo, especially when they're surrounded by enablers who want access to their wealth and influence or to control them. There are people who just want to tinker in their garage or read or travel the world or whatever. I consider those people well adjusted, but not everyone adjusts. Many of the ultra wealthy are not well-adjusted at all. Rand Brittain posted:My impression from reading the Culture novels was that if there's a practical reason for keeping humans around, which there isn't, it's that functioning as a habitat for organic life helps keep all the Minds orbiting around the same social baseline instead of becoming unfathomably alien to each other. This is also addressed in the Bobiverse books, where an engineer dies and his mind is resurrected into a Von Neumann probe. Each replication is slightly different and the humans are all that keeps the digitized Bob and his offshoots centered. Eventually they get fed up with humanity. Many grow increasingly weird and leave as the personality drift grows more and more with each new iteration.
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Mar 6, 2021 22:41
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Kestral posted:It is both hilarious and deeply sad that someone can be so wrapped up in their politics that "post-scarcity utopia where all of humanity's material and emotional needs are met, leaving everyone to pursue their best lives" is seen as insufficient. possibly the purpose of utopia is to better understand one's own politics I don't want to relay a secondhand argument here - honestly, I've only read five of Banks' Culture books and only enjoyed three of those, so possibly he does address this in detail - but I do think there is more to consider about the Culture than just how great it would be to have all our material and emotional needs met by immortal god-children with cool spaceship names
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Mar 6, 2021 23:10
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Rand Brittain posted:My impression from reading the Culture novels was that if there's a practical reason for keeping humans around, which there isn't, it's that functioning as a habitat for organic life helps keep all the Minds orbiting around the same social baseline instead of becoming unfathomably alien to each other. This is a fascinating idea that I'd either missed on first reading, or forgotten. You could do a lot with this notion even outside the setting of the Culture.
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Mar 6, 2021 23:11
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This doscussion is only reinforcing my opinion that the Culture books are for nerds who want to masturbate about the ideas therein rather than anything about the books or story themselves.
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Mar 6, 2021 23:18
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Lt. Danger posted:possibly the purpose of utopia is to better understand one's own politics i mean, the protagonist of the first culture book despises the culture because it's AI led and the humans are pets, the inciting incident of the second is the culture-citizen protagonist's ennui despite being the best of his field, the third and eighth use non-culture-citizens to investigate the violence and brutality that gets abstracted away to just numbers by the minds/the rest of the culture, etc etc so yes the books are interested in addressing the stuff we're talking about
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Mar 6, 2021 23:21
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Cardiac posted:Suffice to say, socialists of that age are different from the socialists of today, mostly since the world is drastically different. This is magical thinking. The outcome would be no different.
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Mar 6, 2021 23:29
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packetmantis posted:This doscussion is only reinforcing my opinion that the Culture books are for nerds who want to masturbate about the ideas therein rather than anything about the books or story themselves. Well this is the sci-fi thread.
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Mar 6, 2021 23:29
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The central conceit is that no human could ever rule over/organise a society that wants for nothing, than can have anything it wants. The humans of the culture cannot have anything they want. The humans of the culture created the AI so that they didn't have "the human problem." Only the AI are just as human as the humans, only much more capable and sophisticated that the wants and needs become more sophisticated by the nature of the being who wants it. Which is why Banks uses outcomers as a mirror (perhaps cypher would a better word) to criticise the nature of the Culture itself.
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Mar 6, 2021 23:38
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withak posted:Well this is the sci-fi thread. Sci-fi can have both!
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Mar 6, 2021 23:40
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Are there any Culture books that do not have a duck-out-of-water?
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Mar 6, 2021 23:43
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packetmantis posted:Sci-fi can have both! well i mostly read the culture books for the plots, and i think the characters are generally memorable and interesting, and well-distinguished from each other (ie not just copy-pasted stereotypes across books), so i think it does have both
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Mar 6, 2021 23:43
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Collateral posted:Are there any Culture books that do not have a duck-out-of-water? excession maybe. hydrogen sonata maybe.
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Mar 6, 2021 23:44
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packetmantis posted:This discussion is only reinforcing my opinion that the Culture books are for nerds who want to masturbate about the ideas therein rather than anything about the books or story themselves. Playing around with ideas conveyed in books is the mark of good science fiction and sometimes if you play with it for long enough, some nerd wants to make it real. Sometimes these things become the internet and smart phones and those ideas reshape the world. More often they're poo poo more along the lines of anime body pillows or something equally cringe tho.
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Mar 6, 2021 23:49
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awesmoe posted:excession maybe. hydrogen sonata maybe. The excession itself? its a bit of a maguffin but still central to the plot. Hydrogen Sonata, the main protagonist lady goes around unfamiliar social groupings looking for the maguffin man. Ice Phisherman posted:Playing around with ideas conveyed in books is the mark of good science fiction and sometimes if you play with it for long enough, some nerd wants to make it real. Sometimes these things become the internet and smart phones and those ideas reshape the world. Sturgeon's law in action.
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Mar 6, 2021 23:52
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Lt. Danger posted:some criticism I have heard of the Culture from a left-perspective is that, like Star Trek, it's merely a post-scarcity utopia - liberalism rather than communism, with all the humans as bourgeoisie It depends on the episode, and of course, series; "The Neutral Zone" from The Next Generation seems pretty overtly communist to me, while many DS9 episodes are not utopian at all. Star Trek has a decidedly liberal bent, one that adjusts with the times of the various shows (DS9 gets a lot more hawkish), but for the most part the utopia it presents is one where money has been done away with, humans are no longer concerned with accumulating property and material possessions, and work is done because you want to. thotsky fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Mar 7, 2021 |
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Mar 7, 2021 00:05
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packetmantis posted:This doscussion is only reinforcing my opinion that the Culture books are for nerds who want to masturbate about the ideas therein rather than anything about the books or story themselves. Authors like Peter Watts fit the "ideas guy" sf writer niche more in my mind. Llamadeus fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Mar 7, 2021 |
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Mar 7, 2021 00:15
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packetmantis posted:This doscussion is only reinforcing my opinion that the Culture books are for nerds who want to masturbate about the ideas therein rather than anything about the books or story themselves. The best Culture book is about the human costs of Special Circumstances loving around in another society because they had a Good Idea, and how all the magic hypertechnology in the universe can't actually make you happy. I'd go so far as to say Look to Windward is the best thing Banks ever wrote.
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Mar 7, 2021 00:16
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packetmantis posted:This doscussion is only reinforcing my opinion that the Culture books are for nerds who want to masturbate about the ideas therein rather than anything about the books or story themselves. Hmm yes the masturbatory ideas of 'what is our purpose in life?' and 'do we derive meaning from our contributions to society, or from our sensual experiences?' Okay I will be less snide: Maybe some of them, some of them are just great novels. Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of them are tragedies (and quite decent ones at that). I don't rate Excession highly because it's sort of just about Spaceships Politics and Large Objects and some odd gender stuff (the protagonist joins the Affront???? clearly I don't think protagonists are required to behave morally but I think this choice retroactively renders him such a monster that much of the book breaks, it's the ultimate 'women, amirite?') but on the other hand something like Use of Weapons or Look to Windward is, in my opinion, a really decent piece of literature. The later books have a lot more of Banks indulging in the setting for its own sake but I have a hard time holding that against him. He was clearly having a blast.
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Mar 7, 2021 00:41
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It's such a shame he died before he was 60. I wish there were good, active writers of utopian sci-fi. I haven't had much luck finding others.
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Mar 7, 2021 00:43
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Mar 7, 2021 00:51
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Gurgeh stared at the space chess. He considered moving the space king over to the space rook, but then he didn't. Instead, he moved it to the right. He nodded. The robot flew over, and said something bitchy. Gurgeh chuckled, then sighed. "Robot," he said, "please fly away." The robot made a light from his head and then he flew away. Gurgeh stared at the board. He reflected that the best games were the games that were so hard. And that what this game was. Where would he move the space piece next? "Well, Gurgeh!" harrumphed the space alien. "Perhaps now you see that the game is so hard?" Gurgeh nodded. The game was so hard. That night, he thought about the space board. He glanded a drug that made the game less hard, but even then, it was still so hard. Gurgeh was immortal and rich, but still he didn't want to lose, because it would be better to win. But the game was so hard. The robot flew over. "Gurgeh!" said the robot. If you don't win, there will be a space murder, and maybe a space rape!" Gurgeh was appalled. "I must win the space game," he said. He sighed. The next day, the alien bragged: "I will win the space game! I am the best at winning the space game!" Gurgeh sighed. But then Gurgeh saw what he would do: instead of moving the space piece to the left, he would move it forward. The alien was so surprised. "But... but the game is supposed to be so hard!" But Gurgeh was very smart. He moved the piece again, and in a way that was so smart. "NOOOOO," shouted the space alien. Gurgeh had made the best move. He had made the best space move. The robot congratulated him, and the girl wanted to have sex with him. "Well," thought Gurgeh, "I will have sex with her. I am, after all... THE PLAYER OF GAMES."
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Mar 7, 2021 00:52
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Collateral posted:Are there any Culture books that do not have a duck-out-of-water? Matter's protagonist is (very nearly) an Agent of Special Circumstances, all of whom are terrifying capable ducks in in the waters of the entire galaxy.
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Mar 7, 2021 01:09
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General Battuta posted:I am, after all... THE PLAYER OF GAMES.   ...I wonder where the clapping emoticon I couldn't find is.
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Mar 7, 2021 02:38
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LOL
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Mar 7, 2021 03:23
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General Battuta posted:Gurgeh stared at the space chess. This thread needs more science fiction translated into simple English
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Mar 7, 2021 03:26
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It was dumb when the male protagonist in Excession is a secret rear end in a top hat. It was really dumb when his great moral failing was cheating on his girlfriend. It's super dumb when she attempts to murder him by cutting out his uterus, but he's cool with that. I thought Use of Weapons was good, but now I am expecting all the male protagonists of the Culture books to have secret moral failings that will be dramatically revealed at the end of the book.
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Mar 7, 2021 03:58
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Those are both reposts don't give me the credit.
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Mar 7, 2021 04:22
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thotsky posted:It was dumb when the male protagonist in Excession is a secret rear end in a top hat. It was really dumb when his great moral failing was cheating on his girlfriend. It's super dumb when she attempts to murder him by cutting out his uterus, but he's cool with that. I thought Use of Weapons was good, but now I am expecting all the male protagonists of the Culture books to have secret moral failings that will be dramatically revealed at the end of the book. The GSV Maury Povich demonstrates that even in a wonderful space utopia there would still be people that self-destruct spectacularly.
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Mar 7, 2021 05:50
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thotsky posted:It was dumb when the male protagonist in Excession is a secret rear end in a top hat. It was really dumb when his great moral failing was cheating on his girlfriend. It's super dumb when she attempts to murder him by cutting out his uterus, but he's cool with that. I thought Use of Weapons was good, but now I am expecting all the male protagonists of the Culture books to have secret moral failings that will be dramatically revealed at the end of the book. Just goes to show that even when you've got fully automated luxury communism people can still spend hundreds of years being giant assholes for no good reason
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Mar 7, 2021 06:04
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Collateral posted:Are there any Culture books that do not have a duck-out-of-water? well, Horza is the only Changer in Consider Phlebas, but since it's set in this sort of liminal space-western frontier between the great civilizations (a type of environment Banks never really explored again in the series) you could say all the characters are far from home and there's no duck-in-water Consider Phlebas *feels* very different from other Culture novels, I think because Banks was thinking in this mode of "what if I made a Star War, but bigger?" and hadn't yet settled on the what the main Idea of the Culture itself was not that Consider Phlebas doesn't have Ideas in it, of course, it's probably my ~third or fourth favorite Culture novel and really the only one I would hand to strangers (no I don't think Player of Games is a good entrepot despite certain internet residents' conviction that it is) PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Mar 7, 2021 |
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Mar 7, 2021 09:17
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This discussion has made me feel less mistaken about my earlier reading of Culture novels (which, admittedly, was only about the first 5). I get that one reason to include protagonists who are uncomfortable/board with utopia makes sense from a literary point of view (because the alternative would presumably be boring) but as others have said I do also find it raises interesting points about whether many humans actually would be happy there. The Epstein comparison made above sprang to mind too, as do the bourgeois people in Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City, who have everything they need but start chasing the high in different ways - hunting poor people for sport, jumping off tall buildings etc.. Aren't there also plenty of examples from history of people/peoples who have acted against what others have claimed is rationally the best and most comfortable way to live, for one reason or another?
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Mar 7, 2021 09:45
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grassy gnoll posted:The best Culture book is about the human costs of Special Circumstances loving around in another society because they had a Good Idea, and how all the magic hypertechnology in the universe can't actually make you happy. I'd go so far as to say Look to Windward is the best thing Banks ever wrote. Agreed, its absurdly good.
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Mar 7, 2021 11:03
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crazyvanman posted:This discussion has made me feel less mistaken about my earlier reading of Culture novels (which, admittedly, was only about the first 5). I get that one reason to include protagonists who are uncomfortable/board with utopia makes sense from a literary point of view (because the alternative would presumably be boring) but as others have said I do also find it raises interesting points about whether many humans actually would be happy there. The Epstein comparison made above sprang to mind too, as do the bourgeois people in Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City, who have everything they need but start chasing the high in different ways - hunting poor people for sport, jumping off tall buildings etc.. Aren't there also plenty of examples from history of people/peoples who have acted against what others have claimed is rationally the best and most comfortable way to live, for one reason or another? Giving everyone a chance to be comfortable and fulfilled isn't going to ruin humanity.
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Mar 7, 2021 15:14
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Can I just hop in on the culture series? Was thinking of getting the windward book but if I gotta read 6 more books to get to it without being lost, I'm not going to bother.
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