Well, Iain M. Banks' SF - the 'Culture' with orbitals and AIs as adult supervision, sort of - had at least three of the adjectives checked, and seemed past concern about the fourth ...
A technicality, perhaps, but the books that the article is about don't actually depict our future. Their civilization did not evolve on Earth and isn't biologically human, and the books are (with the exception of one short story) not set anywhere near Earth or even in our time.
The Culture books don't follow the predictive tradition of science fiction. Banks' books are more appropriately called space opera, though Banks has his own spin on things that sets him somewhat apart.
What Banks does is dream up a completely new, utopian, post-scarcity civilization, and then explores what kinds of conflicts and moral problems can exist in such an environment where anyone can be anyone, have anything, and go anywhere.
Iain Banks (who wrote both scifi and literary fiction) on this very subject:
"An ex-neighbour of ours recalled (in an otherwise entirely kind and welcome comment) me telling him, years ago, that my SF novels effectively subsidised the mainstream works. I think he’s just misremembered, as this has never been the case. Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn’t letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can’t imagine that I’d have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round. And… rant over."
The Culture was seemed too difficult for Banks to write about directly; a very large proportion of the Culture books are written about the intersection between the Culture and the "rest of the universe".
(side note: It's been a while since I've read them, and I admit I generally only reread the first 4 or so, due to sameiness and/or IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge. Sadly, this enthusiasm seems to have sparked a trend among even less-restrained authors like Richard Morgan, so I often hesitate to pick up an SF book for fear of reading about, I dunno, women getting heated irons stuffed into their genitals or something)
That said, Contact and Special Circumstances are usually what he describes - it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se. So most of the action is the Culture at war, regardless of how supposedly peaceful and enlightened the Culture is.
I'm not surprised that Bezos and Musk are fans. Given the way post-scarcity is presented as more or less natural outcome of strong AI and space-opera-level physics, a post-scarcity society is entirely unthreatening to a modern-day billionaire (aside, I guess, from the decline in their relative condition - but in absolute terms, even Bezos and Musk would benefit enormously from being transported to the Culture, as it stands). It's not like we're achieving some sort of utopia by redistributing the resources of people like them (I am not claiming that's a good idea).
Agreed. The problem is that mainstream SF movies have not nearly caught up with written SF. I mean, The Matrix was "mind-blowing" in it's day, even when the idea of simulated universes was old hat in written SF.
Banks has basically crammed, well, everything into the Culture books. When just the idea of uploading phases people you'll have a hard time explaining why a sentient Ship would cocoon a human body in another sentient gel-field suit in order to rescue the image of an old scientist that is currently experiencing the slow time of a truly ancient race of creatures that count time in galactic rotations. Etc.
I mean, we're talking about a universe where self-replicating nano-bots are considered a joke (or at least a pleasurable pastime for warships for target practice). Meanwhile grey goo scenarios haven't even entered the zeitgeist.
"When was the last time in living memory that a person could read most works of science fiction and say "Yeah, with the right kind of funding, we can have that in 10 years""
Depends on which works you are reading. Iain M. Banks' Culture is probably several centuries or more out of our lifetimes...
IMO, there are much better novels about this subject not involving any techno-magic. Lem's Return from the Stars is an excellent work that explores this very question, and unlike Culture novels, it's down-to-earth and fully self-aware. Hard to explain what that means. Lem realized that the very notion of "meaning" will change in the future.
Many works by Strugackiy brothers also deal with this question.
I realize these writers belong to preceding generations of SF, but their works are still very much relevant and (IMO) far more plausible than futures of Vinge and Banks.
There's a strong status separation between SF and literary fiction. If you get someone to read SF that has literary merit, they'll try to tell you afterwards that it wasn't SF.
I'm going even further off-topic, but I saw a blog posting by David Brin where he describes the Culture as "a humanity-that-succeeds" - which is a description I loved.
Some authors do really think about how technological developments could change societies, and I love them for that.
I adore the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks, for example, while I only feel a moderately warm regard for Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Both settings have roughly the same imaginary technologies: nigh-limitless energy, replicators, faster-than-light communications and transportation, teleportation, strong AI. They both started in 1987. But ST: TNG imagined a future society that was still easily recognizable in terms of social relations and behaviors. In the Culture, AIs make most of the big decisions while most people are (effectively) beloved pets of the AIs; people are also immortal, gleefully unemployed, regular users of recreational drugs, and biologically enhanced for pleasure as well as health and intelligence.
I really hope that Amazon doesn't file off the interesting parts of the Culture setting in their upcoming adaptation of Consider Phlebas. Dennis Kelly at least seems to appreciate the source material:
I gather I'm pretty unusual among sf fans in not enjoying the Culture novels, which I find maybe a little sere in their prose and a little too far gone in their post-Singularity space opera to really resonate. I do like the ship names, though.
I also suspect that series plays a heavy role in inspiring Howard Tayler's webcomic Schlock Mercenary, whose very humble beginnings I've had the distinct pleasure of watching it far outgrow over the years. Definitely worth a look for any sf fan, mil-sf fans especially.
Absolutely, its a novel and there are around 50 trillion 'baseline' humans not that different from us. Banks himself has said he has focused on writing more about people who are edge cases or less normal in the culture to keep things interesting, and at that scale there will be a lot of people at the tale ends of the distribution.
IMHO the culture novel is as close to a far out tech utopia as you can write without making humanity completely unrecognizable while creating interesting stories that have general scifi appeal. It deliberately breaks tropes such as the machines having more personality than the humans and adds a good dose of British humor.
I see it as inspiration for what our AI & other tech could lead to, a bit of a thought experiment and less as a verbatim ideal.
> For example, in one book, an object enters the universe seemingly out of nowhere, and is utterly inexplicable by the Minds. But Ian m Banks for some reason spends time telling a human love story in the midst of this - why should I care! Tell me more about what the Minds are doing about a thing they can't explain, a first in the history of the universe for them!
Tangential to the topic of the article, but I share your feelings here. I hate it when sci-fi authors focus too much on people. As I like to say, if I wanted to read about complexities of interpersonal relationships, I'd pick a romance novel.
That is absolutely not true – Iain M. Banks' Culture novels are probably some of the most well-known works of fiction with themes of transhumanism, and would hardly be called dystopian.
I think you're often correct. Literary writers seem to bring their ego to sci-fi, thinking "I'll show these plebes real writing." The result usually sounds like a Dad trying to play cool guitar licks for his teenage son's friends.
But there are counter-examples. Jonathan Lethem is at his best when he toes both worlds, and Iain "M" Banks is equally famous for his literature and his space operas. It's an absolute crime that James Morrow isn't better-known. And pretty much everything the Slate article hits is excellent.
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