This is not the first time I've read articles attempting to paint the Culture as a dystopia. I think the best counter is to quote the author's own words, describing how he felt about it, from an interview he did with CNN [1]:

CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture [the society he has created]?

Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it's my secular heaven ... Yes, I would, absolutely. Again it comes down to wish fulfillment. I haven't done a study and taken lots of replies across a cross-section of humanity to find out what would be their personal utopia. It's mine, I thought of it, and I'm going home with it -- absolutely, it's great.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/05/15/iain.banks/ind...

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cplanas 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That quote from Banks only tells us that The Culture is his personal utopia. Fair enough, but Banks does not have authority over interpretations on his work. One man's heaven is another man's hell.

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nitwit005 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Words are a means of communication. An author can clarify what was intended to be communicated.

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exe34 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

in the Culture universe, you don't have to stay in the Culture - you can get defanged and slum it out on some backwater hell hole like the rest of us.

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FrustratedMonky 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes. Even today, one mans garbage is another's gold.

Sci-Fi is full of 'Utopias' that can also be viewed as 'Dystopia', depending on the view point. And in a lot of movies, that shifting view point is the story.

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Yeul 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I told a Christian recruiter once that I don't want an afterlife. Their mind basically broke down trying to process it.

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like_any_other an hour ago | parent [-]

What makes physical death so special that you do want to exist before it happens, but don't want to after? Why not pick some other arbitrary event, like say, the next New Years?

	▲	oasisaimlessly 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Some people enjoy playing games in 'Hardcore' mode (see e.g. Subnautica) where if you die, instead of respawning, the game ends and your save file is deleted.

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dingnuts 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

exactly; in fact I encountered that quote years ago, shortly after reading Player of Games and Consider Phlebas and found it so shocking, and annoying, that he intends the Culture to be actual Heaven and not a criticism of how certain utopic ideas can be perverse (which I would have found far more compelling, since the Culture is horrifying to me in various ways), that I stopped reading the rest of the series.

The reframing of the Culture as his ideal society turns the whole series into boring political propaganda, in a way, like a very long leftist version of Atlas Shrugged

fucking snore

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AlotOfReading an hour ago | parent [-]

1. "Utopia turns perverse" is established enough to be a tired trope. Brave New World is the canonical example here.

2. The Culture books are critical of the utopia. More than half of them are directly about the difficulty of reconciling the ideals of that utopia while coexisting in a universe with other people. The subgenre the Culture books belong to is literally called "critical utopia" fiction.

3. All (good) sci fi is political. You should find a different genre if you don't want politics in it.

	▲	username332211 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> All (good) sci fi is political. You should find a different genre if you don't want politics in it. I think you are reaching one of the limitations of the English language here. Machiaveli's Prince and John Knox's Monstrous Regiment of Women are both "political" books, but in a very different sense. The former is an exercise in trying to understand the nature of power and society in specific circumstances (in particular, the Prince is a study of autocratic power by a committed republican). The latter is just a polemical weapon, designed to advance some political goal. When people complain about politics in literature, it's usually because they don't like reading the second sort of book. That sort of books are seldom good, whatever their genre may be. (I'm intentionally using Renaissance examples here, to avoid any unproductive discussions on more modern books.)

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Barrin92 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's arguably the worst argument given that the author has no special authority over the interpretation of the work. Heinlein with his increasingly militaristic views wrote Starship Troopers as a sincere story, but Paul Verhoeven showed quite compellingly that it might make for better satire.

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falcor84 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's actually an ironic example, seeing how so many (maybe most) viewers took the intended satire at face value, essentially looping all the way back to Heinlein's intent.

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pessimizer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The best satire is always convincing to its targets, because it doesn't misrepresent their positions. The Prince may be satire; who knows what was in Machiavelli's head.

	▲	username332211 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Doesn't the guy have another book - The Discourses on Livy, that confirms the general gist of The Prince? (i.e. autocracies are horrible, to be a successful autocrat you need to be brutal and ruthless)
	▲	FrustratedMonky 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Exactly. Even today, a lot of satire aimed at the 'right', viewed from the 'right's perspective is not realized as satire and is viewed like someone is trying to make a real point. They can't tell it is satire.

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BoingBoomTschak 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Didn't Verhoeven famously not read the book? Hard to call it "satire" then, "straw man" might be more accurate.