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

▲

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 17 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.)