>By definition, if they're tedious, they're not utopias

Utopias are by definition tedious because a utopia is an end to history and as such an end to meaning or negotiation of how to live. A utopia is always an end to a story or Freedom with a capital f. As Dostoevsky points out in Notes from Underground, on man in utopia:

"[he] would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it!"

Another way to phrase it. If you are in a utopia, you cannot be in a democracy that entails the possibility of ending it. Which is to say, you can't govern yourself at all. And that is why Ian M Banks culture is nothing of the sort. It's a society literally controlled by "perfect minds" using a Sapir-Whorf like language to manage the behavior of its people. Even Banks who tried to write a positive utopia and that's not his fault, couldn't imagine a utopia that entails the possibility of rebellion.

▲

ben_w an hour ago | parent [-]

The Culture is an anarchic democracy: if all but one single GSV had voted to disband, or to become a dictatorship, that lone GSV could disappear elsewhere without anyone stopping them.

They were up for, and welcoming of, even quite extreme changes; compare with humanity today, where being transgender is considered controversial by a significant percentage of the population of a nation that likes to self-promote on the idea it is the beacon of liberty and freedom, versus the way Culture bodies are written to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will, with most people being expected to try it, and with some couples flipping gender while pregnant and pausing the pregnancy just so both can give birth together.

Even species changes are, for them, easy and of no great consequence or dispute. While you may be seen as weird if you choose to give up the visual accuity of an owl and the cerebral resliliance to survive decapitation in order to live out your life on this quaint rock recently discovered to be hosting an atomic age civilization, the Mind won't refuse to change you into a mere human just because you found Jesus.

▲

Barrin92 an hour ago | parent [-]

> to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will

a constant hedonic self modification and individual reinvention is obviously no sign of extreme change but the opposite, banality and powerlessness. As Augusto de Noce used to point out about the sexual revolution of the 60s, the sexual dimension became an obsession precisely because all other revolutions had been rendered impossible by an atomized society. There was nothing radical at all in it.

It's no accident that the Culture puts so much emphasis, and in that it reads ironically enough like satire of modern consumer society, on choice only at a level of reshuffling your sexual organs or bodily characteristics. The minds in the culture are by no means just a sort of voting mechanism that summarize the attitudes of the population of the Culture. They control the culture which we even get to learn in the books in the series that delve into the minds as characters.

▲

ben_w 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

> only at a level of reshuffling your sexual organs or bodily characteristics

"Only"?

	▲	oasisaimlessly 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In the sense that your freedom to enact change ends at the boundary of your skin.