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.

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username332211 2 hours 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.)

	▲	AlotOfReading 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm using "political" in the way it's commonly applied to literature: social relationships involving power. This encompasses both your examples, as well as the Culture books. Kameron Hurley has a longer piece on what it means for writing to be political: https://locusmag.com/feature/kameron-hurley-the-status-quo-i... And honestly, you can pick the "good" writer of your choice from Asimov to Zelazny. Their politics come through in their writing. Foundation and Lords of Light are both obviously political works. I don't need to get into Heinlein or Bradbury, or poul and it comes through the space between in the lines in Wolf and Pohl. Le Guin and Clarke wore their politics on their sleeves. Etc. I'm not making some pedantic point here. Science Fiction is a deeply, inherently political genre and always has been.