They both believe in "progress". This is viewed as quaint, almost Victorian, in today's intellectual climate. That attitude is on display in the article, which in my view misinterprets the conflict of values as being about economic systems.
[1] The books themselves can be grim, and the characters often troubled and/or miserable, but they are depicted as outliers within the Culture.
The Culture was cool and interesting, and the world had some interesting detail but everything else was pretty weak. I generally agree with this review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/48178154?book_show_act...
While we're on the topic I also really didn't like the three body problem.
I loved Permutation City and most of Ted Chiang (particularly Liking What You See: A Documentary, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects).
I love True Names by Vernor Vinge.
I loved this: https://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/
Hopefully someone finds this helpful, sometimes an anti-recommendation can be just as useful for calibration as a recommendation. Here's some of both.
If anyone reading this agrees - I'd love a suggestion from you.
Other sci-fi I have enjoyed which has a very different feel: Dune (amazing), The Diamond Age (also amazing), Ancillary Justice (pretty good).
Thanks for other recommendations!
Incidentally, that goodreads review you posted is self-indulgent prattling at its worst.
I have never seen it actually recommended. The Player of Game is the first really good novel set in the Culture universe and most of them are good from there on.
If you haven't, I recommend picking up some of the later books in the series. They can be read in any order. It's unfortunate mr. Banks isn't around to write any more, because it seemed that his work was showing considerable improvement towards the end.
Thanks for the other recommendations. My only gripe with The Three Body Problem was that the characters spoke in incredibly stilted exposition.
Sure, it has some rough parts, and it's not perfect, and Banks certainly wrote better novels. But it's the book that (together with Look to Windward, which is a spiritual sequel referencing the events in Phlebas) most clearly and beautifully articulates Banks' anti-war sentiment.
In this novel, nothing is gained. Almost everyone dies. There are no heroes, though there's some nobility in the fighting. In the grand scheme of things, the events of the novel end up not mattering one iota. All that remains is the trauma of the survivors. Ultimately, war is meaningless and leaves everyone scarred.
It's also the one novel that shows the Culture from an outsider's perspective, painting Special Circumstances in a less flattering light than other Culture novels.
By the way, I wrote those dissenting comments in that Goodreads thread. The reviewer is notorious on Goodreads for giving almost everything written before 1950 single-star ratings (one commenter called him a "time-traveling Victorian"). I'm not sure what his purpose was in even reading Iain M. Banks. About the only recent thing he's liked is Watchmen and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
But Ken Liu ? I can't stand. It feels like grandiloquent teen SF to me.
I haven't read enough from Ted Chiang yet (or he hasn't published enough) but Baxter and Wilson seem stuck in their themes of predilection now.
Did you read the whole trilogy or just the first one? Because I didn't like the 3 body problem, but the dark forest is my favorite sci-fi novel ever and death's end was great as well.
For transhuman stuff, Brin's Kiln People, Morgan's Altered Carbon, and Scalzi's Old Man's War were fun.
Along the lines of epics like Asimov's Foundation and Banks' Culture, nothing springs to mind. Sadness. That's probably my favorite genre.
Also Greg Egan's Diaspora is very large scale space opera.
The bizarre but shocking Azad society was super interesting and also the narration of the main character and his whole development was truly captivating.
Who doesn't? ;) If you want the freebase, rock-smokeable version, try _Axiomatic_ by the same author. Only fiction book I've found that detours into a (set-theoretically correct!) discussion of transfinite cardinalities.
> and most of Ted Chiang
I'm about to start _Stories of Your Life and Others_, haven't read any other Chiang yet.
For a post-scarcity world you might find more interesting, try MOPI -- if you can look past (or enjoy) the weird sex in the first chapter. Kind of amazing that he wrote it in 1994; in retrospect so much of singularity-AI/transhumanist sci-fi was just aping what he did first:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...
I rated MOPI at "800 milli-Egans".
And, of course, there's always the Sci-Fi masterwork from which I stole my HN username.
Just check out what they did to Star Trek. 'To boldly go.. vs there is no hope (paraphrased by me.)'
It just generally resolved the problems by the end of the episode instead of running longer arcs. That newer Trek has longer arcs has much more to do with the storytelling methods than with an overall unwillingness to show positive change.
It sounds like Star Trek has a lot of similarities with the Culture novels. Both depict an imagined communist utopia in which everyone is flawless, that butts up against or sometimes interferes with other flawed societies.
In Star Trek (as written by Roddenberry) the Federation is a society that doesn't use money, there is no internal strife, virtually everyone is moral and good with Picard being the apex human, the Federation is vaguely democratic but the show is basically uninterested in that aspect of things, and they all exist in a sort of post-scarcity world. The communist nature of Star Trek TNG/Voyager is quite obscure until you see it, and then you can't unsee it anymore. This is no surprise because Roddenberry's views changed in the decades between TOS and TNG until by the 1980s he was an avowed Maoist.
I've actually written an essay about the communist nature of Federation society, along with some of the inevitable contradictions and problems this caused for the writing team:
https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-tre...
Obviously it's not a very serious essay but at the end I do wonder why there are so few optimistic depictions of the future. Even though the arc of human history has been solidly upwards, very little fiction is willing to extrapolate that forwards, and when it does happen the authors are always communists so we get weird, implausible takes on human nature that make humans feel more alien than the aliens. I guess it's because Marxism requires at its core an explicitly utopian prediction of the future to offset the rather less utopian consequences of bloody revolution. Whereas capitalism - being not so much an ideology as a thing that springs up naturally even when governments are trying to suppress it - doesn't have any kind of view on what the future will look like.
Also, are we, the intermediary generations (the present and the near future), are supposed to suffer in the hopes that our distant ancestors will be better off?
They also happen to be fairly successful at pushing the envelope.
Could that be a meaningful correlation?
(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).
When there's no matter to attend AIs are not doing anything interesting, so the stories are just "Culture at (usually someone else's) war" crossed with "life of pets".
But it's so much fun. :-)
Plus, presumably an all-seeing Ship AI probably wouldn't permit the atrocities required to drive most Iain M Banks (or, for that matter, Iain Banks) plots. A would-be molester or rapist on Shipboard would presumably get his brainstem lightly zorched by the ship's effector before he got too close a victim, depriving Banks the opportunity to write a vivid description of the act, and the subsequent opportunity to write about the Bad Person getting incinerated, shot, torn apart by hundreds of tiny drones, etc. etc.
I enjoyed that vignette where everyone on board some ship are getting the common cold for fun.
I didn't particularly find the writing in Colin Greenlund's "Take Back Plenty" that interesting, but it was fascinating reading space opera in that general genre that wasn't violence-driven.
I read this and immediately thought “Bitcoin!”, thought I got the impression from the books that IFS was more like a cross between Sudoku and World of Watcraft — both nerdy and potentially dangerously addictive.
If you simulate conscious entities at the level of detail that Culture AIs are capable of you create sentient virtual beings and you can't just shut down the simulation without being responsible of "murdering" sentient beings.
So if the minds simulate alternate universes in infinite fun space I think they are purely mathematical universes devoid of sentient life to make the whole thing less contentious and purely fun.
I don't recognise this from the Culture novels. Plenty of Bad Stuff happens to people (and all manner of beings, drones, Minds, etc.), but that generally does happen in fiction. I can only think of one Culture novel that kind of has a "revenge plot" (Surface Detail, and it's probably not the main theme of the novel).
> it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se
I think it's possible that Banks thought writing purely about a utopia would be boring. Personally I would have read anything Banks wrote in the setting, even if it was just a story about everyday life.
If you haven't read it, his text (short story? Fictional article?) "A Few Notes On The Culture" is quite interesting and devoid of Bad Things Happening: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
I'm finding all the Consider Phlebas hate kinda weird. I found it electrifying at the time and 25 years on when I re-read it last year, Horza's weary bleakness was incredibly poignant.
Sure, the long listing of various bad and worse and even worse acts are complete clichés, but at least in Surface Detail it was an interesting plot device and setting. (The ending of Player of Games was a bit too much, but looking back, it's okay, it's not really a big part (if I remember that part is ~10 pages, from the moment the drone forces Morat's hand to the king's demise). Oh, and the comically villainous dude in The Algebraist seems like a gag. (With the sentient punchbag.)
When a famous composer puts on a show, the tickets are allocated by lottery. But the demand is so high the people effectively reinvent money in the form of favors and such so they can trade for tickets.
People are constantly looking for stimulus and new leisure activities, to the point where they willingly put their lives in danger (e.g. sailing down a river of lava). If they do die, a copy is just downloaded into another body.
Genuine biological children are very rare. There's a little girl in the book that provides some comedy relief because her outlook is so different to the hundreds of years old adults.
Also, it's not like sci-fi was somehow sterile and devoid of violence/sex/abuse (psychological and otherwise). After all a lot of sci-fi is still basically pulp. Though it's understandable that it's not everyone's cup of entertainment.
What he doesn't get about Banks' universe is that the sentient machines are in charge. They treat humans almost as pets. It's a very pleasant society for humans, but the humans are not running it. Now and then the Culture has to deal with people who really want to be in charge, and it usually finds a place for them, elsewhere.
With some important differences: For one, pets don't get to vote...
I think that's something people do not get when they think about superhuman AI. A superhuman AI is very much likely to just ignore humanity. It is actually quite pompous to assume that humans could either annoy or be of benefit to superhuman AI so that the AI would have any interest in humans beyond mild curiosity. Like, say, how humans treat plankton.
As the somewhat famous quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky goes, "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else".
Culture Minds have a quirk of their build that made them what they are - it's not the norm, though there are other Mind-like AIs that joined later. Building super intelligent unfettered AI has a known end condition where said AI at worst might steamroll local area then pass onto higher plane of existence or however you decide to call the process of Sublimation.
Because a super intelligent AI quickly can reach that point, and with resources available to many Involveds, finds cheaper and more interesting methods to reach there than disassembling biological life.
The most common concept of mind "creation" documented are GSVs physically constructing them and their first ship body. In some places it hints on a sort of ironic/humourous child/parent relationship.
1. Excession
2. Player of Games
3. The Hydrogen Sonata
4. Matter
5. Surface Detail
6. Look to Windward
7. Consider Phlebas
8. Inversions
9. Hitting myself with a hammer
10. Use of Weapons
Others include:
- Accelerando
- A Fire Upon the Deep
- Permutation City
- Daemon
So far, the only sci-fi novel that meets the level of rigor I was looking for—albeit about aliens rather than AI—is The Three Body Problem.
Absolutely love the Culture series, by the way. It's a tragedy that Banks died far too young.
Personally, I would rank Surface Detail, Consider Phlebas, and Use of Weapons higher than the others. I thought The Hydrogen Sonata had some fun parts, but was otherwise quite slight. Matter was good but also severely bloated, a bit like The Algebraist, with a long middle journey portion that felt unnecessary.
Agree with Excession at #1 though, what an incredible book.
> Orbitals, while enormous (greater surface area than earth), are much smaller. The Culture novels do have Ringworld-sized rings as well, though. E.g. from Consider Phlebas, flying under the orbital Vavatch: "It was like flying upside-down over a planet made of metal; and of all the sights the galaxy held which were the result of conscious effort, it was one bested for what the Culture would call gawp value only by a big Ring, or a Sphere."
> Musk by naming SpaceX rockets after Banks’s tongue-in-cheek Culture ships (“Just Read The Instructions,” “Of Course I Still Love You”)
Those are not the names of the rockets, but the ocean barges on which the rockets land.
https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft
>Legacy: The autonomous spaceport drone ships Of Course I Still Love You, Just Read the Instructions 1 & 2, operated by SpaceX, were named after General Contact Units mentioned in The Player of Games, as a posthumous homage to Banks by Elon Musk.[11] The construction of a fourth drone ship, named A Shortfall of Gravitas, was announced by Elon Musk via Twitter on February 12, 2018.[12] It is named after the Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall, a ship mentioned in Look to Windward and Matter as a GSV and GCU respectively.
Although the barges are less glamorous than rocket stages, they are reused more times, and so are more permanent a tribute.
Thanks for reading btw!
Most importantly, the humans give the Culture legitimacy as a galactic civilization, because many of the other Involveds don't give a crap about AIs, but they respect the flesh and blood humans. The humans are also a source of wonder and whimsy and surprise for the Minds, with some outlier humans even able to surpass them in some aspects.
The very first Minds were also programmed to like humans, and that aspect has simply stuck, despite their self-evolution into something far surpassing human ability to create.
It's not a symbiosis in the strongest practical sense. There isn't mutual reliance for survival: if all humans suddenly disappeared, the minds/drones and accompanying infrastructure would survive perfectly fine. But culturally (lower case) you could definitely argue that losing the humans would destroy the fundamental identity of the Culture.
I like that while this topic was gradually touched on over the series, mostly the reader is left to make up their own mind.
And maybe that’s the whole point, that any culture shapes the thoughts of the people that are a part of it. Banks tried to design a context most able to let people develop their thoughts in a benevolent way. The people in the Culture are free to think and do anything, but they don’t because they are guided from birth not to consider some ideas.
The ship/mind Grey Area is explicitly condemend and ostracised from polite society because of it, for example.
(The simulation problem: If you want to simulate a society of sentient beings to figure out what they would do, then your simulated entities also have to be sentient for your simulation to be 100% accurate, but then you've accidentally created sentient life, which has rights, so shutting down your simulation is genocide, which means you now have to commit to keeping that simulation running for eternity, which is too much of a bother so you shouldn't do it in the first place.)
As for political system among AIs it looks to me as a sort of benevolent anarchy where individuals do what ought to be done in accordance to shared logic and etiquette.
There is a cool moment when etiquette is violated and one AI comes unannounced to solar system where other is residing. And this other is highly alarmed and fully expecting to be forced to fight for its survival.
As for the scale of difference between organic and artificial intelligences, with one organic exception whose name I forget, the impression I had was that the difference between typical organic (/drone) and an Orbital’s hub Mind was more like the difference between a gardener and their lawn: human gardeners can communicate with each individual blade of grass under their care (by controlling the level of sunlight or shade and the general chemical environment), but – considering how little each blade has to say in return – looking after them uses such as tiny fraction of a human brain’s capacity that even an entire large lawn of them would not be the only thing one does with one’s life.
But we also see some that are much nicer, the Bora Horza Gobuchul takes a very balanced outlook on events and on its namesake; the Sleeper Service cares very much about just one pregnant woman even if it also has other reasons to be doing what it is doing; the Lasting Damage organises much of the events of Look to Windward, including a lovely music festival to celebrate its own death.
Writing about Utopia is hard, and Banks mostly avoids doing so. We see only fleeting glimpses, a woman's apparent rejection from her chosen career, a game player's frustration at not being the very best, a spoiled girl who wants an adventure she isn't prepared for. They're character backdrops, not focuses.
I think the Gaiman run of Miracleman (Miracleman, in some places and times called Marvelman, was a comic book, historically a pulpy knock-off, then made into something quite extraordinary by Alan Moore, and then Gaiman took over for an aborted run last century) is the best treatment of Utopia in fiction I've read.
Gaiman's completed "Golden Age" of Miracleman zooms in on the brief period after Miracleman defeats the Adversary and before things go sour. This is an age of enlightened absolute government, nuclear weapons are destroyed ("teleported into the sun"), poverty and homelessness are eliminated, there's wind power and something equivalent to the Internet, even the dead can be brought back after a fashion. But nevertheless, people are still people. The stories follow a woman whose husband is cheating on her, what has been done with all the now redundant spies, school children rebelling against... whatever you've got. Miracleman himself appears rarely, and his daughter gets one issue, sort of, through a story-within-a-story that allows Gaiman to sidestep the conventions of comic books.
I think people who see the Culture as a dystopia are those who either believe work/being useful is an essential part of life OR those who get their satisfaction from their relative well-being rather than absolute.
You can be a billionaire CEO and not fall into those categories. I'd imagine a lot of people who have been very successful in capitalism do it because they enjoy their work and not because they feel like work is the only thing worth doing or because they want to be ever-more relatively better off than everyone else.
Yet simultaneously prefer a post-scarcity future in which everyone is Musk and Bezos.
Heavy lies the crown, etc etc
The problem is starting out on that path towards equal distribution is going to mean they lose a lot of money.
If you see the world as Musk and Bezos building and deploying capital to build what they see as a better future, there's no contradiction at all. There's fierce disagreement about how we get to that future, but we all want the same general thing.
Worrying about relative wealth over absolute wealth is a trap for those with limited imagnations.
Can you see the appeal for modern billionaires now?
I think they like "Beggars in Spain" series by Nancy Kress too.
But it's a utopia. Everyone has everything they want and nothing can go wrong. That's like the context these novels start up in ... and I ... just can't get into it.
I imagine stuff must actually eventually happen, but I never get that far.
You have utopia. Now what?
Fav example for both is Buffy shooting that ancient demon thing with a bazooka.
Interestingly, this is not quite true. The Hydrogen Sonata gets a tiny bit into the formation of the Culture.
- https://www.richmondreview.co.uk/banksint/
No, what really becomes a point of ideological tension is the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us.
I read all the books as they came out, I was a teenager when I read Consider Phlebas, and took everything the culture claimed about itself at face value.
I'm looking forward going back and rereading them, having shifting over time to thinking that the culture may be an unreliable narrator of it's own history and ideology, pacifism is the culture's national mythology equivalent to Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, rather than a statement of fact.
Of course I want to live there.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-t...
When scarcity ends, I'm not sure either of them are valid descriptions any more. You could say it's communism because there is no private property, but with infinite resources why would there be? If someone (say) takes my jetpack, but I can click my fingers and have an identical one appear then what would be the point in "owning" one?
The problem is that even today a huge part of the economy is not material production but services of some form, many of which can't be supplied infinitely no matter how fancy your tech gets. If you want an hour of time to get advice advice from the world's best investor, then short of that man choosing to upload his brain into a massively sharded AI or something, his time is scarce and no amount of tech will work around that.
And a lot of what capitalism allocates today is even less physical than that: attention and social status. Instagram sometimes feels like an experimental post-scarcity society in which millions of people with abundant material wealth spend their time competing over social status and influence.
Fundamentally even in a post-scarcity society there will always be competition for the influence of your ideas, other people's time/attention and of course power over those people. This is why the concept that communism happens with sufficiently advanced technology doesn't make sense to me.
> Which bit of not having private property, and the absence of money in the Culture novels, have these people missed?”
I think one thing about discussions that involve private property is that it is often viewed as just material possesions of an external nature, but to me as a constitutionalist, private property is a concept beyond that, which also applies to the self, whether that is body, mind or otherwise, just as much to external things. I often find my more conservative friends don't articulate this, but it is a source of complications of communication with socialists, etc, who ask the same question you do: whats the big deal about private property? Just a little perspective on the topic, if I may.
Technically even in socialist countries in USSR sphere you had somewhat market-acting private companies, though the most "ideologically correct" form of them were co-operatives.
China is interesting case, with mix of centrally planned and market economy. But I can't provide enough details (though I've seen glorious poster calling on people to start SMBs to build communism :D) to argue either way.
Ultimately - Even USSR called the system state capitalism, with a fig leaf that supposedly the people controlled it.
The fan even apparently discussed the matter with Bank's mother who was at the event who confirmed that Iain was "a lovely wee boy".
Saw him a few times in Edinburgh - never had the nerve to say hello - really wish I had now!
There was no next time. Just a reminder - sometimes the time do do what you’ve been planning is now
As in, in which book such thing happened?
https://www.tor.com/2017/11/24/the-revolutionary-optimism-of...
> On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves.
“The State of the Art”
On the contrary, they can develop stuff without having to ensure employees are happy and fed. That burden is taken care of by the AI. Plus, if their ideas are any good, AI will help further by offloading most of the corporate management. How can Musk and Bezos not like that?
I don't know what world the author lives in but, even though I don't believe all the press about Musk, I'm pretty sure both Bezos and Musk have considerably more struggle and strife going on than I do, despite our day to day, month to month challenges being quite different. And I'm pretty grateful for that. I prefer a very different work/life balance, not that I've seen any indication that Musk thinks his is healthy or even recommended.
It's a cartoonish view of people who made money by starting ventures like this.
Irrelevant maybe, but i dont see how they are disempowered in the Culture books. The culture books are full of busy-bodies trying to change the course of events. I'm sure that would be appealing to CEO types in a post scarcity world.
I don't think reality is so black and white. I'm not sure The Culture could really be described as a marxist utopia, given the real power + means of production within The Culture is actually in the hands of so few. Nor does Bezos'/Elons' personal wealth necessarily have to be in conflict with their idealist view of the future.
This does make me want to re-read the Culture series again. I'm actually sad Amazon was unable to pick up the rights to make a TV series; that has potential to be such an incredible ride.
If you have the power and means to do whatever you want then the de jure limits to that power are irrelevant.
On the other hand, if you do not have the means to do as you want, then having de jure rights to do what you want is irrelevant.
In poverty, then, gaining means is as important as gaining rights, because they are two sides of the same coin.
Disagreement between different types of socialist ideologies over how to balance that is part of why socialist political movements span the range from extreme anti-authoritarian to focusing on means, and the power that gives, at the cost of authoritarianism.
But in a post-scarcity society, the details of the distribution of power becomes less and less interesting, as long as everyone has enough power to do what they want to do. That de facto power is what matters.
We're seeing Culture at the point where they deliberately curtailed what's considered normal evolutionary path of civilisation, but several times it's mentioned that when Culture turned independent, Minds weren't "like Gods, on the far side", but the core argument behind the breakaway was that the groups that formed Culture figured free redistribution combined with some significant resourcing models allowed them to "disengage" from capitalism and warfare related to their parent societes.
Loved his books - he might be my favourite science fiction writer
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-t...
Unnecessary ideologically motivated mud-slinging. Amazon is chosen by consumers because it offers better selection, lower prices, and faster delivery.
Amazon has left the world much better than how it found it, unless you think people's wages being able to buy less (i.e. people getting lower inflation-adjusted wages) is somehow a better state of life.
I think he really did see that the end result of technology was good for the human race.
What I enjoy so much about the Culture series is Banks' account of the good things in human nature, while also acknowledging the chaotic and sometimes violent, contradictory parts of our motivations. I view the series as a rare, honest attempt at answering the question "if you could wish anything you wanted for humanity, what would you wish for?" Trying to frame such a wish in a way that keeps only what we want to keep, if there were no materialistic limits. I am not sure that Banks would agree with me, but I've interpreted his socialist angle as merely what seemed the best plausible path towards that, from his point of view. Rather than with communism as an end to itself.
There's so much philosophy to unpack in this question, and it's fascinating to consider it through the lens of what might be possible in contemporary and near-future society. Today's richest people, while having tremendous power, obviously don't all wish to enslave humanity, the way one could erroneously conclude by going too deeply into far-left ideology.
Neither do they necessarily try to move directly in the direction of "progress", if we define progress to mean the fastest possible path towards the nebulous, ideal future of humanity as described above. But certainly some of the efforts of humanity's brightest are pulling us in this direction, and it seems implausible that any single contemporary ideology has the answer. It wouldn't surprise me if some billionaires would wish to move society in that direction. The apparent contradiction in that seems superficial to me.
I'm sure that many ideologies get part of the question right, but they all leave so much room for the parts of human nature that we would largely exclude, if given the choice. As do the power structures in contemporary society. They are limited by both the practical limits of contemporary economics and the partially selfish human motivations of their members.
I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Banks didn't describe the origins and how-to of creating Culture is that he believed that to be impossible (the article touches on that a bit in the end). That actually reminds me of Noon universe, by Strugatsky brothers (that was published much earlier, although not in English ;), that is also an explicitly communist utopia mostly described thru interactions with non-utopian civilizations, although in this case the former is much less in focus and the focus is on the latter. Unlike Culture, I understand it was born incrementally as various novels shared characters and parts of the theme; also unlike Culture, the authors incrementally arrived at sort of a conclusion of the narrative that they mentioned in the interviews but didn't finish before their deaths.
The idea, for the unfinished White Queen novel, was going to be that a character from the complete utopia encounters a society that built a small partial utopia, and a member of the latter eventually tells him that the complete utopia he's describing cannot exist, he must be living in a sci-fi novel :)
The reason Bezos and Musk might like the Culture universe because they are technological optimists - they believe technology can in fact build something like that. Thomas Sowell said "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.". The first lesson of technology for Bezos and Musk is probably that it can gradually abolish the first lesson of economics :)
Ironic that in the US (last I checked) many books were not available on kindle.
They have enough clout, influence, and money to play games like their own personal Special Circumstances projects.
