>this kind of Utopian life isn't terribly interesting for the plot of a novel
If it's not interesting to read about, are we sure it'll be interesting and enjoyable to live that way? Why do we find conflict interesting to read?
If it's not interesting to read about, are we sure it'll be interesting and enjoyable to live that way? Why do we find conflict interesting to read?
In reality in the western nations at least it is the safest/nicest time to live than ever before and tomorrow will most likely be better than today (barring climate change I think)
For whatever reason we just find conflict/violence captivating as long as it is not happening to us or our close friends/family
Money (and therefore jobs) and death are two of the biggest differences between that universe and ours. I cannot off the top of my head think of non-SF fiction or memoirs/biographies where these two things don’t have some bearing on the story, but there are plenty where they are not central to it. Many fascinating stories could be wrapped in the Culture mythos without compromise.
In exchange, IMO, you’d have a lot more personal experiences of people pursuing and achieving the things they are interested in doing with a lot fewer roadblocks along the way. The juicy parts are still juicy; they just achieve much higher levels than they could when “I had to work a shit job and compromise myself for 10 years to save up enough to do X.” That person may not bother writing about it; they’d just tell their friends over drinks (or on a forum when it came up!) because finding personal fulfillment would be more normalized than it is here and now. I think that’s a good thing.
The long standing trope is that Utopia is impossible not because of technical limitations, but because of deep truths about human nature. This goes back to the Old Testament -- e.g. the tower of Babel - the first attempt to build a utopia -- dissolved into conflict. Or perhaps the Garden of Eden was the first attempt, and that also broke down.
People have been trying to build Utopias ever since, and usually these projects become object lessons revealing some kind of human flaw that is incompatible with utopia. In every utopia there is a snake, and that snake is some aspect of our nature that destroys the utopia or forces us out of it.
Of course here I am talking about real life. What happens in novels is up to the author, but then readers will detect a false note if they really believe utopia is utopia, so to speak.
It wasn't internal conflict. It (supposedly) caused by 'God'. From Wikipedia:
"God, observing their city and tower, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world."
Overcoming adversity is literally what life does, from smallest to largest.
I'd be genuinely surprised if, evolved survival machines that we are, some kind of difficulty to dedicate our thinkmeats to overcoming wasn't a necessity for a healthy life.
And maybe the Culture books are really an exploration of that idea.
The first point being that there's an infinite number of interesting stories you could tell about ordinary people living ordinary (to them) Culture lives doing all kinds of exciting things. There'll still be conflict - just different kinds. E.g. people will still fall in love with the same person, or grow to hate someone they once loved over petty little things, and a myriad other things that would produce conflict. Just not about material wealth etc. But many of these stories would only notionally be scifi in terms of setting.
Writing a scifi novel set in the core of the Culture would be harder than setting it on the edges. You'd lose a whole lot of sub-genres. No cyberpunk or military scifi for example. But you could still find stories where the scifi setting matters.
Part of what makes the 'edges' of these utopias easier to write about, though, is that you get to write about them as someone peering in. It justifies more world-building and explanations that helps relate the stories to our reality. A lot of stories about utopias are in a sense travellers tales - all the way back to Thomas More's original book Utopia, for which the concept is named.
And as with More's Utopia, it's easier for us to relate when there are ambiguities and cracks. Not least because pretending there are none is difficult given people have different ideas about what is ideal.
With respect to Banks, for example, I regularly come across people in discussions who have trouble dealing with the fact that Banks was a very outspoken socialist, at one point endorsing the Scottish Socialist Party, and who find it hard to come to terms with a socialist describing a society such as the Culture as an ideal to aspire to. To some people that in itself somehow mars the Culture for them.
And incidentally a lot of the time when people try to imply the Culture is not an utopia, they try to find authoritarianism lurking in the shadows, but forget that for every imagined slave-driver, for example, the Culture canon describes whole sub-civilizations of billions of people freely and peacefully not just dissenting but deciding to leave the Culture over political disagreements without any attempt to use force to hold them back. Any perceived authoritarianism in the Culture exists only in so far as its citizens willingly continues to choose to subject themselves to it.
And that last point brings it back around to the question you asked:
If it's not interesting and enjoyable to live that way, nothing in the Culture prevents you from packing your metaphorical bag and leaving, be it alone, with a group of friends, or seceding with a whole Orbital to forge another path.
That, to me is the strongest evidence that whatever musings we might make, in universe the Culture must be a pretty decent place to live, or it'd disintegrate with people forming their own little fiefdoms. So we might well speculate about whether or not we would like to live in it. But Culture canon is that trillions of citizens choose to stay despite having all the material wealth and practical opportunity to leave if they want to.
If it's a cage, it's extremely gilded.
At the same time, we know people can leave because we also know the Culture is not perfect for everyone, because some people have left the Culture fully or partially. But the very existence of a continuum - the Culture Ulterior consisting of factions that are mostly separate but still nominally Culture - also helps drive home that we're not talking about a centrally ruled empire, but a sprawling decentralised culture, and there's an infinite variety of levels of "leaving" too.
Ok, you've changed my mind (gp poster here). I should have been more imaginative - there are certainly countless unwritten novels about ordinary people living their lives in the Culture's core. They wouldn't necessarily look like traditional sci-fi, but they could certainly work as novels. I mean, people still read Jane Austen's six novels about the interpersonal relationships of characters from 200 years ago who didn't have to work for a living and had all their material needs met (though they were obsessed with wealth, so the parallel isn't exact). It's just that Banks wanted to write about the edges because the stakes there are more in line with traditional sci-fi (planetary or larger, rather than personal) and because like you say world-building exposition is easier if you move from the edge inwards.
> With respect to Banks, for example, I regularly come across people in discussions who have trouble dealing with the fact that Banks was a very outspoken socialist, at one point endorsing the Scottish Socialist Party, and who find it hard to come to terms with a socialist describing a society such as the Culture as an ideal to aspire to.
That's interesting! What on earth did they expect Banks's politics would be? To me the Culture novels always seemed precisely the projection of a certain kind of old 19th-century Socialist (or Anarchist) utopia into the far future: no capitalism, no corporations, no state, no money, no exploitation of labor, the utter elimination of poverty, people free to pursue their dreams amidst boundless abundance. But I suppose it might be a surprise to some folks whose only idea of socialism is an evil caricature of the big bad state taking their private wealth and telling them what to do.
> the Culture canon describes whole sub-civilizations of billions of people freely and peacefully not just dissenting but deciding to leave the Culture over political disagreements without any attempt to use force to hold them back.
I like this point a lot - I think the Culture's openness to departure is one of the most clever aspects of Banks's creation. You're free to leave and go off and do your own thing, and billions of people do, and yet somehow the Culture, with utter Olympian unconcern, holds together and remains the preeminent civilization in the galaxy. What an interesting paradox to play with!
Jane Austen-like novels set in a world where wealth is no object and people change gender/sex and physical appearance at will has the scope for whole new levels of confusion...
> That's interesting! What on earth did they expect Banks's politics would be?
There's a bizarre paradox in especially American views of socialism, where some people dismisses socialist goals as utopian and from that draws the conclusion that the only way a society could be like that is if there's either a capitalist machinery hiding under a carpet somewhere, or authoritarian socialist government agents lurking in the corner.
Often these people are unaware of left-wing libertarianism (anarchists, libertarian Marxists, and a whole range of other "small to no government" socialists), and so they tend to find it hard to even imagine a socialist that wants a small state or no state at all and see talk of that as a ruse.
I think they've been raised by the expectations of a lot of dystopian works that presents a "utopia on the surface" (HG Wells "The Time Machine" being one of the early explicit examples) to look for cracks, and basically assume we can't have good things. When they're then also sceptical of socialism, they have a perception of a mode of how such an expected dystopia should look like "under the hood"
There is a minor opponent and an action subplot, but in the end it takes the backseat and the inner thoughts of the god's mind is the focus.
Ah, and some vulgar display of power form the part of the Culture in the epilogue. Don't fuck with the Culture.
This post-scarcity Utopian vision works equally well for most varieties of libertarian, socialist and capitalist alike. The Culture respects individuals' personal freedom and right to own property if they so choose, which is all a right-libertarian requires. Corporations and money are just tools which capitalism offers to deal with scarcity, not ends in themselves—a post-scarcity capitalistic society wouldn't need them.
> But I suppose it might be a surprise to some folks whose only idea of socialism is an evil caricature of the big bad state taking their private wealth and telling them what to do.
In a society that actually has to deal with scarcity, unlike The Culture, that's pretty much what socialism amounts to in practice. Libertarian socialism is not a stable arrangement in the face of scarcity; it always ends up sacrificing either the libertarianism or the socialism (or both). However, I will freely admit that libertarian socialism can work if you can first eliminate scarcity. (To be fair, almost anything can work if you first eliminate scarcity.)