Month: December 2013

  • A much better Culture novel

    JDN 2456636 PDT 16:53.

    I read Player of Games on the suggestion of a friend of mine who is a big fan of the Culture novels; having been unimpressed by Consider Phlebas I was somewhat reluctant at first, but he convinced me that Player of Games would be better.
    And indeed it was; the characters are more interesting, the plot is more compelling, and we see quite a bit more of what the Culture is like from the inside. I am particularly fond of the drones. The humans are a little too normal—after thousands of years of technological innovation, we still basically function the same? The Minds are a little too vast, appearing almost as gods handing down truth from On High. Of course, that is fully intentional; the Minds are supposed to be AIs of unfathomable intelligence. The drones are a better balance; clearly different from us, more advanced; yet also with some of the same quirks and foibles.
    But still, most of the action takes place outside the Culture, in a distant interplanetary empire known as Azad. The effect is still to reinforce the sense that there are no stories to tell of utopia; once we solve the basic problems of need and pain, we don’t know what else to do or say anymore.
    This is not Iain Banks’ fault; indeed it is something I have struggled with, and I think all SF authors struggle with, when they try to imagine a utopian future. Dystopias are much easier to write; find something we’re doing wrong today, and imagine if it got vastly worse over the centuries. Carry that out to its logical conclusions and have a daring hero challenge the system (if only to fail, as in 1984), and you have a story that almost writes itself. But utopias are much more challenging; what does a perfect society really look like, or even if not perfect—the Culture surely isn’t perfect—then so very much improved that it makes our current life seem barbaric by comparison? How do you tell an interesting story when the system the hero lives in is one that he’s really quite happy with on the whole?
    Iain Banks’ solution is Contact; it seems fitting that Contact functions as the de facto government of the ostensibly anarchic Culture, because stories of Contact are the driving force behind just about every plot in the ostensibly utopian Culture novels. The novel is never really about the Culture; it’s about how other cultures interact with the Culture. One reader characterized the central message of the series succinctly, if crudely: “Don’t fuck with the Culture.”
    Is this the only way? The universe is vast—perhaps infinite—so it’s not hard to argue that once you establish utopia in a few cubic parsecs it’s time to expand it to a few more, and so on. There will always be more cubic parsecs to make utopian, won’t there? It seems quite reasonable that Contact hasn’t run out of things to do over the millennia.
    But is that all utopia is? An end goal? Is human happiness like a term paper—finish this one, move on to the next? Or is there some way to tell stories, really interesting, compelling stories, that take place within utopia itself? If there is, I’ve not yet seen it done. Player of Games is no exception.