I don't really get where he's coming from here, and now of course I never will since he's not around to expand on it. The Culture is a post-scarcity society; while you can't have a planet full of minions and go about conquering other people, nobody in the Culture really lacks for material needs of any kind and risk is virtually non-existent, unless you are determined to off the grid and get yourself killed somewhere that won't be noticed and without having your mind-state backed up. In the absence of economic scarcity and risk, of course money becomes meaningless. I'm not sure about the absence of private property; people certainly have their own houses, ships and other things. Both libertarianism and communism become sort of meaningless in the absence of economic scarcity, and hardly anyone in the Culture seems to be a hippy either - on the contrary, they're all enjoying the hell out of everything technology has to offer, unless he means their energetic epicureanism. Nobody in the Culture (outside of Contact/Special Circumstances, the secret agent set of People Who Have Adventures) is asked to make personal or economic sacrifices of any meaningful kind. It's easy to be generous from a starting point of endless abundance.
Some of Banks' most memorable Culture novel characters go against this trend; Jennat Gurgeh in The Player of Games is singular precisely because of his egoism and selfishness, and this is assigned huge economic value in the story, notwithstanding the nose-holding that accompanies it; Bora Horza Gorbuchul in Consider Phlebas is fundamentally opposed to the Culture but is invested with immense moral standing despite his persistent anti-heroism. I think that a lot of the time Banks likes to start with the Culture as the default narrative perspective and then inflict a hypersadistic external antagonist, beside whom the hedonism and self-absorption of the Culture folk seems positively benign, even though it might appear neurotic or narcissistic by contemporary standards. The Culture-Idiran war (which is in many ways the defining event of the civilization) is laid out in some depth in the latter book, and examines the Culture's transformation from a reactive to a proactive culture, or a transition from pacifism to realpolitik, if you like. It's interesting to me that while life within the Culture is largely based on non-economic mutualism, the vast majority of Banks' Culture protagonists are plucked form the moral gray area in which Special Cricumstances proactively attempts to shape events to suit the Culture - a gray area Banks liked so much that he named one of the Minds after it in Excession.
I both admire and dislike Banks. Stylistically, his writing is brilliant. But I always feel like I need to take a shower afterwards.
He repurposes the most tired SF tropes (example: the cannibals that eat their victims while they are still alive, yawn, in "Consider Phlebas") to create sadistic (or, as you correctly say, "hypersadistic") wildly unrealistic, overblown horror novels, and because his style is so brilliant people lap it up, regardless of the egregious idiocy of most of his plots and the overall impossibility, ugliness and stupidity of his completely imaginary society.
He never delves into the ordinary lives of citizens of the Culture because doing so would reveal the impossiblity of a "post-scarcity" society populated by human beings who are only capable of being happy if they have "more" than their neighbours. This is a well-documented, empirically proven fact of human life, and it means that the transition to universal abundance is going to be way more problematic and violent than Banks' imaginary world suggests. So his whole imagining of the Culture as a kind of British-Imperial playground for Special Circumstances agents is kind of lame. It assumes a convenient backdrop of humanity as it is not and never has been, which does not withstand even the most cursory scrutiny. Banks avoided all that, and it's too bad because that is where all the really interesting stuff happens, amongst the people who are not special, but merely trying to live decent and ordinary lives.
> He never delves into the ordinary lives of citizens of the Culture because doing so would reveal the impossiblity of a "post-scarcity" society populated by human beings who are only capable of being happy if they have "more" than their neighbours
I disagree. There are quite a few looks at the lives of ordinary Culture citizens, and they indicate pretty strongly that this dilemma (if it indeed still exists) is resolved by individualizing lifestyles to the point where "do I have more than my neighbours?" becomes a meaningless question. And to me this does not seem far-fetched or something "humanity is not and never has been" at all; right now, "keeping up with the Joneses" is already a concept of diminishing importance as people find other ways to feel accomplished.
>He never delves into the ordinary lives of citizens of the Culture because doing so would reveal the impossiblity of a "post-scarcity" society populated by human beings who are only capable of being happy if they have "more" than their neighbours.
Firstly, as below, [citation needed]. Secondly, for God's sakes, the Culture is not merely post-scarcity, it is actually post-human. If they spot a moral flaw in their own nature that makes a happy, fulfilled society impossible, they can engineer it away with ease. They may have done so, in the youth of their species, when they were as stupid and naive as evolution could make them.
It's a claim you see bandied around pretty often. Like most overarching generalizations about all of humanity most evidence for or against it is more accurate for a given culture than humanity.
If you tone down the hyperbole and try to express your criticisms without insults you might have more chance of a conversation rather than just provoking ire.
I don't really feel his books feature much sadism or horror, it's more a playful disregard for current mores, or a recasting of current taboos in a future where those wouldn't exist - taboos are remarkably fluid. The novels certainly are not intended as hyper-realism, realistic social models or character studies, nor do I think Banks would see them as such. I disagree that his writing is brilliant stylistically, it's interesting and playful, but often pretty lacklustre in terms of craft (plot, character development, language). The ideas he likes to explore I find intriguing however.
It is true that Banks never really explored how Culture society would function, or really how a post-scarcity model would work - all that is just assumed to exist and function well in the books, however I think he was more interested in exploring the accommodation of humans to intelligent machines, the questions raised by extremely powerful and developed civilisations clashing with civilisations which are not as developed, the contradiction of an ostensibly peace-loving yet heavily militarised culture, and the implications of transcending normal human life. These are questions we will have to address at some point even in our narrow world (we haven't yet), and I find it interesting to read his take on them.
So I think while you're right in some sense that the Culture is implausible (or at least not made plausible), the focus is not on the Culture simply because it's a backdrop, and gets him to the place where he can talk about these interesting questions.
> I don't really feel his books feature much sadism or horror
Maybe the poster you're responding to was confusing the Culture stories with Banks' other non-fiction. There's a lot of sadism and basically look-how-bad-humans-are-torture-porn in his other books:
The Wasp Factory
Canal Dreams
A Song of Stone
Complicity
Transition
> ... only capable of being happy if they have "more" than their neighbours. This is a well-documented, empirically proven fact of human life ...
It's so nice when somebody takes a tiny, contingent finding from some small-n social science studies and blows it up into an incontrovertible framing for the entire world. Nice in that I can quickly ignore pretty much anything they say from that point forward.
You are aware that The Culture is explicitly not a descendant of humanity. Culture agents visit Earth in a short story set after Consider Phlebas and it's during the Middle Ages.
As for your alleged empirical fact -- the implication is that almost no-one is wealthy, which is either manifestly untrue or your definition of happiness isn't useful.
Culture agents visit Earth in a short story set after Consider Phlebas and it's during the Middle Ages.
I'm not familiar with any medieval Culture encounters (and I don't see any in Wikipedia's description of the Culture's fictional history[0]), but there is a story, "The State of the Art", where Culture agents show up in the 1970's, which supports your point about the Culture explicitly not descending from humanity.
I (who submitted of this article to HN) have this problem as well: on one hand, it's great that he's gotten rid of the tired trope of AI as and technology as a pathway to dystopia or of too-overt celebration of warfare that exists in a lot of military sci-fi.
I'll also post a limited defense of why most of Culture novels take place outside the Culture (note that first third of "Player of Games" is a pretty big exception to this): to paraphrase Banks quoting Niven, "stories about happy people are boring".
On the other hand, is the hypersadism needed? The levels are simply numbing, beyond gratuitous, so a few books on it simply fails to shock. On the other hand, Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" featured a much smaller amount of violence (as done by Emergents) it did happen to be realistic and managed to create great amount of empathy (at several points, I was close to simply putting the book down due to the bleak and hopeless situation of some of the characters) with the characters (who -- both humans and aliens -- seemed a lot more alien than culture's non-Homo Sapiens Pan-Humans). Of course comparing "hard SF" to Banks is quite a stretch, but the "non-alien aliens" and "hypersadism" aspects subtracted rather than added to Banks.
On the other hand, Banks' manages to do what very few can: the characters are great, multidimensional, and show development; the big ideas are big, and yet story-telling and plot aren't sacrificed. There are very few other SF writers who are able to do this (Gene Wolfe, Stan Robinson come to mind).
I'm going to stay out of the discussion of libertarianism (there's a corollary to Godwin's law: unless a certain German leader -- not Frederich the Great or Angela Merkel -- is mentioned first, any online conversation will ultimately end up becoming a debate about libertarianism), but I'll leave these few links out there:
http://a.b.i-b.tripod.com/html/faq_text.htm -- see the question about "Top Ten" SF novels according to Banks, the first is quite explicitly libertarian "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (there's debate as to whether Heinlein himself was a libertarian, but it's undeniable that at least some of his works are libertarian fiction; OTOH "Beyond the Horizon" is quite Culture-ish in terms of describing a post-scarcity society).
There's also "The Dispossesed" amongst those books which describes an non-property owning anarchist society ( I haven't read it, although it's on my list). For an example of very well written anarcho-capitalist SF, I strongly recommend Vinge's The Peace War, The Ungoverned, and Marooned in Realtime. The Ungoverned goes as far as describe private ownership of nuclear weapons, and yet the novels/novellas avoid the "shill political screed" feel some of the other explicitly "libertarian SF" works have.
Some of Banks' most memorable Culture novel characters go against this trend; Jennat Gurgeh in The Player of Games is singular precisely because of his egoism and selfishness, and this is assigned huge economic value in the story, notwithstanding the nose-holding that accompanies it; Bora Horza Gorbuchul in Consider Phlebas is fundamentally opposed to the Culture but is invested with immense moral standing despite his persistent anti-heroism. I think that a lot of the time Banks likes to start with the Culture as the default narrative perspective and then inflict a hypersadistic external antagonist, beside whom the hedonism and self-absorption of the Culture folk seems positively benign, even though it might appear neurotic or narcissistic by contemporary standards. The Culture-Idiran war (which is in many ways the defining event of the civilization) is laid out in some depth in the latter book, and examines the Culture's transformation from a reactive to a proactive culture, or a transition from pacifism to realpolitik, if you like. It's interesting to me that while life within the Culture is largely based on non-economic mutualism, the vast majority of Banks' Culture protagonists are plucked form the moral gray area in which Special Cricumstances proactively attempts to shape events to suit the Culture - a gray area Banks liked so much that he named one of the Minds after it in Excession.