Nice! I haven't read Axiomatic yet, but this has been my "Greg Egan year". I have read Permutation City and Diaspora: maybe the two most stimulating scifi novels I have ever read.
Read Diaspora last year w/o knowing anything about it. Easily one of my favorite sci-do books to date—I can’t believe it was there waiting for me the entire time. Permutation City is one of my next 3 reads.
I also highly recommend _Distress_ as it continues some cosmology ideas from Permutation City.
There are also several novels which kind of similar to Diaspora: Schild's Ladder, Incandescence, and stories in the Incandescence universe: Ride a crocodile, Hot rock, Glory.
Not totally related, but I wanted to make a question. Iam sure this post will host quite a lot of Culture fans. With which novel should I start with The Culture? The main two candidates are Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games.
Strongly disagree with most of the consensus here to start with Player of Games and that Consider Phlebas is boring. I found Player of Games to be the much weaker book, with lots of heavy handed social critique and a generally quite stock plot.
It's true that Consider Phlebas is set outside The Culture. I think that's for the best as The Culture is pretty alien and the Phlebas protagonist is more relatable. Banks does a great job of building the world such that when you get to the end of the book, you're like "I get it" in terms of understanding the Culture. Plus, Phlebas has a number of wonderfully evocative set pieces that are super cool. You can see how influential the series was on later sci-fi, especially stuff like Halo.
It’s a very human story, and the technobabble intervenes very little in it. It also has the most connection (of the Culture novels) to our world, being largely a meditation on the first Gulf War. This makes it the most approachable, in my opinion.
It is technically a sequel to Consider Phlebas but the connection is almost nonexistent, no prior knowledge of the Culture-Idiran war required.
Player. It's slow for a short bit with culture in references until he gets airlifted. Then gets interesting dumping you into convos with intelligences and then the games and court drama. I actually don't recall plebias. googling it reminds me it nay be the one with an unmanned snowpiercer. i remember that not as good.
i like the culture books but they suffer sometimes from jumping unreoated viewpoints, mental instability, and sprawl sometimes.
player is tighter and doesnt jump. probbably a better entry.
sorry auto corect and swype tuened off mid post so speley misteaks
The upside of starting with Consider Phlebas is that the story doesn't really take place within the Culture. It provides you with an outside perspective. It also sets up some things that are referenced in later books.
The downside is that it's quite a bit different from (and imo a bit worse than) the other books and could mislead you about what the series is like - or even turn you off entirely.
If you're already committed to reading the entire series, I'd start with Consider Phlebas. If you're unsure, start with The Player of Games.
I actually really like Consider Phlebas - probably because I read it in one go in a day off I allowed myself between finishing my final year project and starting revision for my finals. This was in 1988 <sigh>
Consider Phlebas or Excession. I wouldn't overcomplicate the decision, just read descriptions of those books and pick one.
(I saw Look to Windward and Player of Games recommended. I'd say Look to Windward is probably more enjoyable once you've read Consider Phlebas, and Player of Games is perhaps a little... simple, compared to the others? I don't remember having much doubt of roughly how it would end)
I started with Players of Games and was very happy with it. I followed it with Use of Weapons which was tougher reading due to complex intertwining narratives, one in reverse chronology and way darker themes. So that probably wasn't a great choice. I don't find Consider Phlebas particularly strong. However I love Matter, Excession and Surface Detail.
Consider Phlebas is an incredibly boring book imo, would not recommend it unless you get way into the series and want to read them all. The Player of Games is great, was engaging throughout and had interesting characters. I would start with that one personally (or another book, but I've only read those two so I can't speak to the rest of the series).
That quote from Banks only tells us that The Culture is his personal utopia. Fair enough, but Banks does not have authority over interpretations on his work. One man's heaven is another man's hell.
The Culture intervenes in and steers those other societies and species even when unprovoked. Essentially a neoconservative utopia as envisioned by a young Irving Kristol. Yes, it would be a heaven for all who are pleased to take on its espirit de corps and live in it, casual and decadently low-pressure such might be, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is a healthy influence in the long run on a universe that it is arrogantly homogenizing. There is such a thing as unintended consequences, and The Culture is not yet one of the more advanced, wiser "Sublimed" civilizations.
The Culture is absolutely not "neoconservative". I don't think modern political terms can meaningfully apply to a post-scarcity civilization with benevolent AI Gods.
Right. Just because the universe is post-scarcity, doesn't mean you can't build items, and entire production chains. Just because you can live to near immortality, doesn't mean you have to do things to prevent natural aging.
One guy became a member of the alien race the Affront, so named because they they have culturally and socially ingrained traits for exploitation, sadism and brutality.
Yes. Even today, one mans garbage is another's gold.
Sci-Fi is full of 'Utopias' that can also be viewed as 'Dystopia', depending on the view point. And in a lot of movies, that shifting view point is the story.
What makes physical death so special that you do want to exist before it happens, but don't want to after? Why not pick some other arbitrary event, like say, the next New Years?
Living _forever_ seems like... not necessarily that attractive an idea.
(Also most of the afterlives on offer don't seem particularly attractive.)
As someone who doesn't believe and never has believed that there was an afterlife, there is something kind of horrifying about the _inescapable, eternal_ nature of such a thing. I think this may be different if it's a concept that you've been sold on as a kid, but from the outside, it's really kind of unsettling.
The fact that somebody doesn't want afterlife doesn't imply that death is a special moment for them that separates wanting to exist from not wanting.
They could have "picked" another moment. It might be next New Year or a moment in the past or even a moment before they were born. The moment of death is simply the "earliest convenience" to end unwanted existence.
for me it's the fact that I could theoretically end it (modulo quantum immortality, my worst nightmare). the afterlife is usually sold with "guaranteed forever". I've been in so many situations that you might think "oh I wish this could go on forever" and then regretted it, that I want to make sure there's a way to pull the plug.
What if you could spend it with cats? What if it didn't have to be forever - if you could end it any time you chose, like after 1000 years or whenever? It seems what you don't want is only a very specific version of an afterlife.
I suppose various types of reincarnations might be that. Or afterlife is just temporary state in between. I suppose reincarnating just to die again is something in some belief systems. Sometimes with goal of being liberated from the cycle.
Some people enjoy playing games in 'Hardcore' mode (see e.g. Subnautica) where if you die, instead of respawning, the game ends and your save file is deleted.
I would even say it is lot more scary. After your non eternal life ends you know no better. On other hand if you are aware of the eternal life for rest of entire eternity... I will pick up non-eternity each and every time.
SCP-7179 is simply being trapped inside a 10km cube filled with a tropical island for eternity. And I find it one of the scariest ones of them all. This is one of the entries in the timeline
[1,000,000,000,000 years]: Hiddleston ceases physical activity, as no experience is able to provide him with new stimuli.
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.
> 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.)
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:
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.
Yeah, I'm really struggling to think of a major work of sci-fi that is _not_ in some sense political. Possibly Robert Forward's stuff, but as I think he admitted himself those were mostly an excuse to play with weird physics.
I too was so surprised by that Banks quote that I still wonder if maybe he was lying or being deliberately provocative.
(I wouldn't call The Culture "leftist" exactly, as it seems to be a space version of liberal imperialism, which the international Left always opposed. Though it is "left" in the American Fox/CNN-tier sense.)
If I choose to believe Banks' quote, then I have to interpret The Culture as merely the best possible society, in a universe where human nature severely constrains what societies are possible. To me it seems to be a world full of pointlessness and barely-suppressed existential angst -- so perhaps he is saying: "Imagine that we can solve death and supply unlimited entertainment and pleasure. Even then, you will not be able to escape a kind of background noise, an omnipresent drone, in a minor key -- because that's inevitable to existence."
Now I imagine a back-story: The people of The Culture, the Minds, everything -- they are actually in Hell. Their universe is Hell. They are incredibly clever; they have outwitted the gods (to the extent possible); they have ended the tortures, chained Satan (or whoever used to administer), and found ways to roast marshmallows over the lakes of fire. It is a tremendous triumph. And yet they are still in Hell, and no matter the palaces they build there or the drugs they take, there is pain beneath the surface.
I read The Culture books as a subtler version of that story, where it is never spelled out clearly where they are.
At the same time, don't take this to mean that I want to force some religious meaning onto the books. My meaning is also secular. Hell is a metaphor of some kind. The meaning I am suggesting is more existentialist than religious.
That’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure how well hell maps to Banks’ books in terms of choice though.
In most religious depictions, one of hell’s predominant characteristics is its inescapability—either logistically or by the mental limits of its inhabitants. Tons of Banks’ work, on the other hand, has a through line of “people could choose to leave the Culture, they’re fundamentally in their situation by (extremely unconstrained!) choice”. This comes up in the idea of Subliming, being Stored, many characters’ choices to commit suicide/decline immortality, or just plain leaving the Culture as many do.
Plenty of his characters are in hells of their own making/choosing, or are tortured by other people, which I think is definitely a commentary on the sources of suffering being behavioral rather than just environmental, but I’m not sure it follows that “therefore the Culture is hell”.
> If I choose to believe Banks' quote, then I have to interpret The Culture as merely the best possible society, in a universe where human nature severely constrains what societies are possible.
I'm not sure why you wouldn't just take what Banks says at face value. Living in the Culture would for the majority of people on on Earth be far preferable.
But I do think you're close to correct about what Banks was saying on the darker side of the message. Every book of his that I've read (including the non Culture novels) has a darker side. It always seems to be about the inevitably of conflict in the presence of the human condition. And the terrible cruelty this can result in.
Nevertheless, try as I might, it confounds me how anyone could look around at the state of life on Earth today and think "yeah, much better than the dystopia of The Culture".
Most of the founding intellectuals of neoconservatism, especially Irving Kristol, came from secular socialist backgrounds and imagined their ideal society to be eerily similar to The Culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
About me: Nice to meet you! My name is Cristian. Let me tell you why I think I’d be a great addition to your team. I have over 15 years of experience with Ruby. The highlight of my career is probably the decade I have spent at Zendesk, where I am one of the technical leaders of Support, their flagship product, as a Group Tech Lead and Senior Staff Software Engineer. My main focus is scaling the ticketing system and making sure it can handle massive workloads efficiently. That experience turned me into a bit of a Rails performance nerd—so much so that I wrote a book about it, Rails Scales!, published by Pragmatic Bookshelf (https://pragprog.com/titles/cprpo/rails-scales/). I’ve also had the chance to share my insights at conferences like RailsConf, EuRuKo, and RubyKaigi. You can check my talks in my profile in RubyVideo (https://www.rubyevents.org/speakers/cristian-planas).
About me: Nice to meet you! My name is Cristian. Let me tell you why I think I’d be a great addition to your team. I have over 15 years of experience with Ruby. The highlight of my career is probably the decade I have spent at Zendesk, where I am one of the technical leaders of Support, their flagship product, as a Group Tech Lead and Senior Staff Software Engineer. My main focus is scaling the ticketing system and making sure it can handle massive workloads efficiently. That experience turned me into a bit of a Rails performance nerd—so much so that I wrote a book about it, Rails Scales!, published by Pragmatic Bookshelf (https://pragprog.com/titles/cprpo/rails-scales/). I’ve also had the chance to share my insights at conferences like RailsConf, EuRuKo, and RubyKaigi. You can check my talks in my profile in RubyVideo (https://www.rubyevents.org/speakers/cristian-planas).
> I’ve noticed lots of rails developers optimize so heavily for making things DRY, they make the most hard to debug monstrosities full of meta programming all so they could write a thing one one line of code instead of 3.
I think that was definitely the case some years ago, but the Ruby community has matured since then. Meta programming is a bit looked down upon, these days.
Oh yeah totally. Our linter definitely discourages it.
I still see a false equivalency in the ruby community that verbosity == complexity, that tends to make super complex abstractions and DSLs in order to make the consumption less verbose, that then say “see how simple this is to use”
Because rails does such a good job in their DSL, I think I understand why that tendency exists. But rails under the hood is quite complex, and most DSLs are no where near as well thought out.
Maybe I have Stockholm syndrome, because I hated ruby coming from a nearly all c style language background at first, but I honestly think it is pretty cool now. I think a lot of issues come from people wanting to do things in ruby like they would in C# or Java.
Your experience is very different from mine. I rarely interviewed white candidates, but they were still more common than Hispanic and Black ones. The majority of the candidates were Asian.
I don't think that most of proponents of DEI share my opinion, but for me, the endgame of DEI (and antiracism in general) is the destruction of race as a social concept. IMO, race is basically a casta system, particularly given how it operates in America.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe in genetics. I do believe that certain groups of people form genetic clusters. Nevertheless, I don't think that "race" the genetic cluster and "race" the social concept are that much intertwined. Of the 4 major racial groups in America, there are two that very obviously don't cluster (Asians and Hispanics): this somehow is ignored by both pro and anti DEI sides.
In a world in which DEI efforts are successful, the current races would just become non-sensical, in the same way in which considering Irish and Italians non-white has become non-sensical today.
