/lit/ - Literature

>>I'm surely not the only one appalled by the Culture novels, am I?

Yes, you are. You're probably a Republican as well, aren't you? Go back and cuddle your copy of Atlas Shrugged, faggot.

>>1313161

I take it that Consider Phlebas is your favourite book in the series then, huh?

>he hates the Culture

>>1313176

No surprises there.

Seriously, I find the Culture repugnant on every level. If I was plucked up tomorrow and offered a position similar to Cheradenine Zakalwe in "Use of Weapons", I'd take one of their fancy-dan discombobulating megapistols and top myself right then and there. The Culture is a world that I do not want to live in.

Besides, they probably scanned my brain the second they clapped eyes on me. They can grow a clone with all my mental and physical characteristics, just with a few helpful tweaks to make him compliant, to ease things along. What do they need me for?

>>1313176

Not OP, but I empathised a lot with Horza in that book, and felt for his struggle. Trying to resist the Culture is like trying to resist the tide, the enormity of it is as crushing as its ships.

There's some really, really bad sex in the Culture books. It's toe-curlingly embarrassing in places.

It's a shame, because Banks can be quite evocative with his description... but when people bump uglies it's like hearing a phlegmy uncle breathe heavily over your shoulder.

>Iain Banks's novels could be criticised for their lack of drama, with any problem overcome by a scale of magical technowank that would make the writers of ST: Voyager blush

Really? Like when? The actions and abilities of minds and characters are usually well-defined before they are cleverly used. Otherwise the prissy compassion of Culture Minds means plot points often rest very much on the decisions of individual human characters - giving his machines ethics means the story can still be centred around humans or human-likes in a world where they've in some sense become historically irrelevant.

That irrelevance is something the books frequently signpost - I can't imagine how you missed it. As you yourself note, it doesn't necessarily matter: often what's interesting is how characters react to events outside their control (Zakalwe's defeats, most of Vatueil's battles in Surface Detail). And Banks is open about the dangers and complexities of the society he proposes. 'The Player of Games', for instance, is very skeptical about the possibility for humans to lead meaningful lives in a society run by machines. Did you actually read 'Excession', in which the sudden appearance of a genuinely scarce resource throws the whole supposed utopia off balance, and in which a ship Mind cooly informs one character that the small, unassuming device she admires in Its torture museum is in fact a neural lace - a thing implanted in almost every Culture citizen.

>is know for being quite lefty

find somebody intelligent who isn't lefty.

Also, I can't square your facts with the books themselves. What kind of "cage" would let its citizens leave at any time without any penalty? What kind of dystopia would admit any citizen at any time simply for saying "I'm part of the Culture", or permit them to be half-Culture, sort-of-Culture, not-really-Culture, lapsed-Culture, eccentric-Culture, or anything else? What kind of prison society fails to imprison murderers and fails to execute war criminals? What kind of evil God CHOOSES not to exercise its omniscience by refusing to look inside the minds of its worshippers? Or feels the compassion for them that the Lasting Damage so clearly demonstrates by the end of 'Look to Windward'?

I suppose you could claim that actually Minds are reading brains all the time and the Meatfucker's ostracism is just one huge SC conspiracy. But that seems a bit unwarranted.

>>1313211

>>Really? Like when?

In "Look To Windward", for one. The Minds won't not read your thoughts - except when they do, natch.

>>Really? Like when?

In "Look to Windward", for one. The Minds won't read your thoughts - except when they do, natch.

herp derp

omg, space opera not being super-realistic shit? who'd have thought?

>>1313216

>>What kind of "cage" would let its citizens leave at any time without any penalty? What kind of dystopia would admit any citizen at any time simply for saying "I'm part of the Culture", or permit them to be half-Culture, sort-of-Culture, not-really-Culture, lapsed-Culture, eccentric-Culture, or anything else?

Not OP, but I can see the point he's making about the Culture being Kafkaesque - that quote is only half of the story. The society is illusory - every action you've made has been calculated, gauged, and accounted for. It doesn't matter how peripheral from the Culture you are, they'll claim you eventually. I got the sense of seeping decadence from it.

>>1313235
>seeping decadence

Huh? I don't think any of the Culture books make a secret of the society's complete decadence.

My only problem with the series is the suspension of disbelief regarding super-intelligent computers actually allowing humanoids to happily live those sorts of lives.

>>1313235

>In "Look to Windward", for one. The Minds won't read your thoughts - except when they do, natch.

Are you referring to when the Lasting Damage reads Quilian's mind - with his consent? I thought you were talking about unbelievable deus ex machinas. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing you mean.

>>1313235

Well the liberty to live your life the way you like and have special arrangements made for you if necessary isn't exactly 'illusory'. But I see what you mean. Yet isn't that just a characteristic of any godly AI? It will always have enough processing power to predict what you do to a reasonable degree. Living within its information embrace is concomitant with its existence. Foucault 101.

Besides, there's every indication that millions of people in-universe do indeed live out their lives beyond the mainstream Culture and are never necessarily 'claimed' or sucked in by schemes. But then perhaps some SC Mind always had the power to do so and just did not exercise it. This is of course the (deliberate) paradox at the heart of the whole thing - maximum liberty (which is most leftists' utopia) seems to require the existence of powers that could destroy all freedom were they ever used to that end.

Does the term Kafkaesque apply? I thought it referred to when things fundamentally make no sense, rather than when they are just very complicated and sometimes very well hidden.