The Culture is boring. If everyone is just having sex, producing drugs from their brain, and making art all the time, there is a lot of value being left on the table in the modes of experience they could be having.
the impression i get from the novels is that there are plenty of stories to tell—even books to write—about the ‘hoi polloi’ of the culture. plenty of local drama, gossip, events. gambling, sport, spectacle.
Banks does not focus on these characters. and indeed treats them only in aggregate, as a sort of background noise. but these characters are not bored, or even that boring—it’s just: their stories are more like earth stories. the series, after all, tells the history of the culture; these people are not therein meaningful players.
the same is true here on earth though: if all goes according to plan, i will not warrant even a footnote in the history books. but i don’t find my life ‘boring’—quite the opposite! it’s easily one of the top ten most interesting lives, from my perspective!
It may be worth noting that the typical Culture citizen seems to freely choose to die after a few centuries. This suggests they’ve run out of things they want to do in life fairly quickly.
I feel like I honestly diverge with Iain M. Banks’ model of people’s minds regarding the self termination question. I think there is massive inertia wrt to taking the action to die which would mean many people would just continue by default.
It’s possible that there’s some worldbuilding element that I missed regarding this.
Every person and pursuit we are told of is boring in comparison to what they could be and could become. Sports and gossip? For eternity? That’s utopia?
Sure humans love sports and gossip and I’d love to partake in some. But there are better sports and better gossip and better everything than the culture indulges in. The culture is boring, as though their ambitions were locked in when the Minds were created millenia ago.
Barely twenty-two, famed scholastic overachiever since the age of three, voted Most Luscious Student by her last five University years and breaker of more hearts on Phage Rock than anybody since her legendary great-great-great-grandmother, had been summarily dragged away from her graduation ball by the drone Churt Lyne.
this person is winning, and in style. their life is not boring.
i get your point (and agree!) that they ‘should’ be dissatisfied with the infinite-highschool-beauty-contest planet. it is not the game i would choose to play. but: what do you do with them when it is the one that they choose? some people want simple things.
The examples that you gave of drama don’t seem like particularly interesting things to me, and seem similar to the lowest grade forms of entertainment that we have today, if anything maybe less. I think art and cultural entertainment today are some of the highest forms, and those do exist in the culture, but a big part of the appeal of art is that has teeth, that it actually criticises something. This isn’t shown to be much the case in the Culture.
But moreover, I can easily imagine worlds that are vastly more interesting even within the constraints of the Culture itself that it doesn’t explore. For example, each GSV could represent completely different worlds of experience to its inhabitants, plus a vastly richer digital realm, packed with people competing over invented metrics such as what we see in MMOs today, or people creating vast LARP battles, or recreating interesting moments and scenes from history, or engaging in decades long simulated games with things like simulated magic facilitated by advanced technology.
This is just what I can think of in a few minutes, but there should be enormous numbers more kinds of different experiences available, as well as quite strong convergence to particular sets of values within the Culture, such that the final result seems overall somewhat less diverse even than the modern United States, letalone modern Earth as a whole today.
the impression i get from the novels is that there are plenty of stories to tell—even books to write—about the ‘hoi polloi’ of the culture. plenty of local drama, gossip, events. gambling, sport, spectacle.
Banks does not focus on these characters. and indeed treats them only in aggregate, as a sort of background noise. but these characters are not bored, or even that boring—it’s just: their stories are more like earth stories. the series, after all, tells the history of the culture; these people are not therein meaningful players.
the same is true here on earth though: if all goes according to plan, i will not warrant even a footnote in the history books. but i don’t find my life ‘boring’—quite the opposite! it’s easily one of the top ten most interesting lives, from my perspective!
It may be worth noting that the typical Culture citizen seems to freely choose to die after a few centuries. This suggests they’ve run out of things they want to do in life fairly quickly.
And that they for mysterious reasons don’t indulge in the mind engineering or adventurousness needed to prevent such quick boredom.
I feel like I honestly diverge with Iain M. Banks’ model of people’s minds regarding the self termination question. I think there is massive inertia wrt to taking the action to die which would mean many people would just continue by default.
It’s possible that there’s some worldbuilding element that I missed regarding this.
Every person and pursuit we are told of is boring in comparison to what they could be and could become. Sports and gossip? For eternity? That’s utopia?
Sure humans love sports and gossip and I’d love to partake in some. But there are better sports and better gossip and better everything than the culture indulges in. The culture is boring, as though their ambitions were locked in when the Minds were created millenia ago.
this person is winning, and in style. their life is not boring.
i get your point (and agree!) that they ‘should’ be dissatisfied with the infinite-highschool-beauty-contest planet. it is not the game i would choose to play. but: what do you do with them when it is the one that they choose? some people want simple things.
The examples that you gave of drama don’t seem like particularly interesting things to me, and seem similar to the lowest grade forms of entertainment that we have today, if anything maybe less. I think art and cultural entertainment today are some of the highest forms, and those do exist in the culture, but a big part of the appeal of art is that has teeth, that it actually criticises something. This isn’t shown to be much the case in the Culture.
But moreover, I can easily imagine worlds that are vastly more interesting even within the constraints of the Culture itself that it doesn’t explore. For example, each GSV could represent completely different worlds of experience to its inhabitants, plus a vastly richer digital realm, packed with people competing over invented metrics such as what we see in MMOs today, or people creating vast LARP battles, or recreating interesting moments and scenes from history, or engaging in decades long simulated games with things like simulated magic facilitated by advanced technology.
This is just what I can think of in a few minutes, but there should be enormous numbers more kinds of different experiences available, as well as quite strong convergence to particular sets of values within the Culture, such that the final result seems overall somewhat less diverse even than the modern United States, letalone modern Earth as a whole today.