I am curious what aspects of sci-fi utopias seem unappealing to you. Something like ‘The Culture’ for instance doesn’t have any downsides I can think of.
The possibility of mastering some niche thing that has some genuine demand so that me doing it will be the best way to satisfy the demand. Even better if it involves coming up with something that hasn’t ever been done before.
I’m not sure what you mean, either in-universe or in the real world.
In-universe, the Culture isn’t all powerful. Periodically they have to fight a real war, and there are other civilizations and higher powers. There are also any number of ways and places where Culture citizens can go in order to experience danger and/or primitivism. Are you just saying that you wouldn’t want to live out your life entirely within Culture habitats?
In the real world… I am curious what preference for the fate of human civilization you’re expressing here. In one of his novels, Olaf Stapledon writes of the final and most advanced descendants of Homo sapiens (inhabiting a terraformed Neptune) that they have a continent set aside as “the Land of the Young”, a genuinely dangerous wilderness area where the youth can spend the first thousand years of their lives, reproducing in miniature the adventures and the mistakes of less evolved humanity, before they graduate to “the larger and more difficult world of maturity”. But Stapledon doesn’t suppose that his future humanity is at the highest possible level of development and has nothing but idle recreations to perform. They have serious and sublime civilizational purposes to pursue (which are beyond the understanding of mere humans like ourselves), and in the end they are wiped out by an astronomical cataclysm. How’s that sound to you?
It sounds like Stapledon’s scenario still has grown-up humans able to work on some sort of cutting edge stuff for their civilization. This is very different from the Culture, where humans are basically stuck as housecats and any new stuff is complex enough that only the Minds can tackle it.
I am curious what aspects of sci-fi utopias seem unappealing to you. Something like ‘The Culture’ for instance doesn’t have any downsides I can think of.
Seemed kind of boring to live in to me.
We didn’t get much pitch for the projects and challenges people in the culture do.
But yeah it did seem boring. At least in comparison to the challenge and purpose of Contact and SC.
I think that’s a failure of alignment in world and a necessity of writing for a broad audience from the outside.
What do you want from life, that the Culture doesn’t offer?
The possibility of mastering some niche thing that has some genuine demand so that me doing it will be the best way to satisfy the demand. Even better if it involves coming up with something that hasn’t ever been done before.
There’s a reason that Player of Games is about Contact and not (just) board games. However, Contact cannot exist WITHIN the Culture.
To answer more explicitly, I want to explore worlds where the wildness of nature has not been restrained.
I’m not sure what you mean, either in-universe or in the real world.
In-universe, the Culture isn’t all powerful. Periodically they have to fight a real war, and there are other civilizations and higher powers. There are also any number of ways and places where Culture citizens can go in order to experience danger and/or primitivism. Are you just saying that you wouldn’t want to live out your life entirely within Culture habitats?
In the real world… I am curious what preference for the fate of human civilization you’re expressing here. In one of his novels, Olaf Stapledon writes of the final and most advanced descendants of Homo sapiens (inhabiting a terraformed Neptune) that they have a continent set aside as “the Land of the Young”, a genuinely dangerous wilderness area where the youth can spend the first thousand years of their lives, reproducing in miniature the adventures and the mistakes of less evolved humanity, before they graduate to “the larger and more difficult world of maturity”. But Stapledon doesn’t suppose that his future humanity is at the highest possible level of development and has nothing but idle recreations to perform. They have serious and sublime civilizational purposes to pursue (which are beyond the understanding of mere humans like ourselves), and in the end they are wiped out by an astronomical cataclysm. How’s that sound to you?
It sounds like Stapledon’s scenario still has grown-up humans able to work on some sort of cutting edge stuff for their civilization. This is very different from the Culture, where humans are basically stuck as housecats and any new stuff is complex enough that only the Minds can tackle it.