I can’t remember where I read it, but IIRC Banks himself once said in an interview that the Culture was communist. I’d describe the resource allocation as democratic anarcho-communism (AKA libertarian-communism) run by technocrats (Minds). It’s also shown that, in addition to the mainstream Culture, there are offshoot Cultures made up of Minds and Culture citizens who decided to do things differently.
Except the Minds are required by custom (enforced by the prospect of ostracism from the mainstream Culture) to obey the democratic will of their citizens. On the other hand, it’s heavily hinted in Excession and less heavily in The State of the Art that the Minds are capable of modeling their citizens’ choices well enough to guess the outcome of votes. On the gripping hand, the ethos prevailing among the Minds would seem to discourage socially engineering the outcome even though, and arguably because, they clearly could.
I dunno. Musk comes off more as space cadet than plain greedy. Didn’t he advocate for universal basic income?
Seriously? The climate change metaphor is so dense you could chip Valyrian steel with it.
I’d argue it’s less a philosophy/ethos than a meta-philosophy. Existential nihilism in particular doesn’t say you shouldn’t believe in anything, but that no values are objectively true.
The show that really put them on the map was Transparent (with Jeffrey Tambour) which won a slew of awards and lots of viewers; since then they’ve also done well with Man in the High Castle. Their kids’ programming, such as Tumble Leaf, has been popular as well.
It’s not the CGI that will make or break the series, it’s the writing and direction. Personally, I feel like Phlebas is one of the worst starts to a possible Culture extended series (which must be pencilled in), partly for the fact that it’s a critique of the Culture, and partly because the protagonist is not sympathetic in a TV-friendly way and comes to a sad, bad end.
When I called them the ultimate politburo, I was only half joking. As you point out, they could if they wanted to but are restrained by their own ethics. I suspect the Minds handle logistics mainly because they are so good at it that everyone just expects them to do it. So yeah, the Minds are like some sort of ideal ultimate politburo who do the job because that’s what they do best, not because they like having power.
Thankfully you can build a whole series without shining too bright a light on this. We just want to see Horza get into one scrape after another whilst chasing the McGuffin Mind, wondering if he and the lovely lady from Special Circumstances will end up landing in the sack or remain nemeses, and watch cool CGI things like how the Culture blows up an entire orbital with the power of the Grid.
I imagine Mind voices ranging all over the spectrum. Remember the one with the giant bush-babyoid avatar? That must have had a very sickly “cute” voice.
I think if there is a philosophy, it’s about power, how wielding it is always problematic (either distorting of reality or making people power hungry). It’s also about how people will very easily be distracted from real problems (in this case, from the situation north of the wall) by more petty attempts to hang onto political power.
Exactly. CGI being key is an idea of which the Star Wars prequels should have thoroughly disabused us. CGI is nice and can make a show better, but it cannot make a bad show good.
Tragedy is harder to sell these days (in fiction a anyway), but there’s still a market for it. Audiences haven’t been totally Disneyfied.
Personally I’d like to see them start with The Player of Games. It’s a lot more accessible and the plot is much more linear. Still, I’m cautiously excited.
Amazon, please oh please do not fuck this up!
I guess, but whereas a scarcity-based politburo starts with the assumption that something should not be provided or allowed unless they see a reason to, the Minds start from the assumption that everything should be provided or allowed unless they see a reason not to.
I’ll be interested to see how they depict the Megaships of Vavatch. And it will be interesting to see how faithfully they depict Damage. Even for today’s audiences, it’s a pretty grim game.
To those that haven’t read Ken McLeod’s work and are interested in the politics of Banks, you should know that they were friends from school and clearly had many, many (probably drunken) discussions about politics which inform both their books. I’m pretty sure that some of the characters in MacLeod’s Fall Revolution books are thinly disguised strawmen of Banks.
I’m surprised that the image of the books isn’t a hyperlink to Amazon where you can buy the books. Now I have to go to all the work of finding them myself. On Amazon.
Actually, now that I think about it, most of them take place mostly outside the Culture, and all of them are a critique of it. Which makes sense, since the whole point of the Culture is that most people are perfectly happy being absolutely safe and fulfilled in every conceivable way and only a few malcontents need to venture out into the grim awful non-Culture parts of the universe for some cheap thrills.
I guess that’s pretty obvious, but I hadn’t thought about it in quite those terms before. Anyway, I guess we’ll find out if they can pull it off. I’m not optimistic but I am hopeful.
My heads-up display is showing a field of blinking amber warning lights over this. There are a lot of elements of the Culture books that just can’t be explained visually, and I’m very concerned that the attempt will do violence to the way I picture and think about it.
There’s maybe five or six Amazon shows that I’ve actually seen mentioned anywhere, including Transparent and Man in the High Castle. But they seem to have many times more than that, and with some well-known actors, too, so it’s actually surprising I’d never seen them mentioned anywhere. Though that may have less to do with their quality and more to do with the “peak television” problem. Even people in the industry seem unaware of what’s being made these days.
