"Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces."
Kurt Schiller wrote a whole piece in Bloodknife literally 4 years ago about just how goofy the idea of an Amazon Culture Novel show is, and I think it does a great job of explaining what the general Deal with these stories is, and why I'm skeptical anything Amazon produced could possibly do it justice. I guess the nice thing about starting with Consider Phlebas is you can paint the Culture as a spooky outsider to the main action instead of just a place people live.
I'm not kidding when I say I consider the Culture to be aspirational and inspirational, though. Iain M Banks's notion that there's an inevitability to the Culture as soon as you have intelligent spacefaring civilizations is way more persuasive to me than all the Great Filter, Dark Forest nonsense people throw around as paranoid, ideologically unexamined "explanations" for the Fermi Paradox.
also, I bring up Omelas not just because it's topical but because the Culture novels, like Le Guin's own The Dispossessed, feels like a way better response to Omelas than most of the pretty cringe "responses" people seem addicted to writing. (oh hey, look at that, Bloodknife also has a piece about that.) people always overlook the point of Le Guin's repeated question, "can you intellectually accept this utopia without some dystopian cost?" which is to challenge the limitations of our own imagination. it's significant she takes the time to say of course people in Omelas smoke weed and fuck, we're not puritans for goodness sake. the Culture's blithe inclusion of drug glands, sex enhancing genetic mutations, and the ability to fully alter sex with a conscious or unconscious thought feels like a way more interesting space to dig into than a lot of the replies which basically amount to "if I was in Omelas I'd just fix the problem." like, no you wouldn't lmao, because you're IN OMELAS NOW and you're not FIXING THE PROBLEM you're writing a fantasy story about how you WOULD if you were in a different, fictional Omelas. or, you're writing about how you'd safeguard utopia by stabbing children with spears for thought crimes, which, I mean, I suppose if your other primary activity is socially murdering trans women online.....
anyway the point is it requires bravery to undertake Le Guin's challenge to imagine even troubled utopias where people have to live, rather than fairly straightforward dystopias where you can just engage the different fantasy of blowing everything up. in part because it means affirming our desires, even for things like sex, drugs, easy sex change, nontraditional families, a fluidity of body form, a fluid relationship to the passing of time... and if Banks and Le Guin also keep looking *onward and outward* from their utopias, that's just, like, being a committed communist or anarchist. the anarchists in The Dispossessed struggle with the tyranny of structurelessness; the communists of the Culture split over the morality of deliberately going to war against an expansionist fascist power (with the Peace Faction never fully reintegrating), or divide over whether the Culture should remain relatively stable or absorb new ideas from outside (Zetetic Elench ships and fleets just disappear or are subsumed by paperclip maximizers and the like sometimes, and their civilization as a whole sees that as preferable to a state of incuriosity).
all of which is just really hard for me to imagine in an amazon prime show lol, like there's a whole tradition of radical leftist thought here and I just struggle to envision how something amazon produced could possibly fit into that thought without explicitly just arguing that Amazon should be immediately nationalized and turned into the logistical engine of a planned economy, and Jeff Bezos exiled to an island somewhere with a slap drone to make sure he can't do counterrevolution or eat any more poor iguanas. whatever, it's just gonna turn out to be about "AI" and "postscarcity", and someone's gonna buy shit with "credits" and that'll be the end of it. stupid. waste of everyone's time. go read Player of Games instead. also I wrote all this up instead of working on my 8 different in-progress articles so if you found any of it useful or edifying go throw me some money in patreon.
