> I've read all of the Culture novels and do enjoy them. However, I can recognize it as a single-person utopia, which IMO makes it inherently unrealistic. I mean that it's a utopia which exists entirely in the mind of one man. That means it has never had to face the issues of dealing with real people and real problems. Assumptions and presumptions that person has about how society works and why people do things are encoded into it. Many of these types of assumptions have been found wanting when they go up against real people. It's even more of an issue with sci-fi, where you can make up any technology you want, and have it work any way you want.
Exactly: the "utopia" works because its backstory and mechanics are a series of biased non-sequiturs (of varying levels of audacity, often conflating goal with outcome).
Its a pretty safe to assume that almost nothing in a speculative world would actually work the way it's depicted, and forgetting that can sometimes screw people up (I'm reminded about the John Rogers qip about Atlas Shrugged and Lord of the Rings).
Exactly: the "utopia" works because its backstory and mechanics are a series of biased non-sequiturs (of varying levels of audacity, often conflating goal with outcome).
Its a pretty safe to assume that almost nothing in a speculative world would actually work the way it's depicted, and forgetting that can sometimes screw people up (I'm reminded about the John Rogers qip about Atlas Shrugged and Lord of the Rings).