It gets really intricate and bleak towards the second half.

If anyone's interested in the correlation between spell effects and forcing movement out of them, please check out this question

Sort of like torture porn: "here are 40,000 tiny details to get hopeless and depressed about that are all bleak and dreary"

@Carcer did you read the whole thing?

hm

I have read all of the Culture novels, yes

I'm not actually sure whether a decent GM AI would be that intractable challenge using modern methods if we restricted the problem a bit

The whole ending of Consider Phlebas was so bleak.

yeah, that was a bit of a grim ending

the whole second half, and especially the last quarter or so.

that part with the cannibal culture, ugh.

it's like he spent a few days thinking of the most disturbing imagery possible.

@Akira_Kurusu BTW, new questions posted are pushed to a feed in chat (that dropdown up top), so advertising your questions probably isn't nessecary. You're perfectly allowed to, but it's not like 5e questions don't typically get enough attention anyway

so Banks was of the view that the utopic bits of the universe are obviously going to be boring

but exactly how grim varies between novels

@Carcer what did you think of it?

I enjoyed all of them

The first 10% of the novel was really impressive.

Then after that it got a bit "scifi generic"

Then at the 50% mark or so it got really, really grim.

hm

I guess I should give the other novels a try.

some of them are lighter

For what's supposed to be "just scifi", it had some pretty sharp barbs.

also hey there @Akira_Kurusu, welcome to the RPG.SE lair :)

Use of Weapons is a bit less bleak for the protagonists but the alien society that prominently features has significant unpleasantness

whoops no

I meant Player of Games

No spoilers please

okay

I think the thing is how realistic it is.

Maybe that's his major talent.

Writing about totally outlandish stuff in a hyper-realistic way.

Consider Phlebas feels very, very real.

I guess that's sorta remarkable in a way.

Most scifi books don't get to you no matter what they do because they don't feel real at all.

Then Banks is able to make even a simple scene get to you because it feels so real.

And even though it involves weird aliens and far-beyond-human-intelligence Minds and what not.

@Carcer Amazon is producing a Culture show btw

I've found a lot of authors are able to do that. Recently I've been deeply engaged by the emotional realism of Arkady Martine, Nnedi Okorafor, NK Jemisin, Aliette de Bodard, and Martha Wells.

@JinLong I'm not sure it's something that will really translate well to screen, but you never know.

Rivers Solomon is so intense that I'm taking An Unkindness of Ghosts very very slowly.

@Carcer why? I think it translates pretty well. Most of what happens in Consider Phlebas is pretty visual.

Not a lot happens that can't be presented in images or sounds.

I've read a lot of M. Banks (i.e. the science fictional books), but I drifted away as I aged.

@JinLong mm. It has been some time since I read Consider Phlebas. My impression might be a bit skewed because the later novels tend to feature Minds as perspective characters much more often.

Interesting.

Consider Phlebas can be made into a masterpiece of dark scifi.

An antidote for all the recent Starwars flaws.

I think one of the factors that pushed me off was when his books started leaning more towards author tracts (around State of the Art maybe?).

You make me want to read more of the The Culture :D

Also, character-wise, I remember being really impressed by Sharrow as a kid, but finding her more meh on a re-read.

Which if funny since I had to really force myself to finish Consider Phlebas.

What still is cool about the Culture was that it went really out there with the tech and how it shapes society.

Towards the end it made me feel physically ill.

@BESW that looks interesting

But it has the downside that basically all stories happen outside or on the fringe or under fringe circumstances.

Well the fringe is what's interesting in life.

At least in scifi :)

@Carcer Both @trogdor and @Ash have read An Unkindness of Ghosts all the way through, and can speak to it more accurately. But I really like what I've been able to read so far.

@vicky_molokh well, as said - utopia is boring, who wants to read about a bunch of post-humans living their perfect post-scarcity lives?

(This is in some way the same issue I've found with Eclipse Phase: it built this beautiful world but spends most of the gaming time in ways that make it impossible to explore it.)

@Carcer Hedonism treadmills, vying for the things that are still scarce . . . there's place for interesting stuff in there.

If you want a good novel about boring utopia (dystopia?), pick up Brave New World

The world we live in is an eutopia compared to the stone age, and yet it can have stories set within it.

Oh Unkindness of Ghosts yeah

Just because a setting seems eutopian compared to a lower-tech setting doesn't means it's actually flawless eutopian.

it's a little depressing, but it's also uplifting

@vicky_molokh most of the stories set in our world are about where it fails to satisfy, i.e. fails as a utopia

practically all, actually

like, the circumstances of this ship, and the society built on it,.... are not great

but the main character is amazing, and is worth the read

@vicky_molokh well, sure, but the premise of the Culture is that they're genuinely post-scarcity and run by superintelligences. Culture citizens who get bored of the culture go outside the culture in order to have other experiences.

very good NAT rep too

I can't recall a single story about contemporary or future society that only focuses on positive, utopic themes.

@Carcer What is scarce changes. Today a car may be scarce. In the Culture, planets and reputation are still scarce. A matter of degree and type of scarcity.

planets are not scarce

Maybe I should've been more precise.

More in the 'I want to rule my own planet' kind of scarcity.

ah

@JinLong Cosy mysteries, romantic comedies, sports stories - there are lots and lots of things that can be told even in a vastly more technologically advanced setting where nobody ever goes hungry.

@vicky_molokh hunger is just one type of need. In RomComs for instance, there is scarcity of romantic mate.

I think in the Culture as Banks imagined it that's the kind of thing people deal with by being able to play fully immersive virtual reality games where they can just do that.

the typical romcom is about someone pursuing a love object which is unavailable and uncertain.

@vicky_molokh yeah, there's room for that, it's just not so much the kinds of stories that Banks wants to write.

@JinLong Exactly. And if one seeks 'the real thing', as many people are inclined to, just throwing more credits at the problem doesn't solve it for everyone.

@Carcer Fair enough in terms of what he seemed inclined to write about. But the Player of Games' premise itself was an example of the things I'd find interesting about the Culture.

Well, you're getting into some fundamental questions of what is a utopia

BTW, that's exactly what Brave New World is about.

A world in which all forms of pleasure are readily available.

The author is trying to show that such world is in fact dystopic.

On the simpler level, romcoms, mystery novels, and sport stories all happen in a world that is not utopic.

So they're not really different from any story about scarcity and conflict.

Romcom: one or more people fighting for a scarce romantic mate.

Mystery: struggling to uncover an unknown.

Sports: striving to beat other people/teams for some scarce reward (championship etc)

I think we're getting into fundamental questions of what is a scarcity, and what happens to scarcity as a whole when specific scarcities become abundancies.

In all these cases, the situation is imperfect and often in fact a zero-sum game for its participants.

So the premise is not utopic in any of these.

You can claim that our current settings are far better than they were in the stone age, but they are not a proper utopia.

In fact you brought some good examples of places our society fails to meet the standard of a utopia.

@vicky_molokh abundancy brings its own issues, like matching products to requirements :)

OK, now we did get into the matter of what counts as an eutopia.

Sure.

I think there's a second-stage question of how utopia itself can be dissatisfying, which is what Huxley writes about.

But here we're still at the first stage: settings that are not utopic.

I also don't think our current society is necessarily that much better than presumed ancient society.

There's some discussion of it in anthropology, by the way.

The perception that for instance hunter-gatherers were always hungry and deprived isn't necessarily factual.

There's basically two types of scarcities: absolute and relative. Absolute ones are solvable by availability of more on-demand assets/resources. Relative are not because they're always compared to the total (e.g. there's only one champion of the universe in a given type of sports, no matter how large the universe).

@vicky_molokh right, that's a decent point.

Your "relative" scarcity is an example of why utopia itself is impossible as a condition that satisfies everyone fully and always.

@vicky_molokh "absolute" scarcity per your definition is also very, very limited.

It's basically, what? food and shelter?

@JinLong Food, shelter, many types entertainment, absolute self-improvement, knowledge . . .

Once you get above food and shelter, your premise starts getting shaky.

Entertainment is a good example of something you can't just "throw credits at".

Not sure what "absolute self-improvement" means.

@JinLong The rate at which computer games come out is greater than I can consume.

Sure, but you can conceivably get bored of the premises that they all offer.

Absolute self-improvement means improvements of the self that are measured in absolute terms, rather than relative to others.

For instance, you can get bored with RTS. That means no matter how many RTSes they make, you won't derive much entertainment of them.

@JinLong I can get bored. But games can get better in absolute terms, reducing boredom. This is unlike the entertainment of relative achievement (e.g. becoming the best at X).

I don't know about that.

Games can get better, but in reality, new ideas in games are rare.

Also, you are not a machine.

@JinLong I may get bored with RTS, but the problem can still be solved by more games coming out in more genres that I'm not bored with. This is unlike the relative-ladder scarcities.

So you can get bored even if games get better.

Yeah, I disagree with the assumption that the process is mechanical.

Better games => I am entertained.

Humans are more complex than that.

For instance, have you ever tried watching a lot of movies in a marathon?

vicky mentioned the hedonism treadmill earlier

Right, that's a good example.

It's basically possible for there to be enough variety and quality in games to satisfy every gamer. It's not possible for everyone to become the champion of the universe at StarCraft IV.

Eventually the very concept of watching a film becomes old and boring.

> It's basically possible for there to be enough variety and quality in games to satisfy every gamer.

Right, I disagree with that.

Treadmills are a thing, but there's no law of nature that makes it impossible for improvements to be faster than the treadmill.

That's Brave New World by the way.

In BNW, most people are satisfied with their utopia.

Huxley explores those who aren't.

I can also mention The Matrix in this context.

But the laws of nature make it impossible for all ten out of ten people to be better than all others at Game X.

Sure, but again, I think you're ignoring that 100% of humans will not all be satisfied by those games.

Also, the hedonic treadmill process is recursive.

So once your mind wraps around a process that is rewarding, it will seek "a new level".

It's actually not an easy problem at all to outpace it.

Especially for active minds.

Games are actually a good example for this.

Let's say you throw an FPS at someone fairly intelligent.

Eventually they'll figure out the main reward loop and stop enjoying it.

Then you'll need to throw in some very clever twists to keep them engaged.

true, you can't expect the kind of people who understand rick and morty to stay satisfied with anything for long

That required solid grasp of theoretical physics, of course :)

Anyway, you'll have to keep coming up with fresh ideas, and it will become harder and harder.

@JinLong For the record, I don't think eutopias are easy.

Well, the question is whether they're even possible.

But I do expect anything a Culture Mind can produce to be trivially enough for a human mind to deal with for a lifetime.

(Deal with = have fun etc.)

I mean, you don't even need a Culture Mind.

Some very bright people were occupied with mathematical or scientific inquiry before we even had calculators.

However, that is not utopia.

@JinLong to an extent I think that's a problem soluble by breadth. There are enough different things to do that even if you get bored with one thing there's a whole different domain of new experience you can go have instead and there's enough of those that you can't realistically find yourself unsatisfied with nothing you could conceivably do that's still fun

@Carcer potentially, though people can get bored / dissatisfied with entire categories of things.

@JinLong but there are so many categories of things

Sure. I think people can keep themselves engaged if they wish, but notice how that already implies intention on the part of the person.

So some people will engage with video games, puzzles, etc

But some people will get dejected and depressed or seek god or whatever

one of the significant minor characters in The Hydrogen Sonata is an individual who has lived for a very long time and appears to basically spend his time drifting from obsession to obsession, he utterly dedicates himself to something for a few decades and then goes and does something else

ah, I need to sleep

Yeah, I guess my counterpoint to @vicky_molokh is that utopia isn't simply a matter of resources.

We had people thousands of years ago who felt very engaged and happy in their pursuits before there were any computers or games

Because they could philosophize and theorize and debate and draw geometric figures on the sand with a stick.

@JinLong A lot depends on the definition. Would you count Omelas as an example of an eutopia, or merely an utopia?

And we have people who would be absolutely miserable nowadays when they can play a game designed for maximum engagement on their 50" 60fps 5k monitor

That is so cheap almost anyone can buy.

@vicky_molokh I haven't read the story (I just know the plot), but I don't think it's possible to keep everyone happy mechanically

you can have 0 realistic scarcity and some folks will still be happy

and we also have folks who are mumbling "just one more upvote, please...!" as they are only one upvote away from repcapping on a Stack where getting reputation is a struggle

@Shalvenay the only thing worse than being one upvote away from repcapping is being like twenty upvotes over repcapping

Well, yeah. That's another example of people making themselves miserable in a situation where all their basic needs are provided.

@vicky_molokh here's an idea: what if some people choose to find reasons to be unhappy, so no matter the 99,999 great engaging entertainment and shiny things you throw at them, they'll find that 1 thing that can make them miserable

It's like the Garden of Eden story, where Adam and Eve choose that one thing in their perfect world that they were told would make them miserable.

@JinLong sometimes that sure seems to be true

@JinLong If they choose so, can this be held against the utopia in question as a reason to disqualify it from being a true eutopia?

Because I think probably it shouldn't.

@JinLong sounds like a very maladjusted thing to do. Would you like some free therapy from a superintelligence to help you with that?

What's the saying, 'Can bring a horse to water but can't make it drink'?

Right, so eutopia is impossible in that sense