Does sci-fi shape the future? Tech billionaires from Bill Gates to Elon Musk have often talked about the impact of novels they read as teens, from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" to Iain M. Banks' "Culture" series. Big Think's Namir Khaliq spoke to authors including Andy Weir, Lois McMaster Bujold, @cstross and @pluralistic about how much impact they think science fiction has had, or can have.
Seeing the official form title “Special Circumstances" on my NYS taxes and sniggering in #IainMBanks’ #TheCulture
(and for all its warts, ah if only we lived in that fully automated gay luxury space communism!! instead of manual labor cishet "luxury apartments" terrestrial hypercapitalism. I guess.)
so let me get this straight zeek; you claim to fight for spacenoid independence, yet correct me if im wrong, didnt you gas colonies inhabited by said spacenoids and drop them on to earth? crazy.
@trans_caracal@winter@Mondobizarrro@nyx@big_louse
The Culture series really reveals how cowardly sci-fi has been, both politically and in terms of actually imagining alternative systems (which is to say, politically).
Like it blew my mind when I realized The Player of Games was published at the height of the AIDS crisis. The protagonist is regarded as being weird for never having tried same sex or (built in) sex alteration. All his Culture friends are queer.
@bookstodon
“As a humanist, atheist, and socialist, he preferred to place his trust in techno-scientific development, rather than his faith in gods, or his capital in the market”
Joseph S. Norman on the legacy & utopianism of Iain M. Banks’s Culture series
@bookstodon
“Banks… envisions the overcoming of scarcity as the signal achievement of the civilization made by the Minds, and yet he focuses time and again on objects of unfulfilled desire”
—The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M Banks: Alan Jacobs on the price of bliss, in The New Atlantis Journal
@bookstodon
“Our strange wee country is as complex as any alien civilization, and getting it as right as Banks did in The Crow Road required every bit as much world-building skill as his Culture”
—“The Difference is Entirely One of Setting”: Simon Stephenson travels THE CROW ROAD
@bookstodon
Why has Banks’s Culture series – “a world where your Bezoses & your Musks are not just irrelevant, but actively sought out & disempowered” – garnered a billionaire fanbase?
Kurt Schiller writes in Blood Knife Magazine on what misreadings might attract Jeff Bezos & Elon Musk
“A little more than ten years after his death, we are experiencing a timely, double-pronged Banks bump. His 13 sci-fi books as Iain M Banks are being reissued this month with eye-catching new cover art […] Even more exciting: the recent publication of behind-the-curtain coffee table tome The Culture: The Drawings, collating his earliest conceptual designs for what would become his signature sci-fi creation.”
The Culture Drawings book is full of pages like this - all these raw worldbuilding thoughts and sketches lovingly scanned in and restored! Whether there's much that can actually be deciphered coherently is another matter, but it's kinda fascinating to see :) #TheCulture#IainMBanks#SciFi
“The novels of Iain M. Banks have forever changed the face of modern science fiction. His Culture books combine breathtaking imagination with exceptional storytelling, and have secured his reputation as one of the most extraordinary and influential writers in the genre”
Orbit Books are reissuing all of Iain M. Banks’s #ScienceFiction novels with new cover designs
The Hitchhiker’s Guide was famously written by correspondents like Ford Prefect. It wasn’t an #AI that made shit up based on some random sub-ether drivel. As a result, it was useful.
Curiously enough, an edition of The Guide that fell through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the executive board of X as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came”.
@Nickiquote Elon's whole thing is getting the asthetics of a SFF property, but missing the meaning. He has had the utter gall to name his barges after ships from #TheCulture too. #IainMBanks would loathe him, and The Culture would be giving him the #SpecialCircumstances#AfterlifeExpress treatment if they were real. He has just not an ounce of self awareness in him.
I'm telling you, he may drop in fancy sci-fi quotes but that doesn't mean he's actually read the texts or understood them.
He references Iain M Banks on his Space X drone ship but I bet his understanding of the Culture starts and ends with "lol, funny ship names, cool"
He is a fraud in every sense, no wonder Rishi Sunak adores him.
Delighted to hear from fine @orbitbooks crew that long-gestating project to bring The Culture drawings of the late, & still much-missed Iain M Banks to print, now has a November 2023 release.
"Faithfully reproduced from sketchbooks kept in the 1970s & 80s, these annotated original illustrations depict the ships, habitats, geography, weapons and language of Banks' Culture series of novels in incredible detail."