Collectivist Science Fiction: A Brief Look at Iain M. Banks’ ‘Culture’ and Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Ekumen’.
Kasper Ian McLeish
University of Bristol
What is Science Fiction? Anybody vaguely familiar with the genre, literary or cinematic, will be able to answer this question. However, in asking exactly what Science Fiction (hereafter: SF), this study will wade into the quagmire of literary analysis in its first chapter and come through the other side. The key terminology is Darko Suvin’s notion of the deictic register of SF, which serves to illuminate future possibilities through example. Using this insight, as well as the historical analysis of Science Fiction and the Narrative Form, this study will perform its own deictic explanation of the genre through close readings of Ursula Le Guin’s SF and the ‘Culture’ series of Iain M. Banks, found in chapters two and three. In doing so, I will seek to locate a particular utopian impulse within SF; one whose power lies in the imagination of alternative realities. Alternativity in SF, as will be shown in chapter 4, is not merely an exercise in escapism, but has the imaginative richness to challenge our notions of technology, enabling a future beyond capitalism, wage labour, and even material want. But only if we choose it. Ultimately, this investigation will highlight technology – the vehicle of SF’s philosophising – as a place of struggle in SF, enabling, but not guaranteeing, revolutionary transformation.
Introduction:
SF is a literary enigma. It has a lineage which resists easy categorisation – a great disappointment of the last century is the manner in which SF has evaded meaningful categorisation altogether, instead conceptualised as a commercial category and associated with juvenile, techno-fetishist indulgence. That is to say, the philosophic potentialities of SF, which I will be discussing at length, differ so greatly from the typical consumer experiences with the genre that it might not be unfair to chart it along the separate strands of SF-as-generic-element (relating to a range of narrative forms which might include SF tropes of faster-than-light travel, alien creatures, and so on) and SF-as-form. I make these distinctions not to reductively schematise the genres and forms in question but, significantly, to illuminate the epistemological mechanisms at play in the works of Iain M. Banks, Ursula Le Guin and other visionary SF writers. A vital, nuancing element of this debate is the fact that these concepts are not mutually exclusive by any means: formal SF can be categorised as a narrative approach which defamiliarises and extrapolates contemporary, usually scientific, trends into an imagined future, but this approach does not lose its efficacy from the inclusion of stereotypically science fictional elements – for example, the voyage across space, or contact with an alien species.
The tension between this perception of SF as simply a literary/ cinematic genre interested in technology and futurism, and the critical view that SF is a distinct formal category, helps to explain science fiction’s enigmatic position within contemporary discourse. I would like to begin this investigation by posing, perhaps somewhat pedantically, that the word ‘science’, as pertaining to SF, is misleading in contemporary contexts. In our modern age of unfettered technological expansion, science has become keenly associated with advancements in biochemistry, engineering and, in particular, computing. In the post-war boom of the 20th century, images of space exploration, interstellar colonisation and human-machine integration captured the imagination of the reading public, and understandably so. The fact that this type of advancement is the most visceral sign of our post-industrial era partly explains why the ‘science’ of SF is associated largely with technological development. That said, a complete understanding of SF as a narrative form requires the re-coupling of social to natural sciences; a viewpoint that might call for a (rather less catchy) rebranding of SF into ‘the fiction of innovation’.
Chapter 1: Literary Features of SF
Let us begin with Darko Suvin’s conception of SF:
“a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment”.[1]
The foundation of this definition is Suvin’s notion of “cognitive estrangement”; a term adapted from Brecht, who argued that estrangement in a narrative sense is the effect of defamiliarising an ordinary or well-understood subject such that it appears unfamiliar yet still recognisable. For Brecht the effect of defamiliarisation was linked in a peculiarly way to intellectual perception. The protagonist he was writing at the time of commenting on estrangement was his imagined Galileo, who “[with] that detached eye… observed a swinging chandelier. He was amazed by that pendulum motion as if he had not expected it… and this enabled him to come at some of the rules by which it was governed”. [2] Brecht’s sense that estrangement enables cognitive speculation is at the heart of Suvin’s theory of SF; a theory best explored through his comparison with other genres. Literary genres can be understood as either naturalistic, if they faithfully recreate empirical conditions of the author’s reality, or estranging, if they recreate these conditions in a way that is unfamiliar.[3] Generically, the inverse of estranging fiction can be understood as naturalistic fiction: narratives which seek to illuminate the human experience through “surfaces vouched for by human senses and by common sense”: this form is exemplified best in the contemporary novel.[4]
[1] Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (London: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 20-21.
[2] Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’, Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre 1850-1990, ed. by George W. Brant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 241.
[3] Suvin, p. 8.
[4] Suvin, p. 31.
Even with this introductory definition, it is clear that SF is estranging – it takes subject matter from the author’s empirical environment and, to a greater or lesser extent, defamiliarises it by rendering it at a spaciotemporal remove. Other literary genres share this property of estrangement, notably fantasy, Epic, and pastoral literature but, vitally, at different ontological removes. Fantasy, according to Suvin, derives from and alters the author’s environment into an external ontological zone – the fantasy world is either disconnected entirely from our own or connected supernaturally, as in C.S Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.[5] Folk stories, myth, and the religious tale operate at a temporal remove, in a kind of prehistoric ‘proto-time’ of gods and heroes; the events of these stories often lay out an explanatory groundwork for the phenomena of the author’s time. Suvin argues that fantasy, myth, and folk-tale are metaphysical genres, owing to their positive orientation between the physical world and their ethics. In these stories, physics (i.e. the natural world) privileges the protagonist’s journey in a closed ethical system. Odysseus, Beowulf, and even Milton’s Lucifer, are oriented towards a specific, epic, trajectory: their rise toward a particular conflict; their triumph and eventual failure, forms a moral and ethical cohesion which “den[ies] the autonomy of physics”.[6] In other words, we do not, as readers, fear that Beowulf might be suddenly felled by a stray arrow in an interjection of military realism half-way through the Odyssey. In just this way, while these genres are estranging, they are also ‘un-cognitive’ because their worlds and stories form a closed epistemology that, rather than question the nature of phenomena, seek to conclusively explain their essence. Suvin’s schematics of genre thus confirms his definition of SF: science fiction is estranging because its subject matter is rendered at a spaciotemporal remove, but it is also cognitive because it is not magically disconnected from our world and, just as in the novel, the physical dimension of the SF world does not privilege the ethical. Akin to Brecht’s Galileo, who achieves new insights from his defamiliarised gaze at the swinging pendulum, the defamiliarised world of an SF text enables readers to form interpretations which are, vitally, decoupled from the contextual reality of reader/author. Even more importantly, these interpretations have real-world cognitive implications because the estranged world of a SF text is adjacent, not external, to our reality, existing as a thought experiment to be judged on its internal consistency and interpretive relevance.
[5] Suvin, p. 8.
[6] Suvin, p. 32.
To assist this conception of SF as alienating yet familiar, external yet of-this-world, I want to draw on the work of David Roberts, Andrew Milner, and Peter Murphy, and their book Science Fiction and the Narrative Form. The three scholars predicate their own theory of SF on the ideas of the Hungarian critic Gyorgy Lukacs who, although not concerned with SF, is shown by Roberts, Milner, and Murphy (hereafter: RMM) to have inadvertently set out a criterion for its generic properties. The starting point is Lukacs’s criticism of the novel form:
“The epic form is the solution to the problem of meaning that holds the question latent. The answer precedes the question. The novel form, in contrast, foregrounds the problem of meaning.”[7]
RMM’s formulation of SF through the dichotomy of question and answer accounts for science fiction’s dual status as thematically open and formally closed. Premodern narratives, including the epic, have a tendency to express collective destinies through tales of individual heroism or wickedness.[8] To return to the examples earlier, Milton’s Lucifer is a heroic protagonist in the sense that he represents the collective fate of his society (the fallen angels of Hell and, after the Fall, the society of man altogether); Odysseus similarly embodies the trajectory of his community from warriors to victors, into explorers. Even a biblical narrative such as Jonah’s operates in this way: as well setting up orders of relation between individuals, communities, and God, Jonah’s tale ends with the individual protagonist’s destiny reflecting on an entire community. Written centuries apart, these examples nonetheless show the need for pre-modern narratives to reach back for the final causes of religious, or supernatural, telos to explain the phenomena of their age.[9] In contrast, western civilisation in the early modern period, beset on all sides by scientific rationalism, existentialism, and an industrially-charged impulse towards social mobility, was forced to reckon with the emerging autonomy of the individual. As such, the epic’s replacement – the novel – is ‘the form of the prose of society, as opposed to community’.[10] As imaginary constructions which are influenced by, yet different from, the author’s empirical reality, both the Epic and SF lack the network of references to a shared, social reality that make the novel’s epistemology intelligible.
The novel, in foregrounding the problem of meaning, is formally open, pointing, through its gaps and ambiguities, outwards into the world of its readers in search of interpretive coherence. The epic and the SF text are thematically open, as their themes inevitably point back to the empirical circumstances of the author’s environment, but, formally, they are closed: as complete world-pictures, they point not outwards but inwards on themselves, and the answers to their questions can only be found internally. Furthermore, the epic’s is a given, closed world in the sense that the metaphysical structures in play serve to explain, not interrogate, the order of reality presented.[11] SF worlds, on the other hand, are posited, closed worlds.[12] Their closed totality is external but not transcendental in any epic or religious sense, meaning that they in no way supersede our empirical reality. SF, which takes as its foundation the same uncertainty that underpins the novel, but which explicates its ideas in a formally closed, totalised construction, is the not the narrative form of community and society, but of “a possible future world… the given imagined totality of an alternative reality”.[13]
[7] Andrew Milner, Peter Murphy, David Roberts, Science Fiction and the Narrative Form (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), pp. 4-5.
[8] Milner, Murphy, Roberts, p. 88.
[9] Suvin, p. 56
[10] Milner, Murphy, Roberts, p. 3.
[11] Milner, Murphy, Roberts, p. 42.
[12] Milner, Murphy, Roberts, p. 42.
[13] Milner, Murphy, Roberts, p. 9-10.
Thus far it has been established that SF’s generic specificity lies in its formally closed, thematically open nature. This leaves us, effectively, with a blank framework of SF, an inert schematic of the genre’s imaginary potential. To fill out this empty frame we must examine the central consequence of the genre’s closed totality – SF’s deictic register. A deictic expression of the future strives to illuminate future possibilities through example, whereas a didactic register, on the other hand, advocates difference/ stasis – a hallmark of the political pamphlet. Suvin’s understanding of utopian literature operates largely in the same way. His chapter – ‘Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia’ – binds together SF and utopian thinking. Like SF, a key feature of utopia is its immanence in our own world.[14] Although the historical progression of the form is hotly debated, Thomas More’s namesake novel is characteristic of utopias generally in that its ideal community is not isolated by supernatural or metaphysical forces – it simply exists alongside, though separated from, the real, imperfect human community.[15] Critically, this dynamic hints at a possibilisation of the text-world’s imaginary contents, and the key terminology in this link is, I believe, Suvin’s sense of utopia as “historically alternative”.[16] In its demonstration of an improved, fictional community, utopia acts as a ‘what if’, imaginary yet plausible within our own reality. Free from supernatural final causes, its chief mechanism is historical estrangement. Indeed, in his introductory chapter to Economic Science Fictions, William Davies writes “it is often remarked that utopia is not a plan or a constitution or a blueprint, but something that emerges among all of us as a need in the face of some lack”.[17] In utopia, and by extension, SF, the impulse to imagine other ways of organising human relations is not merely an imaginative exercise. At their best, these genres are a form of literary wish fulfilment and, vitally, their closed totality and immanence in our world enables us to examine new ideas in a fictional ‘testing ground’. While SF may be inherently future-oriented, its narratives inform the near future far more than the spacefaring, technological far-future they present.
Ultimately, the idea that SF bears on our immediate future is the central point of this chapter; a chapter which I want to conclude by bringing together the utopian dimension of the genre with Suvin’s idea of the ‘novum’, as this link will make clear the centrality of the social sciences in SF. A novum, meaning newness or innovation, is a “totalising phenomenon or relationship deviating from the implied readers’ norm of reality”.[18] SF, says Suvin, is distinguished by the hegemony of such an innovation: a new invention, technology, or institution whose presence in the text is narratively central and organises the text around it. An apt example in mainstream SF is Star-Trek, where the far-future setting might invite one to think that the glittering Starship Enterprise is the stories’ central innovation. On the contrary, Star-Trek’s novum is its post-scarcity world: the political implications of scientific advancement (in this case the end of material wants) are hegemonic within the story as the initiating motivation for the Enterprise’s voyage. This is a dynamic reflected across major works of SF.[19] In Iain Banks’ Culture series and Le Guin’s SF, which will be explored in the following chapters, a particular scientific or technological phenomenon dominates the narrative action. In both these cases, however, the thematic focus is the sociopolitical consequences of the text’s novum, not the nuts and bolts of the novum itself. Science in a technological sense is the mechanism which gives SF direction – it is a vehicle for the cognitive elements of an SF text. Riding atop this vehicle, readers watch as the other elements of the text organise themselves around the novum, springing up by the side of the road.
[14] Suvin, p. 42.
[15] China Miéville, Introduction, Thomas Moore, Utopia (London: Verso Books, 2016), p. 14.
[16] Suvin, p. 42.
[17] William Davies, Economic Science Fictions, (London: Goldsmiths University London, 2017), p. 18.
[18] Suvin, p. 64.
[19] Suvin, p. 67.
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction makes evident the point of science’s organisational yet secondary role within SF, arguing that the nature of a novum need not be scientific in itself but must be validated by the scientific method. [20] The genre requires as its foundation a level of cognitive logic, a sense of realistic, internal causation, in order to function deictically. A novum created thus can be tested, not empirically but methodologically, by exploring the shift in human relations that it implies. Its mechanisms are the same as those that drive utopia, and Suvin actually subordinates utopia as “the sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction”. [21] While I am unconvinced on the accuracy of this distinction, it fairly delineates the conjoined destinies of utopia and SF, both concerned with the possibilisation of imaginary realities. Because these imagined worlds are estranging, they invite speculation outside the confines of readers’ empirical reality. What separates SF from utopia appears to be, fundamentally, its impulse towards scientific speculation, which is best understood as its organisation around a novum – a new scientific phenomenon – to explore questions philosophical and sociopolitical in nature.
As such, SF shares the utopian impulse but is charted along the post-modern emphasis on technological development and its consequences. In a twenty-first century grappling with unfettered scientific innovation, it is a new form of utopian literature, neither completely allegorical nor positivistic. Owing to its provisional, deictic register, it is a genre that shuns positivism. In regard to its far-future narratives, it is unconcerned with prediction, and fully invested in a simulation of possible futures, these ultimately reflecting back on our own ‘topia’. It is, as RMM say, the fiction of “the future and fate of humanity”, but it is even more than that: its external totality, its cognitive richness, bring the future forward and into view, not as inert prediction but as possibilisation. [22] In this way, it becomes the imperative literature of our modern world, which promises through its cognitive estrangement not only imaginatively rich escapism, but real political implications. The question explored in the subsequent chapters will be, if SF has the capacity to bring possible futures into view, what kind of futures does it show us? I want to turn my attention to one such possibility – that of decentralised collectivism in a technologically-advanced human society. I would not, of course, dispute that an endless range of political ideologies find their voice in SF, however, I will be arguing that SF in particular contains an impulse to resist individualistic, capitalist modes of being in favour of collective existences. My emphasis will be chiefly on Le Guin’s Ekumen novels and Banks’ Culture series – both socialist utopian constructs that contain enough complexity and nuance to be analysed according to their own contents, as critical utopias which narratively simulate the ideas that they envisage.
[20] Suvin, p. 66.
[21] Suvin, p. 61.
[22] Milner, Murphy, Roberts, p. 10.
Chapter 2: Iain M. Banks’ ‘Culture’
In Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, the namesake civilisation is a technologically advanced anarcho-communist utopia. Having developed alongside countless other societies in a large interstellar community, the Culture is nonetheless singular for its decentralised, post-scarcity, society. Banks has stated that his focus on the edges of the Culture is partly due to the need for conflict; in making this point I hope to clarify that the series’ emphasis away from its utopian centre is not purely a critical decision designed to muddy the waters of interpretation.[23] However, such a dynamic is also at play, and in the Culture’s case there appears to be no clear boundary that delineates its beginning or end. Instead, it tapers off along a gradient, with its interior colonies being recognisable as ‘fully’ Culture, and its peripheral settlements determining autonomously to what extent they would like to be members. In this way, the Culture differs from traditional depictions of utopia (particularly of Communist utopia) in its rejection of uniformity, and this is a rejection that, like other elements of the Culture, is grounded in pragmatism rather than in ideology.
Carolyn Brown describes the Banks’ SF society as “an advanced communist utopia, where Wilde’s celebration of machines and Trotsky’s celebration of the potential of human beings to alter and construct their environments are elaborated and developed”.[24] A particularly commendable feature of Banks’ vision is that these two values are not at odds with each other; they actually work to enhance one another. The Culture’s level of technology means that labour need no longer be performed by its sentient citizens; it is carried out by automated processes. Most of the mundane, everyday processes are performed by basic machines without consciousness. Controlling this network of machines, humanoids, and systems is an unimaginably sophisticated, sentient artificial intelligence called a ‘Mind’. On a Culture ship or habitat,all operations, data, and personnel are under the control of the Mind(s) at all times, making them essentially entities of god-like power. Upon picking up the Culture series, readers well-versed in SF tropes might be surprised to learn that the all-powerful AI does not desire the extinction of human life forms. Like the humanoids who initially designed them, the Minds have a sense of purpose, expressed both in their duty of care towards the individuals under their control, as well as in their basic, human-like curiosity. As such, Banks, though not versed in the specifics of machine intelligence, puts forward a significant philosophical premise through his Minds: consciousness (and, by extension, personality) is not inherently bound up in biology. Far from a visionary on this matter, what sets Banks apart in the debate about machine learning is his ability to give the question life as a real possibility through his SF narrative.
[23] Andrew Milner, ‘Eulogy: Iain M. Banks’, Utopian Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, SPECIAL EDITION: UTOPIA AND ARCHITECTURE, 2014, p. 263.
[24] Carolyn Brown, ‘Utopias and Heterotopias: The ‘Culture’ of Iain M. Banks’, Impossibility Fiction, Ed. by Derek Littlewood, Peter Stockwell (Amsterdam – Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996), p. 61.
A productive starting point for examining Banks’ dynamic of the active, critical possibility is in the intergalactic conflict of the first Culture novel – Consider Phlebas. The war is being fought between the Culture and a hostile civilisation called the Idirans. Survival-of-the-fittest, according to the Culture’s warlike adversary, is not only the governing principle of life but also its ultimate meaning. They believe it is their moral duty to eradicate and consolidate weaker civilisations. They do not directly threaten the Culture, known to be passive yet very powerful, but, unexpectedly, the Culture joins the war all the same. Idiran expansionism, which is meaningless unless permanently sustained, challenges the Culture’s “peace of mind”; “its moral right to exist”.[25] Through its highly controversial body ‘Contact’, the society retains a moral smugness: Contact and its more secretive wing Special Circumstances interfere with less advanced civilisations in order to bring about humanistic outcomes. The appendix of Consider Phlebas makes clear that the self-satisfaction of this process is a sustaining element of the Culture’s psyche, therefore leaving the Idirans to terrorise the galaxy is unacceptable.[26]
There is no reasonable doubt that the Culture is at the moral centre of the text, but their reasons for military intervention are, on the other hand, actively called into question by the novel’s action. I would be remiss not to mention Banks’ infamous response to the Blaire administration’s involvement in the Iraq war, when the author cut up his British passport and posted it to Downing Street. [27] Evidently, there is a degree of scepticism as to the Culture’s motivations for going to war. On the other hand, we need not even look to Banks’ well documented dislike of religion to see that the Idiran’s religious jihad is no better; in fact, the Idirans are far worse. The narrative craftiness of Consider Phlebas is that its charming protagonist – Horza Gorbachul – is fighting on the Idiran side, confusing readers’ responses to the conflict. Horza is on a quest to capture a Culture Mind; a quest he imbues with personal intensity as he reckons with his mistrust of machines and opposition to the Culture which “in effect… was its machines”.[28] His distaste for the hedonistic artificiality of the Culture is convincing especially because the narrative has taken place outside the civilisation’s bounds thus far. That said, Consider Phlebas is fundamentally grounded in a rejection of the ‘great hero’ narrative in which individuals are chiefly responsible for societal change. A common framework in space opera, this Nietzschean dynamic of history written by the great individual is countered by Horza’s failure to secure the Mind and compounded further by the appendix’s report of his efforts as, ultimately, meaningless. But his actual downfall comes during the text in a rare Culture sequence. Fal ‘Ngeestra is a point of view character living on a far off Culture orbital while she aids the war effort through tactical calculation. Thinking of her adversary Horza, she reflects a typical Culture self-consciousness when she imagines his disdain:
“No wonder they despise us. Poor sick mutations that we are, petty and obscene, servants of the machine-devils we worship. Not even sure of our own identity: just who is the Culture?”[29]
[25] Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas (London: Futura Publications, 1988), p. 451. All further references are to this edition.
[26] Banks, Consider Phlebas, p. 451.
[27] Patrick Ward, ‘Interview: Changing Society, Imagining the Future’, Socialist Worker, 322, February 2008’.
[28] Banks, Consider Phlebas, p. 204.
[29] Banks, Consider Phlebas, p. 334.
Though she has never met him, this is a fairly accurate depiction of Horza’s opinion. ‘Ngeestra has him figured out, however. We are already aware that the protagonist is a member of an obscure alien race that can impersonate the appearances of others, called a Changer. ‘Ngeestra reveals that the Changers were manufactured for war untold generations ago, exposing Horza’s dislike of the Culture as originating in his own anxieties. He is just as artificial as the gene-enhanced hedonists he despises, but, as ‘Ngeestra articulates, the Culture is at least self-aware:
“Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing… So where we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr Bora Horza Gobuchul.”[30]
In this way, Consider Phlebas presents the Culture’s ambiguous military intervention as a test for an advanced civilisation, not the fatal flaw of a morally bankrupt one. The foreign policy element of the series is more clouded with ambiguity than the internal, socioeconomic utopia of Culture life: a fact that, among other things, points to Banks’ distaste for turn-of-the-century neoliberal politics. The hegemony of the Minds, the Culture’s unsanctimonious materialism, their hedonistic lifestyle – these elements are acknowledged as unnatural but ultimately redeemed by Fal ‘Ngeestra’s secular philosophising. In so doing, the action of Consider Phlebas shows how, in a universe defined by cold, Darwinist impersonality, technology has the power to enhance the social life of humankind. A prerequisite of doing so, the text seems to argue, is a sober acknowledgment of our technological future lest we, like Horza, become obsessed with purity and resist the potential to shape our own fates.
Banks’ series spends much of its time at the fringes of the Culture, however, the novels inevitably capture some of the day-to-day life of its citizens. Of particular interest is the protagonist Cheradenine Zakalwe’s stay on the Culture ship in Use of Weapons. Taking leave from his role as a soldier, Zakalwe is able to experience the staggering richness of opportunity available on the ship called Size Isn’t Everything – a General Systems Vehicle over eighty kilometres long. These vehicles are the cities of the Culture, containing millions of inhabitants and practically endless diversions, entertainments, and opportunities for fulfilment, all controlled by the ship’s Mind. The Minds are undoubtedly the novum of this text-world: controlling every aspect of Culture society, it is they who enable the anarcho-communist configuration which, in turn, encompasses the series’ sociopolitical exploration. The most interesting concern that arises from this exploration is what becomes of human purpose and endeavour in world without material need, regarding which, Zakalwe’s time on board the Size Isn’t Everything provides a satisfying answer. The overwhelmed protagonist encounters vast caverns of “accommodation units… bristling with foliage”, he drinks with aliens, he debates philosophy with drones, but also, peculiarly to him, he encounters the occasional citizen engaged in menial work.[31] In one such example, he asks a woman involved in the building of new spaceships:
“Can’t machines build these faster?”
“Why, of course!” she laughed.
“Then why do you do it?”
“It’s fun… the fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was me who actually did it.”[32]
In another such case, he talks with a man who is wiping tables at a bar. The man tells Zakalwe that he normally works in the study of
“Alien religions… but the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated… when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.”[33]
[30] Banks, Consider Phlebas, p. 336.
[31] Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons (London: Orbit, 2023), p.272. All further references are to this edition.
[32] Banks, Use of Weapons, p. 277.
[33] Banks, Use of Weapons, pp. 273-274.
As mentioned earlier, Banks’ Wildean celebration of machines has the effect of enhancing individual freedom within the Culture. The interactions above capture an acknowledgment of the fundamental need for purpose in individuals, but the maturity of the Culture’s society means that its inhabitants are under no illusions regarding the philosophical significance of their, or anybody else’s, endeavours. Technology – often depicted in SF as an engine of corporate power – is here a vehicle for liberation. It allows labour to become an opportunity for personal fulfilment rather than a civic duty. By demystifying our potential relationship with technology, Banks’ SF creation indicates that even the contemporary technological ‘bogeyman’ – AI – can have democratising influence. His decision to put the Minds in charge of Culture society is provocative: it cannot be denied that Banks possessed a wry sense of humour. Much has already been made of his enigmatic naming system that sees machine entities of God-like power choosing names for themselves such as the Size Isn’t Everything. To take a step back from the jokes and eccentricities for which his work is so beloved, I believe it is the wry tone of the Culture series as a whole that makes up its utopian appeal. From the disconnected narrative voice that makes intergalactic war sound like an afternoon tea catchup, to the sardonic, quick-witted exchanges between characters, there is a sense of deep sociopolitical maturity in the culture – a seen-it-all, parental kind of ease that not only reflects Banks’ politics but the nature of the civilisation he envisages. Juvenile as it may often seem, the Culture is an old – ancient – society, so old that it really has seen it all. The telos of this utopia is not the tale of brave founding fathers, or of God-like technology suddenly enabling societal change (despite the hegemony of the Minds) but of a civilisations’ gradual refinement, generation upon generation, until the Culture reaches a point of general stasis a few millennia before the beginning of the narrative. It is, in other words, an extremely mature society. This is the most significant, and most misunderstood, element of provisionality in the Culture series: the sense of real possibility in its utopia, tempered by the admission that such a civilisation is separated from us by, potentially, millennia of trial and error.
The central takeaway from Banks’ novum – the Minds – is that their successful utilisation depends on the sociopolitical maturity of the people who first created them. Neither inherently good or bad, artificial intelligence embodies the values, or behaviours, of its creators. The sense that a current version of the Minds in our own world would be disastrous is, I think, implicit in the way that the Culture integrate AI across centuries of refinement. An anecdote from the second Culture novel Player of Games illustrates this perfectly when a lower level artificial intelligence named Mawhrin-Skel antagonises and blackmails the protagonist.[34] Like other such machines, the drone is given the opportunity to generate its own personality upon creation; it is an autonomous individual with a unique set of behaviours. The Culture may not have laws as such, but it does have checks and balances: Mawhrin-Skel’s personality is vetted as dangerous and unstable, and it is denied promotion into the coveted ‘Special Circumstances’ branch. Frustrated with its lot, this leads the drone to terrorise an innocent individual, but at least it has been kept away from the levers of power. This imperfect yet functional dynamic is a perfect illustration of what can be called ‘critical’ utopia. Again, no promises are made as to the transformational power of any particular technology, but the values embedded in our usage of technology are shown by Banks to be the determining factor of societal progress. In this case, his SF shows us a system where labour and competition are de-fetishised in favour of individual fulfilment and liberty so long as, like the case of Mawhrin-Skel, this freedom does not infringe on that of others.
[34] Iain M. Banks, Player of Games (London: Orbit, 2023), p.74.
Chapter 3: Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Ekumen’
In Ursula Le Guin’s rich SF universe, intergalactic bodies are more peripheral than in the traditional space opera. The American author’s version of the anarcho-communist intergalactic community is the Ekumen – a cooperative body of civilisations underpinned by mutual cooperation and fair exchange. Unlike in Banks, this society is relatively young. We see the foundations for its success laid in The Dispossessed and come to fruition in The Left Hand of Darkness – the authors’ two most recognisable SF works. I will be discussing both in more detail, however, the first point about these two narratives is the way that Suvin’s concept of the novum reveals their inner-mechanisms. Despite their differing horizons, the novum of each story is the same innovation: Shevek’s ‘ansible’, which is a device that enables instant communication across vast distances. That two temporally separated stories share this transformational novum is a testament to the historical estrangement possible in SF; the short term implications of the Ansible in The Dispossessed (societal disturbance and Shevek’s undoing) can be compared to its long term consequences in The Left Hand of Darkness when the device has made possible a new intergalactic harmony.
The conditions of the Ansible’s creation in The Dispossessed are worthy of their own examination. Shevek’s implied fate after completing the device is reminiscent of Suvin’s conception of ethics and physics – the protagonists’ unfair demise immediately after finishing his magnum opus reminds readers that the genre is grounded in a realistic, not metaphysical, orientation between individuals and their environments. That said, given SF’s dual nature as formally closed and thematically open, Shevek’s journey is not without allegorical potential. His home world of Annares is a closed-off anarcho-communist utopia located on an austere moon. The scarcity of resources on Anarres has created the conditions for a deeply collectivist way of living. Survival depends on the effective management of resources and labour in a collective manner and this reality is sewed into the fabric of the moon’s society. This bleak world acts as a foil to the allegorically recognisable, capitalist world of Urras, the latter being a clear reflection of twentieth century global relations in our world (complete with a proxy war between its two major superpowers). In this way, Le Guin’s utopian construct takes on a new dimension. On the one hand, the relative perfection of institutional relations and social life on Anarres makes clear its utopian voice. However, this is, as the text’s original subtitle declared, a ‘critical utopia’. Life on Annares is gruelling, and the luxuries stemming from resource-rich capitalism on Urras are absent here.
Even more significant are the obstacles Shevek faces on his egalitarian home-world, leading to his ‘reverse-exodus’ to Urras. His work is hindered by an older, jealous colleague – Salis – and Anarresti society, which has administration but no government, is shown to be incapable of offering a favourable solution. When Shevek and a friend discuss this matter, public opinion, regularly presented as the framework that preserves cooperation on Anarres, is denounced as “the unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules Odonian society by stifling the individual mind”.[35] As such, The Dispossessed complicates the utopian vision implicit in Anarresti social relations. That the fictional world contains revolutionary elements undoubtedly close to Le Guin’s heart does not make it a blueprint for any specific future. Indeed, in the third chapter of Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Suvin qualifies that utopia presents worlds which are “organised according to a more perfect principle than the author’s community”.[36] Clumsy as it might seem, the substitution of ‘more perfect’ for ‘perfect’ is the key which unlocks the deictic register of SF. Le Guin’s choice to indicate problematic elements within her ‘more perfect’ social order gives it authentic life as a realistic possibility, particularly when it is narratively tied in with the novum of Shevek’s Ansible.
[35] Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (London: Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2002) p. 36. All further references are to this edition.
[36] Suvin, p. 45.
As mentioned, the Ansible has revolutionary power within Le Guin’s universe, helping to usher in the Ekumen – a body that looks like a juvenile version of Banks’ Culture. It also embodies the ideals of Shevek and his society, namely egalitarian intellectual exchange. It is ironic, therefore, that he cannot complete his device until travelling to Urras, where the vested, authoritarian interests begin grappling over it almost immediately. This appears to me an acknowledgment that, however harmonious social relations might be under anarcho-communism, capitalism has an innate advantage when it comes to technological innovation. This ought to remind of Marx’s cautious admiration of bourgeois innovation when he acknowledged capitalism to have already created the engines for worker’s liberation.[37] Marx was not disenfranchised with technology itself, maintaining that it is capitalist social relations that cause the alienation of individuals rather than the technologies of capitalism itself, and this idea finds expression in The Dispossessed through the differing uses of technology on Urras and Annares. In the case of the former, a passage from Shevek himself elucidates concern about technology in a market-driven economy:
“He had been fascinated from the start by the Urrasti habit of wrapping everything up in clean, fancy paper or plastic or cardboard or foil… even packets of paper were wrapped in several layers of paper. Nothing was to touch anything else. He had begun to feel that he, too, had been carefully packaged.”[38]
In a deft use of metaphor, the text equates the danger Shevek is experiencing in his individual journey to the inauthenticity of the capitalist civilisation that he finds himself embroiled in. Both circumstances are fundamentally driven by the forces of individualism. Shevek is a collectivist in an individualist’s society; a fact that leaves him at a distinct disadvantage in his dealings on Urras. He does, however, begin to recognise some of the leverage that his disparate worldview provides him with:
“The night before he left Anarres he had burned every paper he had on the General Theory. He had come to Urras with nothing. For half a year he had, in their terms, been bluffing them.”[39]
Because the General Theory is in Shevek’s head and nowhere else, the governments of Urras can manipulate him only cautiously. The figurative ‘bluff’ in this metaphor holds huge significance for the narrative. On a literary level, the association of Urrasti politics with gambling highlights the protagonist’s distaste for individualistic ideology. On a wider, epistemological level, Shevek’s coming empty-handed is reminiscent of the anarcho-communist doctrine he follows, and which he once more brings to revolutionary fruition when, at the climax of the Urras sequence, he tells the mob “If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands”.[40] As a scientist on the brink of inventing a radical new technology and simultaneously a man urging the masses forward to an unpropertied society, it would appear that Shevek is aligned with Marx’s diagnosis; that of the engines of capitalism being relatively innocent compared to the individualistic social relations manning the controls.
In a similar way to how Consider Phlebas introduces concerns about the Culture’s foreign policy, Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness raises questions about the utopian societies’ relationship with its neighbours. It is a tale of intergalactic first contact, with the diplomat Genly Ai representing the Ekumen as ambassador on a world filled with sexually androgynous inhabitants. The androgyny of Gethen’s people is the text’s main novum – Mr Ai, our protagonist representing the Ekumen, is unable to recognise his love for a Gethenian due to his rigidly gendered notions of romance. Sexuality and gender are undoubtedly central to this novel; indeed, its most eminent themes, but for the purposes of this discussion I want to focus on the way Mr Ai’s role as representative of the Ekumen brings into focus the series’ utopian horizons.
[37] Amy E. Wendling, ‘Technology and Science’, The Marx Revival, ed. by Marcello Musto (Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 366.
[38] Le Guin, The Dispossessed, pp. 165-166.
[39] Le Guin, The Dispossessed, p. 170.
[40] Le Guin, The Dispossessed, p. 248.
Gethen – also known as ‘Winter’ due to its extreme cold – is utopian in a very different dimension to Anarres. The gender politics have created a social order without ‘true’ warfare but not without violence and coercion, and its political systems, suspicious of Mr Ai from the start, are shown to be far from perfect. Of the two governments he interacts with, the first is a monarchy whose king – Argaven – is mentally unstable, the other a federal democracy with bitterly competing factions. Arwen Spice’s essay ‘Indigeneity and Utopia in Le Guin’s Ekumen’ describes the organisation as a non-coercive, “interstellar league of worlds”.[41] In this capacity, the protagonists’ task is to learn from the Gethenians and offer them a seat at the intergalactic table as equals. This kind of intercultural process is not always simple, however. Spice describes the Ekumen as underpinned by three values: firstly, it is ambiguous; “stable, peaceful, but not perfect”, and secondly, it coexists with numerous cultures.[42] These first two principles Spice associates with indigenous cultures; “prioritising local knowledge that changes slowly and prizes sustainability”.[43] The essay separates western from indigenous visions of utopia, locating the latter in continuation, or survival, given the traumatic effects of colonialism that indigenous cultures have continually suffered. Le Guin, says Spicer, shares the degree of provisionality shown by native utopias, for whom “perfection is too extreme to be the balance of life that is searched for”.[44] However, her SF lacks the sense of traumatic origin that acts as the foundation for indigenous utopia: Spice’s third principle of the Ekumen is its non-coercive intercultural exchange, a value she associates with western ideology.[45] Ursula Le Guin was the daughter of renowned anthropologists Alfred and Theodora Kroeber. Alfred’s mentor was Franz Boas, a proponent of the emerging concept of cultural relativism. This appears to be a defining influence for the SF writer: peripheral to her childhood was her parents’ study of the Californian Ishi tribe, which was for them rooted in a reverence of and genuine interest in cultural difference instead of the social Darwinist’s impulse to create hierarchies of cultural difference according to evolutionary metrics.[46]
Le Guin’s cultural relativism finds expression in her detailed worldbuilding. Across her SF canon, be it with the Gethenians, the struggling but self-content Anarresti, or the oppressed Athsheans in The Word for World is Forest, there is a marked interest in the way that environments shape their people;.[47] Her 1995 SF novella A Man of the People centres on its protagonist Havzhiva’s dissatisfaction with his functional yet closed-minded tribal society. Leaving his people in order to study among the Hainish (founding members of the Ekumen), he is surprised to hear their respect for his culture of origin when they tell Havzhiva “Local knowledge is not partial knowledge… there are different ways of knowing”.[48] As such, Spice’s notion of the Ekumen is a blend of the western impulse towards intercultural exchange with the indigenous impulse towards cooperation and local knowledge. As she points out, indigenous experiences on earth bring a degree of sympathy to mad king Argaven, whose anxiety at being petitioned by a vastly more advanced intergalactic society is understandable when taken in the context of native survival. Much like Banks’ contact section, the Ekumen’s dealings with other civilisations brings life to Le Guin’s utopian vision by problematising some of its most prized features. Le Guin was well aware of the issues involved with western anthropology, too often an area of fascination for scholars whilst simultaneously an area of struggle for indigenous populations.[49] However, in Spice’s words, the provisional, deictic register of Le Guin’s SF, her concept of “civilisation both sustainable and advancing, local and cosmopolitan… where societies function fairly well, this utopian promise sets a high but conceivable bar for what human civilisation might be”.[50]
[41] Arwen Spice, ‘Indigeneity and Utopia in Le Guin’s Ekumen’, The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction, Ethics, (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), p. 65.
[42] Spice, p. 70.
[43] Spice, p. 70.
[44] Spice, p. 75.
[45] Spice, p. 70.
[46] Ira Jacknis, ‘The First Boasian: Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas, 1896-1905’, American Anthropologist, Vol. 104, No. 2 (June, 2002), pp. 520-532.
[47] Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (London: Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2022).
[48] Spice, p. 69.
[49] Spice, p. 73.
[50] Spice, p. 79.
Regardless of its simulations of sociopolitical conflict, the cognitive logic of the Ekumen’s novum – the ansible – ultimately foregrounds technologies’ central role in a collective future. As mentioned, Shevek’s device has, by the time of Genly Ai’s journey to Gethen, had massive implications. Mr Ai’s ability to invoke the Ekumen is entirely due to this piece of technology, and the Ekumen itself functions as a result of the ansible, as shown in the more allegorical The Word for World is Forest – Le Guin’s charged response to the Vietnam war. The clearly antagonistic human side has designs on the world of the Athsheans, but the ansible turns their activities from covert operations on a backwater planet to potentially public knowledge, frustrating their inegalitarian prospects. Fundamentally, that the ansible connects and holds together the non-coercive government of the Ekumen is reminiscent of The Cultures’ belief in the liberating power of technology. If socio-political speculation is at the heart of Banks and Le Guin’s utopian constructs, technology acts as their circulatory system, a sustaining force with democratising influence. The exact science underpinning the Minds, the ansible, and other novums are unsurprisingly not defined: Le Guin was no more a theoretical physicist than Banks was a computer scientist. As authors, their territory is to make sense of the human existence, and I hope that the culmination of these previous three chapters has shown that, as SF authors, this process is to interrogate humankind’s relationship with technology, which is not just the vehicle to our destiny but determines the horizons of the destiny itself.
Chapter 4: Differing Horizons – Accelerationism and FALC.
Utopia is a slippery concept. It is often misconstrued as requiring perfection, consigning the genre to fantastical escapism. If there is one takeaway from my first chapter, which wades through exactly such slippery waters, it is Suvin’s formulation that utopia, particularly SF utopia, shines its interpretive light back upon the readers ‘topia’. The escapism inherent to spacefaring adventures, new technologies, and the far future is possible in any work of SF but the cognitive richness – aliveness, even – of the genre’s finest entries orients it firmly towards the near future; to shaping the values and ideas of the present. Among these finest entries are the works of Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Samuel R. Delany, Arthur C. Clarke, Margeret Atwood and countless others, including even the collaborative literary work of Game’s Workshop’s Black Library and cinematic works like Star Trek and Red Dwarf. A more comprehensive version of this study would seek to integrate the arguments of the previous chapters into this great SF body, though the expanse, of course, is near endless. For the purposes of this investigation, I have chosen close examination into a small selection of texts as the best methodology. My argument has been centered around technology’s singular power to combat individualist mindsets; to conclude this argument, I want to look at two contemporary visions of humanity’s political future. These two visons agree with Banks and Le Guin concerning the hegemony of technology in this future but, in all other accounts, they are vehemently opposed to one another.
The first vision is called ‘accelerationism’. There is widespread disagreement as to its parameters. I will attempt to sum it up as the view that history is in the process of constant acceleration, such that modern phenomena like commercialisation and industrialisation operate in a closed feedback circuit and, as such, outside the bounds of political formulation. In this view, the capitalist/globalist framework of modern society, already accelerating out of control, can only be sped up towards its revolutionary ends. It is a philosophical movement that has undergone a bizarre supplantation from Roger Zelanys obscure SF novel The Lord of Light into a fringe political philosophy, now most recognisable for Nick Land and the CCRU’s contributions.[51] Nick Land, known as the Godfather of accelerationism, has described it as “simply the self-awareness of capitalism, which has scarcely begun”.[52] Land’s sense of phenomena ever increasing to the point of institutional paralysis “is obviously intrinsically directed against any kind of organic political community”.[53] Instead, he conceives reality – in this case the reality of capitalist technological expansion – as an “external, disruptive factor’ to political organisation”.[54] Expectant of automation, genetic engineering, and space colonisation in the same way as Le Guin and Banks, Nick Land’s point of departure is in his rejection of the idea that humanity can determine these processes for themselves. Exactly what revolutionary ends the acceleration of capitalism will bring about is undefined, because the point is essentially the opposite of utopia. The capital-driven technological processes of modernity, with information as its resource, have an autonomy of their own in Land’s formulation, leaving us little to no scope for sculpting them to our ends. Though leftist strains of accelerationism have emerged, the Godfather “confidently dismisses” them in his point that capital, “in its ultimate self-definition, is nothing beside the abstract accelerative process… runaway consumes its identity”.[55] Given Land’s preference for schizoanalysis – the study of philosophy from non-human points of view – his analysis of the autonomous nature of societal phenomena is understandable, even convincing.[56] I do, however, think that his is a very bleak mindset indeed. It stands as a counterpoint to the utopian premises put forward thus far in a way that is not merely ideological but formal. Land identifies the problem, but fundamentally denies that there can be answers in any organised or collective sense.
[51] Andy Beckett, ‘Accelerationism: How a Fringe Philosophy Predicted the Future We Live In’, The Guardian, < https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in>, posted 11/05/2017, accessed 21/04/2024.
[52] Nick Land, ‘A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism’, Obsolete Capitalism, < http://obsoletecapitalism.blogspot.com/2017/05/nick-land-quick-and-dirty-introduction.html>, posted 26/05/2017, accessed 19/04/2024.
[53] Marko Bauer, Andrej Tomažin, ‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation: An Interview with Nick Land, Synthetic Zero, < https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-impose-is-fragmentation-an-interview-with-nick-land/>, posted 19/06/2017, accessed 19/04/2024.
[54] Bauer and Tomažin.
[55] Bauer and Tomažin.
[56] Ian Buchanan, ‘Shizoanalysis: An Incomplete Project’, The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 163-186.
This idea of the runaway process of modernity, unchecked and uncheckable by political forces, is reminiscent of Laura Horn’s analysis of the SF dystopia. Horn’s essay explores representations of the corporation, particularly in the well-recognised cyberpunk trope of grim, individualist futures. Narratives such as Bladerunner, Mr Robot, The Space Merchants, Westworld, and many more, exhibit “the ubiquitous theme of corporate dystopia”, creating presentations of society defined by “(evil) management and corporate agency”.[57] Horn’s criticism of this trope is that, in narratives such as these, resistance to corporate power is almost always an individualist act – that of the antihero, hacker, or rogue law enforcement. Corporate dystopias rarely acknowledge the possibility of collective resistance; the weakness or absence of the state facilitates ever expanding corporate hegemony, usually dominated by the faceless megacorporation. That corporate dystopias never include the relatively innocent backbone of successful economies – small business – is testament to their implicit, if not explicit, criticism of capitalist society. Unfortunately, these popular SF narratives are aligned, in their pessimism, with Nick Land in their identification of the problem but rejection of solutions. For, if it is the rogue actor who thwarts the faceless megacorporation every time, what solutions are offered in the long term?
Laura Horn identifies a few alternatives to corporate hegemony in SF including The Dispossessed, where the decentralised, largely consensual nature of labour invokes its real world counterpart – worker cooperatives.[58] In so doing, Le Guin’s SF offers alternatives to the competitive organisation of labour, working against the “corporate closure of the imaginary” – a term from Horn that resonates with Suvin’s comments on cognitive estrangement.[59] Critical that they are, the utopias of Le Guin and Banks are just that – utopias, and their contrast with the largely dystopian representation of capitalist futures ought at least to remind us that alternativity – the imagining of other possibilities – is SF’s home ground. Twenty first century geopolitics is dominated both by capitalist means and ends, so it is no wonder that this alternativity often finds expression in socialist, collectivist SF worlds. That said, the examples across the previous three chapters foreground a consistently collective alternative to modern existence: an acknowledgment of the futility of human competition as social organiser in a future with ever increasing machine capability. Shevek’s ansible, as Genly Ai tells us, has not closed the vast interstellar gap between worlds:
“Forays are worth no one’s trouble, across space. Trade, however, is worthwhile. In ideas and techniques, communicated by Ansible”.[60] Although this trade also includes goods and services, the ansible’s role in creating the consent-based, decentralised government of the Ekumen helps foreground technology’s role in our near future, for the Ekumen rather resembles the real world cooperative on a larger scale. Similarly, the hegemony of artificial intelligence in the Culture series is rooted in the near-future: Moore’s law of computational power doubling every two years has endured from Banks’ childhood until the present day.[61] The immanence of artificial intelligence now makes the author’s 2013 death that much more tragic; in my humble opinion, there could be few better guides for this age of accelerating information technology. In in the absence of Banks and Le Guin (also, sadly, deceased), however, new voices have emerged, and I will conclude by discussing two such new voices: Charles Stross and his novel Neptune’s Brood and Aaron Bastani’s manifesto Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
[57] Laura Horn, ‘Future Incorporated?’, Economic Science Fictions, (London: Goldsmiths University London, 2017), p. 41; Horn, p. 42.
[58] Horn, p. 49.
[59] Horn, p. 57.
[60] Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, p. 34.
[61] Edouard Mathieu, Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie, ‘What is Moore’s Law?’, Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/moores-law, posted 28/03/2023, accessed 01/05/2024.
Neptune’s Brood is a corporate-dystopia-meets-space-opera. It depicts a galaxy that is highly financialised, from vast interstellar investments such as entire space colonies down to basic functions like opening one’s cabin door, which is now automated behind a paywall. The ‘meta-human’, highly-augmented individuals of this galaxy are born into substantial debt from the very act of their creation. Neptune’s Brood’s chief novum is the interaction between money and the limitations of physics in an interstellar society. Hampered by the lack of FTL travel, currency is split into fast money, which is ordinary cash, medium money, meaning assets that can be traded on a planetary scale, and, critically, slow money: the slowly maturing currency of interstellar trade. Slow money is “a medium of exchange designed to outlast the rise and fall of civilisations… the currency of world builders.”[62] As such, Stross imagines a future continuing along the modern trend of complex financial algorithms and debt-based economies, only extrapolated into the far future of interstellar travel where debt, and its authentication, is the governing principle of social organisation. Average citizens are powerless, downtrodden, and destitute, and the ferocious but unfair competition has reduced human relationships to the point of being superficial.
The world of Neptune’s Brood appears to be a reasonable picture of what civilisation might look like if left to the accelerationist principle. Stross is unusual among SF authors in imagining the future of money. In his novel, the tapestry of debt, cryptocurrency, financial fraud and space colonisation is a richly imagined logical extreme of our financialised modern existence. Neptune’s Brood is also singular for its response to individualist drives. Its narrative unveils a plot to establish an intergalactic Jubilee – a program of debt forgiveness – through a new invention that allows information to travel at the speed of light. Referenced as far back as the Old Testament, the concept of a Jubilee rests on periodic debt cancellation in order to address inequalities.[63] The term has had a successful revival in recent decades with the efforts of the Jubilee 2000 organisation, which managed to oversee the cancellation of substantial international debt for the world’s poorest nations.[64] In Neptune’s Brood, currency’s newfound ability to travel at FTL speeds initiates an intergalactic jubilee due to the newfound obsolescence of slow money. Thus, the text’s technological innovation brings about societal change, not on an individual level but collectively. The historical estrangement of such a configuration, which looks back on our own era as an initiating epoch for its economic dystopia, calls into question the future that accelerated capitalism is building for us. As does Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani’s visionary political manifesto. Bastani sets out the basis for a new politics which is also the novel’s namesake; hereafter known as ‘FALC’.
Bastani’s book identifies history as defined by constant change, but concentrated more densely around two transformational stages he calls disruptions. The first of these disruptions is the domestication of flora and fauna that facilitated humankind’s first material surplus and, as a result, civilisation. The second he locates in the industrial revolution, which transformed society from being largely dependent on subsistence farming into a world of mass-production and global interdependence. The present day consequences of this disruption make themselves felt through climate breakdown and economic inequality, among other challenges Bastani warns will take hold during the course of our century. The third disruption, coming in true, accelerationist sense, soon after the second, is the computational revolution we are experiencing today. Bastani convincingly argues that capitalism has already transcended production in a traditional sense, its new resource being information. Its abundance, which is tied to the expansion of technological capability as a whole, completes capitalism’s obsoletion. Interestingly, the terms of this obsoletion were set out by Marx in his comments on technology in the essay ‘Grundrisse’.[65] Bastani reminds us that the philosopher’s idea of post-capitalism was to come through capitalism itself. As I mentioned earlier, capitalism necessarily requires ever more efficient modes of production and distribution to fuel the fire of competition. The steadily falling cost of goods, services, and information would, according to the German thinker, eventually bring about the collapse of wage labour. In this regard, Marx was an accelerationist of sorts along with, arguably, his contemporary John Maynard Keynes, in whose writings Bastani identifies a similar post-capitalist theory. Both imagine technological innovation as eventually leading to a world defined by surplus and leisure, but Keynes, disagreeing with Marx on “the relationship between politics and progress”, saw this future as a natural result of capitalism.[66] Marx, on the other hand, viewed it as the territory of the privileged few, “with the spoils only going to the majority of society if they successfully fought for them in the struggle between classes”.[67] FALC takes Marx’s side, thus foregrounding through its attention to modern trends in economics and technology a similar post-scarcity society to Iain M. Banks.
[62] Charles Stross, Neptune’s Brood (London: Orbit, 2013), p. 109. All further references are to this edition.
[63] Sherryl Vint, ‘Currencies of Social Organisation’, Economic Science Fictions, (London: Goldsmiths University London, 2017), p. 68.
[64] Nathan Olson, ‘Jubilee 2000: Twenty Years On’, Christians on the Left, < https://www.christiansontheleft.org.uk/latest/jubilee-2000-twenty-years-on>, posted 27/11/2020, accessed 02/05/2024.
[65] Karl Marx, ‘Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft)’, Marxists.org, < https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/index.html>, posted 2015, accessed 28/04/2024.
[66] Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, (London: Verso, 2020), p. 55.
[67] Bastani, p. 56.
Throughout my discussion of corporate dystopia and its counterpart Neptune’s Brood, of Accelerationism against FALC, and in the worlds of Banks and Le Guin, this dynamic of collective political will features time and time again. Automation, freedom of information, ever expanding technology – all these are taken as, if not inevitable, increasingly likely. The key difference is in these visions of the future is the aforementioned relationship between politics and progress. Fundamentally, the SF narratives of the Culture, the Ekumen, and Neptune’s Brood highlight the need for collective will in the face of accelerating technological development. Consent must underpin our relationship with technology just as it does in the Culture and Ekumen, and if we do not shape our futures together, the future, as Nick Land’s philosophy warns us, will shape us all the same. Indeed, as individuals there is little we can do in the face of runaway, autonomous processes like global capitalism. The world is becoming more reliant on digitisation, and the cost of distributing information is tending ever closer to zero, making the end of wage labour more likely. But it is not guaranteed. My argument has been that technology often has revolutionary implications, but the texts I have analysed present these implications as a sight of struggle, to which we must come figuratively armed and prepared. Encompassing the same horizons, Aaron Bastani’s departure from the accelerationists is to be found precisely in the utopian principle laid out in chapter 1: that of the possibilisation of the future. Identifying the same trends as Marx and Keynes, and compounded through phenomena such as Moore’s law, Bastani’s manifesto lays the groundwork for making technology “subordinate to human needs, not the profit motive”.[68] In doing so he echoes the utopias of Banks and Le Guin, where technology has brought about a more perfect order of relations, but only through a deliberate shift in values. Ultimately, whether or not it results in decentralised luxury communism, the great ‘shift’ or disruption of our times ought to be charged with the imaginary richness of SF because only with that demonstrative power can we conceive of futures truly alternative.
[68] Brian Merchant, ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’, The Guardian, < https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/18/fully-automated-luxury-communism-robots-employment>, posted 18/03/2015, accessed 30/04/2024.
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Kasper Mcleish 
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