Anarchist: "I love the Iain Banks Culture books!"
Anarchist: "Those other anarchists have a bad idea about what #anarchism is."
Did you know that the Iain Banks books have an idea of what anarchism is? It's just not immediately apparent because of a kind of displacement in the fiction.
1/n
First of all, I've written a whole lot about the early to middle Banks Culture books. I did a close reading of an entire novel of his (_Use of Weapons_) back on Usenet back in the 1990s. He commented on it. It was primitively written but I do somewhat better literary criticism now.
So I'd say I'm reasonably well read but cranky.
The basic displacement in the Culture novels is that Banks has written an entire group of super-advanced machine intelligences ("Minds") which do all of the work in the society, including production, service, and (mostly) military work. Humans still exist but no one relies on them for anything.
This one weird trick makes most of the recurring problems of anarchism disappear.
How do you get people to do the work? They don't. Why do the Minds do the work? They were built to be oriented towards doing it, and they have an incredible ability to multitask so that talking to millions of people at once doesn't really impinge on their attention.
What if people go bad? Well the Minds are vastly more powerful. What if the Minds go bad? They sort of mostly don't, but if they do, groups of other Minds control them. There's a small number of them so they know each other.
Most of the other hyphenated anarchisms are supposedly dealt with via technological irrelevance. Anarcha-feminism? Every human can change their physical gender at will through a biological process that they control. Green anarchism? The Culture builds space stations to live and doesn't need planets.
This makes it a well-loved setting. Guilt-free sex, drugs, and whatever else.
But what happens when social problems are imagined to have technical solutions?
Well, nothing can actually "happen" in an unmediated way because this is a fiction, not reality. At the same time:
1) Banks is notably not interested in writing what he once described as a soap opera, if I remember rightly, in which happy Culture citizens go through basically interpersonal conflicts. He seemed to think that a book required an external threat or internal faction-gone-bad to be interesting.
This is an authorial judgement on what, in human life, is interesting.
@richpuchalsky Yes. See also Surface Detail; and, going the other side of the M again, Complicity shows (I think) that Iain saw male sexual violence as very much the original sin.
It's fine that he thinks that: criticisms of patriarchy are a large part of anarchism. But -- he wrote a society in which people could change sex / gender (I get confused in this context about which is meant) at will, and in which this is still a basic underlying problem. It just sort of suggests that something hasn't been worked through in his universe.
Somewhere I have a thread about a time sequence of 4 SF books that wrote about trans-ness.
1/2
Le Guin's was the earliest of the 4 and also probably the best, because she really seemed to trust herself to write a different society in which this could work out differently, and the 3 other (male) authors all came down on "if you're born male you're born into patriarchal attitudes" in societies where that wouldn't seem to hold.
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
Simon Brooke