(2024-04-09) Sloan Muscular Imagination

Robin Sloan: Muscular imagination. A future you might actually want to live in

When I peer into the far reaches of science fictional imagination, way out beyond the easy extrapolations and consensus futures, beyond the Blade Runners and the Star Treks, the name that looms largest is Iain M. Banks.

What is the Culture? A civilization. An agreement. The subject of a collection of books, written across decades. (Culture Series)

A big part of the fun of reading those books is assembling your own mosaic. That said, here’s mine

The Culture is a spacefaring, freewheeling admixture of anarchism and socialism. In most ways, it promises its citizens radical, breathtaking freedom … but in a few other ways, it requires their submission — to superhuman systems of planning and manufacture, the Culture’s ineffable Minds.

The Culture novels aren’t connected by an overarching plot, and there is no canonical reading order. For all my appreciation: I have not even read all of them! If you search online, you’ll find plenty of proposed approaches.

Here is mine, which is unorthodox; call it a recipe for enjoying the Culture. It consists of three stages:

I very strongly believe new readers ought to start with Player of Games

For your second book, you can choose basically at random. I like Matter and Surface Detail.

Here is the unorthodox part: I don’t think it’s necessary, or even desirable, to have read more than a couple of Culture novels before turning to A Few Notes on the Culture, the post from Iain M. Banks that just … lays it all out there. Notes on the Culture is, for me, THE thrilling Culture document.

The original was posted to a Usenet newsgroup in 1994!

I don’t generally love “raw worldbuilding” of this kind — RPG sourcebook material. This document is a brilliant exception, because the ideas are so big, so fresh, and so confidently articulated; and of course because it’s Iain M. Banks behind them, his voice inimitable, wry and winning.

There are, in science fiction, several close peers to Iain M. Banks, at least in terms of the scale of their storytelling. I think in particular of Olaf Stapledon, his Last and First Men, which gallops across millions of years; and of Cixin Liu, his series starting with The Three-Body Problem, which bumps up against the heat death of the universe. I like both of these authors, but/and their futures are cold, airless abstractions. You wouldn’t call either one utopia.

So, I suppose it’s not just the scale of Iain M. Banks’s stories that I want to praise, but their warmth

There’s no utopia without irony or humor; this fact really narrows the field.

In my novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, the ambitious and brilliant Kat Potente asks: “Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?”... Kat straightens her shoulders. “Okay, we’re going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you’re a science fiction writer.”... “Go further. What’s the good future after that?”

I’m trying hard to imagine an average day in the year 3012. I can’t even come up with a half-decent scene.

I have often conceived of imagination as a muscle — one that, like any other muscle, can be developed

I don’t get to Culture scale in Moonbound, but the plan — and there is a plan — is to ratchet up book by book, so my notional trilogy can culminate in a feat that does justice to a species of clever upright apes with a strange gift called imagination.

In these books, the Culture basically always wins! At first glance, this seems fatal to plot.

Turns out, no, it’s not boring at all.

Plenty of readers might indeed read the Culture novels and say, “eh, doesn’t sound that great”. The point is, there is something in the Culture novels to inspect, and consider, and, sure, reject. In these novels, Iain M. Banks hoists the imaginative burden. He twirls it in the air. His muscles bulge. It’s amazing to behold.