The culture of The Culture

[Steel Accord]

"The magnificent epic of an ambiguous utopia." This was true of the Dispossessed, and true of the (often uncomfortable and challenging) Culture; I would like to think that it is true of OA as well. The Terragen Sphere is a comfortable place to exist in, but a nightmare for anyone who wants to live in a world without gods.

I think we have the advantage over Banks' "Culture" in that since there are multiple authors we have a more diverse set of conceptions of 'The Good' than Banks did. I agree with the author of the piece that Banks' conception of an ideal culture is a bit disturbing and contradictory once you dig into it. We, with our multiple viewpoints, have more different ways to entice, and (again, if you look inside our supposed paradises more ways to disturb) the reader.

One similarity I do note is that we, like Banks, are still children of Western culture and of the 'Enlightenment'. The OA setting's 'Civilized Galaxy' is actually the projection of a fairly narrow set of human values out into the larger universe. Western colonialism on a galactic scale, some might argue. :-) Fortunately for plausibility's sake we do admit that there might be other , equally powerful, metacultures at work outside the 'Sephirotics'.

I don't see that in the slightest, at least not with the OA material I've read. The Sephirotics are very broad and have many different sophont viewpoints and powerful memes.

It's just as you said even, multiple authors so we all can picture our own utopia and have it exist somewhere but not at the exclusion to another. If you want to stretch it, I suppose one could call provolving "the Terragen's Burden" but that really is stretching it.

On the subject of the Culture, I've only read two of it's books and I would say it's more than similar to the Sephirotics, except maybe a bit more focused, which makes sense.

While the Sephirotics are wonderfully diverse and allow a great variety of lifestyles and conceptions of the good, they all share one rather glaring feature: rule by the archailects. Modosophonts have no actual say in the direction of their societies. In a few instances, I'm thinking of the Version War specifically, they seem to be little more than game pieces on a unimaginably complex board played for unfathomable goals and reasons.

If your conception of the good involves self-determination, your more or less out of luck in the Sephirotics (and the Culture, for that matter). What's are you options at that point? Join the Backgrounders and live in constant paranoia and in permanent isolation? Push out farther from the Terragen sphere, ever knowing that the wolves are always right at your heels? Not what you'd call tempting options.

But that's not a "Western bias" or any such nonsense, that's just the nature of the Singularity. Such intelligences, by their nature, would be so powerful and so omniscient that it hardly matters what culture exists within their domains.

Even then, the Archai are different in that they allow self-determination. If you live in the Utopia Sphere, you're basically telling the transaps "provide for me, please." Whereas the Invisible Hand of the NoCoZo might as well not be there for the amount of control it exerts over it's slice of space.

And in this future, you ARE free to self-determine. No Archai keeps a modosophont prisoner, I could leave the Sophic League and join the MPA if I wanted. My life is my destiny and I can shape it however I wish. The Archailects don't hinder that, they make it even more practical to do so.

I can't see a Western or Eastern ideal in either, but what I do see is a human one. That there is a greater power at work in the universe. The difference is that in OA, we provably know those powers exist because we created them. I would feel happy and honored to exist within the purview of such benevolent Minds.