‘The future might be a hoot’: how Iain M. Banks imagines Utopia
January 23, 2013
For 25 years, Scottish science fiction writer Iain M. Banks, author of the Culture Series, has been writing about a utopian post-scarcity civilization managed by artificially intelligent drones known as Minds, and preoccupied by artificial intelligence, games, and interactions with other civilizations.
In the latest novel published in October, The Hydrogen Sonata, a civilization known as the Gzilt are making preparations to Sublime — in other words, to leave the known material universe behind for a much more complex and interesting existence.
Scott Beauchamp interviews Banks about the new novel in The Atlantic. Banks differentiates the “Sublime” concept from the Singularity, and explains the role of AI in this civilization.
Comments (31)
by Samantha Atkins
Drones are not Minds in the Culture books. Drones are avatars/intelligent extensions of Minds. Most of the Minds that are presented are embodied in Culture ships.
I have read the new book. It is very good.
by Glen Lincoln
Yes! The future is coming and will be all that dream promised, but more lovely and promising than we know. It’s going to be all right. Youre going to like it!
by someday69
i am writing ah’novel’ of the next few years…forget ten years from now…I want to spice up the nasty’now…..So my super’hyper intel’igence’.Will’,,be quite’sly’,she will hide’,,untill’,there is..nothing that can stop’her….in heaven or here….And at the same time i’m writing one’of the distant past…Where there is a multi’generation black’black’smith’dynisty….and one of the sons..is..”like’ the jesus character,only We don’t le’em get caught by the roman system…..it’s fun…it’s entertaining…what’s left?,,thats right….it will get published as soon as it gets finished….
by AZryan
That was the most incoherent thing I have ever attempted to read. Why would you even post that you’re writing “ah’novel” if you can’t even write a single sentence?
I’ll be sure to be on the lookout for “Full On Jibberish by Someday69″.
by steve
Maybe you should learn some basic grammar first. To get you started, those dots you keep putting after every sentence are called ellipses, there are three of them … and they identify parts of the text that has been skipped. If the skipped text includes the end of of a sentence then there will be four ….
by Ian
If we think of “The Singularity” only in terms of Intelligence, then to a Rat, becoming as intelligent as a human being would be the “Singularity Event”…to them. becoming Greater-Than-Human would be *subliming* to them, even though it is what WE think of as The Singularity. All a matter of perspective I imagine…
by trakk
Maybe i could start writing one?
by trakk
Too many books on future after 50 or 100 years.
Somebody should write a book about what changes will happen this decade!
by Gorden Russell
Hey trakk, I’m writing about those changes every day right here. Do I have to add plot, setting, and characterization too?
Okay, here goes…
It was a dark and stormy night when the first self-replicating robot landed on the Sea of Tranquility. Crashes of lightning rattled the windows at NASA Mission Control.
The voice from the monitor said, “The Falcon has landed. Tranquility Base here.”
Atlas Mission Chief Royal Underwood jumped up from his chair and let out a war whoop. Sitting next to him, Deputy Mission Chief Remington Olivetti did the same. They chest-bumped and gave each other manly bro-hugs, cheering.
“We did it!”
“Yeah, we sure did!”
They held their breaths as the image on the screen showed the robot popping open the hatch, sliding out the boom with the external camera, kicking out the folding stairs, and stepping out onto the dusty surface.
“One small step for a robot,” said the voice of Atlas, “…one giant leap forward for robot kind.”
Atlas walked over to the equipment module with the same bouncing gate that the first men on the moon had used so many years before. It undogged the hatch and released the clamps holding the 3-D copier in place. It pulled the copier out with a slight jerk and carried it over to a sunny spot and set it down, then turned to fetch the solar array. Once the photovoltaics were set up and plugged in, Atlas unfolded a carbon-fiber entrenching tool and started shoveling the regolith into the hopper and the printer lit up.
Atlas brought the camera over from the boom to show the people on Earth what was happening.
“It’s working!” Underwood clapped Olivetti on the back. “That’s the heel bone of a robot foot!”
Atlas zoomed in on the moving printer head.
“This is where I start building Taggart Transplanetary Railroad.”
Underwood turned to Olivetti.
“What is Atlas talking about?”
“Railroads are all Atlas has been talking about since our sponsors gave him those books to read.”
“What books?”
“All the ones by Ayn Rand.”
“Oh why did I accept a robot from the Republican National Committee?”
“Because they’re the ones who cut our budget.”
#############
I’ve got to walk the dogs now. Can you add to this story, Giulio Prisco?
Or anybody else who wants to?
by Gorden Russell
Just back from walking the dogs. They were both full of pee and poop.
Nobody’s made an addition? Oh well, the dogs needed out so bad that I left off a few lines:
Underwood stood there with a strange look on his face, both hands slapped palm-down on his Mohawk (in the year 2023, everybody at NASA wears their hair in a Mohawk — even the bald guys). (The bald guys have implants made of stiff carbon nanotubes.)
Olivetti faced Underwood and placed his hands on the chief’s shoulders.
“So what’s the big deal anyway? So what if Atlas builds all those new boosters and names them after a railroad?”
“Can’t you see? Atlas is privatizing the Moon! He’s giving it all away to the Koch brothers!”
by Gorden Russell
Still nobody adding to the story? No matter, I forgot to give the tale a name.
How about, “Atlas Won’t Shrug.”
by Bri
It’s missing some spicing, some romance and intrigue. You gotta have that dynamic tension. Just toss in some steamy zero gravity space sex, some isolation tension, maybe even some taboo relation with a super sensitive robot who has secret plans to rule the universe. There, there you go. Now we might even have a movie with sequels.
by Whittaker
Another story about simple, predictable pre-Singularity mind.
When will this Atlas being transcend?
by Gorden Russell
Really Whittaker, you should know that. Not til 2046.
by trakk
This decade in my opinion will be less science fictiony than that,i am afraid.
Instead,we might gonna see a great depression, a world war and an epidemic of global proportions. Heck some might say the depression has even started and is happening in slow motion. So all we gotta do is throw in some romance and intrigue in the midst of the war and a bit of science fiction terminator 3 style like that exascale computer that could go online by 2020 and take control of our sewage systems..just kidding!..our communication and defense infrastructure and we have a science non fiction novel that will sum up the next few years.
I am not much of a writer, but hey….no harm in trying.
by Editor
Atlas punched up a program on the Flexcomm built into its skin. It pulsed quickly, indicating a data stream, possibly from Earth, or maybe from the mysterious radbetarian (radical libertarian) base at L5, the two men thought, with a slight shudder. The replicator came alive, generating long, thin strands of silica from the sand regolith. They stretched out, forming … something, hard to make out. What the hell is he doing!? thought Underwood, stepping back nervously. Exabit data cables, leading underground! It’s downloading some massive dataset for what? . …
by Bri
A giant McDonalds! You’ve got that genre down. Maybe that would be a fun addition. Set up a page that relates a fictional story. An audience participation SciFi novel.
by Editor
Underwood was furious. “This is what NADA (National Asteroid Defense Administration) has come to?!!!!”
“Take a stress capsule, dude. Let’s just grab some hempburgers.”
“Uh, wearing these telechron remote viewers on our head? Thanks but not.”
….
by Bri
I guess this is what the world has come to. Who would have thought that Micky D’s would be saving the world from rogue asteroids! Those hempburgers are wieghing heavy on the mind. What the heh. A man’s gotta eat. Anyway, I hear Home Depot is gonna build the space elevator. I betcha that’ll never work right.
by Anthony
Once you are a post-S megamind why would you bother with pants?
by Anthony
Sorry, I meant to place my previous comment in response to Giulio Prisco.
by thane
Of course we can’t know, that’s why its called science “fiction”. Its fun and its speculative. I’m sure aasimov wasn’t expected to be accurate, just being hypothetically plausable was interesting.
by Jabbah
Always good to read interviews like this. Shame that Scott constantly mixes up the Singularity with Subliming. It doesn’t seem as though Scott gets the Singularity concept or understands the Cultures technology. The Culture is a post-Singularity civilization complete with mind uploading. Subliming is the next singularity to come after that.
by Tom B.
Nobody can know what comes after the Singularity. That’s the point. We are incapable of imagining a mind a million times greater than our own. This is no different than expecting a rat to imagine what it’s like to be human. Preposterous!
by Jabbah
Of course you can’t predict what will happen after a singularity. What you can do is write good science fiction about it. Enter the Culture series of books. Whats preposterous is that you seem to be taking the Culture series to be serious prediction of what the future holds.
by Giulio Prisco
A rat can imagine eating Camembert cheese, so it can imagine a small part of what it’s like to be human. Similarly, we can imagine small parts of a greater mind. Good SF writers like Banks or Stross do write good stories about post-S worlds, and they don’t forget that even post-S megaminds will put their pants on one leg at a time.
by Anthony
Giulio,
Once you are a post-S megamind why would you bother with pants?
by Giulio Prisco
Make that “eat their Camembert cheese one bite at a time” then.
by Gorden Russell
Because the women of the Sing still won’t want to look at your ding.
by Whittaker
I recommend the (probably a lot people have heard of) Hannu Rajaniemis’ Quantum Thief and its sequal Fractal Prince.
Very fun (and full of technical terms) story.
It would be great if KurzweilAI do a special introduction on the two books.
by MatthewQ
Thanks for the recommend. I live in Edinburgh as does the author which I did not know. But I have seen his book Fractal Prince in the window of a bookstore called Transreal (whose proprietor looks surprisingly like I. Banks as chance would have it). I shall buy Quantum Thief and give it a read. Maybe I’ll bump into this guy on the street at some point. Always on the lookout for new books.