The Culture War: Iain M. Banks’s Billionaire Fans

The Culture War: Iain M. Banks’s Billionaire Fans

Why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos love Iain M. Banks’ anarcho-communist space opera.

by Kurt Schiller

Explicitly ideological fiction is as old as fiction itself. From ancient steles that boasted unconvincingly of the glorious defeat of the Sea Peoples to the biased histories of that ancient greek fabulist Herodotus, humans have always had a tendency to entangle ideology and entertainment.

And if anything, the last hundred years have only seen this tendency grow. Fiction—whether the written word or newer mediums—has remained a popular standard-bearer for ideologies as diverse as technocratic liberalism (The West Wing), free market right-libertarianism (Atlas Shrugged, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), socialism (The Jungle, The Iron Heel), and even violent white supremacy (The Turner Diaries, The Camp of the Saints). And in the 21st century, the ideological implications of media consumption have become as micro-targeted as the media themselves: if you are a “true American patriot”, you might consume such jingoistic potboilers as 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi or the suburbs-vs-antifa thriller The Reliant. If you are a god-fearing evangelical, perhaps Assassin 33 A.D. or the Kevin Sorbo-fronted God’s Not Dead series are more your speed. Seeking to seize the means? Perhaps you can first seize a controller and dig into Tonight We Riot or Disco Elysium. 

Meanwhile, the reverse has also become true: “If a particular piece of media reeks of ideological impurity,” the conventional wisdom seems to go, “why bother? Why would you let those toxic ideas into your head?”

For all that these notions of ideological contagion and symbology are hilariously overblown, there’s some truth to the matter. At times, reading or watching long-form fiction from someone to whom you are ideologically opposed can feel exhausting, draining, aggravating, and ultimately a bit futile—like being at a party where you simply don’t like anyone, don’t care about the discussions, and are annoyed at the food. There’s much to be gained by engaging with our rhetorical opponents… but, frankly, only up to a point.

What then are we to take from the distinct and quite public fascination of the two richest men in the world—Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, together worth more than $375 billion—with the sci-fi works of Iain M. Banks, an avowedly socialist author who set his far-future fiction in what might best be described as a post-scarcity, anarcho-communist utopia; a world where your Bezoses and your Musks are not just irrelevant, but actively sought out and disempowered by a society comprised of property-less workers and all-caring, mostly-benevolent A.I.s?

* * * * *

Iain M. Banks’s Culture series—consisting of 10 largely standalone novels and a handful of short stories published between 1987 and the author’s death in 2013—charts the intrigues, impacts, and subterfuges of a group of space-faring, far-future transhumans called The Culture. 

In some ways, it’s an almost archetypal space opera. Tough-as-nails soldiers and shady sci-fi diplomats wage war across a variety of fantastical planets and megastructures. Massive, high-tech ships piloted by ultra-powerful self-aware A.I. called Minds have super-science duels among the stars. There are assassinations, revolutions, mass battles with hundreds of ships that play out on a grand scale (while taking only a fraction of a second in objective time).

At first glance, it seems like exactly what you’re imagining when you hear the phrase “space opera,” and so of course two super-wealthy spaceflight-and-sci-fi aficionados would be fans, right? After all, both men own private spaceflight contractors (Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin) and speak often of mankind’s future among the stars, with Musk proposing a mission to Mars and Bezos pitching a return to the moon and other intrasystem exploration. Seeking the stars seems to be in their blood (assuming it hasn’t been completely replaced with Soylent and whatever nootropics billionaires get).

Both men have found ways to conspicuously show their fandom: Musk by naming SpaceX rockets after Banks’s tongue-in-cheek Culture ships (“Just Read The Instructions,” “Of Course I Still Love You”) and a “brain interface” loosely patterned after the Culture’s neural laces; Bezos by attempting to bankroll a big-budget TV series based on the books, although this latter effort was unceremoniously canceled after Banks’s estate abruptly backed out. (Probably a wise decision, given both the challenge of adapting the material and the absurdity of one of the most exploitative corporations in the world attempting to adapt proudly far-left sci-fi.)

Apart from official projects, both men have made public references to Banks’s work as well—not much, but enough to know that they either really have read it, or that they were well-briefed by their PR teams.

“The Culture series is certainly, in terms of more modern science fiction, one of my absolute favorites,” Jeff Bezos told GeekWire in 2018, when asked about his love for the series. ”We’re not quite at that level technologically, we’ve a lot of work to do before we get there, but there’s a utopian element to it that I find very attractive.”

* * * * *

There are ultimately two things that set the Culture series apart from many of its peers.

The first is the literary bent of the prose. Space opera (and genre fiction in general) has never actually looked like the “lasers and explosions” stereotype it was saddled with, but it’s worth emphasizing the depth of Banks’s characterization and strange depictions of an uncanny future. 

Characters grapple with trauma, identity, and crisis, and they do so without losing sight of the visceral and pulpy thrill of space opera’s inherent adventure and intrigue. Moments of quiet contemplation and deep metaphysical quandaries abound, coupled with strange literary pretensions that wouldn’t seem out of place in magical realism or literary fiction—a vast machine the size of a planet made of interlocking, nested globes, each holding a separate society; a grief-sick partner who holds their pregnancy in stasis for the better part of a century in a strange act of penance and passive-aggression; a vast extra-dimensional object that resists all attempts to analyze, communicate, or attack it, nearly sparking an interstellar war. The stories of the Culture simultaneously have a very real sense of strangeness and a deep, complex humanist bent, as if picking the best bit from multiple genres without losing the sense and feel of each constituent part.

Since he first came onto the literary scene in the mid-Eighties, Banks was an avowed and rather public socialist. 

Perhaps this savvy genre-bending should come as no surprise, considering Banks was an established author of literary fiction before he broke through as a sci-fi writer. While he had always dreamed of writing sci-fi (and indeed wrote at least one Culture novel before breaking through as a lit-fic author), it wasn’t until his break-out literary novel The Wasp Factory (1984) that he was able to start selling his sci-fi manuscripts, eventually settling into a rhythm where he danced more-or-less annually between mind-bending literary fiction published under the name Iain Banks and epic sci-fi novels published under the name “Iain M. Banks.” (His family, Banks explained, was offended he hadn’t used his middle name—Menzies—on The Wasp Factory.)

The other thing that sets both Banks and his Culture books apart is their overt and uncompromising politics.

Since he first came onto the literary scene in the mid-Eighties, Banks was an avowed and rather public socialist. He was a member of the Scottish Socialist Party and a frequent interviewee for magazines like Socialist Worker, as well as an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War who campaigned for the impeachment of Tony Blair and, when that failed, shredded his passport and mailed the remains to 10 Downing Street. He spoke openly, and passionately, about labor exploitation, anti-imperialism, the environment, and a host of other now-popular issues, most of which still languished on the edge of the discourse when Banks first hit the scene.

He was also never shy about intermingling his politics and his work. Indeed, he saw them as being one and the same. Nowhere is this more clear than in a 1994 essay titled “A Few Notes on the Culture,” which Banks posted to the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written. The sprawling document is both an overview of the Culture and an exegesis on Banks’s own worldview; between paragraphs delving into the society’s naming conventions, technology, and democratic apparatuses, Banks waxed poetic about the deleterious moral impact of capitalism and market forces:

“The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is – without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset – intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] – through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others – a kind of synthetic evil.”

Iain M. Banks, “A Few Notes on the Culture”

These same politics have been front and center in Banks’s conception of the Culture, a group he affectionately described as “hippie commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.”

To Banks, the Culture was exactly the sort of post-scarcity far-left utopia that he himself wanted to see realized—Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism in the most literal sense. There is no money, no property, and no capitalism. Thanks to the Culture’s vast number of sentient, independent A.I. (all of whom are treated as full citizens in their own right, and are arguably far more powerful and impactful than their human counterparts), the Culture’s human constituents work for pleasure and self-actualization, if they work at all. Many don’t, and choose to idle their days away through intellectual pursuits or quiet contemplation. There’s no hunger, no poverty, little crime, and no criminal justice system to speak of. Banks does allude to something called Slap-drones, semi-intelligent devices assigned to troublesome (or troubled) citizens to prevent them from harming themselves or others, but this is more for safety than punishment. The only real form of punishment in the Culture is ostracism—if you persist in trying to hurt or harass people, one of his characters explains, ”you don’t get invited to too many parties.” (This, we are told, is severe enough consequences to keep most people on at least tolerable behavior.)

Every aspect of their society is based not on power or hierarchy (the Culture has plenty of the former and none of the latter), but rather on preference and affinity. Due to their adoption of vast, artificial Orbitals (think Halo’s titular megastructure, or more accurately Larry Niven’s Ringworld), habitable land is almost infinitely available, and so people are free to live wherever they please. Some citizens might, alternately, decide to live in solitude on a remote Rock (hollowed out asteroid) or hitch a ride on one of the massive, AI-controlled General Systems Vehicles (GSVs) that ply the cosmos like vast spaceborne megalopolises.

The Culture was exactly the sort of post-scarcity far-left utopia that Banks wanted to see realized. 

Bodily and personal autonomy was also deeply important to Banks, and to his creations: people in the Culture are free to structure both their lives and their bodies as they see fit. Aided by their advanced technology, we see characters change appearances, physical form, identity, and presentations at will. Most members of the Culture are also outfitted with a dizzying array of glands, implants, and other hyper-tech capable of everything from releasing euphoric drugs to massively reconfiguring their bodies or repairing otherwise life-threatening injuries.

If a major political or social issue arises in the Culture—say, whether an Orbital wants to remain part of the Culture or schism to join one of its dozens of splinter groups—the vote is handled through instant direct democracy, with every citizen (and super-intelligent Mind, as well as intelligent drones) getting an equal say. 

In the Culture, Banks told the Scottish Socialist Voice in 2002, “nothing and nobody is exploited, and the opportunities for fun are pretty much unrestricted, so I like to think of it as a society that anybody could be happy in.”

* * * * *

At one level, it’s easy to see the appeal of The Culture novels to the likes of Bezos and Musk. After all, these men are far closer than anyone else to actually living the life of a Culture citizen. Their every whim is met, and they are free from hunger, struggle, and strife. That they are served by the vast machinery of capitalism, rather than super-intelligent benevolent A.I., is somewhat besides the point—neither is a state of affairs that we lowly mortals can really imagine. Perhaps there’s some level at which these two billionaires look at the world Banks presents, at the Culture and its vast population of leisurely sophisticates and aesthetes, and see not a utopia but rather a society comprised entirely of people like themselves. (Admittedly it’s also possible that Elon Musk just likes cool lasers and spaceships, both of which Banks provides in abundance.)

There’s a catch, of course: utopias are not especially distinguishable by their benefits, but by the cost and the sacrifice. Most of the utopias we encounter in pop culture are in some way tainted, or a mirage—think Ursula Le Guin’s Omelas, where the idle tranquility masks a terrible moral bargain, or the various 1984 clones, where it’s only a “utopia” if you’ve never known anything else. No, what really becomes a point of ideological tension is the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us. He’s much more concerned with the question of how to run a communist space utopia than he is in the question of building one in the first place.

The Culture arrives fully formed in our first exposure to them, and so we never see them become the Culture. (Ironically, they are also presented as the bad guys in that first appearance—an intentional and futile attempt to mask Banks’s affection for his creation). We never actually see what trials and tribulations the Culture passed through on its way to Utopia. And because most of Banks’s characters are quite happy and content to live in the Culture, few people are heard to complain about what they have given up, or what was lost. Nor would it really make sense to—in a world where everyone has the freedom and agency of Jeff Bezos, what could you possibly be losing? 

A socialist can look at Banks’s utopia and see something attainable only through Marxism, while a libertarian sees the result of free market ideology. 

No, to most readers—regardless of their ideology—the Culture sounds pretty great. And so a socialist can look at Banks’s utopia and see something attainable only through Marxism, while a libertarian sees the inevitable result of untrammeled free market ideology, and a billionaire or other worldly elite might see an outcome that they might steward the world towards, like the mysterious Chairman in the 1976 comedy Network: “Our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit.”

Banks’s own conception was a bit different: much as Marx saw Communism as a sort of historical inevitability, Banks sees the Culture’s basic organization as the natural conclusion of a distributed, post-scarcity space-based society. We might not be able to achieve the lofty heights of the Culture—indeed, Banks was pretty convinced that it would be impossible for us without somehow overcoming our baser natures—but, if we somehow did, he figured our society would likely be quite similar.   

It’s worth noting, though, that Banks jealously guarded his utopia from the dreams of his ideological opponents. Asked by the magazine Strange Horizons in an excellent 2010 interview whether he had heard that the Culture might represent an American Libertarian ideal, the Scottish author seemed downright offended:

“Let’s be clear: unless I have profoundly misunderstood its position, I pretty much despise American Libertarianism. Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, ‘Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness’? […] Which bit of not having private property, and the absence of money in the Culture novels, have these people missed?”

Iain M. Banks, Strange Horizons

Which bit indeed?

* * * * *

There’s another factor at play here, quite apart from the wide appeal of Iain M. Banks’s perfect utopia, and that’s the curious lack of overt didacticism in his novels. This was something he himself noted in that same Strange Horizons interview, where he briefly described the series as “me at my most didactic,” before conceding that much of his ideology was also “largely hidden under all the funny names, action, and general bluster.”

In other words, Banks’s fiction is suffused with his ideology, but he’s no Ayn Rand. You’re not likely to encounter many shouty speeches about why a distributed anarcho-utopia is the right way to organize a society, or why neoliberal capitalism is such a disaster. A great deal of time and care goes into laying out the what and how of the Culture’s vast stellar society is—but it’s quite rare that anyone really delves deeply into the why of the matter.

The notion of a mostly-pacifist, egalitarian society that constantly meddles in the affairs of its neighbors is an interesting contradiction. 

Which is not to say that societal critique is absent from the books—it’s just directed at societies other than the Culture. Many of the novels’ protagonists are drawn from or set in motion by a shady branch of the Culture called Special Circumstances, a sort of black-ops diplomatic corps whose job it is to meddle with other societies. Often this is to prevent them from threatening the Culture’s idyllic existence, but quite frequently it’s done out of a sort of well-meaning technocratic drive: they observe, they judge, and they do their bleeding-heart best to “help” however they can, guided by the unerring calculations of their hyper-intelligent Minds.

(There’s even a short story, The State of the Art, where the Culture briefly visits Earth and judges us thusly: “When they’re not actually out slaughtering each other they’re inventing ingenious new ways to massacre each other more efficiently in the future, and when they’re not doing that they’re committing speciescide, from the Amazon to Borneo… or filling the seas with shit, or the air, or the land.” Harsh, but… okay, yeah, no. That’s fair.)

That said, the notion of a mostly-pacifist, egalitarian society that constantly meddles in the affairs of its neighbors presents an interesting contradiction, and it’s one that is essential to understanding just how the ideology of the series fades into the background.

Consider the second published Culture novel, 1990’s The Player of Games. In it, an especially gifted member of the Culture leisure class is blackmailed by Special Circumstances into becoming the first outsider to join a massive game tournament in the hostile and distant Empire of Azad. The precise reasons for this are obscure until the conclusion of the novel, but suffice to say the goal of Special Circumstances is to accomplish something that another society might simply have done with a single warship, or just an assassin.

If this all sounds rather neoliberal and CIA-like to you, you’re not alone in this observation. In fact, the extent to which S.C. meddles in other societies is a point of contention within the Culture itself—one of a dizzying array of ideological arguments and contradictions that its citizens are constantly hashing out. 

Another prominent example is the Idiran War, one of the few conventional wars fought by the Culture and the basis of the first novel in the series, Consider Phlebas. We learn after-the-fact that the decision to use open force against another society (even a very hostile one) was the topic of a huge and highly contentious vote, one which caused an enormous rift and led large portions of the Culture to split away in protest.

Because the Culture has its internal conflicts and screw-ups, people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk might see it as a future-flung version of ourselves. 

“The minority simply declared itself neutral in the hostilities,” Banks explained in his 1994 Usenet essay, “and the re-integration of the Peace faction after the cessation of hostilities was never totally completed, many people in it preferring to stay outside the majority Culture as long as it did not renounce the future use of force.” Similar society-splitting disagreements are mentioned pertaining to the level of involvement with other societies, the decision to share or withhold technology from other societies, and even the decision to leave our physical reality altogether (a process known as Subliming, and which is the ultimate destiny of most sufficiently advanced societies).

This ideological complexity—the acknowledgement that even utopia is not an endpoint, but a temporary and shifting arrangement—is both refreshing and, admittedly, somewhat troubling for those wishing to use the Culture as a straightforward ideological blueprint. Because the Culture has its internal conflicts and screw-ups, people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk might see it not just as the logical extension of man’s destiny among the stars and a best-case-scenario for a communist space society, but as a sort of future-flung version of ourselves: “Look, even the Culture goes to war and has a CIA—why, they’re just like us!”

Except they’re not, of course—something Banks has always been very explicit about. The Culture may excuse a little ethical flexibility when it comes to contact with other societies, but our real-world superpowers bend ethics until they snap completely in half. Not to mention that when we do regime change in the real world, it isn’t with the ultra-tech precision and careful rationale of the Culture’s super-intelligent A.I., but the slapdash, devastating fumbling of a Henry Kissinger or a Dick Cheney, bellicose stumblebums who leave behind little apart from millions of corpses and decades of strife. 

And this is ultimately the challenge of attempting to base your own real world plans and aspirations on fiction: reality is rarely so straightforward. The Culture has a great deal of qualities that we lack, or regrettably possess—they’re less vicious, more thoughtful, and just overall more pleasant. Banks created an ideological playground by waving a wand and removing the trickiest barrier to any utopia: basic human shittiness.

The Culture is not a map that we can follow to a communist utopia (nor a neoliberal one, whatever the billionaires might think).

“The Culture isn’t us,” Banks said in a 2008 interview with CNN, when asked about whether he thought such an arrangement was in our destiny. “I thought long and hard about this long before the books were published, and decided that the Culture wasn’t going to be us in the future.”

But is this visible to the likes of Bezos and Musk? It’s impossible to say, of course—for all that we know, their affinity for the series could be a lark, or PR-crafted nonsense. (It wouldn’t be the first time the rich and powerful have adopted fake affectations to seem more like people.) But I think it’s something else. I think that Bezos and Musk can read the Culture novels and see in the easy perfection of the Culture and its Minds—perfectly rational, elevated, heightened above their peers both morally and intellectually—something of what they, in their arrogance, see in themselves. After all, they’ve dominated the Earth—fixing all the problems of society should be no big deal, right? You just need a few hundred rockets, some satellites, and a few good memes.

But to people of a more materialist bent, the role of the Culture should be clear: not as a blueprint, but as an “as-built,” to use the architecture term for plans drawn up after the fact to reflect all the various compromises, struggles, cadges, and misfires that happen in the course of any big project, whether it’s building an office complex or a just, equitable society of spacefaring hedonists.

The Culture is not a map that we can follow to a communist utopia (nor a neoliberal one, whatever the billionaires might think). And it was never intended to be, as Banks’s comments make clear. At best, it’s one of those hand-drawn maritime maps, yellowed and strange, with the continents all out of place and distorted by half-recalled recollections and rum-fueled lies and imaginings. A map, then, but not the terrain itself.

Our own map to utopia is something we will have to make for ourselves. But it’s still comforting to dream of the destination along the way.

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Kurt Schiller is the editor of Blood Knife and co-host of the podcast Parents Just Don’t Understand. You can find him on Twitter at @mechanicalkurt.

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