Comment by layer8
2 days ago
> just the default Western canon
It’s particular topics of that canon, and you have to fancy their treatment in a science-fiction setting. Some people like science-fiction because/when it proposes fresh perspectives that aren’t rooted in, by lack of a better description, non-enlightenment parts of that canon.
The clean slate of banks - where we discarded culture to embrace the "culture" and look where this "winging" it got us. Turns out the operating system of a society is important- and the atheist distilled synthetic one is not really working - same goes for alot of others.
The utopist urge for cultural tabula rasa is a retardation, a attempt of the brain to shirk embracing and discovering complexity. One has to look at the "backwards" parts to start to understand what works in a society and with the actual human beeings lifing in a actual society, not the wingless Star Trek Angels in PJs.
Embrace complexity, embrace analysis, build something without defining the endstate first. Make small things that work, combine them into bigger things that work. Way less calling for cullings of the "sabotaging traitors" as they are usual with utopists on the march.
Who is "we"? In Banks' culture universe, humanity (us) were explicitly rejected and never became part of the Culture.
(The State of the Art)
There's a footnote in Consider Phlebas at the end...
> “The following three passages have been extracted from A Short History of the Idiran War (English language/Christian calendar version, original text AD 2110, unaltered), edited by Parharengyisa Listach Ja’andeesih Petrain dam Kotosklo. The work forms part of an independent, non-commissioned but Contact-approved Earth Extro-Information Pack.”
The implication is that Earth is contacted eventually, maybe we developed to the point where we were able to make independent contact and keeping Earth ignorant of The Culture no longer served a purpose. That is only speculation though. Maybe some Free Company showed up and tried to set themselves up as a king, or a disenfranchised non-aligned Special Circumstances operative infiltrated governments and tried doing the "right" thing in guiding it and spilled the beans (future thesis topic: compare Special Circumstances in The Use of Weapons and Rediscovery and Reeducation from The Godmakers).
Within the in universe timeline, it is set by that date and relative dates are based on it. Other books then mention an offset from the Idiran-Culture War and an overall in universe chronology can be roughed out. Much of it takes place about 500 years after the Idiran-Culture War in what would be Earth's timeline of the late 1800s (prior to The State of the Art which was another 100 years later).
And then, even if the appendix of Consider Phlebas was Apocryphal with the 2110 "Earth got the history of The Culture", part of the thing with the scope of the universe is that it is enormous and one rather young (even The Culture is mentioned as not being one of the elder races) it is a footnote of an experiment that one of the Minds did in not contacting Sol-III humanity in the scope of things.