this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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With the assumption I can choose who I am, I would argue that Banks' Culture would be my choice. The Culture as a whole is much less vulnerable due to its size and scale and their technology is more advanced. Want cool space adventures? Join Contact or just go travel around in another civilization. Magic adventures? The sleep games and VR is like holodecks but on steroids. Want to live forever? No problem (although it's frowned upon).
Love the Culture. Also, transgenderism is amateur hour. Let's get to trans-humanism. Fuck 'no wrong way to have a body'; I don't want a body at all.
Don't forget the ability to switch sex/gender freely. I think in Player of Games there is one person known for switching to female and having a kid every ten years or so. Having lots of kids also frowned upon.
Listen, if Bashir can casually turn Sisko into a klingon in an afternoon, outpatient, I'm pretty sure ~~becoming my fursona~~ gender transition is nbd
Agreed, but honestly either is ok. I'd prefer the Minds ruling me to humans too.
The main thing that would scare me is the Megadeath scenarios from the Idiran war.
But that seems like a pretty rare thing. Also, they seem to be a lot better at the sex and drugs thing than ST, as well as how they handle crime.
Coming after these guys is Neal Asher's Polity. It's like Culture "lite", And the robots are a bit less "extra".
The appendix in Consider Phlebus put the Iridian war into interesting perspective.
Wasn't it just one GSV on the Culture side basically fighting the whole war?
It's more that it is mind bogglingly huge by our standards, yet still a blip on the scale of the galaxy.
Yeeeah, I'm not so sure I'd opt for the Polity in third place. It has a lot of problems, and major population centers are regularly threatened. And their AIs go rouge with alarming frequency, but that's probably a consequence of being force-grown for war. Plus, just... Prador. As a civilian, I'd rather face xenophobic Idirans over Prador any day.
Wow, even the most out-there sci-fi has built-in biological chauvinism and fear.
Sure, the universe is boundless and filled with energy and resources, but don't you dare live longer than 80, that's against Nature!
I think this is actually one of the more clever points Banks makes, although not explicitly.
Fundamentally, the Culture believes that living things (and their definition in this regard is remarkably broad) have a moral right to exist. Therefore, as a society they are not expansionist. In order to remain non-expansionist, the population must be kept stable and this has implications either in childbearing or lifespans. The average Culture human mothers about one child but that means they can't, on average live forever. Why they choose to have children at all perhaps also boils down to the future generation's moral right to exist, but also because they recognize that a renewing population means a renewing culture and Culture.
In this light, I believe it's easy to see immortality as a sort of childish self-aggrandizement comparable to wanting to become the ruler of some backwards planet. Skaffen-Amtiscaw (an artificial entity and citizen of the Culture) even remarks on Zakalwe's immortality as childish in Use of Weapons.
The Culture never appeals to nature – how could they, they are ruled by their Minds!
(Mind is a sort of very powerful artificial intelligence).
There is a lot of similarities between the Culture and Trek, they are both visions of post-scarcity humanity made impossible by the simple fact that humans could never be that nice.
Just a bunch of guilt-tripping. Expanding from the Earth, OK, expanding past x light years, childish. It's just moralistic nonsense.
I don't think you're expected to see the moral choices made by characters in the culture as ones you yourself should pick given current reality. It's set against a rather different set of background conditions.
One thing that happens in aging is you lose patience. I also read far less than before. These Culture novels are WAY too long. I'm in the "get on with it" phase of reading now. And I used to read things like Aldiss's Helliconia.
I wish AI was reliable, so I'd just ask for a précis of a given novel and work from that.
Unabridged audio books at 3x speed -- ramp the speed up slowly, if you need to -- and you can rip through books quite quickly. But, more reading could be good. (I know I should probably no more actual reading, too.)
I don't really buy that non-epansionist requires stable-population; there's a lot of optimization potential and each one we achieve means that we can support a larger population on the same energy input. There are physical limits, sure, but it doesn't strike me that The Culture is up against them (and we are many, many orders of magnitude away; we hardly use most of the solar energy that enters the atmosphere, which is a tiny fraction of the solar output, which is a tiny fraction of what a controlled (rather than "gravitationally-organized") fusion reactor can produce on the same fuel).
I also don't buy that stable-population means involuntary death. Even once it stops being a majority position, I think you are going to have some people that opt-in to death for a variety of reasons which allows for a non-zero birth rate.
In all cases, involuntary death seems only motivated by resource limitations, so involuntary restrictions on resource usage would be preferable to involuntary death. (Those involuntary restrictions might turn into voluntary deaths, but certainly not always and likely exceedingly rarely at first.)
I don't think it would happen is "just" 400 years, but I can imagine deciding to opt-in to death "just" to allow a different, new consciousness to experience things, and that may very well be what's happening in The Culture.
If you knew anything about The Culture, you'd know it's not that simple.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Death
I want optional mortality, but am also comfortable with death, and I can imagine situations of survival where I would prefer death.
Why? There's no logical series of "and then because" steps to arrive at this bizarre conclusion. (Not you, in the book's universe, I mean)
Like, everything else ISN'T eccentric, somehow.
I think with all the options for a non-physical existence, it's seen as quaint that one would choose to permanently extend their physical existence. But, I'm not an expert; I've only done the audiobooks for a few of the Culture series.
I don't know enough of the "rules" around consciousness transfer in the Culture universe, if there are any. I can imagine a future were we find out that consciousness is somehow non-copiable and non-mobile, and if that is the case, then I think a lot of people are going to be interested in putting off death forever, one day at a time (maybe tomorrow... but not today). If you can copy consciousness (which is what "backup services" implies to me), things get weird quickly; intentionally or accidentally there could be multiple living individuals that all share my whole history up to some copy point, e.g. Restoring my backup to a separate vessel in Utopia doesn't stop torture or other suffering that might continue for my current vessel.
Quaint isn't "frowned upon", that's two different states. A 1950s pompadour hairstyle is quaint, certainly no one frowns on it like they would, say, to teardrop tattoos near your eyes.
It's just that, in my sci-fi reading experience, the attitudes towards radical life extension always seem to be very conservative, even in a universe tossing black holes around and engineering galaxies, that's all great fun, but someone wants to live longer? Oh no, let's go back to the 18th century!
Like even the '90s show The Twilight Zone, or was it The Outer Limits, a scientist works on life extension with science, and the "moral" of the story was that the universe would punish you with supernatural retribution. I found that episode very stupid.
Of course I want my 25 year old body back. Anyone rational would want that. Even in a modest non-black-hole-tossing universe, imagine the health care savings. It would be unethical to NOT reverse aging.
Yet somehow giving birth in hospitals is OK, as are antibiotics... etc etc etc
It makes little to no sense to me. Of course life extension is desirable, especially anti-aging.
But then again we live in a world in which people actively cheer on, and fund, endless wars.
Despite all our posturing as a society about choosing life, etc, we are just a species of death-loving mortalists. With spaceships for some reason.
(I think that our present infatuation with AI will eventually lead to having enough computing power and mathematical models, to understand every atom in a cell, what reactions they participate in, and therefore how to deal with the unwanted, or long-term undesirable, chemicals. Which well then require yet an even larger simulation to see what effects that will have. I have little hope for the wilder consciousness transfer ideas, I think "me" is inextricably linked to the present state of my brain, and therefore extending the meat life is what needs to happen.)
I think this reflects our current culture. A lot of people seem to really think that death is what gives life meaning, and that bitter experiences are good because they make sweet experiences better. (They really need to understand The fable of the dragon-tyrant)
On top of that, even for people that don't see death as a "positive", many tend to think of life extension as making aging simply last longer, that you'd continue to get more frail and dotty (or whatever) for another decade or two.
There is fiction that celebrates radical life extension, but it is at least as rare as people that want radical life extension. And, even then, many of those people (myself included) as captured by the idea of uploading or otherwise separating the consciousness from the body, which doesn't seem to be what you want. https://www.fullmoon.nu/Resurrection/PrimarySpecies.html
We have plenty of examples of consciousness running on meat. I have none of consciousness separate from the body.
I am unconvinced of "meat" being a uniquely-suitable substrate for anything remotely like consciousness. I think the crazy amount of silly things that turn out to be Turning-complete is sufficient evidence that meat is unlikely to be unique.
Tho, certainly, I'm not ready to be the first volunteer to be digitized or whatever.
Ok good so it's not frowned upon
I think "eccenticity" has a connotation of negative judgment. So, yeah, I think "frowned upon" is an accurate summary of the attitude toward the rare biological citizen that chooses physical immortality.
But, no one is expected to just let "natural" biology cripple and kill them in a mere 80 years. They get to choose when they die, and most choose to end their physical existence sometime after 400 years, tho that's not always the end: they "simply" stop having a fixed physical vessel.
OR
"There's even more to it than that!" [putdown intro not necessary]
I think my reply was still a de-escalation from the attitude in the post to which I was replying. But, noted that I could be better.