gerikson

Everyone is entitled to their own readership of Banks. I'm not saying mine is the one and only. But the Culture is supposed to be a background character, even if Banks spends a lot of time in the later novels "explaining" it. But if the reader only focusses on the lore, they'll miss the quite good characters and psychology that Banks was good at too.

My personal favorite is Use of Weapons, where the focus is on the people doing the Culture's dirty work. In one scene, Zakalwe

In Look to Windward

Tired: the universe was created by a deity

Wired: the universe was created by physical forces

Fucking crazy: the universe was created by a figment of my imagination and I'm communicating with it using a blog post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uSTR9Awkn3gpqpSBi/dear-paperclip-maximizer-please-don-t-turn-off-the

Also the Galactic Empire as an anti-scientific hellhole with secret police surveillance.

Witness good old Hari Seldon unveiling his plans on Trantor:

It was not a large office, but it was quite spy-proof and quite undetectably so. Spy-beams trained upon it received neither a suspicious silence nor an even more suspicious static. They received, rather, a conversation constructed at random out of a vast stock of innocuous phrases in various tones and voices.

[Seldon] put his fingers on a certain spot on his desk and a small section of the wall behind him slid aside. Only his own fingers could have done so, since only his particular print-pattern could have activated the scanner beneath.

[…]

“You will find several microfilms inside,” said Seldon. “Take the one marked with the letter T.”

Gaal did so and waited while Seldon fixed it within the projector and handed the young man a pair of eyepieces. Gaal adjusted them, and watched the film unroll before his eyes.

Some dweeb:

I would recommend “Consider Phlebas” by Iain Banks, which is part of the Culture series of novels. Very formative for me, and I read that while I was writing Theme Park. And I still think it’s the best depiction of a post-A.G.I. future, an optimistic post-A.G.I. future, where we’re traveling the stars and humanity reached its full flourishing.

The protagonist of Consider Phlebas is working for the Culture's enemies, a theocratic empire that has slaves literally bred for loyalty, and the conflict they're engaged in ultimately kills billions of sentient beings. Most of the thoughts about the Culture are his, and he basically decries them as the ultimate wokesters. No wonder HN nerds prefer The Player of Games in which a smart nerd like themselves get recruited as an agent to bring down an empire a bit like our own by being really really good at games.

Picked up by a relatively mainstream US politics blog:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/07/the-times-revises-its-policy-about-whether-to-publish-stories-based-on-hacked-materials-provided-by-ratfuckers-again

"Music is just like meth, cocaine or weed. All pleasure no value. Don't listen to music."

That's it. That's the take.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/46xKegrH8LRYe68dF/vire-s-shortform?commentId=PGSqWbgPccQ2hog9a

Their responses in the comments are wild too.

I'm tending towards a troll. No-one can be that dumb. OTH it is LessWrong.

Maybe it's to hammer home the idea that time before DOOM is limited and you might as well get your rocks off with him before that happens.

LWronger posts article entitled

"Authors Have a Responsibility to Communicate Clearly"

OK, title case, obviously serious.

The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.

Nope he's going for satire.

And ladies, he's available!

If you don't get it, LLMs don't either, and David's work here is done.

Managers: "AI will make employees more productive!"

WaPo: "AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings" https://archive.ph/ejC53

Managers: "not like that!!!!"

It's English, but British, Jim.

The Myrdals are probably entirely discredited nowadays, both for being the quintessential social engineers and their son Jan happily destroying their legacy. As you'll no doubt have learned, fertility has fallen everywhere in the developed world, both in countries with shit welfare for parents (Italy) and quite good (the Nordics). Realistically, the only way to reverse this is to enable draconian abortion laws coupled with a systematic repression of sex ed and contraception. Of course this is congruent with today's fascists' goals...