The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks (2009)
For people who hadn&#x27;t read The Culture series, some notes by the author, explaining what The Culture is: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vavatch.co.uk&#x2F;books&#x2F;banks&#x2F;cultnote.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vavatch.co.uk&#x2F;books&#x2F;banks&#x2F;cultnote.htm</a><p>&gt;Language, entertainment, hormones — all of these resources are overseen by the Minds<p>This is a 100% false assertion made by the article author, I don&#x27;t understand how they came to this conclusion. In no way, shape or form is this true.<p>&gt; recommends that the whole planet be destroyed. Special Circumstances would handle that as well.<p>The implication made by the author is that SC and by extension The Culture, will actually destroy a planet full of sentients. This is false, as they didn&#x27;t destroy the even worse species of the Affront. The Culture respect diversity and further more they respect they rights of sentients.<p>Then the author asserts The Culture judges other civilizations by how close they are to values and priorities of The Culture itself. This is also false, like I said above. The author then mention the Idiran War, implicitly in support of his thesis that The Culture will go to war against civs that don&#x27;t share their values; he then fails to mention that 1) The Idirans were bankrolled by another equivalent civ (the same tech tier as The Culture) 2) they were acting as a homogenising swarm 3) parts of The Culture split over the decision to go to war.<p>In my opinion, the article really stretches some very small morally grey areas of The Culture just to try to paint the whole civilisation as not being a perfect utopia. But The Culture _is_ a perfect utopia and it was written and declared as such by the author. Yet everyone tries to find that small little thing that just proves the whole civ it&#x27;s not so perfect after all.