There’s a baseline 20-30% of all polls taken over the world that is made up of hateful nutjobs and conspiracy theorists
There could be someone running for office who has figured out how to solve all the world’s problems for free, and that 20-30% will vehemently oppose them.
This is the premise that makes Iain M Banks’ Culture series of novels so compelling.
Even though it is a massive interstellar Type2 society that is “fully automated luxury communism” many people are going to be problematic, angsty, and childish. The result is an always interesting plot.
A more thorough exploration of someone living in a relative utopia but being a long streak of misery by nature is Delaney’s novel Triton. Main character is a jerk and you get to explore why, while extremely cool things are happening all around.
I love that about the Culture novels: they are socially coherent. Banks is very keen on telling us about the psychology of this utopian society.
I once tried some Delaney but dropped it as psychedelic hippie scifi. I hope I wasn’t unjust in doing that, but afair it was from that time. Maybe it even was Triton. It was all confusion (“tripping”) and exploring a completely desire-based, erm, exploration.
Recently I read (and barely managed to finish) Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which seems to fit into a similar category (Beatnik scifi?). It had way too many shortcomings, plus it was an old translation that only managed to make the latent racism/sexism more prominent. But it was also very inventive and captivating.
There’s a baseline 20-30% of all polls taken over the world that is made up of hateful nutjobs and conspiracy theorists
There could be someone running for office who has figured out how to solve all the world’s problems for free, and that 20-30% will vehemently oppose them.
“Why should we solve the world’s problems for free? The rest of the world should pay us!”
I have long said that even in a Utopia you would have people unhappy about the way things were.
This is the premise that makes Iain M Banks’ Culture series of novels so compelling.
Even though it is a massive interstellar Type2 society that is “fully automated luxury communism” many people are going to be problematic, angsty, and childish. The result is an always interesting plot.
A more thorough exploration of someone living in a relative utopia but being a long streak of misery by nature is Delaney’s novel Triton. Main character is a jerk and you get to explore why, while extremely cool things are happening all around.
I love that about the Culture novels: they are socially coherent. Banks is very keen on telling us about the psychology of this utopian society.
I once tried some Delaney but dropped it as psychedelic hippie scifi. I hope I wasn’t unjust in doing that, but afair it was from that time. Maybe it even was Triton. It was all confusion (“tripping”) and exploring a completely desire-based, erm, exploration.
Recently I read (and barely managed to finish) Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which seems to fit into a similar category (Beatnik scifi?). It had way too many shortcomings, plus it was an old translation that only managed to make the latent racism/sexism more prominent. But it was also very inventive and captivating.