The Culture of "The Culture": Utopian Processes in Iain M. Banks's Space Opera Series by Joseph S. Norman

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Culture of "The Culture": Utopian Processes in Iain M. Banks's Space Opera Seriesby Joseph S. Norman Chad Andrews Breaking One-Dimensionality. Joseph S. Norman. The Culture of "The Culture": Utopian Processes in Iain M. Banks's Space Opera Series. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2021. x+ 286 pp. £85/ $120 hc. At both the beginning and end of his new book on Iain M. Banks's celebrated C ultureseries (1987-2012), Joseph S. Norman mentions a peculiar fact of modern technoculture: when the Falcon 9 rocket manufactured by Elon Musk's SpaceX completed its mesmerizing flight in 2016, slowly touching down like a car being parallel parked, the platform it landed on was named after an immensely powerful AI ship from Banks's novel The Player of Games(1988), the Of Course I Still Love You. In fact, the platform is just one of several "autonomous spaceport drone ships" (ASDSs) made by SpaceX that takes its name from the idiosyncratic and hyperintelligent ships of Banks's series. Musk is enamored with the Culture, clearly, but for Norman the naming convention also indicates "the extent to which contemporary technoscience is both inspired by, and catching up with, the fictional speculations of SF" (2). If this is the case, our present moment certainly has become science-fictional, given that space opera, the subgenre within which Banks's series operates, is notorious for its far-future and extravagant imaginings of posthuman bodies, faster-than-light travel, advanced megastructures, and so much more. Could it be that our own moment has caught up with the phantasmagoria of sf's most imaginative subgenre? Are we living in the era of space opera? Probably not. And Norman has no interest in pursuing such superficial platitudes. He isconcerned, however, with mapping the representations of Banks's society in relation to utopian thinking (hence the subtitle of his book), and with discerning the degree to which those representations also extend to notions of empire. In doing so, he explores some of the fundamental aspects of utopian thought, including the tricky and uncertain terrain that connects, sometimes inconceivably, the present moment and the utopian future. As such, his work in this book does in fact explore the relation between space opera [End Page 187]and "now," looking carefully at the political context of Banks's early novels—the rise of Thatcherism and neoliberal capitalism—as well as its figurations of technoscience, posthumanism, feminism, humanism, art, and a range of additional topics that attach Banks's spectacular visions to the somewhat more mundane considerations of our own reality. At the same time, it may be the case that Banks's C ultureseries qualifies as a legitimately utopian effort by breaking with the mundanity of our present (as opposed to creating a bridge to it). Borrowing from Fredric Jameson, Norman suggests that the utopian form's real value is not in describing the details and contours of utopian societies—as undertaken by Thomas More and others—but rather in the very act of imagining a fundamental shift or break with the social, cultural, economic, technological, etc., status quo. Jameson calls this "thinking the break" ( Valences of the Dialectic[2009], 423), a phrase that Norman uses repeatedly, including in the title of his second chapter, "Thinking the Break: The Culture as Postscarcity Utopia." The idea here is that the very act of utopian imagination is itself utopian. One does not have to usher in the break, or describe the break analytically, or justify the break politically, but rather simply "think it." And this is something that Norman facilitates with aplomb. His book is well-researched, confident, and offers numerous insights into the various and colorful ways that Banks "thought the break" with his own contemporary society. This is useful framing, allowing Norman to focus on the various and complex intersections of Banks's fiction with utopianism, instead of arguing in a more traditional manner that the Culture society is in fact perfect—this is impossible, of course, because perfect for some is imperfect for others. Indeed, Norman goes to great lengths to underscore the various problematic and even concerning aspects of the Culture, which although existing...