Not crazy about them either. For me, the issue is that they're basically gods (level 8 civilisation) and everything just feels like one big deus ex machina.
Excession stood out as better than the rest.
Excession stood out as better than the rest.
Naturally, the anti- side doesn't have nearly as much money as the pro- side, which is why the special effects in Blake's Seven are so bad.
It makes a lot of sense, too. I mean, TNG started out with political commissars, even - take a look at Troi's character in Season One, especially e.g. Conspiracy, and tell me that's not exactly the role she's playing.
The Culture is a benevolent Matrix where machines make decisions taking the desires and opinions of humans into account to whatever extent they choose to. The amorphous nature of the society is actually part of its explicit nature (whether a ship or population is part of The Culture is kind of up for debate and reassessment at any given time)
The difference between the Federation and the Culture is that Banks actually considered the societal impacts of matter compilers, godlike AI, etc. and tried to describe the results as he imagined them. THe Federation is "kind of like the modern US" with a bunch of tech that would make the modern US make no sense at all.
It's some of the most subversively existential SF I've ever read.
For example, in The Player of Games, Gurgeh devotes his life to games of strategy, and Yay to orbital architecture. Neither character needs to work for a living, so why bother working at all?
Many works by Strugackiy brothers also deal with this question.
I realize these writers belong to preceding generations of SF, but their works are still very much relevant and (IMO) far more plausible than futures of Vinge and Banks.
I feel Banks tried to write a novel about the Culture dealing with peer civilizati0ns, but they a;ways ended up being significantly inferior and we're back to Consider Phlebas (which is The Culture vs a clearly weaker civilization).
I also liked how Matter described a very-low-on-the-civilizational-ladder (literally: It's a located on the lower level of a "shell world", an artificial planetoid constructed of concentric layers of habitation, each home to a different civilization) society whose players discover the Culture and ultimately seek to improve on themselves, while the book concurrently illustrates the other civilizations' underhanded attempts at playing the Culture.
Minor nitpick regarding Consider Phlebas: The Idiran Empire are militarily vastly superior to the Culture at the outset of the war.
They're the only two titles drawn from the poem, so I find it particularly interesting that you mentioned the way that they're more directly referential than other works. Makes me think I should try a closer reading of both.