> given utopias are, almost by definition, pretty tedious.
By definition, if they're tedious, they're not utopias. It's more that writing convincing utopias is hard and people are lazy.
By definition, if they're tedious, they're not utopias. It's more that writing convincing utopias is hard and people are lazy.
I put forward thus that in the same way Superman can be tedious so can Utopias, and Utopias can be interesting in the same way that Superman can.
It’s tedious to a modern audience. Hemingway but in space isn’t really an improvement. (The closest we have is Ted Chiang.)
I think adventure necessarily happens at the edges of civilization and order, or when civilization or order breaks down, and to a reader I think there must be some kind of adventure for story to be fun.
So what you'd see in a true utopia might be very fun for the people living in it, but there might not be much conflict that would appeal to a reader. Utopia conflict situations might be things like "Ethics board analyzes the legality of using state funds for man with Down's Syndrome who wants to try an experimental treatment and must analyze whether he understands well enough for informed consent". You can write it, if it were really good I could imagine wanting to read it, but it's much easier to read a story where people are shooting one another.
Utopias are by definition tedious because a utopia is an end to history and as such an end to meaning or negotiation of how to live. A utopia is always an end to a story or Freedom with a capital f. As Dostoevsky points out in Notes from Underground, on man in utopia:
"[he] would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it!"
Another way to phrase it. If you are in a utopia, you cannot be in a democracy that entails the possibility of ending it. Which is to say, you can't govern yourself at all. And that is why Ian M Banks culture is nothing of the sort. It's a society literally controlled by "perfect minds" using a Sapir-Whorf like language to manage the behavior of its people. Even Banks who tried to write a positive utopia and that's not his fault, couldn't imagine a utopia that entails the possibility of rebellion.
They were up for, and welcoming of, even quite extreme changes; compare with humanity today, where being transgender is considered controversial by a significant percentage of the population of a nation that likes to self-promote on the idea it is the beacon of liberty and freedom, versus the way Culture bodies are written to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will, with most people being expected to try it, and with some couples flipping gender while pregnant and pausing the pregnancy just so both can give birth together.
Even species changes are, for them, easy and of no great consequence or dispute. While you may be seen as weird if you choose to give up the visual accuity of an owl and the cerebral resliliance to survive decapitation in order to live out your life on this quaint rock recently discovered to be hosting an atomic age civilization, the Mind won't refuse to change you into a mere human just because you found Jesus.
a constant hedonic self modification and individual reinvention is obviously no sign of extreme change but the opposite, banality and powerlessness. As Augusto de Noce used to point out about the sexual revolution of the 60s, the sexual dimension became an obsession precisely because all other revolutions had been rendered impossible by an atomized society. There was nothing radical at all in it.
It's no accident that the Culture puts so much emphasis, and in that it reads ironically enough like satire of modern consumer society, on choice only at a level of reshuffling your sexual organs or bodily characteristics. The minds in the culture are by no means just a sort of voting mechanism that summarize the attitudes of the population of the Culture. They control the culture which we even get to learn in the books in the series that delve into the minds as characters.
"Only"?
For the specific case of Banks, Yudkowsky has some interesting ideas about why it fails. [0]
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwnSPgwtmLjvTK2Wa/amputation...
When The Culture voted on the Idirian War, the Peace faction splintered from The Culture. Other groups seceded (or join all the time), such as the AhForgetIt Tendency and the Zetetic Elench.
Rebellion exists only in the framework of an oppresive power structure, where you can't just leave if you want.
So according to your definition the Culture is not a utopia.
In Player of Games we see a corner of a gaming culture which partly meets this criterion but it does not have meaningful consequences outside the gaming participants (unless you count the ways the Minds use it to manipulate Gurgeh).
Maybe by this criterion utopias are impossible, since the disruption caused by exciting activities with consequences conflict too much with the optimality of the society. But I don't think anyone now can prove this would be the case.
The original blueprint - Thomas More's book - made the New England Puritans look like a wild bunch. Phalansteries and communal dining, oh my.