![]() OK, this is kind of a book review, but what I really wanted to say was that it has only recently occurred to me that this approach is very powerful and works for more than just fiction.Īmazing things happen when we take the very best of our ideas and try to break them, I think. A game so complex, intricate and interwoven with their society that the ultimate winner is made emperor, and his strategies used in governing.Īnd someone from a benign enlightened culture can’t win that. ![]() The absolute best, in my opinion, is this one, which features a lone games expert trying his hand at the central game of an alien culture. How would a culture that has infinite intelligence and is completely benign actually function as it encounters imperfectness, let alone evil? What do people do if they don’t need to do anything and are a bit pointless?Īnd picking at those scabs is what makes the novels good. Iain Banks’ genre novels are based on a left-wing fantasy, really: that if we can develop sufficiently advanced AI, they’ll create a fair post-scarcity society and run it for us, and humans can be truly free.īut he’s no fool, and he can see the flaws in that idea. ![]() ![]() ![]() A lot of great fiction comes from an author thinking of a key concept, then being honest enough to try to break their idea.Įspecially Science Fiction. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |