RE: “Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games—Iain M. Banks”
I would second your ordering of PoG>CP. To add to the ordering: IMO “The Use of Weapons” is also not a really good book from a longtermist point of view, while “Excession” is a great read (so I guess: Excession>PoG>TUoW>CP).
I would be interested in what other people thought about the rest of the books of the culture series—are there some books that are much better than others?
+1 to not reading Consider Phlebas. I’ve been reading it because I wanted to check out the Culture series and I was compulsive about starting with the first one even though I heard others were better.
I haven’t gotten much out of it and think it was a mistake.
Yep, skip Phlebas at first—but do come back to it later, because despite being silly and railroading, it is the clearest depiction of the series’ main theme, which is people’s need for Taylorian strong evaluation, the dissatisfaction of unlimited pleasure and freedom, liberalism as unstoppable, unanswerable assimilator.
I wrote a longtermist critique of the Culture here.
Surface Detail is about desperately trying to prevent an s-risk. Excession is the best on most axes.
RE: “Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games—Iain M. Banks”
I would second your ordering of PoG>CP. To add to the ordering: IMO “The Use of Weapons” is also not a really good book from a longtermist point of view, while “Excession” is a great read (so I guess: Excession>PoG>TUoW>CP).
I would be interested in what other people thought about the rest of the books of the culture series—are there some books that are much better than others?
+1 to not reading Consider Phlebas. I’ve been reading it because I wanted to check out the Culture series and I was compulsive about starting with the first one even though I heard others were better.
I haven’t gotten much out of it and think it was a mistake.
Yep, skip Phlebas at first—but do come back to it later, because despite being silly and railroading, it is the clearest depiction of the series’ main theme, which is people’s need for Taylorian strong evaluation, the dissatisfaction of unlimited pleasure and freedom, liberalism as unstoppable, unanswerable assimilator.
I wrote a longtermist critique of the Culture here.
Surface Detail is about desperately trying to prevent an s-risk. Excession is the best on most axes.
Excession, Surface Detail and The Hydrogen Sonata are the three I’d recommend from a longtermist perspective.
Consider Phlebas is (by some margin) the worst novel in the series. It’s a shame it seems like the obvious place to start.