Does sci-fi shape the future? Tech billionaires from Bill Gates to Elon Musk have often talked about the impact of novels they read as teens, from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" to Iain M. Banks' "Culture" series. Big Think's Namir Khaliq spoke to authors including Andy Weir, Lois McMaster Bujold and @pluralistic about how much impact they think science fiction has had, or can have.
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“As a humanist, atheist, and socialist, he preferred to place his trust in techno-scientific development, rather than his faith in gods, or his capital in the market”
Joseph S. Norman on the legacy & utopianism of Iain M. Banks’s Culture series
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“Banks… envisions the overcoming of scarcity as the signal achievement of the civilization made by the Minds, and yet he focuses time and again on objects of unfulfilled desire”
—The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M Banks: Alan Jacobs on the price of bliss, in The New Atlantis Journal
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“Our strange wee country is as complex as any alien civilization, and getting it as right as Banks did in The Crow Road required every bit as much world-building skill as his Culture”
—“The Difference is Entirely One of Setting”: Simon Stephenson travels THE CROW ROAD
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Why has Banks’s Culture series – “a world where your Bezoses & your Musks are not just irrelevant, but actively sought out & disempowered” – garnered a billionaire fanbase?
Kurt Schiller writes in Blood Knife Magazine on what misreadings might attract Jeff Bezos & Elon Musk
“A little more than ten years after his death, we are experiencing a timely, double-pronged Banks bump. His 13 sci-fi books as Iain M Banks are being reissued this month with eye-catching new cover art […] Even more exciting: the recent publication of behind-the-curtain coffee table tome The Culture: The Drawings, collating his earliest conceptual designs for what would become his signature sci-fi creation.”
“The novels of Iain M. Banks have forever changed the face of modern science fiction. His Culture books combine breathtaking imagination with exceptional storytelling, and have secured his reputation as one of the most extraordinary and influential writers in the genre”
Orbit Books are reissuing all of Iain M. Banks’s #ScienceFiction novels with new cover designs