From my first stab at Archiphiloterary Critique. Thank any gods you like that you don’t have to read the other 5,300 words.
…Clear draws a number of parallels between Banks’s “Culture” and Constant’s “New Babylon” Rightly so: the parallels are real and obvious. But perhaps that isn’t so remarkable. There’s no limit to the number of roads ending in dystopia: every scientific and technological breakthrough carries its own unintended consequences, any of a million butterflies could flap their destructive little wings and cascade us toward apocalypse. The number of different ways we might fuck up proliferates endlessly down the x-axis, a conic section ever-widening into the future. That’s not even pessimism; it’s just entropy. Things fall apart.
Utopia, in contrast, involves turning the cone around and swimming against the current: grabbing that weedy proliferation of catastrophe and pruning it back down towards some kind of optimum state. There aren’t quite so many of those; we Humans have basic needs and finite sensibilities, and there aren’t that many ways to keep the dopamine flowing sustainably. (Assuming you want to stay Human, of course. If you’re not so constrained— if you’re willing to throw away the brain stem and the amygdala and all that neural circuitry with a few hundred million years of fine-tuning behind it— why, it’s a whole new ball game. You could turn people into creatures that thrived on pain, rewrite our aesthetic algorithms until the presence of soot and cancer and nuclear glasslands filled us with joy. Now there‘s an ambitious architectural undertaking.)
Any particle in a shotgun blast can get us into the future; but if you’re aiming for Utopia, either in the world of sixties architecture or nineties space opera, there are far fewer degrees of freedom to work within. So perhaps there’s no great synchronistic connection between Banks and Constant; perhaps all Utopian foresight converges on a single point…