Abstract

This paper will develop a reading of Iain M Banks’s “Culture” novels using notions about utopian hope drawn from the work of the German philosopher, Ernst Bloch. Since there are seven novels, a novella and a short story in the series, I will not enter into great detail about particular works, but will rather focus on their overarching theme, albeit with specific refer- ence to the third book, Use of Weapons. Although the novels rank amongst the most commercially successful science fiction of recent years, continuously present in the major bookstore chains of the UK and Australia and translated into languages including Estonian, Spanish and Finnish, Banks does not rate a mention in Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future or in Tom Moylan’s Scraps of the Untainted Sky. This seems particularly odd, given Banks’s focus on utopia and Jameson’s and Moylan’s own sustained engagement with it. Darko Suvin, perhaps the most eminent of science fiction scholars, does, at least, mention Banks, but only to say that the “Culture” series is “[a] lucid variant at [the] margin” of what he calls the “fallible dystopia,” 1 but without any consideration of how this “variant” might trouble the integrity of the category in question