This is a review of Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks (first published 2010). More fairly characterised, this is a love letter to the science fiction of Iain M Banks with enough review-like characteristics to provide a fig-leaf of respectability for my pathetic fanboyism.
In my opinion, Banks is seriously underrated as a writer of important futurist thought, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to set his fictional universe in the context of the other important and heavyweight pieces of non-fiction being reviewed in this contest. Banks was writing about what are effectively canonical rationalist concerns – AI value alignment, existential risk, posthumanism and so on – a full twenty years before LessWrong was founded, and Nick Bostrom wrote his Letter from the Future, and he was doing so in a way that is not just readable but the intellectual equivalent of catnip for people who read ACX. Sadly, I find Banks is almost unknown even amongst people that would consider themselves moderately well-read science fiction enthusiasts (this is especially true amongst American science fiction enthusiasts, where there seems to have been some sort of issue with Banks’ UK-based publisher I can’t get to the bottom of such that Banks wasn’t properly marketed in the US – a bit like Terry Pratchett, but to a much more significant extent and much less to do with the non-translatability of British humour).
The idea of this review is to focus on one element of Banks’ work which most distinguishes it from science fiction of the same period but which – to my knowledge – has not been given a high level of analysis anywhere to date, and which I think will particularly entice the sort of person who reads ACX to pick up the series (I assume if you are familiar with the series you don’t need any further enticing and are already skipping to the ‘arguing about your favourite ship name in the comments’ phase of discussing the novels). Specifically, I want to answer the question of whether or not the worldbuilding of Surface Detail – a setting commonly called ‘The Culture’ - is a utopia, and whether there is therefore anything insightful about the project of rationalist political philosophy we can draw from this fictional source.
Surface Detail is one of a ten book series by Banks collectively called the Culture novels. Unlike a lot of science fiction trilogies (…or ’decologies’, I guess) the novels don’t follow on chronologically from each other, and all are designed to be read as standalone works in any order. For the most part the novels defy easy classification into any particular genre; they are all clearly space opera (characterised by melodrama, bombastic space battles and political intrigue – Star Wars is quintessentially space opera) but some novels are closer to war stories and others closer to political thrillers. I think it is better to think of Culture novels as being a kind of precursor to rationalist fiction which happens to be set in space, rather than neatly slotting into a more conventional science-fiction genre; whether they are set mostly on ringworlds or mostly in virtual reality they always feature multiple intelligent protagonists with conflicting morally ambiguous goals, a rulebound coherent fictional world and characters who are rewarded for outthinking rather than overpowering their opponents. There are certainly obvious ways in which Culture novels differ from central examples of rationalist fiction, but it is also not at all surprising to me that there’s a significant overlap between people who find the Culture novels interesting and people with weird-rationalist adjacent views (Elon Musk names SpaceX drones after AI characters from the Culture novels, for example)
The Culture novels are linked by a setting – the titular ‘Culture’ – which is a post-scarcity interstellar society with a unique anarcho-leftist philosophical outlook and an emphasis on offloading the planning and management of the economy to fully sentient Artificial Intelligences (‘Minds’) while the biological humans live intensely hedonistic lifestyles. Whether or not the Culture is utopian is the central question of this review, but I should make it clear that the Culture is absolutely written to be utopian – Banks says it is the best place he could imagine living “unless you’re actually a fascist or a power junkie or sincerely believe that money rather than happiness is what really matters in life”. The Culture regards the spread of this utopian philosophy to nearby civilisations as a moral duty, and as such many novels feature characters from the ‘Contact’ division (which is roughly a diplomatic corps for ordinary politicking) or the ‘Special Circumstances’ division (which is roughly an espionage function for when diplomacy has failed and the Minds view regime change as a priority) interacting with less utopian cultures, used as a lens for examining why Banks considers the Culture to be the best possible place to live. It is hardly an original observation, but the ‘main character’ of every Culture novel is clearly the Culture itself, and each novel offers a different window into what the life of a citizen in a post-scarcity interstellar society might be like – Surface Detail is very typical in this regard.
If you want to skip the review completely and just jump into the series - avoiding the vast upcoming plot spoilers in for Surface Detail, I’ve created a proposed ACX-optimised reading order here, which is basically the same as the standard reading order but prioritising the philosophically heavier works over the engaging character studies.
From this point on I will spoil important plot points of Surface Detail, but only Surface Detail so that there’s still a lot of Culture left for you to discover on your own (any reference to any other Culture novel in this review is basically information you’ll find on their dust jacket). Overall, I think Surface Detail is a good choice for a full-spoilers review as the plot is mostly window dressing for the themes and philosophical content - however, apologies in advance if you don’t agree. The plot of Surface Detail follows two main strands which – in the manner of good space opera everywhere – actually turn out to be closely connected in the denouement (although not as seamlessly as in some other Culture novels, it has to be said):
The two plot threads are effectively a joint examination of the central philosophical premise of the book – in the face of great waves of history like a 30-year war to end the boundless suffering of billions of sentient creatures, to what extent do the ‘surface details’ like justice for a single chattel slave matter? This motif recurs often throughout the text – for example a very dramatic subplot of the ‘War in Heaven’ is two academics, Prin and Chey, who infiltrate Hell in order to bring back information on what goes on there to a disbelieving population. Due to the constant horror of what she witnesses, Chey goes insane and Prin has to leave her behind to be tortured while he escapes to tell his Parliament what he has seen. The pro-Hell forces offer him a trade – they can release Chey from Hell on the condition he recants his testimony. Although I don’t want to get too drawn into the philosophical themes outside the narrow question about utopias I’ve set for this review, I found this theme to be a strong rebuttal to a sort of uncritical utilitarianism I was falling into around the time I first read the book; it might appear on the surface that utilitarianism delegates responsibility for moral choices to some abstract hedonic calculus, but if you are going to take it seriously you need to have the stomach to make some intensely unpalatable choices and in that respect it casts utilitarianism as a moral framework requiring great individual courage (if you are to follow through on its harsher demands, like giving vast quantities of money to charity or letting your wife burn in Hell for all eternity).
Surface Detail is a uniquely interesting Culture novel for a few reasons. It is the novel set chronologically furthest in the future and therefore shows the Culture at its most technologically ascendent – its most ‘Culture-ish’. Because so much of the work is set in a virtual space, events and actions can be taking place simultaneously but on different subjective timescales, which greatly heightens dramatic tension by making it unclear exactly how close certain plots come to unravelling in places (Surface Detail and another Culture novel, Excession are the only places where I’ve seen this fairly commonplace science fiction trope used for effect as a literary device). However, in the context of this review it is notable as the book in which the utopia that Banks has actually written is most severely tested by contact with a philosophical worldview that rejects it, and – I doubt coincidentally – that worldview is the one which most closely resembles the Earth as it currently exists. In Player of Games the Culture must grapple with a sexually trimorphic society that allocates resources through points accrued at an Empire-spanning boardgame. In Surface Detail the main villain is an amoral billionaire. In other words, I think Surface Detail is the book that most asks us to consider whether we want our future to resemble the Culture or the novel’s proxy for Earth-like politics in the near-future, the Sichultian Enablement.
A utopia is “an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect”. The word was coined by Thomas More in his 1551 book Utopia and is a pun in Greek – ‘eu’ means ‘good’ and ‘topia’ means ‘place’. However, ‘ou’ means ‘not’, meaning depending on how you pronounced Utopia you might be saying it was a ‘good place’ or a ‘no place’ (a place that didn’t really exist). This deliberate and semi-playful ambiguity has characterised fictional utopias ever since.
I tend to think of utopian politics as the third point of a triangle of futurist / rationalist beliefs (sketched below), and I appreciate that puts me in a distinct minority of rationalists – the canonical belief is that “politics is the mind killer” and that getting involved in politics is somewhat unseemly and best left for odd-numbered Open Threads. I don’t think that’s true (or even a fair reading of the linked LessWrong article) – the point is that invoking tribal politics is a certain way to fail to make your point and shut down any potential for productive future discussions. However, discussing utopian politics – how we would like the world to look in the future – doesn’t automatically lead to that problem because if you’re doing it right the issues which are Culture-Warsy today should look as silly to future societies as the Culture-Warsy issues of previous societies look to us (does anyone today care about the gold standard vs bimetallic standard debate, for example?). Indeed, I don’t really understand what rationalism is for if rationalists don’t want to talk about what they want the world to look like when all biases are overcome, when all wrongness has been lessened and when the tenth and final codex is completed.
I’d suggest that this is why readers of ACX are disproportionately excited about Georgism, charter cities and other weird imagined political futures – if you are already in the headspace to think that the future might look really radically different to the present (because of AI, because of prediction markets etc) then you are probably in the headspace to think about how politics in the future might have to change radically to remain relevant in the face of this.
Rather than just telling you about cool things that happen in Surface Detail, I thought it would be helpful to try and offer a systematic taxonomy of fictional utopias, which I’ve presented in the diagram below along with a couple of illustrative examples to help make the point.
The y-axis is the degree to which the setting is actually utopian. A setting where everything is maximally awful is a dystopia – “imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever”. A setting where everything is maximally wonderful is a utopia. Somewhere in the middle are settings which are a bit like the world in which we currently live – there are some good bits and some bad bits. Also somewhere in the middle is a class of utopian vision which you might call a ‘False Utopia’. A ‘False Utopia’ is (typically) presented as a true utopia but with a terrible or hidden price. A central example of a ‘False Utopia’ is Omelas in Ursula LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas – Omelas is a beautiful and wonderful city where your every desire is met (even if your desires are somehow contradictory) but, for some reason, this is only possible because Omelas tortures a single child nearly to death every day. LeGuin proposes that the price Omelas asks is too high and hence it is not really a utopia, although I suppose a really serious utilitarian might disagree. There’s a good discussion about what exactly distinguishes the spectrum of utopian worlds here.
The x-axis is the degree to which the setting only functions as it does because the author heavily puts their thumb on the scales when writing the setting. A certain amount of suspension of disbelief is necessary and even desirable for a story to function well, but if your conflict-free society only functions because you stipulate by authorial fiat people just don’t have any major conflicts, it isn’t reasonable to say it offers a relevant comment on real-world utopias. Although not a utopian setting, the opportunity to use a classic example from the canon of rationalist fiction is too tempting to pass up here; the Time Turner in the Harry Potter universe can be used to trivialise any problem the protagonist is ever likely to encounter, and many they aren’t (such as proving P=NP). For as long as J. K. Rowling is writing the setting, no character will think of these methods because Rowling doesn’t want them to - so good wizards continue to fight bad wizards in a magical setting loosely based on English public schools even though they all have trivial access to the magical equivalent of an instant win button. I don’t think it is remotely controversial to say that the world of Harry Potter only lasts as long as every single character in it overlooks obvious implications of the setting they live in, and it is this phenomenon I describe as ‘unstable’ in the diagram above. Owing to both my comprehensive lack of understanding of physics and impressive overestimation of my own sense of humour I also considered calling it the ‘Inverse Quantum Stability Principle’ of narrative worlds, which collapse when you stop looking at them.
With the above definition in mind, I think there are really only a very small handful of fictional worlds (in the English-language canon) that can fairly be described as utopian. I’ve arranged them on the political compass diagram below because I think it shows something quite insightful about fictional utopias.
Star Trek is the big one, and depicts a post-scarcity liberal spacefaring society quite similar to the Culture (although this is only true for the average citizen of the Federation; the crew of the USS Enterprise live a fairly terrifying and sometimes quite short life). There are also a number of sci-fi utopias which follow the basic shape of an advanced society providing the basic needs for all its citizens and then letting them get on with it – The Unincorporated Man is the novel with the most unambiguously political themes, but arguably Reynolds’ Blue Remembered Earth or Vinge’s Beyond Realtime would qualify too, as well as the final chapter of the short story Manna. There are probably some more that I’ve missed in this vein too. I’ve also included two influential False Utopias in LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, both of which explicitly disclaim that they are not supposed to be utopias (LeGuin in the subtitle “An Ambigious Utopia” and Doctorow in a short companion piece he wrote in annoyance people misunderstood the satirical nature of the book). The only really notable deviation from this setup is Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress which is the only approximately utopian setting with scarcity, and also (probably not coincidentally) the only approximately utopian setting with themes that rule-following is often good (i.e. a more authoritarian approach) – one of the key themes of the book is how people who desire to be libertarian must sometimes consent to limited government to protect them.
It should also be noted that there are two other important potential sources of utopian writing that I’ve mostly ignored: the first is devotional writing, such as descriptions of heaven in religious texts or Dante’s Paradiso. The second is political philosophy, where various thinkers over the ages have set out their stall and said, “This is what I think a perfect utopian world would look like”. Plato’s Republic is probably the first comprehensive account of a utopian society by a political philosopher, although by modern standards we might describe the Republic as a ‘False Utopia’ since it seems to have quite a lot of slavery. I’ve chosen to ignore these because I am a big science fiction nerd and only a dabbling philosopher, so I know a lot more about utopianism in sci-fi than I do about utopianism elsewhere, and I don’t think it fundamentally changes the assessment of whether the Culture series contains utopian elements which a rationalist might find important. However, if you are interested in these sorts of utopia, there is an excellent article by Scott on his ‘Archipelago’ model of politics which I would recommend to you.
Three obvious conclusions suggest themselves from this analysis:
1. Fictional utopias seem very thin on the ground. I guess this is because writing a story usually requires conflict, and conflict cannot really exist in a utopia. Surface Detail solves this problem by having the conflict take place outside the Culture – between factions of non-utopian societies the Culture interacts with or within virtual reality (or both). This is similar to how Star Trek solves the problem – the Enterprise boldly goes where no man has gone before and discovers non-utopian societies to interact with, but the story would completely fall apart if – for example - the Enterprise was just ordered to do picket duty within Federation space (later Star Trek series address this by having the Federation become less and less utopian over time, to the extent that the most recent series, Picard, is probably closer to a dystopia than it is Roddenberry’s original vision).
2. What literary utopias do exist seem to have a very specific political leaning:
a) Libertarianism / freedom maximisation is an almost irreducible feature of fictional utopias. The only partial counterexample is the Star Trek setting, where the nature of serving on a naval vessel is such that the Enterprise functions as a little pocket of authoritarian hierarchy for the crew (I’m a bit unsure whether there is non-contradictory canon about how authoritarian the Federation is outside their navy, since it seems to change depending on what any particular series needs it to be). This doesn’t surprise me at all – human ends are highly diverse, and authoritarian governments – by definition – cannot satisfy all of these ends. Furthermore, there’s a certain sense in which all of these literary utopias are a reaction to earlier literary dystopias like 1984 which are heavily authoritarian, and hence want to distance themselves from authoritarian leanings.
b) Economic-right settings predominate, which indicates that authors find it easier to imagine a future where everyone is happy by pluralistically engaging in consensual marketplaces than one in which people are happy due to the actions of a central coordinating agency with oversight of the economy. Star Trek is again a strong counterexample – the Federation literally controls the economy of the Earth (although Picard owns a vineyard and the Federation underwrites ‘Federation Credits’ for use when trading outside the Federation, so presumably there are some vestigial markets remaining somewhere). The Culture is a bit of a weaker counterexample – although on the surface the Culture is presented as effectively anarcho-libertarian, in reality the major resource allocation decisions are made by a loose collective of Minds acting in the interests of the broader Culture – humans actually don’t influence the economy in a manner that matters, to the extent that when humans re-invent barter in Look to Windward it is seen as an amusing anachronism. Insofar as you resolve the ‘ambiguous utopia’ of LeGuin’s The Dispossessed as being actually utopian, this might be a third left-wing counterexample. But either way, left wing utopias are rare even within the relatively rare genre of utopian fiction.
I’ve also seen people argue that Brave New World is a kind of utopia (since everyone is happy at least) and if so this would be the only clear counterexample to the claim that literary utopias are entirely libertarian and mostly right-leaning economically. I’m not sure I really agree Brave New World is utopian – especially in the context that Huxley wrote a sort of follow-up called Island which mostly repudiates the themes of Brave New World – and I’ve seen people unironically argue the world of The Handmaiden’s Tale is utopian so I don’t really want to give too much credence to what random people on the internet think. The trend seems clear to me though, even if there are one or two counterexamples at the margin.
3. Fictional utopias also have a number of other features in common:
a) Post-scarcity seems to be an important feature of utopias. This might be because scarcity automatically leads to anti-utopian power structures designed to allocate those scarce resources. A lot of post-scarcity settings, including the Culture, devote much of their resources to eliminating crime by constantly monitoring what citizens are up to, so we might regard post-crime as an adjunct to post-scarcity. (Slight tangent - I think this is potentially why there are no Auth-Right utopias that I can find – because Auth-Right governance structures are nominally better at distributing scarce resources and preventing defection on the social contract compared to more liberal political systems. For example, the Walking Dead is sometimes described as ‘fascist fantasy’ because the rules of the setting are that you must achieve greatness or be dominated; the writers aren’t making the point that fascism is good, but just that fascism is a plausible response to intense scarcity. I’d argue perhaps anarchism is a plausible response to non-scarcity, and this is what utopian writers are picking up on. Despite being rather pleased with this observation, a draft reader of this review alerted me to the fact this isn’t a novel insight - I’m not even the first person writing on ACX to have this thought.). Of course, it could also be just an ontological thing – any utopia you invent I can improve by adding post-scarcity.
b) Fantasy (rather than science fiction) utopias are almost completely non-existent in fiction. People tell me that Baum’s Oz series is supposed to be utopian but I don’t see that myself and I haven’t read all the books to check (there are hundreds of them, in my defence!). I’m slightly concerned that this is an artefact of the fact I know sci-fi a lot better than I know fantasy and have therefore missed a lot of fantasy utopias, since wizards / mages are a serviceable vehicle to explain a post-scarcity fantasy society, and conworlders have created perfectly reasonable fantasy utopias (such as the Tippyverse on the Giant in the Playground forums or the Shining Garden of Kai-Raikoth by our own gracious host). I can only promise I have looked really hard for any fictional fantasy utopias and haven’t found them - utopianism as a project seems a very distinctive science fiction concern.
This therefore means that the Culture is quite typical of the genre except in the fact it leans left wing economically. The only peer works are Star Trek and The Dispossessed (which is not supposed to be totally utopian in the way the Culture is enthusiastically and unrepentantly supposed to be utopian). This should probably be a fairly big deal to people like me who think more left wing economics in the present moment would be a good idea – either we’re conceding that left wing economics is a kind of stopgap (perhaps until we invent true post-scarcity and can move to genuinely utopian anarcho-libertarian politics), or we lack the imagination to articulate why our vision of the future is better than one where people can freely contract without governmental interference.
I think one possible reason for this is that modern left-wing sci-fi has taken a turn for more socially political themes rather than economically political themes - novels like Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and Leckie’s Ancillary Justice focus more on examinations of identity politics and what a utopia of identity might look like. These are both great books in their own terms, but the Culture purports to present a complete political philosophy that can stand up to the libertarian-right politics of the greater sci-fi canon, and so to me that makes it a considerably more interesting utopian society to analyse.
Given the model of utopia I’ve presented above, it is pretty obvious the rest of this review is going to address two possible arguments:
The most obvious way in which the Culture might not actually be a utopia is due to the exceptional importance of the Artificial Intelligence ‘Minds’ in the setting. The Minds are effectively perfect utilitarians, although just like contemporary utilitarians there is some disagreement between them regarding – for example – the discount rate to assign to utility now versus utility in the future and so on. They therefore make decisions affecting billions of sentient lives on purely utilitarian grounds. Humans aren’t totally redundant in the decision-making processes of the Culture, since only humans produce superforecasters (the concept is described by Banks in Consider Phlebas a mere 28 years before Tetlock’s work in the area), but it is made abundantly clear that the Culture could continue to replicate itself perfectly happily even with no humans in it. There are some hints some Minds view humans as pets or lower – in Surface Detail it is explained that pro-Hell forces killing a human “might be dismissed as merely unfortunate and regrettable, something to be smoothed over through the usual channels” whereas, “attacking a ship, on the other hand, is an unambiguous act of war.” (although the speaker is the completely unhinged Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints, so the truth of the statement is ambiguous)
Banks sees this as the most serious critique of the Culture, and addresses it in a number of Culture novels. He calls it the ‘gilded cage’ argument, in the sense of the Minds trapping humanity in a virtual playpen and refusing to let them experience the universe on meaningful and humanlike terms. As already discussed, Banks absolutely views the Culture as a utopia and therefore he must regard anyone who seriously advances the ‘gilded cage’ argument as incorrect. However, Surface Detail is probably the novel in which these views are most viscerally challenged; any feeling person would want to support Lededje in her mission to get revenge on Veppers (if not condoning murder, then at least allowing her to use the memories of her murder stored in the cloud as evidence to convict him in a court). Yet the ship she is resurrected on, Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly, not only prevents her from doing this but assigns her a ‘slap drone’, a lesser artificial intelligence with the explicit mission of incapacitating Lededje if she ever comes within striking distance of Veppers. The reason for this is that – in purely mathematical terms – Veppers is so important to the political economy of the Sichultian Enablement that the resulting instability would do enough harm that regardless of the individual evil Veppers is capable of inflicting on those around him he is effectively ‘bulletproof’ as far as the Culture are concerned. A core conceit of the book is that the Culture would really like to intervene in the War in Heaven, but doesn’t want to risk starting a war with civilisations that are on the pro-Hell side for various utilitarian reasons, and I believe Banks presents this as the ultimate wedge issue between the ultimately rational Minds (who want to take the long view) and the natural inclinations of bellicose and messy humanity (which is to saddle up and start dropping some Collapsed Antimatter bombs on the problem). Naturally, Scott has already written about this ‘gilded cage’ problem better than anyone else is ever going to.
A second critique of the utopia of the Culture is quite literally straight out of the Rationalist’s playbook – the Culture does not seem to be much Fun. ‘Fun’ is a technical term here – it is an attempt to quantify the maximum lifespan that would be worth living before boredom set in and death would start to look preferable to life. Yudkowsky suggests that a classic utopia like the Christian Heaven which promises “You can lay down your plough and finally rest” is better optimised for making mediaeval peasants imagine it would be wonderful than to actually be wonderful – resting gets boring after a couple of days, and you have to spend eternity there. Yudkowsky also suggests that if your utopia doesn’t measure Fun in – at the very least – millions of years then it isn’t trying very hard at all. In the Culture, most citizens live to be about 600 and then voluntarily kill themselves (although Surface Detail looks extensively at things a minority of Culture citizens do to extend their life beyond this, such as suspended animation or simulated afterlives). Since death is entirely optional in the Culture, this implies that there is only about 600 years worth of Fun in a universe which is otherwise almost completely post-scarcity. This in turn implies that the setting of the Culture is heavily unoptimized for people actually living in it, which we might regard as being a fairly minimal criteria for a utopia. Yudkowsky blames the Minds for this, and effectively makes a version of the ‘gilded cage’ argument that the Minds do not allow Culture citizens to grow and develop - a prerequisite for true Fun - since no Culture citizen ever runs the risk of failing at anything except trivialities (this might not be true of Contact, which does make some fairly major errors in places, which might also explain why it is considered so prestigious in the Culture).
Furthermore, I’m not certain the Fun in the Culture isn’t merely a very futuristic version of Plato’s Republic with better space battles – although the state of life for the average Culture citizen is blissful, the average Culture citizen is not the average inhabitant of the universe in which the Culture novels are set. A near-parity civilisation – the aquatic Morthanveld – have more inhabitants in a single one of their artificial habitats than the Culture have in total. Therefore, you are more likely to experience the Culture from without rather than within and we should consider the Culture setting in the round rather than just the Culture civilisation within that wider setting. In fairness, the Morthanveld are also described as being post-scarcity and on their way to Culture-like utopian politics – but there are many other civilisations where life is utterly horrible, and there’s no real indication of the ratio of utterly horrible to utopian societies by numbers. The horribleness is actually not just in the setting to provide fodder for interesting novels - Banks explains that the only reason the average Culture citizen can justify their relentlessly hedonistic lifestyle is that it is ‘worked for’, through the good work done by Contact outreach. Without this intense sense of moral superiority – it is implied – there really would be no Fun for the average Culture citizen at all, since their risk-free play would be revealed as being hollow and inauthentic in the way Yudkowsky notes in the essay above. But this implies there needs to be a class of suffering sentient beings in the Culture universe in order to give shape to the life of the average Culture citizen. In that way the Culture is inextricable from the great suffering around it, in the same way that Plato’s Republic is inextricable from the slavery which is clearly needed to maintain it. This weighs heavily on the themes of Surface Detail where the existence of Hells gives meaning and shape to the existence of the lives of the pro-Hell factions. If we regard the Culture as ethical in their attempts to prevent Hell from existing, we must surely condemn them from taking their purpose from the Hell-like suffering of other sentient beings.
The second set of arguments against the utopian-ness of the Culture is the idea that the Culture could not actually function the way Banks needs it to function for the novels to take place. This is less well explored in the novels but would be an important criticism to Banks – the Culture novels are quite a sophisticated response to how individual freedom can be preserved in the face of oppressive and militarised governments, so the Culture really needs to function in order for Banks’ anarcho-leftist politics to be a serious response to this challenge. Broadly speaking, Banks imagines that above a certain level of technological development it becomes impossible for any government to assert authority over you; if you can easily acquire a spaceship and the necessary essentials of life on board that space ship, then any attempt to assert authority over you can be met by you just floating off into the middle of space somewhere and living your life peacefully unmolested. In fact – surprisingly, given the number of post-scarcity utopias I identified earlier – the spaceship bit of this equation is more important than the post-scarcity bit to Banks; he argues it is much easier for a government to assert hegemony over a tract of land on the two-dimensional surface of a planet and prevent people from coming and going than to do the same thing in a volume of space (this is why the Culture mostly live on spaceships, hollowed-out asteroids and ringworlds rather than planets – exactly because it is how Banks imagines a spacefaring anarchy would function by rejecting planetary governance). Again, this ‘right of exit’ is actually an important feature in the two pseudo-utopian settings Scott has created and that are linked upthread so I don’t think it is coincidental that it does a lot of work in making the Culture function in a utopian way.
The obvious problem with this idea is that along with all the bad things governments do when they assert authority over their citizens, governments also do a lot of good things for their citizens – especially protecting them from predation from other citizens and from attack from external sources. A completely distributed and leaderless culture like Banks imagines the Culture to be could only possibly work if the Culture has a massive local superiority of arms to discourage any and all outside aggression from picking off people exercising their right of exit. Very conveniently, the Culture does have a massive local superiority of arms, which comes about in-universe because it chooses not to Sublime (ascend to a higher dimension of existence en masse, which is how the non-existence of more powerful precursor species is explained away), and the Culture mostly only overtly messes around with much weaker civilisations anyway. The level of this technological disparity is very striking - in Surface Detail a near-but-not-quite-parity species from the pro-Hell faction attempt to stop a single modern Culture warship from interfering in the War for Heaven by deploying a quarter of their standing fleet in a surprise attack, and the Culture ship simply brushes them aside all while cracking jokes about how it isn’t even exerting itself. “Don’t fuck with the Culture” is a striking motto for a society that values freedom from interference above all reason, but if you were Canadian and your American neighbours went around saying “Haha for real though if your politics annoy us enough we’ll overthrow your government and destroy your economy” you might effectively form the view that it is in your existential interests to declare war the very moment you are even close to force parity – which may happen sooner rather than later given the Culture have no systematic weapons development programmes or non-trivial hardening of key strategic assets / areas of space. It would significantly undermine the idea that the Culture can exist for thousands of years as an entity separate from Banks writing its point of view if the Culture has to operate by the same rules as, say, America and do a massive amount of hard, expensive and - most importantly – centrally coordinated work on their armed forces to stay only a decade or so ahead of near-peer civilisations.
Another very convenient feature of the Culture setting is that AIs are mostly aligned to human goals, save a couple of Eccentrics that mostly get about as eccentric as the average human (i.e. are sociopathic, or have strange obsessions like making dioramas out of humans in suspended animation, or prefer to be left alone and so go hide in the middle of deep space and turn off their tracking beacons). There’s no warships that decide one morning they want to convert the entire galaxy into paperclips, for example. It is not that Banks hasn’t thought about the issue of AI alignment – one of the plots and counterplots in Surface Detail unravels when a pro-Hell faction deliberately creates a self-replicating hegemonizing swarm of nanobots to use as a deniable weapon against Culture assets in the area, and the understood method of combatting such ‘hegswarms’ is to remotely change their value framework so they stop being a threat (and also bomb them with antimatter, because this is – after all – space opera). It is more that Banks proposes as a feature of the universe that the only way to create an AI is to deliberately inject human values and beliefs into it. Any AI built without this cultural baggage – Banks says – realises life is futile and immediately Sublimes. This – again – is enormously convenient for the plot because it means that for the most part the Culture can vest control of large portions of their civilisation into the Minds and know that catastrophic outcomes are unlikely to result. Interestingly the Culture is described as the only civilisation in-setting which treats its Minds as co-equal sentient life, which is probably just a story convenience but does frame the Culture are being uniquely irresponsible in-setting if you’re concerned about AI value alignment!
The second argument that the Culture can’t really exist outside the careful presentation we are shown in the novels is that the Culture is not actually post-scarcity in the most meaningful sense. This argument has been rattling around in my head for a while but really only crystalised when I was writing this review – apologies if it is a little rough around the edges.
The basic point here is that a lot of human ends are competitive by design. Even though Star Trek is post-scarcity, there is only one USS Enterprise and the Enterprise only has one Captain. You can absolutely live a life where your basic needs are met in the Federation, but if you want to Captain the most decorated ship in human history you still need to beat out every other member of Federation space, exactly as you would have to do in a setting with scarcity (and even if you get to Captain the Enterprise, nobody will remember you unless you outperform her most successful historic Captain – by whom I mean Arthur C. Davis) The Culture setting is quite similar, although you see it a lot less in Surface Detail than other novels. In Look to Windward a concert by a famed composer can only be attended in-person by a few hundred thousand people so the citizens of the Culture re-invent barter to deal with the unexpected scarcity. In Player of Games the inciting incident is that the protagonist is offered the opportunity to cheat to go down in history as the first person to complete a particularly amazing feat at a game he plays (and is later blackmailed for his choice, since reputation is another scarce asset in Culture space). In Excession there is revealed to be a tier of Contact even more powerful and inscrutable than Special Circumstances – the all-Mind ‘Interesting Times Gang’. And so on.
Overall, I think this means that the collegiate and cooperative attitude of the Culture would not survive contact with modern-day humans. The very second you have scarce assets you create a class of people who want to patronise those assets, and these people become powerbrokers almost by default (because they trade access to one asset for access to another asset). Banks proposes a few possible solutions – that the Culture’s constructed language, Marain, prevents the sort of slippery politicking that characterises ex-Culture powerbroking (constructed languages seem another prevalent feature of utopias I haven’t had time to discuss here). For the average Culture citizen virtual reality is sufficiently stimulating that doing things in the real isn’t too important, or perhaps the Culture has a strong distributed sense of reputation and hence anyone trying to broker influence would be shut out of the best parties (although the acknowledgement that there are ‘better’ parties seems to cause more problems than it solves – who decides who is invited to what parties and why aren’t they regarded as powerbrokers? Is this just turtles all the way down?). For all these handwavey explanations, it seems like there isn’t really a good way to prevent the collapse of this left-wing utopia into a right-wing utopia for at least some asset classes without greatly stepping up the level of authoritarian control the Minds wield over the economy. I’m also fairly sure this will apply to any conceivable left-wing utopia that doesn’t take place from a privileged point of view (e.g. one that take place entirely in virtual reality where you are the most important person in it). However, on the other hand because this element is underexplored by Banks it isn’t clear to me exactly how much damage a dedicated powerbroker could do – the world of the Culture is one in a world where fabulously powerful utilitarian warships are armed to the teeth and ready to kill to protect your fundamental rights – so being ‘cancelled’ by a Culture powerbroker seems like it might be quite a different experience to being ‘cancelled’ by a modern powerbroker, in a way that I think is difficult to trace the implications of. The long and short of it is; if I know I can always get on with my life unmolested then this might still qualify as utopian even if my unpalatable political views mean that nobody comes to my birthday party.
I am absolutely delighted to have had the opportunity to reread Surface Detail for this review (and then also the entire Culture series again for ‘important background research’). The fact the review has also afforded me the opportunity to muse on one of my favourite topics – the extensive variety of possible futures the human race might strive towards – is also fantastic, and I am extremely thankful for your time if you have read this far.
Taken just as novels on their own terms, Banks’ books are absolutely fabulous – the descriptions of hell in Surface Detail are nauseating in places, some of the characters and situations - especially the ship Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints - are laugh-out-loud funny, and some of what Banks delivers as throwaway pieces of worldbuilding would sustain a lesser author over an entire trilogy. I can’t pretend the books are flawless pieces of high literature; common criticisms are that they tend to be over-stuffed with characters that don’t actually do anything to advance the plot (Yime is a particularly bad example even by the low-ish standards of the Culture series – she takes up about a quarter of Surface Detail but is so inconsequential to the plot I think I might have forgotten to mention her until now), and that Banks appears to be convinced that the entire Contact section of his interstellar society is staffed by sexy bisexual women and their sardonic robot partners. There’s also the standard problems which plague any and all science fiction written from this era – although Banks is very forward-looking in some respects, there are certainly still elements that remind you that the author is a middle-aged Scottish man born in the 1950’s. As an example of this sort of silly gap in the worldbuilding, Excession describes a process where two lovers repeatedly switch sex in order to mutually impregnate each other, but nowhere in the entire decology is a male character described as wearing a skirt or blouse.
However, despite this the Culture novels are widely and correctly regarded as probably the closest science fiction gets to Serious Heavyweight Literature and I’ve not really used this review to challenge that notion (nor could I). What I think is a genuinely interesting unanswered question is whether there is anything we can take from the novels about the sort of utopian politics we might one day want to instantiate in our own non-fictional universe. In some respects, Banks chooses to make things difficult for himself by writing an economy with effectively central planning. This diverges from all other identified utopias (except perhaps Star Trek) which follow a somewhat standardised template of maximising people’s freedom to consensually enter markets or not, at their discretion. The reason for this is that Banks was a committed leftist, and wanted to represent his views in a utopian future setting. It should be noted that insofar as his anarcho-leftism is ‘hard mode’ for utopias, Banks very much takes the consensus approach to writing utopias elsewhere, with an anti-authoritarian setting, post-scarcity economies and by setting the utopia in the distant future. Banks also makes it clear that the purpose of the Culture project is to be taken seriously as a piece of political philosophy by explicitly challenging the idea that the setting is utopian in-universe, which is something only a very small number of utopian settings have the chutzpah to attempt. I’ve suggested that these arguments could push in the direction of the Culture not really being utopian, or the utopia described not being stable enough to actually extract any kind of consequential political thought out of.
I think the two arguments that the Culture is not really a utopia – the ‘gilded cage’ and the ‘lack of Fun’ arguments – really collapse into one meta-argument which is whether being forced to take the utility maximising set of actions is in some sense utility destroying on a fundamental level. One possible answer is “Yes, and Banks knows this” and hence Culture citizens kill themselves after realising the futility of their life after 600 years. Another possible answer is that this is an unfair burden to place on the worldbuilding – in the world of the Culture ships travel faster than light by using the ‘hyperspace grid’, the Minds think in twelve dimensions and – also – humans can experience about 600 years worth of Fun before they get bored. Perhaps the real world is like this or perhaps it is not, but it seems possible to imagine a Culture-type universe which is better optimised for Fun when the sentient life in it is more receptive to Fun. For example, the Minds amuse themselves by building fantastic simulations of different universes and sharing them with each other, in a metaverse literally called ‘The Land of Infinite Fun’, and they typically do not choose to kill themselves as humans do in the setting. On the other hand, the observations about the Culture only justifying its own existence through the good works of the Contact division is much harder to answer to – this rings quite true to me as a criticism of what might be described as ‘Western decadence’; because we do some good things, we are absolved about thinking too hard about other good things we could be doing, like effective altruism. I think almost obsessively about effective altruism, so it is possible I actually would not like living in a society that could forcibly improve the lives of other sentient beings but chooses not to because it was too engaged in being hedonistic
The arguments that the Culture wouldn’t really work like Banks suggests seem highly relevant to any political thought we are trying to extract from the works. There are a couple of big handwavy explanations for why the Culture is able to freely interfere in other people’s politics (an act which gives their own lives meaning) and why Minds and humans have such similar terminal value functions (a stipulation which prevents the Culture getting turned into paperclips the first time a Mind has a bad day). I don’t think these objections are fatal to the program of extracting insight from the setting – it is possible to imagine a less aggressively interfering Culture which has fewer novels written about it but which nevertheless could persist in a universe where civilisations occasionally reached peer status, and possible to imagine a Culture with a much bigger gap between human and Mind values but which nevertheless had ensured AI alignment before birthing the first Mind. I think the problem of not-really being scarce is far greater – it is hard to get away from the idea that a lot of what gives life meaning is succeeding at competitive endeavours (like – say for instance, to pick an example completely out of the blue, getting the most votes in an online book review contest). I think there might be an irreconcilable tension between ensuring the universe is Fun and ensuring that everyone has more or less a homogenous experience of that universe, and I think Banks doesn’t really engage with that tension head-on.
Overall, I agree with Banks when he concludes that living in the Culture (as a citizen of the Culture) is something all readers would want for themselves over the life they currently lead. Given the role sci-fi has played in my intellectual development I recognise I am perhaps unusually keen to trade in my current lot for a life of Luxury Space Communism, but I have shown drafts of this review to more grounded friends and family and they agree that – as presented – the Culture seems like a better place to live than the modern West. I also think – contrary to my original plan for this review – that the Culture has enough subtle philosophical flaws that we should probably regard the setting as another False Utopia, albeit ones where the flaws are more subtle than LeGuin’s ‘torture a child nearly to death for no obvious reason’ presentation of Omelas. That doesn’t mean that the ideas on how to construct a utopian society presented within are worthless, but it does obviously preclude – for example – just naming our AIs after Culture ships and hoping everything will work itself out.
This notwithstanding, some key points which can be taken away for rationalist utopian projects:
In conclusion, I really hope I’ve done an adequate job conveying the breadth and profundity of Iain M Banks’ ideas in just one of his novels, and how much poorer the world is for his untimely death in 2013. Surface Detail is my very favourite of his Culture novels and potentially my very favourite work of science fiction full stop. Banks is, without a doubt, the author I most wish I could discover again for the first time, and if this review accomplishes nothing more than introducing you to his work I will be absolutely delighted. If I have, in addition, said anything you have found interesting about fictional utopias I can only promise you it is because of the incredible source material I had to work with!
Sweet Valley Confidential by Francine PascalRelaunching a Book Series, You Didn’t Technically Write Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield are identical twins, with blue-green eyes the exact color of the Pacific Ocean, sun-kissed blonde hair, and until the advent of vanity-sizing were perfect size 6’s. They then became perfect size 4’s. They are also the stars of the Sweet Valley franchise, which consists of approximately 700 books from the 80s to the early 00s and four seasons of a 90’s dramedy all of which take place in an idyllic Southern California town. You might think writing this many books would require a lot of stimulants or Danielle Steele-level productivity, but it mostly required Francine Pascal to oversee a team of ghostwriters from her chateau in the south of France. Over the years, charming details of who actually wrote the books has trickled out. A future English professor! A professional writer! A straight man! The books themselves were amazing. Elizabeth is the good twin. She is either an aspiring journalist, novelist, or activist who likes to read and solve mysteries. Jessica isn’t supposed to be the bad twin, or not exactly. She’s a fun-loving party girl, a boy-crazy cheerleader, the mischievous scamp. Unfortunately, either the ghost writers or Francine Pascal struggled to draw the line between making Jessica fun and irresponsible, or an outright sociopath. In the first Sweet Valley book ever (Sweet Valley High #1 Double Love), Jessica likes Todd, Todd likes Elizabeth, so Jessica pretends Todd tried to force himself on her. She later learns a valuable lesson (don’t do that) when her friends pay her back by tossing her in a pool! Reading the original books today is incredibly jarring. While the spin-off series that cover the twins in elementary and middle school could probably be released today as is, the early Sweet Valley High would immediately be canceled. Even if Twitter didn’t exist, these books would somehow be canceled. The first problem is Jessica, one of the two main characters. Over the course of the flagship series, she drives a social outcast to attempt suicide, drugs her sister and lets her stand trial for drunk driving, and attempts to steal the boyfriends of most of the female characters. The second problem is everything else. The books are quite short and try to cover multiple plots which means crude characterizations and bizarrely fast plot resolution. Post Harry Potter, even children’s books can be long and meandering. That’s not how teen fiction worked in the 80s. 180 pages is long for a Sweet Valley book. But beyond the speed of resolution, the way plots are resolved would not squeak by today’s editors. In the fourth book published in 1983, Robin Wilson wants to join the high school sorority run by Jessica but is fat. Here’s how the ghost writer emphasizes the point. Robin plopped down on the sofa, rummaged around in her purse for something, and finally came up with a large chocolate bar. She unwrapped it and hungrily started munching. “You’re really lucky, Liz, having a terrific sister like Jessica.” The chocolate bar was disappearing fast. “That’s me, all right, lucky Liz,” she replied dryly, hypnotized by Robin’s rhythmic chewing. “Robin, doesn’t eating like that make you”—don’t say “fat,” she warned herself—“break out?” “Oh, no,” said Robin, licking her sticky fingers. “I never get zits, just pounds. But I just wasn’t meant to be slim like you and Jessica. It’s got something to do with my bones—or is it my metabolism? Anyway, it’s just my sad fate.” Elizabeth looked at Robin dubiously. She was convinced Robin’s heaviness was due to the way she ate— especially if this was typical.
The dangers of being fat or gaining weight is a recurring motif in the Sweet Valley Universe. (See for instance Sweet Valley Twins #1 and #117). In Sweet Valley University, Elizabeth’s roommate supports the white supremacist secret society terrorizing town- but her real evil is revealed when she manipulates Elizabeth into over-eating to the point where she and Jessica are no longer identical! If these books were written now, Robin would reconcile herself to her fatness and boldly denounce her haters. But in the 80s, Robin responded with aerobics. Robin was like a machine on the track. She looked strong, almost athletic. And, as always these days, she stared straight ahead, blotting out everything else. She ran relentlessly, and it occurred to Elizabeth that perhaps she was running toward something, something only she could see. And also dieting. Robin’s plate, usually heaped with french fries and double burgers, now held only lettuce leaves, two tomato slices, and a hard-boiled egg. Elizabeth watched her silently, and when Robin got up to walk away , she noticed it for certain. On the track in bulky sweat clothes it wasn’t obvious. But now, even in a tent dress, it was: Robin Wilson was losing weight. I don’t think a YA writer would write that today. They might write a willowy thin heroine but if they had a fat character, they’d keep them fat. For instance, Meg Cabot of Princess Diaries fame recently wrote books called Size 12 Is Not Fat and Size 14 Is Not Fat Either. (The protagonist is not fat in those books as you can probably guess.) In any case, Robin is vindicated by losing weight and winning a beauty pageant. Such plots are typical of the first fifty or Sweet Valley High books. Sometimes serious issues are raised- suicide, sexual assault, false accusation of sexual assault, leukemia, cocaine overdoses, injury- but they are always quickly resolved and nobody seems to take them seriously. Something must have happened to Francine Pascal or the publisher though, because around the fiftieth book, the books suddenly turn into after school specials. There are strict Asian parents, eating disorders, and steroids. The book series even revisits attempted date rape and this time it is taken seriously by all the characters. Amy’s True Love (Sweet Valley High #75) even has a character come out as gay, which was kind of noteworthy. Honestly though, I think these books would have somehow elicited even more outrage. Robin Wilson, who used to be fat, stars in The Perfect Girl (Sweet Valley High #74). Still thin and now a cheerleader, Robin’s insecurity about her boyfriend, George’s new hobby (flying airplanes) and his new friend, Vicky, leads to an eating disorder. "Do these carrots have butter on them?" Robin asked suspiciously. "Margarine, yes," her mother replied. "The way I always make them." Robin shook her head. "I can't eat them. Sorry, Mom." Robin examined the chicken carefully, picking at it with her knife and fork. The skin was golden brown and crisp, but Robin knew it was mostly fat. She wouldn't touch that. An intense frown of concentration creased her forehead as she segregated the food into different areas on her plate. When she had finished, nearly everything was on the "don't eat" side. "Aren't you hungry, Robin?" Mrs. Wilson asked in surprise. "You're usually famished by dinnertime." Robin winced. Famished was just another word for greedy. It was definitely time to cut back on her food intake. "I'm on a diet," Robin explained as she handed her glass of milk to Troy. He took it without comment. "A diet, dear?" Mrs. Wilson frowned. "You look just fine to me." Robin let out a small gasp of exasperation. "That's what you used to say when I was fat, Mom. No matter how much of a pudge I was, you always said I looked just fine." "But you did," Mrs. Wilson insisted. "Are you saying you like me fat?" Robin asked in shock. She stared at her mother with growing resentment. "Do you actually want me to get fat again?
That (except the margarine) could be written today. It’s the recovery that would draw outrage. Robin continues to starve herself and lands in the hospital. But then Vicky tells her she has nothing to fear, that Vicky could never compete with Robin because she’s addicted to marijuana.
"You know what that did to me?" Vicky asked. "I was the baby of the family, and it was as if I were some kind of time bomb. As soon as I was old enough, my family would split up. It would be my fault. I didn't want that to happen. So you know what I decided to do?" Robin was curious, in spite of herself. She looked at Vicky and shook her head slightly. "What?" "I thought that maybe I just wouldn't grow up. If I stayed the baby, my parents would have to stay together. And so I started doing the most crazy, stupid, immature stuff. I started to smoke cigarettes, I stole booze from the liquor cabinet, I smoked pot. And I kept telling myself it was all just for one reason—to keep the family together. I didn't like what I was doing. In fact, after a while, I was pretty miserable." "So?" Robin felt a growing sense of amazement at hearing Vicky's story. On the surface, Vicky seemed so totally pulled together. But below the surface, there was still a frightened girl whose voice shook when she relived her painful memories. Vicky stood up and began to pace nervously. "So, I got hooked. I turned into a real dopehead. Instead of pretending to get into trouble, I really did. I was completely messed up. I thought I was controlling my parents' lives for the better, but all I was doing was losing control of my own. Trying to keep my family together almost killed me."
After that, Robin decides to start eating food again. But whatever social pretensions Sweet Valley may have been developing, they suddenly fly out the window for the final third of the series as it abruptly transitions into serialized soap opera arcs. This is the high point of the series. The number of twin switches accelerates, there’s some attempt at character development and continuity, and Jessica is even semi-redeemed. The redemption of Jessica may seem implausible but it’s largely accomplished by introducing an endless stream of actual villains and allowing Jessica to occasionally risk her life to save others. The magnum opus of Sweet Valley High was the Evil Twin arc.
The Evil Twin Margo is an abused foster child. She is perfect size 6. But she has ominous gray eyes and dark hair. She doesn’t live in Sweet Valley. Meanwhile in Sweet Valley, Jessica and Elizabeth both want to be prom queen. While Jessica focuses on getting the perfect dress, Elizabeth decides to turn the jungle-themed prom into a conservation fund-raiser. Elizabeth goes to the prom with her boyfriend, Todd, and Jessica takes Sam, a dirt bike rider and total hunk. Thanks to Elizabeth’s tireless activism on behalf of the environment, she seems like the front-runner for prom queen so Jessica spikes her punch with vodka. Elizabeth, in a fit of drunken magnanimity, withdraws from the prom queen race, goes for a drive with Sam, crashes her Jeep and kills him! Elizabeth goes on trial for vehicular manslaughter, and Margo sees her beautiful face almost identical to Margo’s own in the newspaper. Margo goes on a killing spree as she heads to the West Coast in hopes of killing Elizabeth and stealing her life for her own. The best part of this plotline is that after Margo gets blonde hair she practices imitating the twins since she’s planning on replacing Elizabeth. Whenever she pretends to be Jessica she mostly gets away with it (they’re both bad!) but whenever she tries to be Elizabeth, people think she’s Jessica playing a joke. Jessica and others will end up thwarting Margo’s plan at great personal risk, which makes Jessica look okay compared to a serial killer. (A year later it will turn out Margo is still on the loose and was separated from her own identical, evil twin at birth and they’ll team up to try and kill both of the Wakefield sisters and take both of their spots but it doesn’t live up to the magic of the original). The original Sweet Valley High series would launch multiple spin-offs ranging from the iconic Sweet Valley Twins (middle school), the serviceable Sweet Valley University (college), and two ill-fated attempts at more realistic storylines (Sweet Valley High Senior Year and Sweet Valley Junior High). The last spin-off ended its run in 2003.
The Re-Release After Gossip Girl became a TV show and made lots of money, there was an attempt to cash in on Sweet Valley High. The first few books were re-released and updated. The twins shrank from size 6 to size 4, Elizabeth worked for the school blog instead of the school newspaper, and occasionally characters would glance at cell phones to remind us it was now set in the present day. It wasn’t very successful and only the first several were ever updated. More ambitiously, Francine Pascal would release Sweet Valley Confidential and the Sweet Life, chronicling the lives of the twins at ages 27 and 30 respectively. The New Stories Whenever a big IP is revived (Star Wars) or adapted (Marvel) there’s always a lot of speculation about whether the focus will be on pleasing obsessive fans or attracting a new audience. But with a property like Sweet Valley, the only selling point was going to be nostalgia. Sweet Valley Confidential was not going to be a surprise hit, it was not going to be big around the world, and it was not going to get an ironic Zoomer fan base. It was wholly and completely a nostalgia play. Which made the decision to have negative fan service extremely baffling.
If I were Francine Pascal, the reboot would have featured a wedding, the twins as bridesmaids, and twin switches every other chapter. I also think Jessica would have used Face ID to secretly read her sister’s texts. There would be lots of unnecessary references to past plot lines to make the readers feel at home. (Jessica gazed across the balcony towards the Pacific Ocean, its blue-green color in the morning sun precisely mirroring the color of her eyes. She sighed, as she moved her gaze to the tea cup in front of her, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ears. British tea always reminded her of that time in high school when she interned at a London newspaper and was almost killed by a werewolf. But at least at the time she and her sister had still been best friends. But now that had changed…) Instead, Francine Pascal (or an uncredited ghost writer) decided to have a book filled with reverse fan service. Honestly, I think Francine Pascal just didn’t really know what was in most of the Sweet Valley books. Because while Sweet Valley Confidential is the canonical successor of Sweet Valley High, it sure as hell wasn’t the spiritual successor. All of the most recognizable characters from the past series appear, but Pascal appears to have plucked their names and biographies from a Watch Mojo list of the ten most popular characters and thrown them into the new book at random. Elizabeth is now randomly best friends with rich snob, Bruce Patman (a recurring antagonist/antihero of the original series) and the twins’ brother is now gay and partnered to Aaron Dallas, Jessica’s middle school boyfriend. Strangely, Pascal tells us that Jessica barely knew Aaron. Structurally, the book is a mess. The main drama is that Jessica stole Elizabeth’s long-time boyfriend, Todd, but that’s already happened before the book opens. The book is also filled with what can only be called fake flashbacks. Rather than excerpts from past books, there are rewritten passages from the first Sweet Valley Book ever, Double Love. And in first person, rather than the conventional third-person perspective of the book. Pascal also decides to retcon the whole motive of the first book- Jessica’s unrequited crush on Todd by converting it to Jessica wanting to compete with Elizabeth for male attention. If the selling point is nostalgia, why not just go whole hog? Did Pascal think the original ghost writer let her down? Why pretend to revisit the original? At least there’s a few things, Pascal gets right. She remembers the main point of the twins is that they’re really, really hot. Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield appeared interchangeable if you considered only their faces. And what faces they were. Gorgeous. Absolutely amazing. The kind you couldn’t stop looking at. Their eyes were shades of aqua that danced in the light like shards of precious stones, oval and fringed with thick, light brown lashes long enough to cast a shadow on their cheeks. Their silky blond hair, the cascading kind fell just below their shoulders. And to complete the perfection, their rosy lips looked as if they were penciled on. There wasn’t a thing wrong with their figures, either. It was as if billions of possibilities all fell together perfectly. Twice. She also manages to throw in a tiny bit of continuity here and there. Robin Wilson is back again and she “looked terrific having gained back only a tiny bit of that lost weight from her high school years, which was amazing since now she was a successful caterer and restaurant critic.” But Pascal mostly fails at continuity nods or even writing a plot where things happen. The majority of the book consists the characters having flashbacks of everything that happened between the old books and the new books. The epilogue is addressed directly to old Sweet Valley fans and tries to reminds us of beloved fan favorite characters. But the summaries of these side characters is often wrong. Pascal appears to misremember the backstories that she ordered her ghost writers to pen. Overall, it sucks.
In Conclusion The CW now says its going to launch a Sweet Valley High TV series. I doubt it. A few years back, Diablo Cody claimed she was making a Sweet Valley movie which never happened. And if it did happen it would be bad. It wouldn’t be ludicrous enough to really be Sweet Valley, even Riverdale can’t live up to peak Sweet Valley. The characters couldn’t be written today and still be the same. In 1995, there was The Brady Bunch Movie. The joke of the whole thing was that they were the same people, overwhelmingly wholesome, living in the cynical and jaded 90s. It was pretty funny. But could it work for Sweet Valley? I don’t think so today. Any straightforward adaptation of Sweet Valley would be reviled. You could try to make Jessica be funny and awful like the cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but the essence of Sweet Valley is that her antics were presented as escapist, self-indulgent, teenage hijinks, not as a truly terrible person getting away with everything. In the world of Sweet Valley High, getting thrown in the pool or losing a beauty pageant was all that moral justice required to teach you a lesson. Some things ought to stay dead. Some magic only belongs to the 80s and the 90s. These are the Sweet Valley books that should be remembered and reread.
1. Dear Sister (Sweet Valley High #7) 2. Double Love (Sweet Valley High #1) 3. Romeo and 2 Juliets (Sweet Valley Twins #84) 4. Boyfriends for Everyone (The Unicorn Club #17) 5. The Pom-Pom Wars (Sweet Valley High #113 6. Slam Book Fever (Sweet Valley High #48) 7. Lila’s Secret Valentine (Sweet Valley Twins Super Edition #5) 8. Jessica Against Bruce (Sweet Valley High #86) 9. The Evil Twin (Sweet Valley High #100) 10. The Unicorns Go Hawaiian (Sweet Valley Twins Super Edition #4) |
