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The muscular imagination of Iain M. Banks: a future you might want
A future you might actually want to live in.
When I peer into the far reaches of science fictional imagination, way out beyond the easy extrapolations and consensus futures, beyond the Blade Runners and the Star Treks, the name that looms largest is Iain M. Banks. Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of this is what we ought to do, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale. I think in particular of Olaf Stapledon, his Last and First Men, which gallops across millions of years; and of Cixin Liu, his series starting with The Three-Body Problem, which bumps up against the death of the universe.
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