Greg Egan's Diaspora is a hard sf novel set in year 3000 where most of the planet is given up to nature and the majority of humans, billions upon billions of them, live in like five 10 meter cubic supercomputers powered by geothermal energy. One of my favorite novels but you have to be a huge nerd to really enjoy it.
Yeah, this is a drum I've been beating in for quite some time. I love Culture, but it's not particularly radical and Banks seems to have been a lib. Culture is basically what libs want to see "the West" as. Progressive, prosperous, untouchable in its hegemony. Graciously interfering with more backwards weaker civilizations for their own damn good.
Look to Windward is a particularly revealing example.
spoiler
Culture secretly meddles in affairs of cat people's backwards cast civilization, trying to get democratic forces to power through bribes and what not. This backfires spectacularly and leads to a cat civil war killing a good fraction of population in process. The cats are pissed at the Culture. They sent a civil war veteran who lost family in the war to go 9/11 on the Culture's massive space station. The attempt is easily thwarted and it's cat architects are brutally tortured and murdered by Culture's super special forces robot agent.
Published in year 2000. You can't make this shit up.
If anyone is curious I also read an academic article with the same sentiment.
Irish travellers descend from Irish who took off for in reason or the other in the seventeenth century. Before genetic sequencing a popular theory was that they were a remnant of an indigenous population.
Yeah. Projecting $1000 into $17000 is stupid but the amount of people in twitter replies to this article going "no, no, a $1000 iPhone is nessesary in a modern society, accept no substitutes" is baffling. Americans, I guess.
·2 years ago
That's funny, but is the show any good?