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Next Page is a newsletter written by senior correspondent and book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. Read her latest work on our site. |
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Next Page is a newsletter written by senior correspondent and book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. Read her latest work on our site. |
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Welcome back to Next Page, Vox’s books newsletter. We’re trying something a little different, and we hope you’re as excited about it as we are.
Going forward, Next Page will offer you an expansive essay on bookish topics that touch on big themes in publishing, literature, reading, and language. We’ll continue to have book recommendations for both old and new releases, but they’re going to come accompanied by some meatier ideas, too. Let me know what you think! |
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The tech billionaires are missing the point of their favorite sci-fi series |
Iain Banks’ Culture novels take place in a socialist utopia. The broligarchs love them. |
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One of the most momentous developments of the new Trump era is how major billionaires in the tech industry — frequently known as the broligarchs — have thrown their weight behind the president. During the 2024 election, they offered high-profile support and made big donations; after the inauguration, they announced new company policies that aligned them with President Donald Trump’s regressive cultural ideologies.
Elon Musk had already turned Twitter into a right-wing echo chamber after purchasing it in 2022, and he spent several chaotic months earlier this year as Trump’s government efficiency henchman. Jeff Bezos has revamped the Washington Post’s editorial section to build support for “personal liberties and free markets.” Mark Zuckerberg decided to get rid of fact-checkers at Meta.
It was a massive show of power that revealed how possible it is for these wealthy men to remake our culture in their own image, transforming how we speak to each other and what we know to be true. Using that power on Trump’s behalf seems to have paid mixed dividends for Silicon Valley, but it nonetheless makes clear how important it is to understand their worldview and their vision for the future.
Which is why it is striking to note that Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg share a favorite author: Iain M. Banks, the Scottish science fiction writer best known for his Culture series. Banks is an odd choice for a bunch of tech billionaires. The author, who died in 2013, was a socialist and avowed hater of the super-rich. |
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“The Culture series is certainly, in terms of more modern science fiction, one of my absolute favorites,” Bezos told GeekWire in 2018, adding, “there’s a utopian element to it that I find very attractive.” Bezos has attempted twice to adapt the series for TV at Amazon, once in 2018 and again in February. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg picked the Culture novel The Player of Games for his book club in 2015.
The most avowed Culture fan among the broligarchs, however, is Musk. Musk has named Space X drone ships after the starships in the Culture books. His original name for the neuralink — a computer chip that can be implanted in human brains, pioneered by his neurotechnology company — was the neural lace, a piece of telepathic technology that Banks came up with in the Culture books. In 2018, Musk declared himself “a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.” (It’s worth noting that in 2018, Musk was under fire for union busting but had not yet waded so far into national politics or declared public war against the “woke mind virus.”)
Plenty of us like and even identify with pieces of pop culture whose politics we don’t entirely agree with, like the libertarian Little House on the Prairie books or the Christian Chronicles of Narnia. Still, the Banks Culture series, which consists of 10 books released between 1987 and 2012, is not politically coded so much as it is downright didactic. “The Culture is hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism,” Banks said in an interview with Strange Horizons in 2010, in a line that’s only barely more explicit than the books themselves.
The Culture series takes place in a post-scarcity galactic society known only as the Culture, which strictly values empathy, pluralism, and social cooperation. Most of the volumes of the series see the Culture navigating an altercation with another civilization, usually one with a much less progressive ethos, and figuring out how to handle the resulting tension. Does the Culture intervene in the affairs of another planet to, for instance, stop the spread of a theocratic empire? What does it do about civilizations where slavery is legal?
The politics of these books are not subtle, and they are also not compatible with the existence of billionaires. So it’s worth thinking about why the broligarchs have so consistently cited a socialist author as an inspiration. What do they find tantalizing about Banks’ work? Are they missing the point altogether? Read the full story >> |
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Book recommendations to get lost in |
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Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. And just like clockwork, a new Hunger Games prequel arrives! Listen, I never needed to know what tragic backstory drove Haymitch to call Katniss “sweetheart,” and you didn’t either. All the same, give Suzanne Collins this credit: She never writes a new Panem novel unless she wants to think through an interesting political concept. In this case, it’s the issue of why the masses, when they are so many, don’t rise up and overturn those in power, when they are so few. It’s a tricky question, and Collins explores it with her characteristically merciless sense for storytelling.
Sky Daddy by Kate Folk. A woman is sexually attracted to airplanes in this comical and dreamlike debut novel. Folk says that her plane-loving heroine is in conversation with Moby-Dick, an idea that struck me as first absurd, then incredibly funny, and then profoundly true. You’ll never think of a layover the same way again after reading this one.
Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel. A witty metafictional novel, Pale Fire meets Star Trek, Metallic Realms is a collection of science fiction short stories, annotated by one Michael Lincoln (get it?). Michael is convinced he’s introducing the reader to some of the most important science fiction of the 21st century, mostly because a lot of it was written by Michael’s best and potentially only friend. Over the course of his annotations, Michael traces his way back through his heartbreakingly one-sided friendship, showing us the strength of his delusions and pretensions — and of his nearly heroic love for his friend.
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📲 For more thoughts from Constance Grady, follow her on X, Threads, or BlueSky.
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