Toward the end of his 2009 novel Transition, the late
Scottish author Iain M. Banks has the story’s voice of wisdom
describe libertarianism as “a simple-minded right wing ideology
ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own
self-regard.”

It’s safe to say that Banks, who died in June at age 59, shared
this opinion. An avowed anti-Thatcherite and outspoken critic of
New Labour, Banks was prone to unprompted rants about the
“greedism” and “marketology” advocated by the “intellectually
facile.” “It really gets my hackles up, the right wing cover of
libertarianism,” he told Wired in 2012.

And yet Banks’ science fiction novels drew heavily from the
universe of libertarian interests, particularly in his Culture
novels, a long-running set of loosely connected space operas that
deal with a high-tech post-scarcity society comprised mainly of
biologically advanced human beings and artificial intelligences.
Banks may have hated libertarians, but the fictional worlds he
built were founded on fundamentally libertarian ideals and
morality. For a quarter century, he offered a sweeping
science-fiction vision of how those ideals might survive a
brilliantly imaginative series of practical and moral tests.

The Culture series can be read as a sprawling, intergalactic
left-libertarian thought experiment. It’s a functioning anarchist
society with no government, no laws, and no money. Powerful
artificial beings known as Minds work with humans to solve large
social problems, but governing groups are formed and managed on a
mostly ad hoc basis.

Culture humans have dramatically extended lifespans,
occasionally thousands of years long. Most are equipped with
special drug glands that allow them to alter their moods,
attitudes, and sensory experiences with a mere thought. In the
absence of resource constraints or inevitable death, most people
can do pretty much anything they want, as long as they are not
coercing others in the process. The only limiting factor is
individual consent.

The first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, appeared in
1987. By the time it came out, Banks had already published three
essentially realistic mainstream novels. Phlebas was his
first explicit foray into science fiction, which his publisher
denoted by adding his middle initial to the byline. For the rest of
his career until his death, Banks published about a book a year,
trading off between science fiction and more mainstream work, using
that middle initial to differen­tiate between the two.

It’s clear which side of that divide his passions laid. Banks
said that before the publication of his first novel, he always
considered himself a science-fiction writer. And he described the
Culture, which eventually fanned out across eight official novels,
several short stories, and a novel presumed to take place in the
same universe, as a “secular heaven”—his own “personal Utopia.”

Banks was a technological optimist with a keen interest in both
the how and why of technological development. Perhaps the greatest
joy in reading his science fiction is the freewheeling sense of
invention, especially when it comes to physical spaces. He was a
master world-builder who worked on the grandest possible scale.

Few Culture citizens live on naturally occurring planets.
Instead they prefer fabricated living spaces customized to suit
their needs. Many reside on impossibly large ships that act as
spacefaring megacities: self-repairing, constantly evolving
constructs capable of holding tens or even hundreds of millions of
individuals. Others live on orbitals—giant rings constructed around
stars as homes for human occupants. Nonhuman intelligences build
equally massive worlds to their own specifications: airspheres for
an ancient race of blimp-like creatures, hollowed-out multi-level
shellworlds for older and more mysterious beings.

Banks doesn’t merely posit the existence of these giant-sized
space structures. He often describes in loving detail the process
by which they were constructed, as well as the reasons societies
favor certain living spaces over others and why their tastes shift
over time.

It’s natural for intelligent beings to reengineer their
environments, his books suggest, but also to discard them when
they’re no longer useful. Others, meanwhile, can scavenge and
re-shape whatever has been left behind. When we first encounter the
ancient shellworlds in Matter (2008), for example, the
exact origins of the structures are shrouded; their creators have
gone, leaving only scattered monuments. Yet many of the worlds have
been settled by younger races determined to make them their own,
taking advantage of some excellent cosmic hand-me-downs. 

There’s a tremendous sense of wonder in Banks’ depiction of a
universe full of spectacular things and environments that
intelligent minds have created, but also an abiding sense of
practicality and individual preference.

Banks extended both his imagination and his acceptance of
individual tastes into more intimate realms as well. One of his
strengths was to recognize and portray the practically infinite
variety of human (and nonhuman) interests and obsessions. In the
Culture novels, to be an intelligent being—human, alien, or
machine—is to be not only unique but unusual, and perhaps
even a little bit freakish.

There’s an almost carnival atmosphere to his books, packed as
they are with characters boasting all manner of odd hobbies and
sexual predilections. Gender-switching, for example, can be
accomplished more or less at will, and most Culture residents make
at least one transition in their lifetime. As a result, anyone can
bear a child, and various unexpected arrangements ensue. In
Excession (1996), Banks describes a common practice
between particularly committed lovers in which two pregnancies are
timed to occur in parallel, with each party simultaneously becoming
female and bearing her loved one’s child.

The Culture and its allies tacitly encourage people to chase
whatever desires and ambitions seize them, just as long as those
ambitions are consensual. Some of these pursuits are rather
mundane. The protagonist in The Hydrogen Sonata (2012),
who is a member of the Gzilt, a civilization that nearly joined the
Culture at its founding, grows an extra pair of arms to play a
famously difficult composition; in the same book, an artificial
intelligence becomes a hermit who passes days constructing
intricate rivers of sand. Others are more risqué. In Surface
Detail (2010), a devious Mind makes a deal with a curious
human to occupy his body for a year, with no other conditions. The
Mind proceeds to wantonly abuse the body for his own amusement.
Some of the other Minds see the arrangement as in poor taste, yet
nonetheless accept it as a matter of consent.