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Podcast: Science Fiction
Episode: The thematic genius of Iain M Banks
Description: This episode of the Science Fiction podcast is re-published from an original video essay first published in September 2018.
I spent years searching, after I first read the Culture novels of Iain M Banks, for other space opera novels that equalled them. And this is what I discovered. Nothing else in the space opera genre even comes close to the Culture. Nothing. Zip. Nada. As Theodore Sturgeon said, 90% of everything is crap. But as a young reader I wondered why, with all these books marketed as space opera, did none read like the Culture? The answer is – theme.
Science fiction tends to...