Place Within Science Fiction
When the first Culture stories appeared, science fiction was dominated by cyberpunk, a pessimistic sub-genre that worried about but offered no solutions for the offshoring of jobs to countries with lower costs or less strict regulations, the increasing power of corporations and the threats to privacy posed by computer networks. The Culture stories are space opera, making no attempt at scientific realism, and Banks uses this freedom extravagantly in order to focus on the human and political aspects of his universe; he even rejects the inevitability of capitalism, which both cyberpunk and earlier space operas had assumed, in creating an anarchistic society with a socialist flavour. Space opera had peaked in the 1930s, but started to decline as magazine editors such as John W. Campbell demanded more realistic approaches. By the 1960s most space operas were satires on earlier styles, such as Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and Bill, the Galactic Hero stories, while televised and film space operas such as Star Trek and Star Wars were thought to have dumbed down the sub-genre. The Culture stories did much to revive space opera.
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