>>2382180I like those books and yeah. It's the most attractive vision of communism I've read in fiction (although they don't call it that, but it's clearly a super-futuristic and galaxy-spanning version of it). It has gone
beyond a planned economy as they've been practiced in real life. It's really truly a place where individuals can design their own continents. There's more than enough room and resources to do that. What people are capable of doing is limited only by manners, imagination, and taste. Nothing and nobody is exploited and human labor is essentially a hobby.
>>2382173Stories are usually about conflict (man vs. nature, man vs. society, man vs. man). It's hard to do that in a society that has mastered nature and doesn't have social conflict. So in Star Trek, the crew of the ship interacting with aliens or weird and threatening entities and phenomena is the narrative machinery to tell stories.
The Culture books do this too. One of the principle problems that people have is boredom and a tendency towards decadence and how they deal with that when the religious fundamentalist aliens show up and start blowing up their orbitals. When you blow up a Culture ship, you actually kill a sentient A.I. that is powering it.