• Aphelion@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    50
    ·
    edit-2
    5 days ago

    One of his favorite book series is The Culture books by Ian M Banks, and it’s about a civilization who’s post-human citizens are genetically modified to be hermaphradites, who can change their their outward appearing gender at will. They also live in post-scarcity communist society that likes to benevolently interfere with less advanced cultures to secretly improve their quality of life.

    I am 100% certain at this point that Phony Stark only remembers details about the media he consumes that fit his personal world view.

    • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      29
      ·
      edit-2
      5 days ago

      There are multiple Culture novels where the main character switches gender for at least part of the story, and another where the main character is lightly teased for never having done so himself. The Culture series is peak FALGSC.

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      5 days ago

      This one always hurts me because I literally own every book (some in multiple editions) of this series, and I had someone tell me after I showed them it, " So you like Elon Musk right?", and I was like “No? Why would you think that?” and gained cursed knowledge.

      And this was when he was still a bit of a liberal darling.

    • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      5 days ago

      likes to benevolently interfere with less advanced cultures to secretly improve their quality of life

      freedom-and-democracy

      spoiler

      I’ve never actually read any of the Culture books lol

      • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        5 days ago

        It’s more that the Culture believe they have a moral imperative to combat fascist ideologies and do so through subterfuge that enhances the contradictions of those societies. It is explicitly viewed as morally gray that they interfere at all. When the Culture destabilizes the fascist Azad Empire by delegitimizing how their society chooses leaders, hundreds of people die in the immediate uproar. When the Culture wars with the Idiran Empire, which practices theocratic slavery, 850 billion sentients are killed, and it takes about 500 years for the war to become justifiable to many Culture citizens that lived through it.

      • Aphelion@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        5 days ago

        To be fair, that’s my super quick summary having only read the first book, and half of the second, out of ten books, so I still have a lot more to read.