In my experience, it feels real but the feelings doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. It's more like the set of a play than a real world, where a thin facade evokes all the right cues in the audience but couldn't actually be used to trick someone into thinking it's real.
I'm also aphantasic, but I do dream, though rarely remember them unless I wake up and go back to sleep (probably due to being a deep sleeper rather than anything to do with aphantasia). At most I get some attraction to and diffusion of (not sure how to describe this experience) fractal patterns and vibrant colors on LSD. On shrooms I've gotten some color-shifting of lights, but no open or closed-eye visualization or hallucination. Strong opiates have given me closed-eye hallucination (uncontrollable visualization) though.
> I think most scifi (that isn't just action adventure) tries to reframe the problems of today in a different context for the purposes of social commentary. Despite the future setting, it is fundamentally a genre about the present.
Allegory is allegory whatever the setting. The genre is just the setting. Some settings are more useful for allegories than others, but that's very specific to the culture and literary tradition that produces the work. Eg. fantasy writers in western countries pretty much never use the setting for allegory, they use scifi more often. Writers from China that I've seen are the opposite, almost every other work in xianxia is deeply political, but the scifi is just scifi.
Why is humans having to work forever even when it's totally unnecessary more optimistic than utopia where work is just a vacation for when you get bored of doing human things?
> Why is humans having to work forever even when it's totally unnecessary more optimistic than utopia where work is just a vacation for when you get bored of doing human things?
Because, IMHO, having some sort of meaningful occupation is good. The bad thing is actually the loss of power and control over your own life and your society that comes with it in our world.
In the Culture, I get the impression that most of the people are essentially dumb little lap dogs, who have little idea of how anything works, occupying themselves with social-media-tier stuff. There are still "people" who have to get the work done, but they're non-human which means the society is really a non-human one.
> I get the impression that most of the people are essentially dumb little lap dogs, who have little idea of how anything works, occupying themselves with social-media-tier stuff. There are still "people" who have to get the work done, but they're non-human which means the society is really a non-human one.
Is that really any different from our modern society other than the robots freeing the more capable or more dutiful humans from the chores? The central critique of most human systems of governance is that they place power in the hands of the idle/corrupt rather than the productive (left and right, they just disagree on which parts of society are productive). Putting all the power in the hands of the people doing all the work is the ideal solution for most people, we just don't have self-sacrificing civic-minded slaves to force the drudgery on.
> Is that really any different from our modern society other than the robots freeing the more capable or more dutiful humans from the chores?
Yes it is, because our modern society is still a human society. Humans in culture society are more the like dogs in ours, perhaps loved and cared for, but it's not their story.
> Putting all the power in the hands of the people doing all the work is the ideal solution for most people, we just don't have self-sacrificing civic-minded slaves to force the drudgery on.
The problem in the Culture is that they effectively put all the power in the hands of the "Minds." I have no problem with a Roomba or toilet-cleaning robot handling true drudgery. But the interesting or important shit should be for people.
In the Culture novels, there was some pretty radical genetic engineering going on (to the point of enabling alien reproductive compatibility). You'd think they could have done some of that to make "self-sacrificing civic-mindedness" very fun and satisfying, instead of going all-in on vapid hedonism stuff (which what you see whenever you catch glimpses of the bulk of culture citizens).
It's not explicitly stated, but I get the impression that Culture citizens are generally very pro-social and willing to sacrifice for others' benefits and may well have been engineered with that aim.
They were willing to sacrifice nearly a trillion lives in the Idiran war, which was voted on by the entire population. Even after that vote, it was very easy to opt-out and I get the sense that most of those who did were motivated by genuine pacifism rather than personal fear.
The most dangerous and uncomfortable jobs like Special Circumstances and Contact seem to have an enormous surplus of volunteers and it's even hinted that there might not be any need for humans to do most of those jobs; they exist just because humans want to do them.
Citrus peels taste good. They're used for cooking in every culture that grows citrus. Eating them raw is only bad due to farmers poisoning the food they sell.
I was joking, but there is a huge difference between using citrus zest/rind in cooking or as a garnish and eating the whole thing like an apple, including the pith.
I've never eaten citrus like an apple except when at a restaurant and they give slices of lemon or lime - I eat those whole. I usually eat the fruit first, then the peel. The bitterness of the pith is not noticeable at all when eaten like this.
Well, thank you for editing your post to not ask me if I only like microwave dinners.
I guess maybe it's a cultural thing - I've never seen anyone ever make mash potatoes with skins inside, and mash is a dinner staple here(in fact both here in the UK and Poland where I'm originally from).
These people are also all wealthy with stable fortunes - they don't need a lot of cash because they have everything. Trump is also a rich guy, but he has a lot of debts and legal troubles and worries about leaving office, so he urgently needs cash to bankroll and bribe and attract likeminded individuals to help him.
When people say that US corruption is nothing new, they aren't condoning it, they're (in every case I've seen) drawing exactly the contrast you are making - it was like this before, but now it's so much worse!
Corruption was not isolated incidents and unproven theories before, there have been corruption scandals throughout US history and even similarly flagrant actions earlier in the US (read about the "robber barons" of the industrial era, the early figures in long-lived political dynasties like the Bushes or Kennedys or the history of organized crime groups like the Irish or Italian Mobs). Political machines built on graft and money laundering were just thought to be something of history books because nobody pays attention when things are going well and the past century has been pretty great for US citizens overall. We've come to dominate the world militarily and economically, righted historical wrongs and corrected contradictions in our society, and achieved a level of global cultural and political influence that is truly unprecedented in history. Now, we are probably going to go through another few tumultuous round of reforms and changes just as previously happened.
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