Consider Phlebas

The first published novel of Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, a 1987 space opera set during the Culture’s war with the Idiran Empire — and told from the side fighting against the Culture, through a shape-changing mercenary who thinks a machine-run post-scarcity civilisation is a dead end for the species. Starting the sequence here means meeting the utopia as its enemies see it before ever seeing it from inside.

Context: a16z call the Culture books “criminally unknown among casual readers” and describe the setting as a post-scarcity future where travel is trivial and machine intelligence is far advanced, so the series’ real question is what happens after the problems are solved. That is the most directly relevant question on their list for people who build infrastructure for a living.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from, where the Culture series is a ten-volume S-tier entry.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates it.
• Iain M. Banks — the author.
• The Player of Games — the second Culture book, and the usual alternative starting point.
• Utopia — the concept the series is an extended argument about.
• Historical Futurism — the research lens.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.