Iain M. Banks and The Culture

It is easy to picture the collapse of civilisation, drop a cast of characters into a grimy dystopia, and call it bracing, brutal and blunt. True novelty, building from the ground up, not relying on tropes or clichés, requires more than imagination: it requires deep empathy, a will to sit and truly consider potential paths for the future and their consequences, and how they would be felt across myriad dreamed-up civilizations. Iain M. Banks had the imagination and the skill to do so. Across nine novels (and a story collection) of the Culture, he did the contrarian thing: he sketched out a future that isn't dystopian (though there are dystopias in it), and had the nerve to suggest humanity might actually enjoy living in it.

Read more here: https://www.kenreid.co.uk/blog/the-culture-series.html