[davidivadavid]

Again, this is lazy, topsy-turvy thinking. It's conjuring up a purely academic definition of utopia as a corpus of texts and saying that since they're all boring, that must mean utopia is by definition boring. The point of utopian thinking is precisely to identify those failure modes as such with respect to the utopian project. Thus, if something is "tedious", it can only ever be a failed attempt at utopia.

For the specific case of Banks, Yudkowsky has some interesting ideas about why it fails. [0]

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwnSPgwtmLjvTK2Wa/amputation...