>I have to wonder what he would have made of Iain M. Banks's Culture
>novels, which take his ideals to their logical extreme. The
>Federation sometimes seems like a precursor phase of a Culture-like
>civilization.

Roddenberry almost certainly would have really loved them. Well, maybe not the part where in order for the Culture to work it absolutely requires AI gods that are beyond human intellect or corruption to make all the important decisions that we can't be trusted with in order to work. But literally everything else. He'd probably go "I love this, but lose the robot overlords, there's no reason the people can't run everything themselves."

Quibble tho: the actually-existing Federation in the media as it evolved away from Roddenberry is actually rather politically retrograde. It practices an immensely strong form of federalism that does very little to protect the rights and dignity of its citizens as regards to the local politics of their specific species or homeworlds. Member worlds are permitted to do things like exile people forever because they disapprove of their private consensual romantic choices or to forcibly remove children from their parents in order to raise them in single-gender enclaves, and Federation law supports that and will even in some cases enforce it on their behalf.

-Merc
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