Politics & Power Quote by Iain Banks

The future, Banks implies, didn’t just change aesthetics; it changed ownership. His nod to Blade Runner and Neuromancer is a timestamp from the late Cold War, when sci-fi stopped treating “tomorrow” as a shinier version of midcentury America and started rendering it as something denser, neon-slick, and culturally hybrid. That pivot wasn’t neutral. It was an admission that the US monopoly on imagining progress was cracking, replaced by a Japan-coded modernity associated with miniaturization, consumer electronics, high-speed urban life, and corporate power that felt more intimate than governmental.

Banks is also clocking how sci-fi works as a mood board for geopolitics. Blade Runner’s rain-soaked LA and Gibson’s corporate sprawl don’t merely borrow Japanese signage for flavor; they externalize an anxiety about American decline in the face of Japan’s 1980s economic rise. “Started to look more Japanese” is shorthand for a future where the commanding heights are held by transnational companies, where identity is modular, and where the street-level texture of life is shaped by imported goods and media rather than national myth.

There’s subtextual critique here too: the “Japanese future” is often a Western projection, a selectively exoticized palette (kanji, yakuza vibes, vending-machine futurism) that turns another culture into an atmospheric signifier for late capitalism. Banks, a writer attentive to systems and power, is less praising Japan than diagnosing a cultural handover in the imagination: when your sci-fi stops looking like you, it’s a quiet confession that you no longer expect to run the world.