Houellebecq’s Annihilation: excerpts, including space—a social construction, and the aesthetic superiority, to the cultural production of the elite, of popular cultural production: Or, Houellebecq, in whose hands Realism becomes a genre superior to either

Could a politician really influence the course of things? It seemed questionable. Developments in technology could do that without a doubt; and so, perhaps, to some degree, could economic power relations—even though Bruno [based on Bruno Le Maire, France’s Finance Minister] still tended to some degree to see
Simon Taylor

excerpt from the penultimate in the Culture series in which world-building proves space is a social construction

Roughly ten percent of the land area of Golter was autonomous state; countries in the accepted sense. The rest was technically Free Land in the form of city states, beltland, commercial and industrial parks, farming collectives, ecclesiastical dependencies, bank franchises, sept reservations, leased and freeheld familial estates, Antiquarian societies’ digs,
Simon Taylor