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Can a whole civilization be a Mary Sue?

This book was an unfortunate reminder that, for all his imagination, Clarke remained a creature of his time. This is one of his last novels (a novella, really) and it was clearly an effort to imagine his idea of a plausible future utopia, but it fell well short on both plausibility, and utopia.

His faith in a technological ascension was so strong that it becomes detached here from humanity; so many of his conceptions of this 1000-year future society are incoherent or morally repugnant yet go unremarked, that they can only be understood as the author's ideals. E.g.: although there are only 1 billion humans now, everyone subsists on artificial food; brain scans deemed deviant get their users sequestered from society; spirituality and psychotherapy are deemed pathologies that have "long since" been weeded out of society. Uh... sure. Not to mention the whole society getting billed as egalitarian, even though the narrative clearly dwells among the few highly privileged, with occasional dismissive glances at the indistinguishable masses who exist solely to serve the main characters.

Add in that there was almost no actual story, and what there was reduced the preceding mystique of the series -- the monoliths -- to a dumb machine(view spoiler)[ that succumbs to a computer virus (hide spoiler)]. Give me a break.