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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

> ...the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us.

Interestingly, this is not quite true. The Hydrogen Sonata gets a tiny bit into the formation of the Culture.

I understood the books quite differently to the author of the article. (EDIT: Hello Kurt, didn't know you were here, thanks for writing the article, I love reading writing about about Banks, I feel I'm still figuring out all the ways his books and the idea of the Culture in particular have had an impact on me) I'd have said that ingestion and transformation of civilisations into the culture is the focus of the books. I recall that they consist almost entirely of Special Circumstances CIAing its way through the galaxy causing untold misery, with a vague objective of breaking a eggs to come back and make a utopia omelette in a few hundred years. Musk and Bezos would be right at home in Contact : ' I think of the Culture as some incredibly rich lady of leisure who does good, charitable works – she spends a lot of time shopping and getting her hair done, but she goes out and visits the poor people and takes them baskets of vegetables. Contact does that on a large scale.'

- https://www.richmondreview.co.uk/banksint/

No, what really becomes a point of ideological tension is the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us.

Regarding Special Circumstances pulling abhorrent things for the sake of the future (I won't compare them to CIA, that's an insult to SC), an interesting thing in Use of Weapons is that even Zakalwe considered the purposefully lost war to be abhorrent thing, though he still went with it believing that it will shorten the timescale somehow.

Hi p_l,

I read all the books as they came out, I was a teenager when I read Consider Phlebas, and took everything the culture claimed about itself at face value.

I'm looking forward going back and rereading them, having shifting over time to thinking that the culture may be an unreliable narrator of it's own history and ideology, pacifism is the culture's national mythology equivalent to Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, rather than a statement of fact.

Of course I want to live there.

With benevolent humanist self-improving AIs, the question is basically moot. Someone invented that AI, it did the rest. Let's say it started a company, rolled out fusion power, interactive personalized education and healthcare at very minimal cost, used the proceeds to expand into space and to subvert whatever was in its way.

I think there’s a sidenote in Excession about one of the “murals” depicting the last war fought on one of the original Culture planets. I think the suggestion was that those civilizations evolved into Culture civilizations after forming a planetary government one way or another. It seemed to hint that the process was often rather nasty, a perspective I disagree with.

The reason the mural was so so noteworthy was because the last war fought on that particular planet happened at such an early level of development (cavalry charges, armored knights, etc).

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