Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

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The Culture was seemed too difficult for Banks to write about directly; a very large proportion of the Culture books are written about the intersection between the Culture and the "rest of the universe".

(side note: It's been a while since I've read them, and I admit I generally only reread the first 4 or so, due to sameiness and/or IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge. Sadly, this enthusiasm seems to have sparked a trend among even less-restrained authors like Richard Morgan, so I often hesitate to pick up an SF book for fear of reading about, I dunno, women getting heated irons stuffed into their genitals or something)

That said, Contact and Special Circumstances are usually what he describes - it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se. So most of the action is the Culture at war, regardless of how supposedly peaceful and enlightened the Culture is.

I'm not surprised that Bezos and Musk are fans. Given the way post-scarcity is presented as more or less natural outcome of strong AI and space-opera-level physics, a post-scarcity society is entirely unthreatening to a modern-day billionaire (aside, I guess, from the decline in their relative condition - but in absolute terms, even Bezos and Musk would benefit enormously from being transported to the Culture, as it stands). It's not like we're achieving some sort of utopia by redistributing the resources of people like them (I am not claiming that's a good idea).

Culture at peace is just minds sitting around and spending most of their brain power in 'infinite fun space' which is just infinite math done for enjoyment. And humans do whatever, while being watched and accompanied by thousands of ship avatars using up just a fraction of AI power.

When there's no matter to attend AIs are not doing anything interesting, so the stories are just "Culture at (usually someone else's) war" crossed with "life of pets".

But it's so much fun. :-)

Maybe Banks had enough imagination to think up the Culture, but not enough of an imagination to think up any interesting stories that would be internal to the Culture... I suppose Wodehousian or Jane Austen-style comedies of manners set on Shipboard probably weren't really his forte.

Plus, presumably an all-seeing Ship AI probably wouldn't permit the atrocities required to drive most Iain M Banks (or, for that matter, Iain Banks) plots. A would-be molester or rapist on Shipboard would presumably get his brainstem lightly zorched by the ship's effector before he got too close a victim, depriving Banks the opportunity to write a vivid description of the act, and the subsequent opportunity to write about the Bad Person getting incinerated, shot, torn apart by hundreds of tiny drones, etc. etc.

I enjoyed that vignette where everyone on board some ship are getting the common cold for fun.

I didn't particularly find the writing in Colin Greenlund's "Take Back Plenty" that interesting, but it was fascinating reading space opera in that general genre that wasn't violence-driven.

> Maybe Banks had enough imagination to think up the Culture, but not enough of an imagination to think up any interesting stories that would be internal to the Culture... I suppose Wodehousian or Jane Austen-style comedies of manners set on Shipboard probably weren't really his forte.

It's more than the Culture is a gimmick Banks use both as a light way to explore the limit of a somewhat ruleless utopia where mankind surrendered most of its power to an a benevolent deity and to write entertaining pieces of fiction.

He didn't use the setting and published as Iain Banks rather than Iain M. Banks when he wanted to write some other kind of story.

> spending most of their brain power in 'infinite fun space' which is just infinite math done for enjoyment.

I read this and immediately thought “Bitcoin!”, thought I got the impression from the books that IFS was more like a cross between Sudoku and World of Watcraft — both nerdy and potentially dangerously addictive.

FUN FACT: In The Culture, money is a sign of poverty.

I thought rather of equivalent of four color theorem in higher dimensions.

The Culture doesn't have money, nor scarcity.

Isn’t infinite fun space described as simulating alternate universes and observing the outcomes?

In one of the books it's mentioned that simulations have moral component.

If you simulate conscious entities at the level of detail that Culture AIs are capable of you create sentient virtual beings and you can't just shut down the simulation without being responsible of "murdering" sentient beings.

So if the minds simulate alternate universes in infinite fun space I think they are purely mathematical universes devoid of sentient life to make the whole thing less contentious and purely fun.

> IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge

I don't recognise this from the Culture novels. Plenty of Bad Stuff happens to people (and all manner of beings, drones, Minds, etc.), but that generally does happen in fiction. I can only think of one Culture novel that kind of has a "revenge plot" (Surface Detail, and it's probably not the main theme of the novel).

> it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se

I think it's possible that Banks thought writing purely about a utopia would be boring. Personally I would have read anything Banks wrote in the setting, even if it was just a story about everyday life.

If you haven't read it, his text (short story? Fictional article?) "A Few Notes On The Culture" is quite interesting and devoid of Bad Things Happening: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

Banks explicitly talked about utopia's being too boring to write about and that the friction on the edges of Culture and the rest of the universe provided the necessary drama for a novel.

I'm finding all the Consider Phlebas hate kinda weird. I found it electrifying at the time and 25 years on when I re-read it last year, Horza's weary bleakness was incredibly poignant.

> I'm finding all the Consider Phlebas hate kinda weird.

You're not alone. Most of it does not ring true for me at all.

I wish we knew more about the Changers!

Banks really did use sexual violence as a signifier of some character or faction being supremely evil. Off the top of my head [spoilers ahoy, naturally], there's the institutional rape for entertainment in the empire of Azad in The Player of Games, there's the Archimandrite Luseferous in The Algebraist, and there's a fairly explicit scene in Transition. I think there are more examples, but it's been a few years since I read the books so I can't remember the details.

I found that Banks wrote about every kind of sadism/violence in a big mix, plus when he really wanted to showcase someone truly nasty, he just used the good old suspense and banality-of-evil method.

Sure, the long listing of various bad and worse and even worse acts are complete clichés, but at least in Surface Detail it was an interesting plot device and setting. (The ending of Player of Games was a bit too much, but looking back, it's okay, it's not really a big part (if I remember that part is ~10 pages, from the moment the drone forces Morat's hand to the king's demise). Oh, and the comically villainous dude in The Algebraist seems like a gag. (With the sentient punchbag.)

If I recall correctly, the book 'Look to Windward' mostly takes place on a Culture orbital and the reader see a bit more of the ordinary Culture citizenry.

When a famous composer puts on a show, the tickets are allocated by lottery. But the demand is so high the people effectively reinvent money in the form of favors and such so they can trade for tickets.

People are constantly looking for stimulus and new leisure activities, to the point where they willingly put their lives in danger (e.g. sailing down a river of lava). If they do die, a copy is just downloaded into another body.

Genuine biological children are very rare. There's a little girl in the book that provides some comedy relief because her outlook is so different to the hundreds of years old adults.

Hm, interestingly Surface Detail was published in 2010, well after Altered Carbon (which came out in 2002). Or maybe you have earlier Banks books in mind?

Also, it's not like sci-fi was somehow sterile and devoid of violence/sex/abuse (psychological and otherwise). After all a lot of sci-fi is still basically pulp. Though it's understandable that it's not everyone's cup of entertainment.

Surface Detail was Banks at his most excessive, but the first 3 books are also pretty ripe, as are a number of his other non-M efforts (Canal Dreams was my first glimpse of Banks' willingness to go Full Schlocktard, and Complicity isn't much better). Most of these (and some of his other efforts) predate the (IMO putrid) Altered Carbon by a decade.

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