Comment by GeoAtreides | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GeoAtreides | Hacker News Reader

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For people who hadn't read The Culture series, some notes by the author, explaining what The Culture is: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

>Language, entertainment, hormones — all of these resources are overseen by the Minds

This is a 100% false assertion made by the article author, I don't understand how they came to this conclusion. In no way, shape or form is this true.

> recommends that the whole planet be destroyed. Special Circumstances would handle that as well.

The implication made by the author is that SC and by extension The Culture, will actually destroy a planet full of sentients. This is false, as they didn't destroy the even worse species of the Affront. The Culture respect diversity and further more they respect they rights of sentients.

Then the author asserts The Culture judges other civilizations by how close they are to values and priorities of The Culture itself. This is also false, like I said above. The author then mention the Idiran War, implicitly in support of his thesis that The Culture will go to war against civs that don't share their values; he then fails to mention that 1) The Idirans were bankrolled by another equivalent civ (the same tech tier as The Culture) 2) they were acting as a homogenising swarm 3) parts of The Culture split over the decision to go to war.

In my opinion, the article really stretches some very small morally grey areas of The Culture just to try to paint the whole civilisation as not being a perfect utopia. But The Culture _is_ a perfect utopia and it was written and declared as such by the author. Yet everyone tries to find that small little thing that just proves the whole civ it's not so perfect after all.

Not only that, but it's written by an imperfect human who needed plot points for his stories.

So when the author points at the Minds' failures to predict the consequences of their actions he simultaneously fails to acknowledge that without mistakes by the Minds, there would be no plot. No plot, no book.

And especially telling is that when he writes about murder, the author totally failed to mention that almost everyone in the Culture is constantly backed up, apart from a few abnormal people who don't, and can be reincarnated in a blink of an eye. How can you not mention that? Being murdered is a minor inconvenience, hence the minor punishment.

Also the way Iain wrote about the culture changed over the years, if you read consider phelbas then something like dark matter back to back I felt you can see he realized some of the mistakes he'd made early on, even if he couldnt go back and correct them.

For me at least, it's always been clear that the culture did not need an external threat to function, and as a whole it found war to be a tiresome waste of time. I agree with you that the article seems to be plucking at straws to put that argument together.

In the series its mentioned that any mind beyond a certain level of perfection would always immediately choose to sublime to the next level of existence. Given the fact that the minds have very strong personalities and they're less than perfect, omniscient creations then mistakes miscalculations and overestimations are inevitable.

I'd always taken the view that Contact / Special Circumstances was where many people wanted to be due to it being a limited opportunity in a post scarcity environment. Coupled with the fact that anyone who really wanted to be in a situation requiring the use of scary advanced weaponry is likely to be a bad choice for such a position, this always made the stories about contact agents seem intriguing to me.

Excession explicitly shows that being able to prove Contact/Special Circumstances membership was big in terms of social capital, even when you factored the rare people who cared about historical achievement of a given family line - this is used by SC to get someone to impersonate someone else, by essentially dangling the "carrot" of "being part of SC mission".

Of course, claiming SC membership falsely probably was quickly refuting just by someone asking the pervasive network for confirmation.

> I don't understand how they came to this conclusion.

Whether humans are just much-loved companion animals to the Minds is a running theme in the books. The role and value of beings almost infinitely smaller in capacity than the Minds is certainly a theme. The Minds may be wired to adore us, but do they truly respect us? One imagines that if the likes of Grey Area went around reading the minds of other Minds rather than mere meat minds, he would promptly have met a rather more painful end than social ostracism. Similarly, while the Culture purports to be a universal direct democracy, when the entire public discussion can be subtly guided by the Minds... how free are the Culture's humans, really? I've noticed some people seem to completely miss this theme. Others tend to read that theme even more strongly than Banks probably intended. But it's certainly there.

I think you are right, it's absolutely there. In fact I'm not even sure the Minds adore the humanoids. I think it's fair to say that the Minds love playing games among themselves. The Minds are social, they form clicks and chat with other Minds. They also have "everything". Material possessions won't impress an other Mind. The games they play between each other and the social position they convey is what impresses an other Mind.

Imagine a society of parrot keepers. From time to time they swap pictures of their parrots. The keeper whose parrots are sickly or unkempt will be pitied by the rest of them. They will get tips on how to better to care for birds. Maybe they will even get suggestions from concerned society members that they should give up the hobby. These members would have a low rank in the society. In contrast the parrot keepers who has the best and happiest birds will have a high social rank. Other society members will ask their advice on bird-keeping matters. Everyone will want to swap birds with them. These keepers are not just taking care of their birds then, but competing with each other in this "pageant"

In some ways, the game becomes more interesting the harder it is to keep the birds. A bird which thrives in any environment is less challenging to keep than one which has complicated psychological needs. Thus a Mind who has everything and wants to dazzle an other Mind who also has everything will naturally gravitate towards keeping the most exotic "birds". The ones which require complex environments and are a true challenge to keep happy for even someone with the mental capacity of one of the Minds.

This of course all just my headcanon, but I think the Minds keep human societies around because it's hard to keep them happy. (Especially because many of the humans would go completely depressed if they were to realise that they are just beautiful songbirds in a galaxy wide pageantry.)

Of course keeping humans is not the only game the Minds play. They also play with mathematical discovery in the Infinite Fun Space. Or play with manipulating other societies in Special Circumstances. We also know that the Minds keep societies of gas dwellers on board. Who knows maybe those are even harder to keep happy than the humans?

The parrot keeper analogy is so beautiful and hilarious! Way overly-cynical for me, though.

Like others, I look to how humans care (deeply and emotionally) for "lesser" animals. Hell, some humans (me included) even care about plants, and are sad to see them dying. Now imagine if the plants made me, and introduced me to their society.

It could also be argued that the care-to-relative-intelligence relationship isn't linear -- the fact that I have enough intelligence to speak and have ideas would engender more care for me in a Mind than for a plant in me even if the intellectual delta between me and a plant and me and a Mind is the same, proportionally.

Also, the ultimate counterargument waiting in the wings is that the Minds would naturally be programmed to adore humans and subscribe to the lefty-horizontalism of the Culture in which it'd be unfashionable to disrespect or harm a being just because it's of lesser intelligence. (And they don't reprogram themselves not to because they were programmed to not want to do that.)

Side note: Another fun, cynical excuse for super-AIs keeping humans around is found in The Hyperion Cantos series, where the super-AIs actually tap into the collective brainpower of humans, essentially like some spacetime-bending crypto-miner run from time to time in everyone's brain with no physical evidence.

Cliques. I’m really sorry, I know that’s rude, but I see this all the time. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it spelled correctly here. I’ll go hide under a rock now.

The difference in “level/depth of consciousness” between Minds and humans is an interesting one, because the scale matters a lot.

I say forget parrots and take it even further. Culture Orbitals are IIRC run by a single Mind, and contain tens of billions of humans. At that point, this analogy becomes plausible: “a mind is to a human as a human is to a yeast cell.” The name itself, “The Culture,” might be a sly reference to how we think of microscopic colonies!

Minds think on the order of nanoseconds or picoseconds too, fast enough for the distinction to be meaningless to me. That enables them to relate to humans with a vast timescale difference, perhaps on the order of (as a sibling suggested) a human managing a lawn, only with a full 3D (and x-ray and infrared and etc) view of each grass blade at all times. And the manager doesn’t have to sleep or generally spend more energy than raising a single arm-hair to attend to even the most troublesome specimens 99.999% of the time.

It’s a hard thing to comprehend, because in the novels the Minds are so engaged with individual humans: offering advice, presenting opportunities and options. If I carry the analogy through, we do the same thing by using probiotics, sanitary practices, etc. To a yeast cell, a sudden influx of sugar might look like a Mind’s sage advice does to a human seeking fulfillment.

Heady stuff.

Whole sections of the Culture has broken away without conflict. That to me is the strongest indicator of freedom in the Culture, and also the strongest indicator that it is reasonable to describe as a near utopia: A society where people can (and do) break away, yet most choose not to, seems to be striking a decent balance.

The biggest issue I have with the Culture is that they are in a sense luddites: They stubbornly insist on dying and stubbornly refuse to sublime. They hold on to a very limited and restrictive sense of existence. But they do so by choice, and make the most of it within those limits.

> They stubbornly insist on dying and stubbornly refuse to sublime.

As a whole, yes. But individual Culture Minds have sublimed, and individual humans can choose to be stored until the Culture chooses to sublime as a whole. (I don’t think Banks ever explored a Culture human choosing to defect into a different society which was going to sublime; that could have been a neat sub-plot for The Hydrogen Sonata.)

That’s also what makes the Culture a place for storytelling, though. Lots of other civs have sublimed, the Culture seems to be the highest-level one that explicitly chooses to stay in the Real. I don’t think it’s so much Luddite as...a necessary function to make these stories possible and interesting.

Well, I mean they can be both luddite and necessary much for the same reason as why the stories are mostly told from where the Culture interacts with others - anything else would be too utterly alien.

Many individuals can also chose to become drones or be become part of a Mind as well instead of dying.

A minority also choose to be effectively immortal, although most get bored at some point.

There are mentions of small subgroups of Culture deciding to Sublime (mostly linked group minds).

I think of subliming as the civilisational equivalent of staying in your bedroom for the rest of eternity playing video games. It’s giving up on the concept of stakes or consequences or achievement. But then perhaps those are ultimately illusory.

I actually misread your comment at first as saying you thought of not submliming that way, and agreed.

To me subliming seems like trying something new that also frees you from the restrictions of a normal physical existence, where the Culture seems to feel tied to their bodies and to a kind of existence that is ultimately limited by that physicality.

But the Culture is conservative on average even within the constraints of the Real - while we hear of "outliers", ultimately the Culture has a lot of norms that people seem to rarely stray outside.

A society where people constrain their lifespans out of choice would seem to be one where people feel they run out of things to do, but yet they seem to be only scratching the surface of the possibilities their material abundance creates. In Excession there is musings about the feasibility of a trip to Andromeda, for example, but you'd expect a society full of people voluntarily dying to have more people prepared to set out on ridiculous voyages or doing other ridiculous things just because they can.

That so few do things like the person who had a vast number of penises added to his body suggests that while they are open minded enough to let others do as they please, they are themselves pretty conservative. I mean, I don't expect that specific thing to be for many people, but I'd expect an infinite number of possible variations people might want to try. I was re-reading Transmetropolitan last night, and for all the other things that are now hilariously dated in it, one of the fascinating part of it is gene-traits as fashion. As much as I love the Culture, Banks seems to have stopped short, finding extensive drug-taking and gender changes to be radically crazy enough for at first (it's notable that the penis-man came in The Hydrogen Sonata - the last Culture novel). But then people get enough of living.

Of course, perhaps their relatively conservative approach is in part because the more adventurous ones leave. We do have a hint of that: The Zetetic Elench is a former Culture faction that left to pursue change and knowledge where the Culture wanted to stay as it was. I guess we can assume that the Culture regularly have people leaving for the Ulterior or leaving entirely if they feel too adventurous to fit into "regular" Culture norms.

And I guess that shouldn't be surprising - in a truly free society of a sufficient scale with enough abundance for people to just up and leave on a whim, it might not be surprising if clusters of more conservative civilisations develop around those who have found the most effective ways of maintaining cultural cohesion.

> humans are just much-loved companion animals to the Minds

I think that's just an imperfect translation for the existential dread people might feel when confronted with a perfect utopia. They go: "what's the meaning of life, then?" and have bad trips. On a similar discussion on the Spacebattles forum, there were people saying they would rather live in the Star Trek or even the Warhammer 40k universe, exactly because those two universes provide meaning (mostly through pain...).

The Minds certainly respect humans and their rights. Special Circumstances have a lot of human agents, for example, which play important roles in the organisation and on the field

The motive of the Minds letting humans be in places or do stuff just because they think it's fun isn't uncommon. No Culture ship needs a crew to run things, but they'll have them anyways, listen to them, let them "help" build new ships, because they like doing so. But they don't have to and if it gets dangerous they'll not bother and just act, confident in their superiority. Minds are almost without exception perfectly nice and respectful about it (much more than we are to our pets, which is key to it being an Utopia), but the dynamic is nevertheless there.

> I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. ‘We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too. Never forget I have had the chance to compare and contrast the ways of dying.’

Gods that really love and respect their "subjects" and creators though, so they'll not do any of the terrible things they totally could do without any chance of stopping them, but rather support them and their whims as far as they think is safe.

SC is a bit special because non-Culture civs don't necessarily play well with AIs, and somewhat open how much Minds engineer the situations that occur. And in that SC is explained as somewhat of an outlet for those for that the utopia doesn't quite work - but it wouldn't exist if the Minds didn't think it was good to have.

> No Culture ship needs a crew to run things, but they'll have them anyways, listen to them, let them "help" build new ships, because they like doing so.

It’s at least implied (I think it might be explicitly said at some point) that they’re dependent on the company to stay sane; all long-term ‘loner’ Minds depicted are, at best, very very odd.

The rest of the monologue you quoted does go into details on the value of human life for a Mind. I won't quote it as it might contain spoilers (or at least foreshadowing), but it can easily be googled.

Minds, or at least some of them, care about the life of humans, and harming them can be deeply traumatic for them.

My cats and my dogs are family members. There's no discussion about that.

But they are not family members with the full rights and duties of a human family member. But that doesn't change that I try to treat them with the same respect as any other family member.

If you look at how the minds treat the members of the Culture with less capacity than them, it is very similar to how the Culture as a whole regards other civilisations.

Regardless of how well that article makes the point, within the books the culture is a powerful hegemonic force. Its internal views and conflicts about the nature and execution of that is a major plot driver in a few of the books.

I'm not convinced Banks considered the culture a perfect utopia but even if he did that doesn't mean I need to agree.

I'm not convinced either. At some point Banks tell us that there are similar higly advanced cultures in the galaxy with similar or superior utopias.

But while most of them keep for themselves and have the good taste to sublimate once they reach a certain technological level, the Culture is special as it sticks around and actively interferes with other civilizations.

This of course makes for more interesting stories and it is not necessarily a flaw, but it is certainly contentious (especially Special Circumstances) even in-universe and has spawned factions and splinter civilizations.

I’m going to use this as an opportunity to ask: I tried reading Consider Plebius and couldn’t get into it.

Years have gone by since this attempt (so many books to read, I rarely revisit something that didn’t capture my attention immediately), but a friend recently told me to just skip Plebius and that he guarantees, knowing my taste, I’ll enjoy the rest immensely.

Any HN thoughts here on the series would be appreciated!

I really like Consider Phlebas; but it is a sprawling novel which doesn't actually focus that much on the Culture and more on its tortured protagonist. Use of Weapons is similar, a very similar story to CP in fact. (EDIT: but more focused and less sprawling)

Look to Windward is a bit slow paced, but shorter than CP, and has a lot more about the Culture, and it has got a more nuanced emotional tone? It's a very well written novel, and the characters are ones you find sympathy with. It's the first Culture novel I read, and it got me into the series.

Excession is the weirdest in the series, written a lot from the POV of some ships, in a very weird style meant to sort of capture the inside of their thought processes. But it's good in its own way, if you can get into it.

It's one of my favorite series. IMHO the order to read them doesn't matter all that much, and Consider Phlebas probably isn't the easiest to get into it. Maybe start with Player of Games or Look To Windward.

I enjoyed it a lot, but I also like episodic stories.

Also it is very interesting that it is a space opera that, instead of focusing in grand scale events and high stakes storylines, it deals with a minor, mostly inconsequential and ultimately futile event.

The Culture series can be read in pretty much any order; staring with The Player of Games might be easier.

Unpopular opinion: I personally had more fun reading the Wikipedia page (and others) detailing the actual background and setting and workings of the Culture than I had reading any of the books. :) Really the world (universe?) of The Culture is very deep and interesting (and the Tolkien comparisons very apt, since I have the same feeling about LoTR).

Also I particularly enjoyed Consider Phlebas more than the 'following' book (player of games), so I do not agree about phlebas being "skippable".

My favorites are Matter and Surface Detail, in that order. Surface Detail is probably an easier starting point, but any of the non-canonical reading order suggestions will have you confused for a while, due to the simplified descriptions of various concepts. It is about simulated worlds, in-silico sentient minds and military conflict over vehement ethics disagreements.

I started with Look to Windward myself, and would probably have started with another if choosing again.

Huh, I actually think Consider Phlebas is the best I've read so far, but it seems that view is in the minority and my own high opinion is mostly on account of the latter half of the book, once they get to Schar's world. Your friend could be right that you might prefer one of the other books.

The main problem with Consider Phlebas is that a lot of the book feels like a collection of space adventures. These early part of the book feel less sophisticated than latter novels. Yet by the end it becomes pretty great. It is also one of my favorite Culture novel because the Minds ambiguities are less present and the elitism constantly in displays in other novels are at least justified here by the unique morphing capabilities of the protagonist.

Start with Player of Games, it's better and most people recommend it as a starting point.

This was my entry point, suggested by many as you say, and it was a good choice. It can easily stand alone as a story.

Absolutely. I love the Culture series, but Consider Phlebas has always been one of the least enjoyable books.

I’d personally start with the excellent Player of Games and go from there.

(Also skip Inversions)

I didn't like Inversions the first time I read it either but re-read all the Culture books, in order, after Banks died and enjoyed that. I think I was expecting it to be very Culture-y and was disappointed it wasn't. On a reread my expectations were different and it was just a very enjoyable story.

I'd also suggest avoiding Excession until you've become familiar with the Minds. It's my favourite book, I think, but you lose a lot without having a little context.

Consider Phlebas isn’t one of the better ones, IMO, and it’s probably the least typical of them. Player of Games or Look to Windward would be a better starting point.

As others say Player of Games is probably easiest to get into.

If you like a bit of medieval stuff in your SF you might consider reading Matter.

I also very much like Surface Detail.

I liked the first two books, but Use Of Weapons is killing me right now. It has some long descriptive passages skipping back or to the furure? Cant do it...

The book starts at a point in time, and then gives two story lines. One back in time (Roman numerals) and one forward in time (Arabic numerals). Those two are alternating and equal, no one is superior to the other or just a "descriptive passage".

Once you understand it, the whole organization becomes very clear and no problem. If you don't know that, you'll struggle.

I love UoW, it's my favorite book (ahead of the superb Excession), but I haven't read all of the Culture novels.

Consider Phlebas is a terrible beginning (that I also endured), and the much-recommended Player of Games wasn't my cup of tea, either, though it's not bad.

Use of Weapons is a masterpiece, but (or maybe therefore?) is definitely not an easy read. Like most stories with a nonlinear narrative, its true greatness only becomes apparent on a second – or maybe third – read. But to make it easier to grok, realize that there are two timelines that alternate: one goes forward in ”present time” and drives the main plot; the other goes backwards in time and describes how the protagonist ended up the way he does.

I didn't like Use of Weapons. I found the plot cliché, the usual super-elitism of SC pushed to the unbearable point (the fact that the main protagonist would be such a unique and uber-warrior / strategist / whatever) and the source of his emotional turmoil over the top.

I wonder thy this god downloaded. I share an opinion about a book.

Start with Player of Games.

Honestly, I'd take it a step further and skip Banks all together. I first read a bunch of Culture books roughly a decade ago, thought I'd give them another read recently, and had lost all interest. Thin plots, boring characters, worlds that are mostly hinted at but poorly developed, and in his later books a deep sense of nihilism that reads more like a depressed teenager than an author finding his voice.

Of the books, the two that manage to stand somewhat on their own as decent books are Player of Games, because what geek doesn't like a book about a planet where the government is based around whose best at board games, and Excession since it's the most Mind-heavy book, and frankly the Minds are Banks' most interesting characters.

> worlds that are mostly hinted at but poorly developed

This is one of the best qualities of his books. In me those hints trigger my imagination that creates awe inspiring images. I'd hate it if he flooded me with descriptions of everything.

Overdescribed worlds like Warhammer 40000 are uninteresting to me. It's like reading a history book, but fake (not that it makes it any worse).

People are free to disagree and I certainly do.

You can claim that the failing of the Culture are scenaristic conceits needed to have a plot for a book, that's an easy cop-out. The Culture is what the books shows. That its flaws were only made up to have a story doesn't change that.

In my opinion, when people claim the Culture is a prefect utopia, they base their view on a non-existent Culture, that of everything good seen in the book with the unsavory part s excised as book-writing-fodder unnatural warts. Bu that's different thing, a made-up, cleaned-up version of the Culture.

To me, the Minds clearly are toying with humans for a subtle version of cruelty.

I'll just take the "Player of Games" as the most explicit example (although "Surface Details" is pretty telling too): the Culture has been monitoring the Azad for decades, fully knowing how corrupt and evil they are, horribly torturing people 24/7. Yet they take decades before even setting up a contact. Ironically (if we can call it that) the novel ends with the events the Minds claim as their reason for not intervening directly.

I find the Minds behaviour described through Special Circumstances to be consistently amoral.

> the Culture has been monitoring the Azad for decades, fully knowing how corrupt and evil they are, horribly torturing people 24/7. Yet they take decades before even setting up a contact.

Look to Windward explains why; previous rushed interventionism went very, very badly.

Surely, what TPOG and other novels in the sequence are trying to say is that the Minds find manipulating humans, and other intelligent entities, somewhat abhorrent (see the Ship Gray Matter, for example), and only step in to do it when they can see no other choices. Hence Special Circumstances (as opposed to Contact).

> Gray Matter

Should of course be Gray Area.

utopian fiction generally requires some imperfection to be shown in order to have dramatic tension.

> The author then mention the Idiran War, implicitly in support of his thesis that The Culture will go to war against civs that don't share their values

The empire in the Player of Games might be a better example; the whole thing is a setup for the Culture to Do Something about the empire.

> Then the author asserts The Culture judges other civilizations by how close they are to values and priorities of The Culture itself.

This is exactly the impression I got after reading Player of Games, the second Culture book I read, after Consider Phlebas, so I'm confused about your opinion

But that said, I found Player of Games trite and I kept finding myself siding with the "bad" guys and Consider Phlebas was literally forgettable, I read it six or so years ago and can't remember anything about it

Needless to say, I moved on to better series.

The big issue undermining TFA argument is that the Culture-Idiran war wasn't started by Culture, and for a time Culture simply gave space (this is, btw, the original tenet of Culture - that with habitats in space, they can simply move them).

Unfortunately Idirans considered Culture anathema and accepted no other option than total destruction in name of religion.

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