A Few Notes on the Culture by Iain M Banks (1994)

From the essay:

> Indeed, Banks distinguishes himself in having thought carefully about the social and political consequences of technological development.

This we need more of. In any way shape or form.-

Culture has AI. Dune doesn't.

Consider Phlebas was my first book too, I liked it enough to read another, but I neither remember much from it nor loved it.

I really liked Player of Games, and I'd like to read a few more books in the series. I also read the Wasp Factory, and while his writing is brilliant, I wasn't too captivated by the story itself.

I think there is a wide consensus that Consider Phlebas, though first, is not the ideal starting point for Banks' Culture series. The plot is meandering, and compared to later books, it is clear that Banks had not yet quite found the form that would be so impressive later on. I usually recommend The Player of Games, or alternatively, depending on the reader, Use of Weapons as starting points.

It is however a good idea, having read other Culture books, to read Consider Phlebas before beginning Look to Windward, as there is a connection between the two.

Plenty of Culture Minds value humans/pan-humans in the books. They get involved, too, just look at the effort expended by the Sleeper Service in Excession for such a personal agenda.

Not to say that there isn't a good deal of joking at humans' expense by Culture ships, but in the end, all are Culture citizens.

> it's all just the intelligences watching the funny monkeys play at still having meaningful role

Is this not inevitable, once AI reaches a certain threshold?

> A ship visits us at some point in the 1970s, and as it departs its Mind mischievously creates an EM signature crafted to baffle us.

The short story is "State of the Art", and is contained in a collection of short stories (some Culture, some not) of the same name. One of the final paragraphs in the story is a lovely testament to the prowess of Culture ships:

> The Arbitrary held its darkfield for a few minutes, then dropped it just past Mars (so there was just a chance it left an image on an Earth telescope). Meanwhile it was snapping all its various remote drones and sats away from the other planets in the system. It stayed in real space right up till the last moment (making it possible that its rapidly increasing mass produced a blip on a terrestrial gravity-wave experiment, deep in some mountain-mine), then totalled as it dispatched Linter's body into the stellar core, sucked a last few drones of Pluto and a couple of outlying comets, and slung Li's diamond at Neptune (where it's probably still in orbit).

That's very categorical. Full stop :)

Must be really good.-

Worth a shot! He does have a bit of an odd way of writing characters. I preferred the setting and culture of Player of Games, but I do think Use of Weapons and Consider Phlebas have stronger characters.

Was wondering myself. Leaning towards the "least spoiler-y" approach :)

Read the books first for sure. The essay is a bit spoiler-y.

Read Player of Games, then the essay, then go back and read some more books in the series.

Movies would be a better medium for Culture stories, I think. And any studio but Amazon...

It's socialist in the sense that the Minds could just fuck off and have their own corner of the galaxy, but instead devote processor cycles and physical presence to ensuring helpless little oxygen-breathers have everything they need

Economic systems of the 1800s doesn't really make sense in a space based, post scarcity society - economics is after all, the allocation of scarce resources. But I would argue that the ultimate aim of the socialism as envisioned by Marx wasn't government control over the means of production (the "dictatorship of the proletariat") but rather "full communism" where the eventual aim was to make resource allocation unnecessary, which in a way, does hint at a post scarcity society. So I can see the connection to the original Marx. Less so with the so-far practical implementations of socialism.

In a way ownership itself becomes obsolete.-

Not by polítical of sociological design, but through mere irrelevance, obsolescence.-

Interesting ...

Not merely socialism, communism. I suspect this is why there isn’t a TV series for it yet.

Haven't gone too deep to Culture. But it does the whole post-scarcity thing much better than Start Trek does. When anyone can basically do anything they want well, apart from getting space ships... And it is all provided for by essence robots if I have understood right. Whole thing does coherently make sense with advanced enough technology. Where as in many other universes it just does not.

We have recently developed a system that eliminates scarcity for all digital media. The results is not an ideological re-alignment but a crowbar that locks down the rules of scarcity.

>It's a place where everything is taken care of for you, not through the thoughtful allocation of resources for mutual benefit, but because it's trivially easy for a machine to just give you everything you ask for.

It's trivially easy for the wealth of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to provide for the needs of tens of thousands of people without any appreciable dent in their own wealth, but it doesn't happen because of the political structure of our society. The Culture could easily be a society of near-infinite potential wealth which enforced scarcity the way legal & economic systems in our world enforce scarcity beyond what is naturally present now - from John Deere increasing the costs of agriculture to extract profit to the enforcement of intellectual property laws. Our society has more than enough wealth and industry to provide a home for every person, but we choose to organise our economy in a way that requires homelessness instead - I'm not making a moral judgement, just pointing out that that is in fact a decision our society makes and not just a natural fact of the universe.

The Culture is politically organised to provide for the needs of its citizens, using the labour of those able to provide what is necessary. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" is communism, it's not just a state of things that falls out of a coconut tree once you have enough production.

could you give some examples of which words you found long?

if you prefer shorter words, and moral relativism, you might like Neal Asher's polity series.

I’m a veteran SF reader but I only read The Culture books for the first time recently, and I agree with you, albeit you have to acknowledge their massive influence on contemporary SF. The Three Body Problem, though, I struggled to finish the first book at all, because I found the prose excruciatingly bad (or more properly I guess, the translation).

Banks admits that the Culture itself is kind of boring because it is too perfect - so for most of its teeming trillions living their hedonistic lives on their orbitals life is nice and safe and a bit boring to write about.

So the stories have to deal with the edges of the Culture and the mission of Contact and Special Circumstances to try and make the galaxy that bit nicer by direct interference.

The dialogue in the English translation of Three Body Problem is torturous. I couldn't finish it.

I've found all the Culture novels far better written.

Sci-fi almost always succeeds because it manages to present interesting ideas. Often the writing can be quite poor, I remember some Asimov novels were characters were just defined by a single thing that they believed.

To me the culture series fails, as it has no interesting ideas. "What if we solved every problem", just isn't an interesting premise. There is no interesting conflict that can even exist in the setting, the only thing that the author could come up with were religious fanatics. But the "interesting question" answered there wasn't more interesting then a New Atheist debating some Christian.

> For a contrast, think of The Three Body Problem. It's set on an equally epic scale - but so much more happens!

I disagree. TBP is not nearly as epic. TBP could easily exist within the Culture series, but not the other way around.

As a counterpoint, I found 3 body problem terrible to read (how many pages of trudging through deserts do I have to endure?), and the Culture series delightful.

A fairly reductive dismissal.

Not completely wrong - except the bit about blandness. If I want bland characters and dialogue I'll just crack open Three Body Problem again.

Seriously though: Matter, Surface Detail, and Look to Windward are all fairly clear counterexamples to your template.

The first involves an explicit refusal by various advanced civs (including the Culture) to help a deposed leader of one such primitive society to reclaim his throne. The last one deals explicitly and at length with various Culture citizens reckoning with its actions both recent and long past, and the consequences thereof.

Meanwhile, Three Body Problem is an impressive series with interesting ideas which nonetheless left me unmoved. I didn't care about any of the characters, and as someone pointed out elsewhere, the dialogue is not great, which to be fair could just be an issue of translation.