20 ms·

The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks (2009)

191 points by jasim 6y ago

notsuoh 6y ago
This is a really good read. I absolutely love the entire Culture series.
GeoAtreides 6y ago
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 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.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  utopian fiction generally requires some imperfection to be shown in order to have dramatic tension.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
  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.
  - gpderetta 6y ago
    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.
- mattmanser 6y ago
  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.
  - rkachowski 6y ago
    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.
    - p_l 6y ago
      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.
- sharkweek 6y ago
  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!
  - wmf 6y ago
    The Culture series can be read in pretty much any order; staring with The Player of Games might be easier.
  - GeoAtreides 6y ago
    Start with Player of Games, it's better and most people recommend it as a starting point.
    - hnick 6y ago
      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.
  - ilikeyou 6y ago
    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)
    - u02sgb 6y ago
      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.
- retrac 6y ago
  > 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.
  - GeoAtreides 6y ago
    > 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
    - detaro 6y ago
      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.
- pierrebai 6y ago
  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.
  - zabzonk 6y ago
    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).
    - zabzonk 6y ago
      > Gray Matter Should of course be Gray Area.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    > 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.
- culturenothx 6y ago
  > 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.
  - p_l 6y ago
    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.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  > 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.
WJW 6y ago
I love the culture series. It's so unashamedly optimistic about how life "could" be, while exploring which problems even an absolutely utopian post-scarcity society with benevolent AGIs would encounter. It is, as the article mentions, an absolutely intriguing mirror held up to our own society.
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bhaak 6y ago
I miss positive science fiction. I don't want to read or see science fiction that drags me down. Reality is grim enough as it is. Show me fictional realities that inspire me to make them real.
- yourapostasy 6y ago
  The ongoing First Contact series by pseudonym Ralts Bloodthorne [1] is a space opera that could be considered optimistic in the sense of "humanity shall overcome". There is an active Discord community around it, lots of fans. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/f94rak/oc_pthok_eats_an_ice_cream_cone/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/f94rak/oc_pthok_eats_a...
  - bhaak 6y ago
    I'm already subscribed to r/HFY but I mostly read the one-shots so far. Thanks for the recommendation, I will check it out.
- wccrawford 6y ago
  If you enjoyed The Martian, you might also enjoy the Diary of a Murderbot series. Neither of them are particularly positive, but the humor in them really does it for me.
  - tmoertel 6y ago
    I second this recommendation.
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    The Murderbot books are good, but holy crapballs they are expensive. Full book price for practically a novella.
- dsign 6y ago
  I recently read "Red Sky-Ceiling" by one such Kein Ouzunupi. It's near-future about seculars having fun in a space habitat after some sort of ideological cataclysm (social media? polarization?) brings back the middle ages on Earth. Pity it was all too short, the book.
tablespoon 6y ago
> In the one Culture story that refers to our planet, “The State of the Art,” Sma is among a group of Contact representatives who visit Earth in the year 1977. After a period of careful investigation, Sma argues — in the official report that constitutes most of the story — that the Culture needs to intervene to clean up the mess that human beings are making of our world. Were such an intervention to take place, Special Circumstances would spearhead it. However, one of her colleagues finds the Star Trek television series almost the only redeeming feature of Earth civilization and recommends that the whole planet be destroyed. Special Circumstances would handle that as well. I'm not really a fan of the Culture, but that kind of blows up any illusions about it. The against-their-will homogenizing manipulations are one thing, but actual literal unprovoked genocide? If that's an option what other kinds of skeletons can this utopia be assumed to have in its closet?
- Angostura 6y ago
  I've just pulled my copy from the shelf and am starting to re-read, but I'm sure Sma doesn't recommend the destruction of Earth. That would be very un-Sma
  - NateEag 6y ago
    > However, one of her colleagues finds the Star Trek television series almost the only redeeming feature of Earth civilization and recommends that the whole planet be destroyed. According to the quote, Sma's _colleague_ recommends destroying Earth, not Sma.
  - zabzonk 6y ago
    > I'm sure Sma doesn't recommend the destruction of Earth That's not what the post you are replying to said.
- nsm 6y ago
  Individuals in the Culture are free to state whatever they want, that doesn't mean the civilization executes it. Taking the thought (not action) of one individual in a civilization that has on the order of trillions of individuals is hardly being fair to your representation of the Culture. In addition, whereas in our world, such a person would likely be Twitter shamed into oblivion, even if they had such a thought as teenager, in the Culture they would have a reasonable argument with other humans and Minds that would attempt to convince them of the foolishness of pursuing a genocidal agenda. The Culture tries to preserve life as much as possible. For context, what actually ends up happening is that Earth is left to its own devices. The Culture is dedicated to doing the right thing, but that right thing isn't always easy to figure out. To quote the State of the Art: [Diziet Sma asking the Ship Mind] "How certain do we have to be? How long must we make them wait? Who elected us God?" [The ship] "Diziet... that question is being asked all the time, and put in as many different ways we have the wit to devise (...) and that moral equation is being re-assessed every nanosecond of every day of every year, and every time we find some place like Earth -- no matter what way the decision [to interfere or not] goes -- we come closer to knowing the truth. But we can never be absolutely certain... I'm the smartest thing for a hundred light years' radius, and by a factor of about a million (...) but even I can't predict where a snooker ball's going to end up after more than six collisions."
jameshart 6y ago
Starting an essay on any topic with an assessment of just the size of the Wikipedia pages about it really doesn’t inspire confidence that the author’s research goes much beyond having brought up the Wikipedia pages and declared ‘gosh, those are long.’ It’s really only one stop short of opening the essay “Webster’s dictionary defines ‘culture’ as...” Then the author makes a weird and baseless speculation: ‘I would not be at all surprised if Banks himself, in the writing of Culture novels, consulted Wikipedia to ensure consistency with his previous work.’ - most of the novels predate the very existence of Wikipedia; a page about The Culture was only added in 2009.
ahelwer 6y ago
I'd heard a lot about the culture series and was in the mood for some optimistic sci-fi, so I picked up the first book in the series (Consider Phlebus). It was... not great. Now looking online I learn the series varies widely in quality and there are really only two or three novels people tend to genuinely really like. So do your research before jumping in.
- riffraff 6y ago
  I have to concure, I deeply disliked "Consider Phlebas", but the world seemed so interesting that it led me to try again.. and I really liked "The Player of Games". Your mileage may vary _a lot_.
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- anigbrowl 6y ago
  Lots of people dislike Consider Phlebas but I think it's significantly better than most of the others; I like Excession better but it's also hammier. Banks had great vision but he's not that great of a writer; he relies on the few tricks over and over again - hyper-sadistic villains, revenge reveals (take a one-dimensional but clearly driven character, tease the readers with a slow reveal of the moral outrage they're seeking revenge for), very cringey sex scenes, Good Guys either set up the Bad Guys all along (triumphal outcome) and/or Good Guys kamikaze Bad Guys and enjoy moral satisfaction (defiant outcome). The same few plot devices are recombined to the point of tedium and/or disgust and after >20 years of reading his stuff I get the impression that Banks was rather aggressive and unpleasant at the personal level; his more sympathetic characters are thinly sketched whereas his obnoxious ones are rendered in gratuitous detail. Consider Phlebas is more interesting and different from his other books in that almost all the characters are confused and heavily conflicted, and unhappily wrestling with the outcome of prior bad decisions. It's more hard work because it's (mostly) written from a single point of view that gives it an episodic pearls-on-a-string structure that sometimes feels like one set piece after another; in later books he eschewed this approach and went for a multiple-converging-plotline approach (CP adopts this for the last part of the story). The fact that almost everyone in the book is spiraling downwards as the result of prior bad decisions is a real downer, but the characters are much more complex and involving as a result.
kashyapc 6y ago
If you're new to the Culture series by Banks and are wondering where to start, I'd suggest not to start with the first book, "Consider Phlebas". Instead, I'd strongly recommend to pick up the second one, "The Player of Games" — this thrilling book is a love letter to board games. It's beautifully executed and an incredibly absorbing book for a newcomer. Then you can pick up "Consider Phlebas". I'm glad I did my research and didn't start with this. It has its many brilliant moments, but I had to show significantly more patience to finish it. I'm now currently working my way through the fifth book in the series, "Excession". It's living up to the hype. (Two years ago, a Scottish man sitting next to me on a plane just wouldn't stop talking about it when he saw me reading "The Player of Games". I'm glad he badgered me to pick it up.)
philipkglass 6y ago
The Culture is unobtainium-grade post-scarcity. The Minds and lesser AIs make computing and intelligence abundant beyond want. It also has effectively unlimited freedom of voice, freedom of exit, freedom of association, freedom to roam, and unlimited supplies of energy, matter, and manufactured goods. The only limits it can't overcome are logical contradictions. It has basically the same fictional technologies as Star Trek: powerful AI, FTL communication, FTL travel, replicators, transporters, and ridiculously abundant energy. But it is a far more wild and unrestrained What-If than Star Trek, which is probably why it has never been adapted to the screen. (An adaptation of Consider Phlebas was apparently a project for Amazon Prime for a while, but that was dropped.) Consider for example transporter accidents/paradoxes/quirks. In Star Trek the question of identity and continuity going through the transporter is mostly shoved to the side, sometimes addressed in oblique character remarks, and occasionally rises to the forefront in an episode where somebody is duplicated or trapped in a transporter. Then the possibility of personal storage or duplication is set aside until the next rare occasion where it rises to Plot level. In the Culture, having a molecular pattern backup of your body stored is routine, even among ordinary citizens. Not retaining a backup is unusual. Most Special Circumstances agents killed in the line of duty will be restored from backup, minus a few hours or days of memories. Only in wide scale conflicts, where backup data cannot be replicated outside the danger zone fast enough, are people in danger of involuntary permadeath. Star Trek has basically the same in-universe technology to make violent death reversible, but chooses not to pursue it, probably to avoid making things seem too weird to audiences. But the future seen from the past is weird even when it includes only actually-realizable technologies. If you had a time machine and could show an audience of SF enthusiasts from 1940 a vision of things to come from technological change, 2010's film The Social Network would be about the best you could do. It might also be baffling and off-putting to the sorts of people who liked SF stories of the time. Most people who enjoy SF prefer adventure stories with relatable characters and some plot-enabling or plot-driving tech gizmos. Visions of everything transfigured and rendered strange by technology or sheer cultural drift over time are less popular.
- zabzonk 6y ago
  To be slightly nit-picking, instantaneous travel in the Culture is performed by "displacement" - i.e. moving a small chunk of space-time from one location to another, not by destructively performing a bitwise copy and "transporting" the bits and re-assembling them. There is real (tiny from human point of view) risk involved in doing this, which the neurotically risk-averse Culture Minds find near-unacceptable - this would not be the case if a perfect copy were made before displacement. Indeed the implications and technologies of backing-up humans is not really addressed often or deeply in the novels.
libraryofbabel 6y ago
> CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture? > Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it’s my secular heaven….Yes, I would, absolutely. Iain Banks's The Culture is my Utopia too. Of all the worlds and societies of science fiction that I've read or seen on the screen, The Culture is the one I'd most like to live inside as an ordinary citizen. A society that has eliminated material scarcity. Life is centuries long, health and disease are solved problems. The lives of most of its inhabitants are largely devoted to self-actualization, the pursuit of happiness and meaning. And... that sounds pretty good to me. Go climb in the mountains all day and come back and philosophize with friends around a camp fire. Learn architecture and design your home; make art; seek out new kinds of music. Spend 10 years mastering a new branch of mathematics, just for the sheer joy of learning. Travel between the stars, go to parties, fall in love, cultivate friendships - and when you want to be alone, go to your ranch in a desert for a month and just look at the stars. Explore what it means to be yourself under a hundred different suns, on a hundred different worlds, in a universe of boundless wonder. Good grief yes, heck, yeah - sure as anything I want to live in that world. Footnote: of course, the irony of the Culture books is that this kind of Utopian life isn't terribly interesting for the plot of a novel, so you only see it in fragments. The books are mostly set around the edges of the Culture, where it comes into conflict with societies or individuals that don't share its values. And they're damn fun to read (I particular recommend _The Player of Games_ for those starting out.)
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- ancarda 6y ago
  >this kind of Utopian life isn't terribly interesting for the plot of a novel If it's not interesting to read about, are we sure it'll be interesting and enjoyable to live that way? Why do we find conflict interesting to read?
  - rsj_hn 6y ago
    I don't think it's that we find conflict interesting in and of itself. What we find interesting to read is things that reveal some truth, especially about human nature, and especially if this truth is non-trivial. The long standing trope is that Utopia is impossible not because of technical limitations, but because of deep truths about human nature. This goes back to the Old Testament -- e.g. the tower of Babel - the first attempt to build a utopia -- dissolved into conflict. Or perhaps the Garden of Eden was the first attempt, and that also broke down. People have been trying to build Utopias ever since, and usually these projects become object lessons revealing some kind of human flaw that is incompatible with utopia. In every utopia there is a snake, and that snake is some aspect of our nature that destroys the utopia or forces us out of it.
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loeg 6y ago
(2009)
5tefan 6y ago
I wanted to like the Culture Books. Didn't work out for me. Surface stories are weird to me and I don't have a knack in finding undelying things.
worik 6y ago
It is interesting to tread the culture novels in the order they were written. Use of Weapons (I think written, but not published first) and Consider Phlebus (sp?) were quite dark and portrayed the Culture in a broader vision than the later novels. I feel they are much better, and far more courageous than the later novels. He came to like his characters too much and could not let them die. The total cluster fuck at the end of Consider Phlebus and the dark and tragic ending of Use of Weapons would not happen in later novels.
clort 6y ago
It took me like 15 years to try Iain Banks non sci-fi books but oh boy.. I would recommend 'Canal Dreams' as a starter, its not as .. raw as some of the others, and somewhat topical this week. If you want to see how raw he could make it, The Wasp Factory' goes all the way to 11.
- michael1999 6y ago
  The Wasp Factory left a mark - on me, and the British literary establishment.
moonbug 6y ago
Dunno what this guy was reading but I sure don't recognise it.
ufmace 6y ago
I've read all of the Culture novels and do enjoy them. However, I can recognize it as a single-person utopia, which IMO makes it inherently unrealistic. I mean that it's a utopia which exists entirely in the mind of one man. That means it has never had to face the issues of dealing with real people and real problems. Assumptions and presumptions that person has about how society works and why people do things are encoded into it. Many of these types of assumptions have been found wanting when they go up against real people. It's even more of an issue with sci-fi, where you can make up any technology you want, and have it work any way you want. For example, in the real world, drugs are a serious problem for many people. The libertarian assumption is that all of the problems flow from prohibition. I'm willing to believe that many of the problems do, but it's quite clear that not all of them do. See the prescription opioid epidemic. In many of the cases, there are no issues with the quality of the supply or the cost of the drugs, but nevertheless, the users frequently overdose themselves or abandon everything and everyone in their life in the pursuit of more drugs. I'm quite doubtful that you could give everyone in the world "drug glands" that give them a hit of as much of any drug as they want anytime they want and not have a large chunk of the population die or become catatonic from opioid overuse, or go psychotic as tends to happen with overuse of stimulants like meth or cocaine, or something else. And of course we have the Minds. Of course everything is nice and easy if you make up the fact that the Minds are perfect benevolent dictators who would never harm a human and always do everything legitimately for the greater good. Humans have never been able to do that, but hey, we made up some super-intelligent AIs that do, because I said so. We've never built a real super-intelligent AI, so we don't know how it would be. Maybe it actually would be a perfect benevolent dictator. Or maybe not. Maybe it'll be just like every human dictator we've ever had, happy to squash anyone who questions its rule. Maybe it'll just wipe us all out for being inconvenient and messy. Maybe it'll go off and do whatever it finds interesting somewhere else and ignore us. Who can say? Bottom line is that it's very easy to make a fake utopia of any ideology at all, as long as it's all in one person's head. A Nazi could just as easily write their own fake utopia where society did everything their way and it all just magically worked perfectly because of course they're right about everything in their own minds. What happened to all the Jews, you ask? Why they just don't exist in our imaginary perfect society! Don't you dare ask any inconvenient questions, can't you see we're building a utopia here!
dang 6y ago
If curious, the interesting past threads appear to be: The Culture War: Iain M. Banks’s Billionaire Fans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25924560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25924560 - Jan 2021 (294 comments) Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16348885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16348885 - Feb 2018 (31 comments) Iain Banks audio interview - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749881 - June 2015 (1 comment) A Few Questions About the Culture: An Interview with Iain Banks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8587447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8587447 - Nov 2014 (86 comments) Iain Banks dies of cancer aged 59 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849186 - June 2013 (133 comments) A Few Notes On The Culture, by Iain M. Banks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5497905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5497905 - April 2013 (1 comment) A Personal Statement from Iain Banks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5485236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5485236 - April 2013 (346 comments)
Barrin92 6y ago
>The Culture is neoconservatism on the greatest imaginable scale. Exactly this. It was one of the first thoughts I had when people introduced me to the Culture and pitched it to me as a sort of socialist utopia. I don't even think Banks is aware of this himself given his own takes quoted in the article but the The Culture fundamentally isn't a futurist utopia but a socially engineered, materially abundant liberal 19th century experiment in the broad sense of the term extrapolated into the future. All difficult problems are effectively outsourced to the Minds, even language is understood in a Sapir–Whorf way as a tool to exercise social control. Criminals aren't punished but ostracized and neutered in an 'enlightened' way. Individual hedonism is basically the only activity left for people to engage in. A lot of the problems of the Culture haven't vanished but been outsourced to a kind of space CIA in the form of 'Special Circumstances' which does all the ugly stuff the happy people of the Culture don't want to deal with. Outwardly the culture is very aggressive in its attempts to assimilate everyone incompatible with the Culture. Contact between the Culture and other civilizations often leads to covert conflict. Player of Games being probably the best example, where the Culture basically sends a Bobby Fischer style character to a 'backwards' empire to use a game competition as a means to topple the regime from within. And for democracy in the Culture itself, even though in the eyes of the people the Minds are supposed to be a sort of magical democracy solving technology that just builds consensus in fair ways, we also learn that the Minds very much have minds of their own (no pun intended) in the book (can't remember the title) that tells the story to us from their perspective. Banks in general seems to me like Trotskyist who turned from Communist to Neocon (a very common phenomenon), with the twist that he doesn't really seem to be aware of it at all and thinks he's actually writing a genuine utopia. I've always liked that about the books the most because it actually in many ways to me makes the Culture a really good dystopian work where the author rather than trying to write one is actually trying to trick you into liking the Culture.
- perardi 6y ago
  …Minds very much have minds of their own (no pun intended) in the book (can't remember the title)… Possibly Excession, which featured Minds at their most…well, I’d argue human. Their desire for [space McGuffin] does not end up being a good look for the Interesting Times gang.
- 6y ago
elihu 6y ago
> Why was the wisdom of the Culture’s Minds not sufficient to foresee this mess? No explanation is given. Indeed, the Minds of Special Circumstances are surprised fairly often in these novels — in The Player of Games they seem to realize from the start that they don’t have the political situation on Azad figured out. There are only two inferences I can make here: either Banks is being careless or he is suggesting that even an intelligence capable of handling the everyday affairs of an Orbital containing thirty billion people is still not smart enough to figure out what sentient beings will do in response to conflict. One hopes the latter is the right inference; but if it is, it suggests that the power of the Minds is largely the power of control: they can predict and deal successfully with the behavior of those who speak their language and use their drugs, but have limited ability to manipulate others. If I remember right, in Player of Games, the Culture simply didn't have enough information to go on. It seems very weird to assume that even an infinitely powerful computer could accurately predict the behavior of a society it doesn't have much visibility into. I think the article also misunderstands the Minds and where their influence comes from. Most of the biological population of the Culture lives on ships or artificial structures, which are themselves almost like living things. A ship is essentially the body of the Mind that controls it, and the people are generally allowed to ride along. The people aren't particularly controlled by the Minds, but the Mind decides where the ship goes. The Minds are powerful in that they control immensely powerful machinery and have access to enormous amounts of information and are able to process it. But at they same time, they're also dependent on biological people when it comes to interaction with non-Culture societies, who tend to be more easily accepted than the machines themselves or their avatars. Minds often disagree with each other on the basis of different degrees of risk tolerance and relative priorities. They're definitely not infallible.
- detaro 6y ago
  At least in what's told to Gurgeh at the end of the Player of Games, the Minds had the situation very much figured out. They sent Gurgeh and threatened the Emperor because the figured they could cause the Empire of Azad, which we can assume they did not want to tolerate, to collapse this way. And they were right. Gurgeh doesn't know it, but the Minds totally expect that he'll beat everyone at Azad. Him winning weakens the fundamental principles of the Empire, and in the end they tell the Emperor that he's playing for real: If the emperor wins, they'll leave. If Gurgeh wins, the Culture will come in "guns blazing". (they probably wouldn't, or at least very much would prefer not to, but the Emperor doesn't know that, attacks and gets killed, and the empire falls over this, with the Culture shedding minimal blood on its own)
nsm 6y ago
For fans of Banks, who are looking for a analysis of the Culture books through the utopian lens, I highly recommend "The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction" by Simone Caroti. To quote Fal N'geestra from Consider Phlebas: "Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms?"
304774169 6y ago
I created a bunch of hoodies based on the books a while ago because I was struggling to find something I wanted to wear, this is a shameless self plug but I suspect many of you will get a kick out of it and I'm not in it for the money. https://www.spreadshirt.com.au/shop/user/304774169/ https://www.spreadshirt.com.au/shop/user/304774169/
ggm 6y ago
"Ambiguous Utopia" is the minor title of "the disposessed" by Ursula Le Guinea in 1974.
stefantalpalaru 6y ago
> The philosophy of Banks’s Culture is that of Liberalism That's an embarrassing proof that the author did not read the Culture series. The Culture is the embodiment of "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" - a far-left utopian ideology - while Liberalism is a centre-right ideology that wouldn't work without a monetary system to sustain Capitalism. Maybe the article's author should have clicked some of those Wikipedia links instead of counting them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks#Politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks#Politics
chrisweekly 6y ago
If you're new to the Culture novels: * don't worry about sequence / chronology, they're great in any order * absent other guidance, try "Player of Games". This was my first (and still, I think, my favorite) of the 6 or 7 I've read * the unabridged audiobooks on audible are (other than the drm) fantastic; world-class narration, if you want to explore them that way. I love bouncing between modalities, using whispersync to keep in sync across kindle, audible and phone...
glangdale 6y ago
I find myself very happily rereading Iain M Banks before '93 and Iain Banks before '86. Anything later causes me discomfort, disgust or boredom. His earlier stuff is an impressive achievement for any author, and I don't begrudge him his long career (and am not going to argue with people who like it) but personally I found IB/IMB incredibly disappointing in his later career.
- u02sgb 6y ago
  I found Surface Detail and The Hydrogen Sonata an excellent return to form. Maybe give them a try if you haven't already.
wryroybatty 6y ago
Martha Wells and Ann Leckie have less evenly distributed utopias, more dystopian perspectives. Well's Murderbot is hilarious.

191 points by jasim 6y ago

This is a really good read. I absolutely love the entire Culture series.

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 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.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
utopian fiction generally requires some imperfection to be shown in order to have dramatic tension.
8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
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.
- gpderetta 6y ago
  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.
mattmanser 6y ago
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.
- rkachowski 6y ago
  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.
  - p_l 6y ago
    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.
sharkweek 6y ago
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!
- wmf 6y ago
  The Culture series can be read in pretty much any order; staring with The Player of Games might be easier.
- GeoAtreides 6y ago
  Start with Player of Games, it's better and most people recommend it as a starting point.
  - hnick 6y ago
    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.
- ilikeyou 6y ago
  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)
  - u02sgb 6y ago
    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.
retrac 6y ago
> 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.
- GeoAtreides 6y ago
  > 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
  - detaro 6y ago
    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.
pierrebai 6y ago
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.
- zabzonk 6y ago
  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).
  - zabzonk 6y ago
    > Gray Matter Should of course be Gray Area.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  > 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.
culturenothx 6y ago
> 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.
- p_l 6y ago
  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.
rsynnott 6y ago
> 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.

WJW 6y ago

I love the culture series. It's so unashamedly optimistic about how life "could" be, while exploring which problems even an absolutely utopian post-scarcity society with benevolent AGIs would encounter. It is, as the article mentions, an absolutely intriguing mirror held up to our own society.

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bhaak 6y ago

I miss positive science fiction. I don't want to read or see science fiction that drags me down. Reality is grim enough as it is. Show me fictional realities that inspire me to make them real.

yourapostasy 6y ago
The ongoing First Contact series by pseudonym Ralts Bloodthorne [1] is a space opera that could be considered optimistic in the sense of "humanity shall overcome". There is an active Discord community around it, lots of fans. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/f94rak/oc_pthok_eats_an_ice_cream_cone/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/f94rak/oc_pthok_eats_a...
- bhaak 6y ago
  I'm already subscribed to r/HFY but I mostly read the one-shots so far. Thanks for the recommendation, I will check it out.
wccrawford 6y ago
If you enjoyed The Martian, you might also enjoy the Diary of a Murderbot series. Neither of them are particularly positive, but the humor in them really does it for me.
- tmoertel 6y ago
  I second this recommendation.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  The Murderbot books are good, but holy crapballs they are expensive. Full book price for practically a novella.
dsign 6y ago
I recently read "Red Sky-Ceiling" by one such Kein Ouzunupi. It's near-future about seculars having fun in a space habitat after some sort of ideological cataclysm (social media? polarization?) brings back the middle ages on Earth. Pity it was all too short, the book.

tablespoon 6y ago

> In the one Culture story that refers to our planet, “The State of the Art,” Sma is among a group of Contact representatives who visit Earth in the year 1977. After a period of careful investigation, Sma argues — in the official report that constitutes most of the story — that the Culture needs to intervene to clean up the mess that human beings are making of our world. Were such an intervention to take place, Special Circumstances would spearhead it. However, one of her colleagues finds the Star Trek television series almost the only redeeming feature of Earth civilization and recommends that the whole planet be destroyed. Special Circumstances would handle that as well. I'm not really a fan of the Culture, but that kind of blows up any illusions about it. The against-their-will homogenizing manipulations are one thing, but actual literal unprovoked genocide? If that's an option what other kinds of skeletons can this utopia be assumed to have in its closet?

Angostura 6y ago
I've just pulled my copy from the shelf and am starting to re-read, but I'm sure Sma doesn't recommend the destruction of Earth. That would be very un-Sma
- NateEag 6y ago
  > However, one of her colleagues finds the Star Trek television series almost the only redeeming feature of Earth civilization and recommends that the whole planet be destroyed. According to the quote, Sma's _colleague_ recommends destroying Earth, not Sma.
- zabzonk 6y ago
  > I'm sure Sma doesn't recommend the destruction of Earth That's not what the post you are replying to said.
nsm 6y ago
Individuals in the Culture are free to state whatever they want, that doesn't mean the civilization executes it. Taking the thought (not action) of one individual in a civilization that has on the order of trillions of individuals is hardly being fair to your representation of the Culture. In addition, whereas in our world, such a person would likely be Twitter shamed into oblivion, even if they had such a thought as teenager, in the Culture they would have a reasonable argument with other humans and Minds that would attempt to convince them of the foolishness of pursuing a genocidal agenda. The Culture tries to preserve life as much as possible. For context, what actually ends up happening is that Earth is left to its own devices. The Culture is dedicated to doing the right thing, but that right thing isn't always easy to figure out. To quote the State of the Art: [Diziet Sma asking the Ship Mind] "How certain do we have to be? How long must we make them wait? Who elected us God?" [The ship] "Diziet... that question is being asked all the time, and put in as many different ways we have the wit to devise (...) and that moral equation is being re-assessed every nanosecond of every day of every year, and every time we find some place like Earth -- no matter what way the decision [to interfere or not] goes -- we come closer to knowing the truth. But we can never be absolutely certain... I'm the smartest thing for a hundred light years' radius, and by a factor of about a million (...) but even I can't predict where a snooker ball's going to end up after more than six collisions."

jameshart 6y ago

Starting an essay on any topic with an assessment of just the size of the Wikipedia pages about it really doesn’t inspire confidence that the author’s research goes much beyond having brought up the Wikipedia pages and declared ‘gosh, those are long.’ It’s really only one stop short of opening the essay “Webster’s dictionary defines ‘culture’ as...” Then the author makes a weird and baseless speculation: ‘I would not be at all surprised if Banks himself, in the writing of Culture novels, consulted Wikipedia to ensure consistency with his previous work.’ - most of the novels predate the very existence of Wikipedia; a page about The Culture was only added in 2009.

ahelwer 6y ago

I'd heard a lot about the culture series and was in the mood for some optimistic sci-fi, so I picked up the first book in the series (Consider Phlebus). It was... not great. Now looking online I learn the series varies widely in quality and there are really only two or three novels people tend to genuinely really like. So do your research before jumping in.

riffraff 6y ago
I have to concure, I deeply disliked "Consider Phlebas", but the world seemed so interesting that it led me to try again.. and I really liked "The Player of Games". Your mileage may vary _a lot_.
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anigbrowl 6y ago
Lots of people dislike Consider Phlebas but I think it's significantly better than most of the others; I like Excession better but it's also hammier. Banks had great vision but he's not that great of a writer; he relies on the few tricks over and over again - hyper-sadistic villains, revenge reveals (take a one-dimensional but clearly driven character, tease the readers with a slow reveal of the moral outrage they're seeking revenge for), very cringey sex scenes, Good Guys either set up the Bad Guys all along (triumphal outcome) and/or Good Guys kamikaze Bad Guys and enjoy moral satisfaction (defiant outcome). The same few plot devices are recombined to the point of tedium and/or disgust and after >20 years of reading his stuff I get the impression that Banks was rather aggressive and unpleasant at the personal level; his more sympathetic characters are thinly sketched whereas his obnoxious ones are rendered in gratuitous detail. Consider Phlebas is more interesting and different from his other books in that almost all the characters are confused and heavily conflicted, and unhappily wrestling with the outcome of prior bad decisions. It's more hard work because it's (mostly) written from a single point of view that gives it an episodic pearls-on-a-string structure that sometimes feels like one set piece after another; in later books he eschewed this approach and went for a multiple-converging-plotline approach (CP adopts this for the last part of the story). The fact that almost everyone in the book is spiraling downwards as the result of prior bad decisions is a real downer, but the characters are much more complex and involving as a result.

kashyapc 6y ago

If you're new to the Culture series by Banks and are wondering where to start, I'd suggest not to start with the first book, "Consider Phlebas". Instead, I'd strongly recommend to pick up the second one, "The Player of Games" — this thrilling book is a love letter to board games. It's beautifully executed and an incredibly absorbing book for a newcomer. Then you can pick up "Consider Phlebas". I'm glad I did my research and didn't start with this. It has its many brilliant moments, but I had to show significantly more patience to finish it. I'm now currently working my way through the fifth book in the series, "Excession". It's living up to the hype. (Two years ago, a Scottish man sitting next to me on a plane just wouldn't stop talking about it when he saw me reading "The Player of Games". I'm glad he badgered me to pick it up.)

philipkglass 6y ago

The Culture is unobtainium-grade post-scarcity. The Minds and lesser AIs make computing and intelligence abundant beyond want. It also has effectively unlimited freedom of voice, freedom of exit, freedom of association, freedom to roam, and unlimited supplies of energy, matter, and manufactured goods. The only limits it can't overcome are logical contradictions. It has basically the same fictional technologies as Star Trek: powerful AI, FTL communication, FTL travel, replicators, transporters, and ridiculously abundant energy. But it is a far more wild and unrestrained What-If than Star Trek, which is probably why it has never been adapted to the screen. (An adaptation of Consider Phlebas was apparently a project for Amazon Prime for a while, but that was dropped.) Consider for example transporter accidents/paradoxes/quirks. In Star Trek the question of identity and continuity going through the transporter is mostly shoved to the side, sometimes addressed in oblique character remarks, and occasionally rises to the forefront in an episode where somebody is duplicated or trapped in a transporter. Then the possibility of personal storage or duplication is set aside until the next rare occasion where it rises to Plot level. In the Culture, having a molecular pattern backup of your body stored is routine, even among ordinary citizens. Not retaining a backup is unusual. Most Special Circumstances agents killed in the line of duty will be restored from backup, minus a few hours or days of memories. Only in wide scale conflicts, where backup data cannot be replicated outside the danger zone fast enough, are people in danger of involuntary permadeath. Star Trek has basically the same in-universe technology to make violent death reversible, but chooses not to pursue it, probably to avoid making things seem too weird to audiences. But the future seen from the past is weird even when it includes only actually-realizable technologies. If you had a time machine and could show an audience of SF enthusiasts from 1940 a vision of things to come from technological change, 2010's film The Social Network would be about the best you could do. It might also be baffling and off-putting to the sorts of people who liked SF stories of the time. Most people who enjoy SF prefer adventure stories with relatable characters and some plot-enabling or plot-driving tech gizmos. Visions of everything transfigured and rendered strange by technology or sheer cultural drift over time are less popular.

zabzonk 6y ago
To be slightly nit-picking, instantaneous travel in the Culture is performed by "displacement" - i.e. moving a small chunk of space-time from one location to another, not by destructively performing a bitwise copy and "transporting" the bits and re-assembling them. There is real (tiny from human point of view) risk involved in doing this, which the neurotically risk-averse Culture Minds find near-unacceptable - this would not be the case if a perfect copy were made before displacement. Indeed the implications and technologies of backing-up humans is not really addressed often or deeply in the novels.

libraryofbabel 6y ago

> CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture? > Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it’s my secular heaven….Yes, I would, absolutely. Iain Banks's The Culture is my Utopia too. Of all the worlds and societies of science fiction that I've read or seen on the screen, The Culture is the one I'd most like to live inside as an ordinary citizen. A society that has eliminated material scarcity. Life is centuries long, health and disease are solved problems. The lives of most of its inhabitants are largely devoted to self-actualization, the pursuit of happiness and meaning. And... that sounds pretty good to me. Go climb in the mountains all day and come back and philosophize with friends around a camp fire. Learn architecture and design your home; make art; seek out new kinds of music. Spend 10 years mastering a new branch of mathematics, just for the sheer joy of learning. Travel between the stars, go to parties, fall in love, cultivate friendships - and when you want to be alone, go to your ranch in a desert for a month and just look at the stars. Explore what it means to be yourself under a hundred different suns, on a hundred different worlds, in a universe of boundless wonder. Good grief yes, heck, yeah - sure as anything I want to live in that world. Footnote: of course, the irony of the Culture books is that this kind of Utopian life isn't terribly interesting for the plot of a novel, so you only see it in fragments. The books are mostly set around the edges of the Culture, where it comes into conflict with societies or individuals that don't share its values. And they're damn fun to read (I particular recommend _The Player of Games_ for those starting out.)

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ancarda 6y ago
>this kind of Utopian life isn't terribly interesting for the plot of a novel If it's not interesting to read about, are we sure it'll be interesting and enjoyable to live that way? Why do we find conflict interesting to read?
- rsj_hn 6y ago
  I don't think it's that we find conflict interesting in and of itself. What we find interesting to read is things that reveal some truth, especially about human nature, and especially if this truth is non-trivial. The long standing trope is that Utopia is impossible not because of technical limitations, but because of deep truths about human nature. This goes back to the Old Testament -- e.g. the tower of Babel - the first attempt to build a utopia -- dissolved into conflict. Or perhaps the Garden of Eden was the first attempt, and that also broke down. People have been trying to build Utopias ever since, and usually these projects become object lessons revealing some kind of human flaw that is incompatible with utopia. In every utopia there is a snake, and that snake is some aspect of our nature that destroys the utopia or forces us out of it.

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loeg 6y ago

(2009)

5tefan 6y ago

I wanted to like the Culture Books. Didn't work out for me. Surface stories are weird to me and I don't have a knack in finding undelying things.

worik 6y ago

It is interesting to tread the culture novels in the order they were written. Use of Weapons (I think written, but not published first) and Consider Phlebus (sp?) were quite dark and portrayed the Culture in a broader vision than the later novels. I feel they are much better, and far more courageous than the later novels. He came to like his characters too much and could not let them die. The total cluster fuck at the end of Consider Phlebus and the dark and tragic ending of Use of Weapons would not happen in later novels.

clort 6y ago

It took me like 15 years to try Iain Banks non sci-fi books but oh boy.. I would recommend 'Canal Dreams' as a starter, its not as .. raw as some of the others, and somewhat topical this week. If you want to see how raw he could make it, The Wasp Factory' goes all the way to 11.

michael1999 6y ago
The Wasp Factory left a mark - on me, and the British literary establishment.

moonbug 6y ago

Dunno what this guy was reading but I sure don't recognise it.

ufmace 6y ago

I've read all of the Culture novels and do enjoy them. However, I can recognize it as a single-person utopia, which IMO makes it inherently unrealistic. I mean that it's a utopia which exists entirely in the mind of one man. That means it has never had to face the issues of dealing with real people and real problems. Assumptions and presumptions that person has about how society works and why people do things are encoded into it. Many of these types of assumptions have been found wanting when they go up against real people. It's even more of an issue with sci-fi, where you can make up any technology you want, and have it work any way you want. For example, in the real world, drugs are a serious problem for many people. The libertarian assumption is that all of the problems flow from prohibition. I'm willing to believe that many of the problems do, but it's quite clear that not all of them do. See the prescription opioid epidemic. In many of the cases, there are no issues with the quality of the supply or the cost of the drugs, but nevertheless, the users frequently overdose themselves or abandon everything and everyone in their life in the pursuit of more drugs. I'm quite doubtful that you could give everyone in the world "drug glands" that give them a hit of as much of any drug as they want anytime they want and not have a large chunk of the population die or become catatonic from opioid overuse, or go psychotic as tends to happen with overuse of stimulants like meth or cocaine, or something else. And of course we have the Minds. Of course everything is nice and easy if you make up the fact that the Minds are perfect benevolent dictators who would never harm a human and always do everything legitimately for the greater good. Humans have never been able to do that, but hey, we made up some super-intelligent AIs that do, because I said so. We've never built a real super-intelligent AI, so we don't know how it would be. Maybe it actually would be a perfect benevolent dictator. Or maybe not. Maybe it'll be just like every human dictator we've ever had, happy to squash anyone who questions its rule. Maybe it'll just wipe us all out for being inconvenient and messy. Maybe it'll go off and do whatever it finds interesting somewhere else and ignore us. Who can say? Bottom line is that it's very easy to make a fake utopia of any ideology at all, as long as it's all in one person's head. A Nazi could just as easily write their own fake utopia where society did everything their way and it all just magically worked perfectly because of course they're right about everything in their own minds. What happened to all the Jews, you ask? Why they just don't exist in our imaginary perfect society! Don't you dare ask any inconvenient questions, can't you see we're building a utopia here!

dang 6y ago

If curious, the interesting past threads appear to be: The Culture War: Iain M. Banks’s Billionaire Fans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25924560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25924560 - Jan 2021 (294 comments) Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16348885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16348885 - Feb 2018 (31 comments) Iain Banks audio interview - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749881 - June 2015 (1 comment) A Few Questions About the Culture: An Interview with Iain Banks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8587447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8587447 - Nov 2014 (86 comments) Iain Banks dies of cancer aged 59 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849186 - June 2013 (133 comments) A Few Notes On The Culture, by Iain M. Banks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5497905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5497905 - April 2013 (1 comment) A Personal Statement from Iain Banks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5485236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5485236 - April 2013 (346 comments)

Barrin92 6y ago

>The Culture is neoconservatism on the greatest imaginable scale. Exactly this. It was one of the first thoughts I had when people introduced me to the Culture and pitched it to me as a sort of socialist utopia. I don't even think Banks is aware of this himself given his own takes quoted in the article but the The Culture fundamentally isn't a futurist utopia but a socially engineered, materially abundant liberal 19th century experiment in the broad sense of the term extrapolated into the future. All difficult problems are effectively outsourced to the Minds, even language is understood in a Sapir–Whorf way as a tool to exercise social control. Criminals aren't punished but ostracized and neutered in an 'enlightened' way. Individual hedonism is basically the only activity left for people to engage in. A lot of the problems of the Culture haven't vanished but been outsourced to a kind of space CIA in the form of 'Special Circumstances' which does all the ugly stuff the happy people of the Culture don't want to deal with. Outwardly the culture is very aggressive in its attempts to assimilate everyone incompatible with the Culture. Contact between the Culture and other civilizations often leads to covert conflict. Player of Games being probably the best example, where the Culture basically sends a Bobby Fischer style character to a 'backwards' empire to use a game competition as a means to topple the regime from within. And for democracy in the Culture itself, even though in the eyes of the people the Minds are supposed to be a sort of magical democracy solving technology that just builds consensus in fair ways, we also learn that the Minds very much have minds of their own (no pun intended) in the book (can't remember the title) that tells the story to us from their perspective. Banks in general seems to me like Trotskyist who turned from Communist to Neocon (a very common phenomenon), with the twist that he doesn't really seem to be aware of it at all and thinks he's actually writing a genuine utopia. I've always liked that about the books the most because it actually in many ways to me makes the Culture a really good dystopian work where the author rather than trying to write one is actually trying to trick you into liking the Culture.

perardi 6y ago
…Minds very much have minds of their own (no pun intended) in the book (can't remember the title)… Possibly Excession, which featured Minds at their most…well, I’d argue human. Their desire for [space McGuffin] does not end up being a good look for the Interesting Times gang.
6y ago

elihu 6y ago

> Why was the wisdom of the Culture’s Minds not sufficient to foresee this mess? No explanation is given. Indeed, the Minds of Special Circumstances are surprised fairly often in these novels — in The Player of Games they seem to realize from the start that they don’t have the political situation on Azad figured out. There are only two inferences I can make here: either Banks is being careless or he is suggesting that even an intelligence capable of handling the everyday affairs of an Orbital containing thirty billion people is still not smart enough to figure out what sentient beings will do in response to conflict. One hopes the latter is the right inference; but if it is, it suggests that the power of the Minds is largely the power of control: they can predict and deal successfully with the behavior of those who speak their language and use their drugs, but have limited ability to manipulate others. If I remember right, in Player of Games, the Culture simply didn't have enough information to go on. It seems very weird to assume that even an infinitely powerful computer could accurately predict the behavior of a society it doesn't have much visibility into. I think the article also misunderstands the Minds and where their influence comes from. Most of the biological population of the Culture lives on ships or artificial structures, which are themselves almost like living things. A ship is essentially the body of the Mind that controls it, and the people are generally allowed to ride along. The people aren't particularly controlled by the Minds, but the Mind decides where the ship goes. The Minds are powerful in that they control immensely powerful machinery and have access to enormous amounts of information and are able to process it. But at they same time, they're also dependent on biological people when it comes to interaction with non-Culture societies, who tend to be more easily accepted than the machines themselves or their avatars. Minds often disagree with each other on the basis of different degrees of risk tolerance and relative priorities. They're definitely not infallible.

detaro 6y ago
At least in what's told to Gurgeh at the end of the Player of Games, the Minds had the situation very much figured out. They sent Gurgeh and threatened the Emperor because the figured they could cause the Empire of Azad, which we can assume they did not want to tolerate, to collapse this way. And they were right. Gurgeh doesn't know it, but the Minds totally expect that he'll beat everyone at Azad. Him winning weakens the fundamental principles of the Empire, and in the end they tell the Emperor that he's playing for real: If the emperor wins, they'll leave. If Gurgeh wins, the Culture will come in "guns blazing". (they probably wouldn't, or at least very much would prefer not to, but the Emperor doesn't know that, attacks and gets killed, and the empire falls over this, with the Culture shedding minimal blood on its own)

nsm 6y ago

For fans of Banks, who are looking for a analysis of the Culture books through the utopian lens, I highly recommend "The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction" by Simone Caroti. To quote Fal N'geestra from Consider Phlebas: "Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms?"

304774169 6y ago

I created a bunch of hoodies based on the books a while ago because I was struggling to find something I wanted to wear, this is a shameless self plug but I suspect many of you will get a kick out of it and I'm not in it for the money. https://www.spreadshirt.com.au/shop/user/304774169/ https://www.spreadshirt.com.au/shop/user/304774169/

ggm 6y ago

"Ambiguous Utopia" is the minor title of "the disposessed" by Ursula Le Guinea in 1974.

stefantalpalaru 6y ago

> The philosophy of Banks’s Culture is that of Liberalism That's an embarrassing proof that the author did not read the Culture series. The Culture is the embodiment of "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" - a far-left utopian ideology - while Liberalism is a centre-right ideology that wouldn't work without a monetary system to sustain Capitalism. Maybe the article's author should have clicked some of those Wikipedia links instead of counting them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks#Politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks#Politics

chrisweekly 6y ago

If you're new to the Culture novels: * don't worry about sequence / chronology, they're great in any order * absent other guidance, try "Player of Games". This was my first (and still, I think, my favorite) of the 6 or 7 I've read * the unabridged audiobooks on audible are (other than the drm) fantastic; world-class narration, if you want to explore them that way. I love bouncing between modalities, using whispersync to keep in sync across kindle, audible and phone...

glangdale 6y ago

I find myself very happily rereading Iain M Banks before '93 and Iain Banks before '86. Anything later causes me discomfort, disgust or boredom. His earlier stuff is an impressive achievement for any author, and I don't begrudge him his long career (and am not going to argue with people who like it) but personally I found IB/IMB incredibly disappointing in his later career.

u02sgb 6y ago
I found Surface Detail and The Hydrogen Sonata an excellent return to form. Maybe give them a try if you haven't already.

wryroybatty 6y ago

Martha Wells and Ann Leckie have less evenly distributed utopias, more dystopian perspectives. Well's Murderbot is hilarious.