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

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.

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.