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The Culture is unobtainium-grade post-scarcity. The Minds and lesser AIs make computing and intelligence abundant beyond want. It also has effectively unlimited

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.
- philipkglass 6y ago
  You are technically correct, the best kind of correct :-) The Culture uses displacers for "teleportation" and sentient beings usually don't use them to travel. I agree that the stories could have gone into a lot more depth about the consequences of backups. Surely there are Orbitals out there populated with 10 million copies of the same backup original. Those were never written about. (Other SF authors have written stories in that vein.) The pervasive embrace of death-proofing is still a notable part of the Culture. Star Trek was very small-c conservative about showing radical changes to the human condition -- even changes that seemed to easily follow from their available technologies. That could be because radically changed conditions don't offer as much opportunity for commenting on the realities of the present. Or perhaps because the writers didn't want to lose the audience. Or because it's more difficult (though possible!) to write dramatically gripping stories when death itself is only a temporary inconvenience for the protagonists. I feel like the Culture series is a joyful rebuke to the common SF theme that there are some things man was not meant to know or tamper with. They'll meddle with everything and only rarely does it backfire. There are a few spectacular failures along the way, as with the Chelgrians. Even employing post-scarcity everything and the best of intentions, the outcomes aren't always good. But on balance the Culture does far more good than a default policy of non-intervention. Readers might inappropriately translate the ethos of the Culture into real life. The New Atlantis article touches on this. If the Culture uses secret agents and a judicious touch of firepower to improve lives across the galaxy, why can't citizens of prosperous democratic nations also liberate people living in dictatorships/theocracies/other bad circumstances? (Because we are only human, not Minds, would be my answer. So our forceful interventions are much less likely to avert more suffering than they cause.)
scotty79 6y ago
I absolutely love the treatment of artificial consciousness in Star Trek (Voyager especially I think). It's so wonderfully obliviously callous. They create consciousness for entertainment and work. Treat it kindly then destroy it without remorse or consideration. From the point of view of Culture that considers moral implications of simulating people in too much detail Star Trek federation would be completely barbaric.
marvin 6y ago
Descriptions of being restored from a backup are also ambiguous. Don't remember the exact phrasing, but a character in imminent fear of death in one of the books thinks to themselves along the lines of "I am backed up and will be restored, but it's not the same as surviving, of course".
dsign 6y ago
>> But the future seen from the past is weird even when it includes only actually-realizable technologies. Amen. You can freeze technological advance and let only society develop on its own, and the future will still look weird. Take the LGBT revolution; it has nothing to do with tech but today's world looks weird to somebody from the perspective of just two decades ago.

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.

philipkglass 6y ago
You are technically correct, the best kind of correct :-) The Culture uses displacers for "teleportation" and sentient beings usually don't use them to travel. I agree that the stories could have gone into a lot more depth about the consequences of backups. Surely there are Orbitals out there populated with 10 million copies of the same backup original. Those were never written about. (Other SF authors have written stories in that vein.) The pervasive embrace of death-proofing is still a notable part of the Culture. Star Trek was very small-c conservative about showing radical changes to the human condition -- even changes that seemed to easily follow from their available technologies. That could be because radically changed conditions don't offer as much opportunity for commenting on the realities of the present. Or perhaps because the writers didn't want to lose the audience. Or because it's more difficult (though possible!) to write dramatically gripping stories when death itself is only a temporary inconvenience for the protagonists. I feel like the Culture series is a joyful rebuke to the common SF theme that there are some things man was not meant to know or tamper with. They'll meddle with everything and only rarely does it backfire. There are a few spectacular failures along the way, as with the Chelgrians. Even employing post-scarcity everything and the best of intentions, the outcomes aren't always good. But on balance the Culture does far more good than a default policy of non-intervention. Readers might inappropriately translate the ethos of the Culture into real life. The New Atlantis article touches on this. If the Culture uses secret agents and a judicious touch of firepower to improve lives across the galaxy, why can't citizens of prosperous democratic nations also liberate people living in dictatorships/theocracies/other bad circumstances? (Because we are only human, not Minds, would be my answer. So our forceful interventions are much less likely to avert more suffering than they cause.)

scotty79 6y ago

I absolutely love the treatment of artificial consciousness in Star Trek (Voyager especially I think). It's so wonderfully obliviously callous. They create consciousness for entertainment and work. Treat it kindly then destroy it without remorse or consideration. From the point of view of Culture that considers moral implications of simulating people in too much detail Star Trek federation would be completely barbaric.

marvin 6y ago

Descriptions of being restored from a backup are also ambiguous. Don't remember the exact phrasing, but a character in imminent fear of death in one of the books thinks to themselves along the lines of "I am backed up and will be restored, but it's not the same as surviving, of course".

dsign 6y ago

>> But the future seen from the past is weird even when it includes only actually-realizable technologies. Amen. You can freeze technological advance and let only society develop on its own, and the future will still look weird. Take the LGBT revolution; it has nothing to do with tech but today's world looks weird to somebody from the perspective of just two decades ago.