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I've been reading sci-fi for decades and among it all, the Culture novels have left the greatest single lasting impression. Among galaxies, across time, somewhe

I've been reading sci-fi for decades and among it all, the Culture novels have left the greatest single lasting impression. Among galaxies, across time, somewhere a maybe-boring hedonism but free of oppression and want - dwarfing the piddling amateurish nonsense that passes for civilization in our neck of the woods in the here & now. Purraps to be considered as an admittedly fanciful but not wholly impractical set of goals for the next hundred years here. BTW note that based on one of his short stories, the Culture does exist "now" in our galactic region. A ship visits us at some point in the 1970s, and as it departs its Mind mischievously creates an EM signature crafted to baffle us.

n4r9 2y ago
> A ship visits us at some point in the 1970s, and as it departs its Mind mischievously creates an EM signature crafted to baffle us. The short story is "State of the Art", and is contained in a collection of short stories (some Culture, some not) of the same name. One of the final paragraphs in the story is a lovely testament to the prowess of Culture ships: > The Arbitrary held its darkfield for a few minutes, then dropped it just past Mars (so there was just a chance it left an image on an Earth telescope). Meanwhile it was snapping all its various remote drones and sats away from the other planets in the system. It stayed in real space right up till the last moment (making it possible that its rapidly increasing mass produced a blip on a terrestrial gravity-wave experiment, deep in some mountain-mine), then totalled as it dispatched Linter's body into the stellar core, sucked a last few drones of Pluto and a couple of outlying comets, and slung Li's diamond at Neptune (where it's probably still in orbit).