Among other things, it compares the Idirans—who have what we consider a more traditional, modern-day culture—with the Culture. For example:
"The war between the Idirans and the Culture is peculiarly asymmetrical, since the Culture is not an empire, or even a “polity” in any traditional sense of the term, it is simply a culture. It has no capital city, or even any “territory” in the conventional sense."
I also love Heath's criticism of Dune (I appreciate the series, but now can't help but notice how often sci-fi series use regressive social structures).
"In fact, modern science fiction writers have had so little to say about the evolution of culture and society that it has become a standard trope of the genre to imagine a technologically advanced future that contains archaic social structures. The most influential example of this is undoubtedly Frank Herbert’s Dune, which imagines an advanced galactic civilization, but where society is dominated by warring “houses,” organized as extended clans, all under the nominal authority of an “emperor.”"
Of the spectrum of possibilities of how (if) we end up co-existing with AIs then anything like the Culture is definitely towards the positive end. Yes it can look like the humans in the Culture are being kept like pets - but if any group or individuals want to leave the Culture then they get support and encouragement - which isn't very pet like?
I found the second book in the series, The Player of Games, much more explanatory about what the Culture is than the first book, Consider Phelbas. I enjoyed Consider Phelbas much more upon re-reading after I did an initial read through of the rest of the series than I did having that be the first book I read from him.
I think there is a wide consensus that Consider Phlebas, though first, is not the ideal starting point for Banks' Culture series. The plot is meandering, and compared to later books, it is clear that Banks had not yet quite found the form that would be so impressive later on.
I usually recommend The Player of Games, or alternatively, depending on the reader, Use of Weapons as starting points.
It is however a good idea, having read other Culture books, to read Consider Phlebas before beginning Look to Windward, as there is a connection between the two.
I wouldn't recommend starting with Use of Weapons - it is probably the best Culture novel but it took me a few readings to really appreciate it.
Edit: As far as I recall, Banks originally created the Culture as a background for the protagonist of UoW - the ultimate warrior:
"The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons."
Player of Games was the first Culture novel I read and I enjoyed it a lot. I still sometimes go back and reread it and have found new perspectives each time. Would definitely recommend.
I enjoyed Player of Games and it was a good second book for me after Consider Phlebas. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Use of Weapons, but I haven’t been able to get into it after starting and restarting a couple times.
Consider Phlebas was my first book too, I liked it enough to read another, but I neither remember much from it nor loved it.
I really liked Player of Games, and I'd like to read a few more books in the series. I also read the Wasp Factory, and while his writing is brilliant, I wasn't too captivated by the story itself.
Matter and The Hydrogen Sonata are very good, more action-packed stories that I thoroughly enjoyed. Surface Detail is also extremely good, but has some pretty dark setting and themes involving virtual afterlifes. If you’re looking for something different after reading one or two of those, definitely check out Excession. It follows a bunch of the different Culture minds embedded in the various size ships as they investigate strange interstellar goings-on and we get to see the wide range of personalities the ships develop during their existence.
""
This novel is about how the Culture deals with an Outside Context Problem (OCP), the kind of problem "most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."
""
Some paperback editions of The Wasp Factory had quotes from reviews included at the start alternating between very positive and very negative reviews.
His non-Culture non-SF works as Iain Banks deserve more attention I think - mind you perhaps that because I frequently travel across the Forth Bridge (The Bridge) and, as I write this, I can see Inchmickery out of the window (Complicity).
However, my favourite has to be Espedair Street - which is simply sublime.
Apologies, should have been clearer there - the Wasp Factory is not a Culture novel and isn't even SF - it's about a rather troubled teenager and his unusual circle of family and friends.
It's hard for me to read the Culture novels and not hear Porno for Pyros' "Pets" on loop in my head.
It is amusing that this essay starts with "Government" and does not get down to the intelligences until halfway through -- in my mind, it's all just the intelligences watching the funny monkeys play at still having meaningful role in the Culture and the surprising things they do at the edges of its influence.
Plenty of Culture Minds value humans/pan-humans in the books. They get involved, too, just look at the effort expended by the Sleeper Service in Excession for such a personal agenda.
Not to say that there isn't a good deal of joking at humans' expense by Culture ships, but in the end, all are Culture citizens.
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.
> 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).
The polity novels by Neal Asher scratch a similar itch - the polity is much less utopian than the culture, but the world building is quite similar. I would recommend the Transformation arc as a good starting point!
Worth a shot! He does have a bit of an odd way of writing characters. I preferred the setting and culture of Player of Games, but I do think Use of Weapons and Consider Phlebas have stronger characters.
It's a bit of a mixed bag at Amazon. I think They did a great job on the boys, the wheel of time, and fallout. TLOTR's content basically cancels those out though.
Great essay. I feel like I read this 20 years ago, which is the last time I read the Culture novels. My impression at the time, which remains true on reread now, is that the idea that a post-singularity, post-scarcity society would organize itself along something like socialist lines makes no sense to me, and isn't well-supported (by my recollection) in the novels I read. This is a universe where, if you want, you can just fuck off and have your own planet. It's a place where everything is taken care of for you, not through the thoughtful allocation of resources for mutual benefit, but because it's trivially easy for a machine to just give you everything you ask for. There is no need to even think about who owns what, because everyone can usually have what they want, go where they want, do what they want. I see the anarchy, I don't see the socialism.
Haven't gone too deep to Culture. But it does the whole post-scarcity thing much better than Start Trek does. When anyone can basically do anything they want well, apart from getting space ships... And it is all provided for by essence robots if I have understood right. Whole thing does coherently make sense with advanced enough technology. Where as in many other universes it just does not.
We have recently developed a system that eliminates scarcity for all digital media. The results is not an ideological re-alignment but a crowbar that locks down the rules of scarcity.
At the same time we have not yet eliminated scarcity in other areas. Thus some still need digital scarcity to solve their physical scarcity. If physical scarcity in general was solved issue there would be no need to lock down digital media.
My gut tells me the probability we make it to post scarcity without a calamity (probably human manufactured) that ruins our ability to progress to post scarcity is pretty close to zero.
Now fast forward that by 10k years and what does it look like when time has worn down all those legal issues. The digital society is only two generations old at most.
It's socialist in the sense that the Minds could just fuck off and have their own corner of the galaxy, but instead devote processor cycles and physical presence to ensuring helpless little oxygen-breathers have everything they need
In one of the books Banks explains that the Minds were created with a bias to be helpful to humans, and that whenever they did try to create a “neutral” Mind that didn’t specifically care about this, the first thing it would do is fuck right off (to another plane of existence.)
In fact in-universe the Culture is considered deviant as a whole by similarly advanced civilizations because, instead of focusing on collectively ascending as a civilization as it is proper, they meddle in the affairs of other civilizations.
>It's a place where everything is taken care of for you, not through the thoughtful allocation of resources for mutual benefit, but because it's trivially easy for a machine to just give you everything you ask for.
It's trivially easy for the wealth of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to provide for the needs of tens of thousands of people without any appreciable dent in their own wealth, but it doesn't happen because of the political structure of our society. The Culture could easily be a society of near-infinite potential wealth which enforced scarcity the way legal & economic systems in our world enforce scarcity beyond what is naturally present now - from John Deere increasing the costs of agriculture to extract profit to the enforcement of intellectual property laws. Our society has more than enough wealth and industry to provide a home for every person, but we choose to organise our economy in a way that requires homelessness instead - I'm not making a moral judgement, just pointing out that that is in fact a decision our society makes and not just a natural fact of the universe.
The Culture is politically organised to provide for the needs of its citizens, using the labour of those able to provide what is necessary. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" is communism, it's not just a state of things that falls out of a coconut tree once you have enough production.
Economic systems of the 1800s doesn't really make sense in a space based, post scarcity society - economics is after all, the allocation of scarce resources. But I would argue that the ultimate aim of the socialism as envisioned by Marx wasn't government control over the means of production (the "dictatorship of the proletariat") but rather "full communism" where the eventual aim was to make resource allocation unnecessary, which in a way, does hint at a post scarcity society. So I can see the connection to the original Marx. Less so with the so-far practical implementations of socialism.
Unnecessary though productivity outpacing demand as far as I've understood it.
In Marxism what they call "full communism" is envisioned to be the "final state of humanity" where productivity is described to be higher than the sum of needs and wants - everybody can help themselves to anything from the warehouses. Obviously very utopian, and I'm not sure there ever was any detailed analysis on how a society a would actually function in "full communism" - but I don't think the economics of The Culture would be that far off if you would describe it to someone of those views. Early Marxists were much a bit more practical, more focused on critiquing the practices of their contemporary societies than envisioning the details of their utopia.
I think there is a fundamental psychological and social engineering element to Marxism that many socialists gloss over. The end state is one of voluntary labor, contribution and exchange.
human desire can outstrip any gains of productive capacity, and includes factors which can not simply be produced. Marx didn't envision everyone owning palaces and yachts post scarcity. He imagined people having enough to get by with moderate comfort for an 1800's standard of living.
Similarly, in the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless.
I think the truly radical part of Marxist end state communism is the idea that people will outgrow desire for "more" if more is an option.
Without this, there will always be squabbling over who gets what. It is this human drive that draws socialism down into totalitarianism.
Because fundamentally, to want more is to want change and an improvement for yourself. Sometimes this is something society thinks is good and appropriate, sometimes not.
In any large group, the way to condition people to not pursue ‘more’ is to punish those who attain ‘more’. Or attempt to
do so.
Also known as ‘the nail that sticks out gets hammered down’.
Sometimes this is done via ‘hard’ power, like the police, asset seizures, re-education camps, etc. Other times it is done via ‘soft’ power, like shaming, exile, bullying, false accusations, etc.
And that includes ‘being’ more, or ‘getting’ more.
And to make this work, there of course has to be a group of people who have power over the group to enforce this.
Those people always end up having tools at their disposal which makes them ‘more equal than others’ and hence defacto exempt from ‘not allowed to be more’. So folks who are the type that want more always end up gravitating there.
And since it’s impossible to pull everyone in the population up to the level of the highest member (economically), the easier option inevitably gets chosen - which is mashing everyone (except those with exemptions) down to the lowest level attainable across the entire population. Which is usually quite low.
How else do you think it would
work?
This really clearly played out in the USSR, and actively plays out in the Chinese Communist party today, albeit with a lot
of leeway given to greed.
There is itself no way to interact with and be present in the world that provides any guarantee of relief of suffering. Existence guarantees a risk of it.
And if someone is hungry, or bored, or in a disadvantaged position, of course they naturally will want more.
And due to the nature of how humans work, hierarchies form and in every venue someone always has ‘more’ and someone always has ‘less’. It could be freedom. It could be beauty.
It could be health. It could be money. It could be physical strength. It could be fame.
Also sometimes because they just see the potential for things to be better.
Improving oneself and one’s situation involves desiring to be and have more (fundamentally).
Your assumption that somehow ‘removing the drive to have more’ will somehow remove suffering, is reminiscent of thinking World Peace would make everyone actually happy.
Because the only way to plausibly have world peace would require a massive authoritarian dictatorship covering every square inch of the planet, unaccountable to anyone, with a monopoly on force, that also regularly projects power so everyone ‘gets along’. Which would, of course, eventually also have to use violence to enforce its goals.
But what would ‘getting along’ even mean, when there are major conflicting differences on where a border is, or who gets access to what resources, etc? Or even people with fundamentally conflicted ideas of what ‘true’ is or not?
If there isn’t enough water, or food to go around, who decides who starves or dies of thirst if no one is allowed to fight about it? And if you were one of those picked to starve or die of thirst, what would it take for you to not try to fight it using any means you could find?
For instance, what would it take for Trump and Biden to be ‘at peace’? Or Zelensky and Putin?
So any such force, to ensure peace, would have to either micromanage the world’s population so much it would be a dystopia, or pick and choose ‘the truth’ and murder enough people that no one would have anyone to disagree with anymore, or decide that ‘peace’ just meant something like ‘no one actively nuking anyone’ - in which case the war moves to using a different set of tools.
> plays out in the Chinese Communist party today, albeit with a lot of leeway given to greed.
This is what first came to mind.-
PS. I am inclined to believe - unfortunately - that even if "peace" were to be achieved, men would fight over ... increasingly ideological and vague things, finding any excuse (ie. "Which side of the egg is the "bottom" side ...)
I found the meme "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" recently and thought it was hilarious (pretty sure Banks would have liked it as well) it does rather capture quite a lot about the spirit of the Culture.
I don't think Iain M. Banks is a good writer. (You can see it in this piece, which falls into the trap of using long words to sound clever.) His sci-fi has a serious flaw: it's static. Nothing changes, everything is inevitable, the baddies are predestined to lose. His characters and dialogue are bland.
The books do have a strength, which is the completeness of their picture of the world. The concept of the Culture is interesting. I think it has less to do with the third dimension of space, and more to do with the 1990s. The Culture looks a lot like confident liberal democracy, pitting its advanced tech and cultural openness against its various (doomed) rivals. That's why a lot of the books seem a bit colonial: travel to a small annoying planet, knock some sense into the primitive authorities holding sway. And it also has that 1990s vibe that one side is in the right, and that side is always going to win.
For a contrast, think of The Three Body Problem. It's set on an equally epic scale - but so much more happens!
Banks admits that the Culture itself is kind of boring because it is too perfect - so for most of its teeming trillions living their hedonistic lives on their orbitals life is nice and safe and a bit boring to write about.
So the stories have to deal with the edges of the Culture and the mission of Contact and Special Circumstances to try and make the galaxy that bit nicer by direct interference.
I’m a veteran SF reader but I only read The Culture books for the first time recently, and I agree with you, albeit you have to acknowledge their massive influence on contemporary SF. The Three Body Problem, though, I struggled to finish the first book at all, because I found the prose excruciatingly bad (or more properly I guess, the translation).
As a counterpoint, I found 3 body problem terrible to read (how many pages of trudging through deserts do I have to endure?), and the Culture series delightful.
Not completely wrong - except the bit about blandness. If I want bland characters and dialogue I'll just crack open Three Body Problem again.
Seriously though: Matter, Surface Detail, and Look to Windward are all fairly clear counterexamples to your template.
The first involves an explicit refusal by various advanced civs (including the Culture) to help a deposed leader of one such primitive society to reclaim his throne. The last one deals explicitly and at length with various Culture citizens reckoning with its actions both recent and long past, and the consequences thereof.
Meanwhile, Three Body Problem is an impressive series with interesting ideas which nonetheless left me unmoved. I didn't care about any of the characters, and as someone pointed out elsewhere, the dialogue is not great, which to be fair could just be an issue of translation.
I agree TBP's characters aren't great. It makes up for that by the bold concepts.
I don't think advanced civs not getting involved is a counterexample to the colonialist template. "Get involved or not" was a standard dilemma that e.g. the British Empire, or indeed the US, faced – think of the US after the 1990 Gulf War, for example, debating whether to enter Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. Empires don't always choose to interfere, and non-interference does not mean they exert no effect on their neighbours.
One way to check whether Banks' characters are bland: look through these posts. There's a bunch of fans posting here! Lots of them talking about their favourite books. Not one mention of a favourite character. Now, imagine talking about LOTR without Frodo and Sam, or The Left Hand Of Darkness without its hero.
In the Culture novels, the characters that stand out most to me were his Minds rather than any of the pan-human non-AI. What's most intriguing to me, something I rarely ever see in science fiction is how utterly "human" and warm his AI creations always were. Just read Look to Windward, Masaq Hub in particular, for the ultimate example.
You grant Liu his bold concepts but not Banks? As someone else pointed out, TBP would fit inside the greater Culture universe but not the other way around.
> I don't think advanced civs not getting involved is a counterexample to the colonialist template.
Your criticism was of a supposed simplistic pattern of plotting across the books, not that the Culture's behavior is generally colonialist. The "template" I understood you to be talking about is one of plot.
> One way to check whether Banks' characters are bland: look through these posts.
Yeah I'm not sure about that. What sci-fi novels claim fans with this enthusiasm about the characters? Especially non-serialized space operas?
Even if the characters aren't all-time greats, the personality he writes into even the bit players is commendable. The drone escaping the Peace Makes Plenty at the beginning of Excession comes to mind.
Sci-fi almost always succeeds because it manages to present interesting ideas. Often the writing can be quite poor, I remember some Asimov novels were characters were just defined by a single thing that they believed.
To me the culture series fails, as it has no interesting ideas. "What if we solved every problem", just isn't an interesting premise. There is no interesting conflict that can even exist in the setting, the only thing that the author could come up with were religious fanatics. But the "interesting question" answered there wasn't more interesting then a New Atheist debating some Christian.
> To me the culture series fails, as it has no interesting ideas.
Just one of the subplots of Surface Detail involves a war conducted in virtual reality to decide the continued existence of virtual "hells" which advanced-but-repressive societies use to keep their citizens in line.
> There is no interesting conflict that can even exist in the setting, the only thing that the author could come up with were religious fanatics
How many of the books did you read before reaching this conclusion?
>Just one of the subplots of Surface Detail involves a war conducted in virtual reality to decide the continued existence of virtual "hells" which advanced-but-repressive societies use to keep their citizens in line.
That is not an interesting idea.
>How many of the books did you read before reaching this conclusion?
Consider Phlebas, Player of games, use of weapons. Which definitely was enough for me.
Among other things, it compares the Idirans—who have what we consider a more traditional, modern-day culture—with the Culture. For example:
"The war between the Idirans and the Culture is peculiarly asymmetrical, since the Culture is not an empire, or even a “polity” in any traditional sense of the term, it is simply a culture. It has no capital city, or even any “territory” in the conventional sense."
I also love Heath's criticism of Dune (I appreciate the series, but now can't help but notice how often sci-fi series use regressive social structures).
"In fact, modern science fiction writers have had so little to say about the evolution of culture and society that it has become a standard trope of the genre to imagine a technologically advanced future that contains archaic social structures. The most influential example of this is undoubtedly Frank Herbert’s Dune, which imagines an advanced galactic civilization, but where society is dominated by warring “houses,” organized as extended clans, all under the nominal authority of an “emperor.”"