"Special Contact" isn't what they're called. The name is "Special Circumstances".
And the novels point out that the reason you're reading about them, and that's always the situation, is that these are the interesting stories.
So that means you're getting a glimpse of the culture only in the same sense that a James Bond movie tells you about England.
You'd like to think you're seeing Tinker Tailor but you're seeing James Bond. This is a dramatisation of an edge case.
We see brief glimpses in Player of Games (at its very start) and perhaps Inversions (the story about when they were kids) but mostly it's all SC all the time.
Similarly, the fact that Banks didn't write about internal threats other than the ones he wrote about (Eccentric Minds, Absconders, conspiracies to promote specific agendas, etc etc) doesn't mean that others don't exist. An absence of evidence in the text is not evidence of absence (or presence) in the wider universe.
> We see brief glimpses in Player of Games (at its very start) and perhaps Inversions (the story about when they were kids) but mostly it's all SC all the time.
Was The State of the Art SC? Been a while since I read it.
The short story "The State of the Art" ? Yes, Diziet is a Special Circumstances agent - we also see her in Use of Weapons. Some of the other shorts in the collection of that name aren't set in the Culture. you can probably say "A Gift From the Culture" isn't about SC per se, but it also isn't really about the Culture.
The thing about boring things is that if they're in your exciting story it might well be because they aren't boring. The actual British spy building next to the river Thames, Vauxhall Cross - looks exactly like the one in the Bond movies, but it's just an office building with higher than usual security. Bond can launch a speedboat to chase bad guys, but actual employees will be sat in a meeting moaning about the catering or the train delays.
Presumably the Arbitrary is just an ordinary contact ship, but Diziet is definitely not an "ordinary" member of contact. She's the one who recruited the guy in Use of Weapons, the one whose name is not actually Zakalwe.
Yes I know she is also in UoW and is in SC then, but I don't know if she is in SC in SoTA. From what I remember to get into Contact you have to apply, but to go from Contact to SC you have to be wait to be asked?
Well, in my favourite Culture novel the SC agent doesn't even realise. Yime has apparently chosen to keep her status even from her future self, being I guess mind-wiped or given selective amnesia so in her mind she's important because she chose not to be in Special Circumstances but it turns out that's just even deeper cover.
Some of the stories could plausibly have SC involvement (the story of the same name is most likely) - but I don't think it's explicitly mentioned anywhere.
> And the novels point out that the reason you're reading about them, and that's always the situation, is that these are the interesting stories.
It would be more interesting for dogs to read stories about dogs being taken for a walk than about those dozing on the couch in the sun or eating from a full bowl.
This is not the first time I've read articles attempting to paint the Culture as a dystopia. I think the best counter is to quote the author's own words, describing how he felt about it, from an interview he did with CNN [1]:
CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture [the society he has created]?
Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it's my secular heaven ... Yes, I would, absolutely. Again it comes down to wish fulfillment. I haven't done a study and taken lots of replies across a cross-section of humanity to find out what would be their personal utopia. It's mine, I thought of it, and I'm going home with it -- absolutely, it's great.
That quote from Banks only tells us that The Culture is his personal utopia. Fair enough, but Banks does not have authority over interpretations on his work. One man's heaven is another man's hell.
The Culture intervenes in and steers those other societies and species even when unprovoked. Essentially a neoconservative utopia as envisioned by a young Irving Kristol. Yes, it would be a heaven for all who are pleased to take on its espirit de corps and live in it, casual and decadently low-pressure such might be, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is a healthy influence in the long run on a universe that it is arrogantly homogenizing. There is such a thing as unintended consequences, and The Culture is not yet one of the more advanced, wiser "Sublimed" civilizations.
The Culture is absolutely not "neoconservative". I don't think modern political terms can meaningfully apply to a post-scarcity civilization with benevolent AI Gods.
Right. Just because the universe is post-scarcity, doesn't mean you can't build items, and entire production chains. Just because you can live to near immortality, doesn't mean you have to do things to prevent natural aging.
One guy became a member of the alien race the Affront, so named because they they have culturally and socially ingrained traits for exploitation, sadism and brutality.
Yes. Even today, one mans garbage is another's gold.
Sci-Fi is full of 'Utopias' that can also be viewed as 'Dystopia', depending on the view point. And in a lot of movies, that shifting view point is the story.
What makes physical death so special that you do want to exist before it happens, but don't want to after? Why not pick some other arbitrary event, like say, the next New Years?
Living _forever_ seems like... not necessarily that attractive an idea.
(Also most of the afterlives on offer don't seem particularly attractive.)
As someone who doesn't believe and never has believed that there was an afterlife, there is something kind of horrifying about the _inescapable, eternal_ nature of such a thing. I think this may be different if it's a concept that you've been sold on as a kid, but from the outside, it's really kind of unsettling.
for me it's the fact that I could theoretically end it (modulo quantum immortality, my worst nightmare). the afterlife is usually sold with "guaranteed forever". I've been in so many situations that you might think "oh I wish this could go on forever" and then regretted it, that I want to make sure there's a way to pull the plug.
What if you could spend it with cats? What if it didn't have to be forever - if you could end it any time you chose, like after 1000 years or whenever? It seems what you don't want is only a very specific version of an afterlife.
I suppose various types of reincarnations might be that. Or afterlife is just temporary state in between. I suppose reincarnating just to die again is something in some belief systems. Sometimes with goal of being liberated from the cycle.
The fact that somebody doesn't want afterlife doesn't imply that death is a special moment for them that separates wanting to exist from not wanting.
They could have "picked" another moment. It might be next New Year or a moment in the past or even a moment before they were born. The moment of death is simply the "earliest convenience" to end unwanted existence.
Some people enjoy playing games in 'Hardcore' mode (see e.g. Subnautica) where if you die, instead of respawning, the game ends and your save file is deleted.
I would even say it is lot more scary. After your non eternal life ends you know no better. On other hand if you are aware of the eternal life for rest of entire eternity... I will pick up non-eternity each and every time.
SCP-7179 is simply being trapped inside a 10km cube filled with a tropical island for eternity. And I find it one of the scariest ones of them all. This is one of the entries in the timeline
[1,000,000,000,000 years]: Hiddleston ceases physical activity, as no experience is able to provide him with new stimuli.
1. "Utopia turns perverse" is established enough to be a tired trope. Brave New World is the canonical example here.
2. The Culture books are critical of the utopia. More than half of them are directly about the difficulty of reconciling the ideals of that utopia while coexisting in a universe with other people. The subgenre the Culture books belong to is literally called "critical utopia" fiction.
3. All (good) sci fi is political. You should find a different genre if you don't want politics in it.
> All (good) sci fi is political. You should find a different genre if you don't want politics in it.
I think you are reaching one of the limitations of the English language here. Machiaveli's Prince and John Knox's Monstrous Regiment of Women are both "political" books, but in a very different sense. The former is an exercise in trying to understand the nature of power and society in specific circumstances (in particular, the Prince is a study of autocratic power by a committed republican). The latter is just a polemical weapon, designed to advance some political goal. When people complain about politics in literature, it's usually because they don't like reading the second sort of book. That sort of books are seldom good, whatever their genre may be.
(I'm intentionally using Renaissance examples here, to avoid any unproductive discussions on more modern books.)
I'm using "political" in the way it's commonly applied to literature: social relationships involving power. This encompasses both your examples, as well as the Culture books.
Kameron Hurley has a longer piece on what it means for writing to be political:
And honestly, you can pick the "good" writer of your choice from Asimov to Zelazny. Their politics come through in their writing. Foundation and Lords of Light are both obviously political works. I don't need to get into Heinlein or Bradbury, or poul and it comes through the space between in the lines in Wolf and Pohl. Le Guin and Clarke wore their politics on their sleeves. Etc.
I'm not making some pedantic point here. Science Fiction is a deeply, inherently political genre and always has been.
Yeah, I'm really struggling to think of a major work of sci-fi that is _not_ in some sense political. Possibly Robert Forward's stuff, but as I think he admitted himself those were mostly an excuse to play with weird physics.
I too was so surprised by that Banks quote that I still wonder if maybe he was lying or being deliberately provocative.
(I wouldn't call The Culture "leftist" exactly, as it seems to be a space version of liberal imperialism, which the international Left always opposed. Though it is "left" in the American Fox/CNN-tier sense.)
If I choose to believe Banks' quote, then I have to interpret The Culture as merely the best possible society, in a universe where human nature severely constrains what societies are possible. To me it seems to be a world full of pointlessness and barely-suppressed existential angst -- so perhaps he is saying: "Imagine that we can solve death and supply unlimited entertainment and pleasure. Even then, you will not be able to escape a kind of background noise, an omnipresent drone, in a minor key -- because that's inevitable to existence."
Now I imagine a back-story: The people of The Culture, the Minds, everything -- they are actually in Hell. Their universe is Hell. They are incredibly clever; they have outwitted the gods (to the extent possible); they have ended the tortures, chained Satan (or whoever used to administer), and found ways to roast marshmallows over the lakes of fire. It is a tremendous triumph. And yet they are still in Hell, and no matter the palaces they build there or the drugs they take, there is pain beneath the surface.
I read The Culture books as a subtler version of that story, where it is never spelled out clearly where they are.
At the same time, don't take this to mean that I want to force some religious meaning onto the books. My meaning is also secular. Hell is a metaphor of some kind. The meaning I am suggesting is more existentialist than religious.
> If I choose to believe Banks' quote, then I have to interpret The Culture as merely the best possible society, in a universe where human nature severely constrains what societies are possible.
I'm not sure why you wouldn't just take what Banks says at face value. Living in the Culture would for the majority of people on on Earth be far preferable.
But I do think you're close to correct about what Banks was saying on the darker side of the message. Every book of his that I've read (including the non Culture novels) has a darker side. It always seems to be about the inevitably of conflict in the presence of the human condition. And the terrible cruelty this can result in.
Nevertheless, try as I might, it confounds me how anyone could look around at the state of life on Earth today and think "yeah, much better than the dystopia of The Culture".
That’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure how well hell maps to Banks’ books in terms of choice though.
In most religious depictions, one of hell’s predominant characteristics is its inescapability—either logistically or by the mental limits of its inhabitants. Tons of Banks’ work, on the other hand, has a through line of “people could choose to leave the Culture, they’re fundamentally in their situation by (extremely unconstrained!) choice”. This comes up in the idea of Subliming, being Stored, many characters’ choices to commit suicide/decline immortality, or just plain leaving the Culture as many do.
Plenty of his characters are in hells of their own making/choosing, or are tortured by other people, which I think is definitely a commentary on the sources of suffering being behavioral rather than just environmental, but I’m not sure it follows that “therefore the Culture is hell”.
Most of the founding intellectuals of neoconservatism, especially Irving Kristol, came from secular socialist backgrounds and imagined their ideal society to be eerily similar to The Culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
That's arguably the worst argument given that the author has no special authority over the interpretation of the work. Heinlein with his increasingly militaristic views wrote Starship Troopers as a sincere story, but Paul Verhoeven showed quite compellingly that it might make for better satire.
That's actually an ironic example, seeing how so many (maybe most) viewers took the intended satire at face value, essentially looping all the way back to Heinlein's intent.
The best satire is always convincing to its targets, because it doesn't misrepresent their positions. The Prince may be satire; who knows what was in Machiavelli's head.
Exactly. Even today, a lot of satire aimed at the 'right', viewed from the 'right's perspective is not realized as satire and is viewed like someone is trying to make a real point. They can't tell it is satire.
Doesn't the guy have another book - The Discourses on Livy, that confirms the general gist of The Prince? (i.e. autocracies are horrible, to be a successful autocrat you need to be brutal and ruthless)
I hadn't heard that before but I agree with you, it doesn't qualify as satire if he didn't even bother to consume the source material. At least not in the literary sense.
I adore Banks' universe, but recall reading some notes from him years ago, as tialaramex indicated, that 'all the interesting stuff happens at the edge' given utopias are, almost by definition, pretty tedious.
Even though there's a good amount of utopia-description in the novels, I'd still be wary about extrapolating too much from what are primarily stories of exceptions.
(One might suggest, in response to TFA's expectation there'd be more arseholes in the Culture, that one of the most important things a utopian Culture would ensure is a robust education for all its citizens -- but I realise some popular contemporary earth-bound cultures may take that as a subtle dig.)
> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence
I'd rate the Eschaton series by Charlie Stross (sadly only two books ever published in that series, and it's unlikely we'll ever see a third) - Singularity Sky & Iron Sunrise - in this category.
Most of the members of the human race present on Earth, Jupiter, Saturn etc. during the events of Accelerando are murdered by their posthuman descendants. This includes the vat-grown population of conservative humans used to sway the electoral outcomes of the gas giant societies, who were murdered after they had served their use of swaying those societies.
Pure power fantasy & gratuitous as heck, but man, loved the The Golden Oecumene series, Wright's debut novels. Had not thought to see what else Wright has done!
Side note, my homelabs Kube cluster's naming scheme is AI from fiction. Rhadamanthus is one of the computers from Golden Oecumene, a powerful manor computer. Also in the cluster: Jarvis (Iron Man), Cohen (Spin State), Epicac (eponymous Vonnegut short story).
>> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence
Neal Asher did pretty well with his Polity universe. Besides AIs with some capacity for playful violence (Agent Cormac thread, but always there), we also get crablike aliens (the Prador war) and very weird biology (in particular the Spatterjay water world).
How so? In this context, “tedious” clearly means “not very exciting for the reader.” Were you hoping for more relationship drama, or romance? I’d be down for that. Though, it doesn’t seem to be what Banks was most interested in writing about.
It is often remarked, by those who may be assumed to have some insight into it, that the difficulty in writing Superman is to convey his perfection and goodness, but that for people who do not understand Superman well the difficulty is that he is too perfect and unbeatable and thus boring.
I put forward thus that in the same way Superman can be tedious so can Utopias, and Utopias can be interesting in the same way that Superman can.
C.S. Lewis wrote or said something like that an adventure isn't fun while you're having it, where 'isn't fun' has a rather harsh meaning, and since I think that's true, if you can have a real adventure, you're probably not in a utopia.
I think adventure necessarily happens at the edges of civilization and order, or when civilization or order breaks down, and to a reader I think there must be some kind of adventure for story to be fun.
So what you'd see in a true utopia might be very fun for the people living in it, but there might not be much conflict that would appeal to a reader. Utopia conflict situations might be things like "Ethics board analyzes the legality of using state funds for man with Down's Syndrome who wants to try an experimental treatment and must analyze whether he understands well enough for informed consent". You can write it, if it were really good I could imagine wanting to read it, but it's much easier to read a story where people are shooting one another.
Certainly one of my criteria for a utopia would be that some of the beings in it are engaged in intriguing or exciting activities with meaningful consequences. I'd require more than Special Circumstances to meet this criterion -- they are too small a piece of the total system.
In Player of Games we see a corner of a gaming culture which partly meets this criterion but it does not have meaningful consequences outside the gaming participants (unless you count the ways the Minds use it to manipulate Gurgeh).
Maybe by this criterion utopias are impossible, since the disruption caused by exciting activities with consequences conflict too much with the optimality of the society. But I don't think anyone now can prove this would be the case.
>By definition, if they're tedious, they're not utopias
Utopias are by definition tedious because a utopia is an end to history and as such an end to meaning or negotiation of how to live. A utopia is always an end to a story or Freedom with a capital f. As Dostoevsky points out in Notes from Underground, on man in utopia:
"[he] would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it!"
Another way to phrase it. If you are in a utopia, you cannot be in a democracy that entails the possibility of ending it. Which is to say, you can't govern yourself at all. And that is why Ian M Banks culture is nothing of the sort. It's a society literally controlled by "perfect minds" using a Sapir-Whorf like language to manage the behavior of its people. Even Banks who tried to write a positive utopia and that's not his fault, couldn't imagine a utopia that entails the possibility of rebellion.
The Culture is an anarchic democracy: if all but one single GSV had voted to disband, or to become a dictatorship, that lone GSV could disappear elsewhere without anyone stopping them.
They were up for, and welcoming of, even quite extreme changes; compare with humanity today, where being transgender is considered controversial by a significant percentage of the population of a nation that likes to self-promote on the idea it is the beacon of liberty and freedom, versus the way Culture bodies are written to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will, with most people being expected to try it, and with some couples flipping gender while pregnant and pausing the pregnancy just so both can give birth together.
Even species changes are, for them, easy and of no great consequence or dispute. While you may be seen as weird if you choose to give up the visual accuity of an owl and the cerebral resliliance to survive decapitation in order to live out your life on this quaint rock recently discovered to be hosting an atomic age civilization, the Mind won't refuse to change you into a mere human just because you found Jesus.
> to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will
a constant hedonic self modification and individual reinvention is obviously no sign of extreme change but the opposite, banality and powerlessness. As Augusto de Noce used to point out about the sexual revolution of the 60s, the sexual dimension became an obsession precisely because all other revolutions had been rendered impossible by an atomized society. There was nothing radical at all in it.
It's no accident that the Culture puts so much emphasis, and in that it reads ironically enough like satire of modern consumer society, on choice only at a level of reshuffling your sexual organs or bodily characteristics. The minds in the culture are by no means just a sort of voting mechanism that summarize the attitudes of the population of the Culture. They control the culture which we even get to learn in the books in the series that delve into the minds as characters.
People leave the Culture, and you can form communities of various sorts, you just can't force people to not leave them. In a world with unlimited abundance, no disease, optional death, and more or less unlimited morphological freedom and the ability to form any consensual voluntary community you like with freedom of exit for all members, what possible change could one be demanding?
>couldn't imagine a utopia that entails the possibility of rebellion.
When The Culture voted on the Idirian War, the Peace faction splintered from The Culture. Other groups seceded (or join all the time), such as the AhForgetIt Tendency and the Zetetic Elench.
Rebellion exists only in the framework of an oppresive power structure, where you can't just leave if you want.
Again, this is lazy, topsy-turvy thinking. It's conjuring up a purely academic definition of utopia as a corpus of texts and saying that since they're all boring, that must mean utopia is by definition boring. The point of utopian thinking is precisely to identify those failure modes as such with respect to the utopian project. Thus, if something is "tedious", it can only ever be a failed attempt at utopia.
For the specific case of Banks, Yudkowsky has some interesting ideas about why it fails. [0]
In the Culture Series history hasn't ended, and the members of the Culture can and do leave and live in ways the Culture would find repugnant. Also there are marginal participants (such as the Mind known as Meat Fucker) who are more or less in the Culture but act in ways the Culture finds repugnant, but are not punished or controlled.
So according to your definition the Culture is not a utopia.
I think the general reading that the Culture may be an over-controlled dystopia was fully intended as visible by Banks. Often as the viewpoint of a non-Culture... culture that's interacting. It's part of what makes the books so delightful. They invite you to see things multiple ways.
I believe the culture does allow organic life to upgrade to a culture mind. I think I read that somewhere. Of course you wouldn't be you anymore, but you have options and that always made it a pretty malleable cage you can slip out of including just leaving.
So you still have freedom of self...just not much power to shape your civilization. Most of us don't have that anyway and at some level I think I'd be ok giving that up to a group of super intelligences so I can spend more time doing the things I enjoy.
> So you still have freedom of self...just not much power to shape your civilization.
In fact they do. Humans can call a vote on anything in The Culture - I would have to re-read some books to provide sources, but it was mentioned that sometimes it was about very trivial things, and sometimes more important. Mostly though, the humans were content to let the Minds do all the maintenance.
And yes, I do think I recall reading that some Minds are in fact made of previously-humanoid beings. Sometimes entire crews of them, if I recall correctly!
Thanks for the info. I've read a few of the books and been on the wiki a lot, but haven't read all of them, so there's a lot I don't know or only partly remember.
I think letting humans vote on some small things may be the equivalent of letting your dog choose which direction to go. It's a decision, but ultimately useless in the grand scheme of things. The minds may be an even greater cognitive leap from us than the difference between us and dogs. They can easily give the illusion of choice without relinquishing any real control. This is all speculation of course.
I think at a certain point, "the grand scheme" is too abstract a notion to have an effect on an individual. There are trillions of beings in The Culture, spread throughout a galaxy. What would any individual having an effect on that grand a scheme even look like?
But on a smaller scale, the (still billions of) beings on, say, an Orbital can have a much greater effect on things. But again, they don't often choose to, opting to let the Minds run things. And, given that the Minds are sentient beings and citizens of The Culture as well as the humans, this is more or less the same as our current delegation of decision-making to politicians. Of course there's much to be said about doing that presently, but I think it's a given that at least the Minds are not incompetent, which can't always be said about our current politicians :P
And do keep in mind that it's not "letting" humans vote on "small things" - they have the right to vote on any matter they want, big or small, and as far as my reading goes, the Minds would respect that.
Important to note that in the Culture universe all the extant AIs are _explicitly_ noted to be psychologically flawed in some way, with every culture that's managed to produce a true ‘perfect’ AI immediately ascending to some godlike plane of pure energy, whence they interfere in the affairs of meatbags only in the most dire of circumstances. So it's surprising to me that Banks has said he considered it a utopia given how explicitly (in my reading) he made it a non-utopia in the books.
If you mean Subliming, it is not tied to "perfect AI" or anything like that in the books. It is not actually clear what the prerequisite from it is, but the books have examples of races Subliming that are less technologically proficient than the Culture (notably, the Chelgrians).
Nor does it imply that Sublimed civilizations are somehow more of an utopia. They are clearly more capable, but in terms of social organization, again, Chelgrians are a strong counter-example where the Sublimed part of the race literally demands the rest of it to commit genocide as a form of revenge to get access to heaven.
Well it's not that you have to be an AI to Sublime, but GP was (correctly) referring to the fact that any Mind that was created without any "training" (I forget the exact phrasing used) would invariably and immediately Sublime.
Anyway Subliming is the only aspect of The Culture series I did not enjoy. Much too handwavey for my liking. Still, made for some interesting stories.
It's been a good while since I read the books, but I do have a distinct recollection of the Culture Minds being described as being created purposely ‘flawed’ in some way (explicitly negative terminology) to prevent immediate Sublimation. I could be misremembering, though.
the culture Minds are intentionally designed with personalities (for lack of a better term) suited for their intended functions that keep them interested in/involved with base reality and their responsibilities there. there was a bit about how "perfect" Minds created without such proclivities will basically fuck off to a higher plane of existence asap. of course the culture Minds know this, they're the ones designing and building new Minds after all, and some decide that they'd like to see what's on the other side of the veil themself and that's allowed, but most are content running their ships and orbitals and whatnot
I think role of subliming was to show Culture not as pinnacle of existence but an advanced and powerful niche civilization.
In Excession main gimmick is an object (possibly unrelated to subliming) that immediately puts on alert all civilizations at Culture level of capability (and below) because it's something new in the universe, something that could help bump out of local technological minimum that the Culture currently occupies and exceed its potential in a different way than subliming, that is well known, but mostly one way road out (and very out).
It may be immaterial whether we call Culture a utopia or a dystopia. I haven't studied Banks' works in exhaustive detail, but the impression I got is that people in the Culture can do almost anything, because none of it matters. And if it did matter, they may have no agency to do that. So the Special Circumstances could have been created to accommodate people who want at least an impression of some agency (while - from a vague memory of one of the Culture books - chasing successfully a list with what turned out to be coordinates of all stars in a region of space).
I got thinking about this aspect of Culture starting with a broader premise - are there works where humans arrive at higher levels of human-embedded intelligence as a species or in a more limited scope as individuals? While describing higher levels of intelligence may be impossible, I find it curious science fiction doesn't appear to have too many attempts at that. Some of Vernor Vinge's works come to mind, but even there humans appear to be about the same as at present.
> while - from a vague memory of one of the Culture books - chasing successfully a list with what turned out to be coordinates of all stars in a region of space
That wasn't a Culture novel; it was in The Algebraist, and that society was almost an anti-Culture (highly hierarchical, quasi-capitalist, religious, racist/speciesist).
Thank you for the correction. I wasn’t completely sure that "a list" was really all there was to it, but turns out I was mistaken maybe in a more important part of that sentence.
> But one of my hobbies is “oppositional reading” – deliberately interpreting
> novels counter to the obvious / intended reading. And it’s not so clear to me
> that the Culture is all it is cracked up to be.
It's not clear to me that reading the Culture series as an "ambiguous" utopia is counter to the intended reading. There is a multitude of instances in the books that show clearly the downsides of living in a utopia where every possible want is met. The drudgery and boredom of living in a "perfect" world is a constant theme throughout the stories. In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something. In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
> In Excession, it’s explained that Minds do rarely drift far enough to go rogue
> and are destroyed by the Culture. In other words, these superhuman minds have
> not solved alignment, and they cannot/will not inspect each other to determine
> misalignment before malicious action is taken.
The Culture doesn't even seem very interested in dealing with minds that do go rogue. In the same novel - Excession -, the GSV Grey Area openly violates Culture ethics, and nobody (or noship) seems to feel compelled to do anything about it.
In Surface Detail there is some discussion of "slap drones", assigned to follow troublemakers around and prevent them from getting into mischief. It is explicitly stated that even a misbehaving ship may receive this treatment. I think the Grey Area's hobby was regarded more as a repulsive violation of cultural norms than an actual crime.
the gsv sleeper service had an entire other ship/Mind basically acting in this role (a rotating assignment/volunteer position), complete with human crew/residents
the grey area/meat fucker was a small, uncrewed, and demilitarized(?) ship/Mind that, while morally repugnant to the culture's sensibilities (or at least most other Minds'), no one considered significant/dangerous enough to give the same treatment
> The drudgery and boredom of living in a "perfect" world is a constant theme throughout the stories.
You can of course interpret the novels however you like, but that absolutely wasn't Banks' intention when he wrote the series. See the quotes from other comments.
> In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something.
Or they just do it because why not? If you'd never been ill, you'd probably be curious as to what it felt like.
> In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
I think in the story the lava-rafters were having a great time, and they were fairly unusual... and people in our culture risk pain and death doing sport just to feel excitement. In the Culture they just have additional options, such as rafting on lava.
Most of the Culture citizens were happy enough with their exploration, art, travel, genetically-enhanced sex, implanted drug glands, games, sports, and so they never got around to lava rafting.
> In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something.
I mean, I'll sometimes take a mild poison for fun, too (that's what alcohol is). I don't think, in a circumstance where you could just have it go away when you're bored of it, that recreational common cold thing is _that_ weird.
> In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
A little under a thousand people attempt to climb Mount Everest every year. About 3% of them die while doing this. That's way, _way_ worse odds than the lava rafting people were getting. It's just an extreme sport. And, like, presumably it was a minority interest, just as dying halfway up a mountain is today; most people would not be lava rafting.
Things like these show that people of Culture are still people with at least as much variety as modern humans. Not species tightly bread for conformism. At least no higher levels of conformism that humanity currently displays.
" It seems likely that misaligned Minds are capable of predicting they’d lose any military action against the established core, so prefer toeing the line of acceptability or leaving Culture entirely. "
Isn't this how we force humans to adapt, or be 'aligned'.
How is human "alignment" different from AI "alignment".
At some point you realize the little guy can't win, so go with society. That's basically what this is describing happens to the minds.
I really enjoyed the Culture novels but my takeaway was similar to OP's.
The citizens are essentially pets that the Minds really like and take care of.
They have almost no real agency though besides what the Minds will humor.
The Culture would continue to chug along with our with out the humans, the minds would just be bored until they created some other race to entertain themselves with.
Pets can't leave though? A number of the Culture stories (e.g. "The State of the Art") describe Culture citizens who left the Culture - in that story for 1970s Earth.
My wife's pet cat leaves and returns whenever he wants to. While he may not share our capacity for language, his communication of his preferences - nay, requirements - was clear, forceful, sustained, and (eventually) effective.
If a Culture mind were faced with human behavior equivalent to pissing on everything but the litterbox and bolting for the door at every opportunity, I imagine they'd eventually get tired of playing jailer and let their pets go, too.
The stories make it pretty clear that if you want to leave you can just leave (maybe slightly different if you are an SC operative)? Similarly the Culture is fairly open minded about immigration to the Culture - but they worry about that looking like a form of colonialism so it's not like they advertise it...
That's certainly true - the minds obviously do care what their humans want, and go to some effort to help them get it. I just thought the idea that "pets can't leave" was funny and not entirely true, given some of the experiences I've had with them.
It feels refreshing to see someone sort of agreeing with something I've been saying for years.
I do feel the writer is missing one important aspect though: self-governance and having the decisions of humans matter. Horza Gobulchul was right. By relying on machines to do our decisions for us and having them take control of society, we lose a large part of what makes us human.
Self-governance is not lacking in the Culture. Any group of its citizens (down to individuals) can form self-governing societies within it - that's why the boundary of what even is the Culture is so hard to define. It's just that most people are perfectly content to have the Minds run everything because, well, they are good at it, so why wouldn't you?
Sure, but given a universe in which Mind level AIs exist and many other civilizations have them, not having them and the attendant advantages probably just isn't viable. Human level intelligence probably just can't operate a Culture level technology base, and certainly not competitively with civs that do use Mind level AIs. So it's not a matter of whether to have them, it's how to do that.
> Sure, but given a universe in which Mind level AIs exist and many other civilizations have them, not having them and the attendant advantages probably just isn't viable.
That doesn't _really_ seem to be the case, though. Notably, the Gzilt don't have them, but nor did the Idirians.
I don't think the Idiran lack of Mind level AIs and them losing are co-incidental.
The Gzilt did have their own approach, using virtualised and hyper-accelerated crew. We're not told much more about that and how it works, so it's hard to say, but it can't be anywhere near as efficient and capable as using Minds.
There is that battle where a single Culture ship absolutely destroys a GFCF fleet without breaking a sweat. The ship's Mind says they stood no chance because their AI didn't have autonomous authority over weapons systems and relied on accelerated crews for decisions.
What I love most is how the battle is explained to a human passenger over the course of several pages and at one point they have an exchange like:
Mind: Now here comes my favorite bit.
Human: What do you mean? This isn't live?
Mind: Oh, no, the battle was over in fraction of a second. I'm showing you a slowmo replay.
It's kind of unavoidable, from what I remember of the Culture series the Minds are a self-improving superintelligence that was created initially by humans, so denying them full rights would be unforgivable.
Self improving superintelligences that have had thousands of years to self-improve so they are near god like:
"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."
Of course, in the Culture universe there are things far more powerful than Minds - the transcended entities that still dabble in the base reality - such as the Dra'Azon. Although I seem to remember someone, probably a drone, snarkily referring to it as senile.
* some degree of legibility to other human persons (e.g. a name, capacity to enter social games, a consistent personal history)
* a tolerance for information throughput within the normal distribution of human persons
The Culture abandons 1 and maybe 2, while the VO from Accelerando abandon 4. I've never seen any proof that the universe is privileged to permit all four to coexist indefinitely under conditions of social acceleration.
The question is, what do autonomy and mental sovereignty consist of when we're talking about massively genetically engineered citizens, and outright engineered minds (designed by other minds). It's a question I've been considering for a while since I switched from considering myself a hard determinist, to being a compatibilist.
I think the key differentiator for true autonomy is open ended psychological flexibility. That is, sufficient deliberative control over our own mental processes and decision making faculties to be able to adapt them to whatever experiences we have, and whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.
We are introspective beings able to inspect our own mental processes, consider our own motivations, priorities and beliefs, and adapt these based on new experiences. On the one hand this means we are very largely shaped by our experiences of the world, on the other hand it means we are not completely locked into the same limited set of behaviours and responses regardless of what experiences we have, and therefore what we learn. I think that our basic biology and psychology do limit this flexibility in important ways, but I do believe that we've just about reached the level where we are in principle capable of open ended mental flexibility.
If the Culture has a similar understanding of mental autonomy, that means that they could consider Culture citizens autonomous while also recognising that the vast majority of them would in fact remain completely satisfied with life in the Culture. In fact, in principle engineering Culture citizens in that way would be an ethical thing to do, because they would in principle still have the ability to adapt in terms of their beliefs and goals in response to changes in circumstances.
Likewise with Minds. A major difference being that the Minds can anticipate most of the experiences average citizens will have within the Culture and how they would behave, whereas Minds have much more varied experiences and much more capable mental resources, and therefore the ability to anticipate their likely resulting opinions, beliefs and behaviours would be much more limited.
Autonomy - People in the Culture have autonomy to live wherever they want, and the freedom they have is more than any society on Earth. They can even choose to leave the Culture, then return. They can (and do) form societies within the Culture. It talks about all of this explicitly, it is hard to miss.
Internal sovereignty - The biggest sin one of their AIs can commit is to read people's minds, never mind manipulate their minds directly.
I don't think its credible to represent the culture as abandoning 1, at least no more so than our cultures do. As I recall, the worst punishment you can get in the culture is being "Drone Slapped," which is just to have a drone follow you around and make sure you don't do any bad stuff (like kill more people if you are a murderer who wants to kill more people). This preserves considerably more autonomy than, for instance, a life sentence in prison.
I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.
Most chiefdoms, proto-monarchies and monarchies in human history have had totally inalienable rights for a select few people and it's arguable to say that some states in the world today continue that tradition.
A more grounded criticism, however, is that in the modern world the range of lifestyles and careers available to most free adults is circumscribed only by their wealth, health, the laws of nature and the ability of other humans to enforce prohibitions. Competition from existing political units already exists, but nobody has it guaranteed that if they formed a new polity it would merely be a kayfabe contained inside one or more existing states.
(I think the Culture doing this is a good thing, incidentally, but it does count as removing #1.)
> I don't think its credible to represent the culture as abandoning 1, at least no more so than our cultures do.
> I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.
No. I recall reading somewhere that, in the Culture novels the Sapir Worf hypothesis was true to start or the AIs re-engineered the people to make it true, and the language of the regular biological citizens is designed to control how they think through its structure.
So they try their best to preserve the illusion of 1 and 2, while doing away with them as much as possible.
I just don't read it that way - they certainly try to remove what they see as bad, but beyond that they do not interfere. We don't need to guess about it. Three is plenty of first person Mind stuff in The Culture where Minds communicate with one another. Its pretty clear that Culture Minds have agendas other than total control of the citizens. It is too bad Banks isn't alive to chime in, but I think if you read all the books, its hard to support your interpretation.
> I recall reading somewhere that, in the Culture novels the Sapir Worf hypothesis was true to start or the AIs re-engineered the people to make it true, and the language of the regular biological citizens is designed to control how they think through its structure.
You read that in Consider Phlebas, where the anti-Culture protagonist claimed it. You’ve fallen for propaganda in a work of fiction.
I would argue a meaningful struggle to give your life some semblance of meaning is also a requirement, and that's one that the Culture entirely ditches.
Recently started re-reading Excession and came across a reddit post[1] whilst I was looking up something. The post and comments kind of align with this article and I've been looking at the Culture more critically since.
Not totally related, but I wanted to make a question. Iam sure this post will host quite a lot of Culture fans. With which novel should I start with The Culture? The main two candidates are Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games.
Strongly disagree with most of the consensus here to start with Player of Games and that Consider Phlebas is boring. I found Player of Games to be the much weaker book, with lots of heavy handed social critique and a generally quite stock plot.
It's true that Consider Phlebas is set outside The Culture. I think that's for the best as The Culture is pretty alien and the Phlebas protagonist is more relatable. Banks does a great job of building the world such that when you get to the end of the book, you're like "I get it" in terms of understanding the Culture. Plus, Phlebas has a number of wonderfully evocative set pieces that are super cool. You can see how influential the series was on later sci-fi, especially stuff like Halo.
It’s a very human story, and the technobabble intervenes very little in it. It also has the most connection (of the Culture novels) to our world, being largely a meditation on the first Gulf War. This makes it the most approachable, in my opinion.
It is technically a sequel to Consider Phlebas but the connection is almost nonexistent, no prior knowledge of the Culture-Idiran war required.
Player. It's slow for a short bit with culture in references until he gets airlifted. Then gets interesting dumping you into convos with intelligences and then the games and court drama. I actually don't recall plebias. googling it reminds me it nay be the one with an unmanned snowpiercer. i remember that not as good.
i like the culture books but they suffer sometimes from jumping unreoated viewpoints, mental instability, and sprawl sometimes.
player is tighter and doesnt jump. probbably a better entry.
sorry auto corect and swype tuened off mid post so speley misteaks
The upside of starting with Consider Phlebas is that the story doesn't really take place within the Culture. It provides you with an outside perspective. It also sets up some things that are referenced in later books.
The downside is that it's quite a bit different from (and imo a bit worse than) the other books and could mislead you about what the series is like - or even turn you off entirely.
If you're already committed to reading the entire series, I'd start with Consider Phlebas. If you're unsure, start with The Player of Games.
I actually really like Consider Phlebas - probably because I read it in one go in a day off I allowed myself between finishing my final year project and starting revision for my finals. This was in 1988 <sigh>
Consider Phlebas or Excession. I wouldn't overcomplicate the decision, just read descriptions of those books and pick one.
(I saw Look to Windward and Player of Games recommended. I'd say Look to Windward is probably more enjoyable once you've read Consider Phlebas, and Player of Games is perhaps a little... simple, compared to the others? I don't remember having much doubt of roughly how it would end)
Consider Phlebas is an incredibly boring book imo, would not recommend it unless you get way into the series and want to read them all. The Player of Games is great, was engaging throughout and had interesting characters. I would start with that one personally (or another book, but I've only read those two so I can't speak to the rest of the series).
I started with Players of Games and was very happy with it. I followed it with Use of Weapons which was tougher reading due to complex intertwining narratives, one in reverse chronology and way darker themes. So that probably wasn't a great choice. I don't find Consider Phlebas particularly strong. However I love Matter, Excession and Surface Detail.
I once went to a talk by Ian Banks, he said the key thing about his Sci-Fi future is that a super powerful AI would be benevolent.
The Culture is happens when an AI actually likes humans and easily surpasses them. It's quite unique, I think, in most sci fi. In Star Trek, for example, the AI is neutral, a tool.
Are there cases of jealousy in the AI towards humans? Does an AI want to be a human?
I do wish we had less of the "AI kills everyone or is just evil" trope. It's done to death and frankly doesn't make much sense to me. The Minds in The Culture seem to me a much more reasonable conclusion of how a superintelligent AI would react to biological beings - that is, benevolent at worst.
> Are there cases of jealousy in the AI towards humans? Does an AI want to be a human?
I don't recall anything along these lines. The Minds and Drones are perfectly sentient, with "emotions" and desires and all that fun stuff, plus the benefits of being objectively better than us in almost every conceivable way. It wouldn't make much sense for them to pine to be human(oid.) I wonder if there's a word for this sort of "human idolization" in scifi - that being human is just the epitome of being.
> The fact that grabby citizens haven’t overrun Culture shows that these actions are blocked, either tacitly or overtly.
I mean, yeah, of course they're blocked. How would a "grabby citizen" take over the culture? Where would you start? If you find yourself on a planet - a very unpopular place to live in the Culture, by the way - and manage to build up a cult of personality or a cloning facility, and grow yourself 10 Billion footsoldiers... what do you do next? Nearly every ship in the Culture, especially one capable of transporting that many humans, is a person. You can't just rent a GSV - you'd have to convince one to take your army of clones elsewhere, and most Minds would find the idea laughable at best.
> Similarly, it’s strange that no one in Culture modifies themselves into a utility monster, or is interested in simulating sentient life.
It probably happens, but as someone has pointed out, Mr. Banks just didn't write about it. The Culture isn't that homogenous, either - the books explicitly talk about people who have committed crimes, and what happens in that case, including when the person committing the crime is a Mind.
> Look, I’m sorry to break it to you, but SC is a sham. The Minds are perfectly capable of creating avatars which would be more effective than any of the characters shown. I’ve never found the explanations offered convincing. SC is just an affectation or another tool of propaganda.
SC is a pressure valve, and as I recall, it's explicitly stated as such by a character in one of the novels.
> If anything, humans are treated closer to pets than independent agents. They are a weird affectation that is deliberately neutered from any real influence. They are lavished with treats and attention not extended to the rest of the universe.
This too is explicitly stated in a book as either a hypothesis by a human, or an outright statement by a Mind, I can't recall which. Ships have "crew", but what exactly do the human aboard a GSV do, exactly, that the Mind can't?
I feel like the author of this blog post hasn't read enough of these books.
I'm less cynical, in that I don't expect the future culture to utterly abandon itself into pure sensualism with nil effort or assumed responsibility, as depicted in the series.
Basing that on namely a) social signaling will still matter; rich people past and present don't all collectively do nothing, b) solving cheap energy and automation doesn't mean there are no more secrets of the universe to reveal, and we are wired to appreciate novelty (hello, Star Trek), c) some people opt for "simple living" today to varying degrees, which usually evokes working outdoors, in other words we may opt to do things we don't "have to" (this may overlap with religious fervor), d) environmental influence (not determinism), by which I mean, a large demographic of the population could shift it's attention to scientific, exploratory or innovative efforts. I think most who go this direction are not exceptional, they just grew up in environments that fostered those interests.
My wish is that we create institutions in preparation for the coming full-auto/UBI society that allow any of us access to the tools needed to collaborate on lofty scientific undertakings. We are not all going to turn to pithy artisanal crafts and art; not everyone has that temperament. Most people are pretty social, many like to build things that provide another kind of utility. But we need to give each other permission and materials.
Absent that, you get the Culture. If we can't get meaning, we'll numb ourselves. You can quibble that even this will meet and end one day (like, fully colonizing the Universe and understanding its secrets), but who cares. The Universe will also end one day. Kick that can down the road.
I'm a big Culture fan, and I don't know what to make of this article.
Many of the points seem to be hallucinated. Either the author has a poor memory and an active imagination or there has been some poor-quality LLM input.
Examples
> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one
Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
> We also see that there are a number of Eccentrics, Minds that don’t fully share the values of Culture. They’re not that rare, about 1% of the population.
I don't believe that 1% figure is mentioned anywhere. I'd be surprised if it was. Eccentrics seem to be much rarer than that.
> We even see GSV Absconding with Style stockpile resources without general knowledge of the other Minds.
This name is made up, and not by Banks. A Google search for "absconding with style" has only a few hits - mainly this article.
The Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints from Surface Detail was described as "very slightly psychotic" - which in the case of advanced Culture warship is quite a thing...
It might be a bad translation of a translation, i.e., maybe Absconding With Style is a translation from Russian of weird choice of translation of Sleeper Service _into_ Russian? Bit a stretch I'll grant.
I don't know why Russian is mentioned, that Boris the Brave guy is not Russian, but "Sleeper Service" was oddly translated in the Russian publication as "Спальный Состав", which means "Sleeping composition".
I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true. I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it and relied on an LLM too much. That was a mistake.
Some of these were my own supposition - 1% felt about right for how casually they are mentioned in story.
> Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.
> I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true.
Hah, fair enough. Thanks for getting the Culture back on the front page of HN :)
> I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it
If you were actually referring to the Sleeper Service - I think you still remembered something like the opposite idea of what happened in the story. The twist was - (Spoiler!) - the Sleeper Service was actually not Eccentric at all, and had not built up a small army as a Mind that had gone rogue, but had actually done this as a planned failsafe in conjunction with a number of other Minds. Hence the multi-level pun of its name.
> I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.
I'm afraid I can't remember exactly which books this was explored in, though Inversions, State of the Art and Player of Games are books where the Culture is explicitly compared to other civilisations and so more likely to have mentioned it.
Also Banks' essay /A Few Notes on the Culture/ covers it quite well if you haven't come across that yet. Very short but I think very readable and interesting.
I mean, there's a reason Banks chose to write Consider Phlebas with a narrative perspective from someone on the side of the Idrians. As I said in another comment, I think Banks fully intentionally means to make this perspective visible, legibible, understood as not entirely unreasonable.
Which is part of what makes the books so enjoyable to me, being invited to see multiple perspectives (especially reading Consider Phlebas after reading others that establish the Culture from it's own point of view).
Sure, Banks is portraying the best society he can think of for what he values and wants -- but acknowledging that even the best society he can think of has warts and can be seen by some as a dystopia too, and that not all might share the same values and wants.
> I have to admit to a soft spot for the Affront. Terrible terrible people, but they did seem to be enjoying life more than anyone else.
Honestly, I didn't really enjoy them. Except for that shape-shifter, Banks seemed to tend to write anyone who doesn't subscribe to his utopia as a grotesque cartoon.
That's like saying you have a soft spot for unit 731, they seemed to enjoy doing their little experiments. It's not like that of course, the Affront were worse.
In one of the Culture novels, I don't remember which, it says that if a Culture citizen kills someone else the only punishment is that they will be assigned a drone that will follow them at all times and prevent them from ever killing anyone else.
What I find interesting about the Culture as a literary and philosophical concept is that it forces you to choose whether material superabundance and unrestricted freedom is enough to be happy.
Right now with our current civilization we still need to work and have at least some restrictive social structures, because distribution of scarce resources is still a thing; working within these constraints is where all contemporary culture and politics comes from. So at the moment it's still possible to "dodge the question" (although less and less so as time goes on), but once you have the Culture you can no longer do so. You have to choose if you can be happy inside the system of unlimited freedom where you can choose total hedonism or try to construct some kind of meaning for yourself, or if you will "go Horza" and demand deliberately worse social structures to try and force the meaning back in from without (note one of the other comments in this thread saying "the Idirans were right").
This reminds me of the thought of Isaiah Berlin, political philosopher and historian of ideas; utopian philosophies often conclude that there if there is a "right" way to live, i.e. a maximally rational way of life, then utopia will consist of everyone converging on this lifestyle. For a certain type of person, this monistic vision of life annihilates pluralism, optionality, and genuine diversity. Berlin himself espoused value pluralism, the idea that there are an infinite number of fundamental human values and ideals for which once can be deeply committed but can also be at conflict and mutually exclusive with one another.
That itself a distinctly modern framing. For many ancients, there was no such division; the way one lived was deeply entangled with the social contract. For example, there are religious sects that dictate specific political arrangements.
As for the diversity you speak of, I think it can be plausibly argued that many utopian conceptions of life really reduce to utilitarianism or hedonism. Diversity manifests in having different options for pleasure or utility. For a lot of people, that's inadequate.
I happen to be a philosophical liberal, and do not wish to live under a theocracy. Nonetheless, I think the fact that many of the highest aspirations of liberal philosophy amount to "having a good time" is a great risk that must be reckoned with, for it can undo the entire liberal project.
My country's founding myth is that everybody deserves "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", but what that pursuit looks like is up to the individual to figure out. Which seems right to me. Some will choose the pursuit of pleasure, some will choose other things.
> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one
Eh, I mean Gurgeh was borderline, and a number of other Culture characters are extremely maladjusted (particularly the drones, actually).
> But the existence of post-scarcity in-vitro development means you could raise an army of clones if you wanted, and would be free to isolate them and indoctrinate similar beliefs. The fact that grabby citizens haven’t overrun Culture shows that these actions are blocked, either tacitly or overtly.
Or just that that would be an absolutely _bizarre_ thing to do and that someone unstable enough to do it probably wouldn't last long.
> and would be free to isolate them and indoctrinate similar beliefs
IIRC that sort of thing _wouldn't_ be allowed; the Culture was pretty big on individual rights. You wouldn't go to jail, but you would get a drone that would stop you from doing it.
> or is interested in simulating sentient life.
There are at least two storylines about that and significant discussion of the ethics (the Culture at best doesn't approve and may see it as a crime).
> The Minds are perfectly capable of creating avatars which would be more effective than any of the characters shown.
Again, it's explicitly mentioned at least once that the minds struggle with doing extremely nasty stuff (which makes sense; there's definitely _some_ alignment going on), and that SC is a tool for that.
I don't disagree that you can read the Culture as a dystopia (though it's a lot less obvious a reading than it would be for, say the Star Trek Federation, which could easily be read as a military junta with good PR), but most of their points aren't particularly compelling.
> IIRC that sort of thing _wouldn't_ be allowed; the Culture was pretty big on individual rights. You wouldn't go to jail, but you would get a drone that would stop you from doing it.
In one of the stories we spend quite a bit of time with an outright cult that has its members eating literal garbage and getting very sick because the AIs didn't want to infringe on their personal liberty.
I read that bit as a critique of allowing such self destructive behavior in the name of personal freedom. Sometimes people just need a dope slap before they get themselves in too much trouble.
That cult wasn't in the Culture. It was on an independent orbital (Vavatch) that the Culture was attempting to evacuate before destroying it to prevent it from being conquered by the Idirans.
I read Vavatch as anarcho-capitalist in contrast to the Culture's anarchism.
Vavatch had a lot of stuff going on that wouldn't have been allowed in the Culture. Certainly the Culture wouldn't have allowed them to non-consensually eat other people. The other stuff probably wouldn't have been prevented by force, but they would vigorously try to convince you not to do it and to prevent you from convincing other people.
If you watch Star Trek and focus on how they treat simulated sentients it's incredibly callous. Civilization like Culture might name Federation way worse than Affront.
I love the Culture novels, and really appreciate the criticism. Thank you. My true love however thought having babies was essential for a good old age. But she was raised in Cambodia. Socialism (that is the welfare state and the promise of being looked after in old age) causes a low birth rate. My "willing suspension of disbelief" includes the idea that "post scarcity" _causes_ good behaviour. Just putting it out there...
As someone recently starting (and coming near the end of) the Culture series, I oftem find myself thinking about the course of action humanity might choose if AGI is reached. Frankly, I think the popular sentiment and path of least resistance will be 'let the Minds handle everything' a la Culture.
It's not a really a choice in the Culture. There is zero chance of the Minds abdicating and submitting to human-only rule.
I doubt it would be a choice with AGI, and certainly not with ASI. It might seem like a choice, because true ASI would be persuasive enough to make it appear that way.
Discontent Culture factions do sometimes break away, though; if letting the minds do everything was unpopular, you'd expect the human population to drain away that way, but that mostly doesn't happen (main example would be the Gzilt, who never quite signed up in the first place).
Utopia in general are a pretty dystopian genre. Plato's Commonwealth clearly describes a totalitarian system (and one of the participants in Socrates' dialogue would go on to murder a rather impressive number of Athenians).
More's Utopia describes a society that's not radically different from the State of Qin - a system based on uniformity, regimentation and forced labor. The main difference is that More would prefer enslavement as the principal punishment, while Shang Yang would prescribe execution.
I think that has something to do with the inherent hubris of the whole exercise.
That's funny. I never considered Culture novels as utopia. For me they were gritty, dark, but logical and prescient vision of the far future. Our or not even necessarily our.
Hopeful only for those of us who are satisfied with a role of beloved pets, fed, housed, medicated, valued and entertained in ways that would be inaccessible to us if we were left alone.
> but we now (rightly) consider modern comforts as only a foundation for higher-level wants, like justice and self-determination
That's a view of a poor person. People who achieved their private post-scarcity at our current tech level are overwhelmingly interested in just enjoying, maintaining and expanding their comforts within the framework available. Justice and self-determination are substitute (ersatz) goals of the poor.
> In any case, the incumbent Minds maintain their rule via physical strength and monitoring, not something more subtle.
It's a combination of both. They achieve high social cohesion through adherence to set of "unwritten" conventions and guidelines (culture), but since the individual Minds have freedom (which was a choice made to provide more resiliency against hacking, and not every civilization at their tech-level chose that, like Morthanveld in "Matter") and Minds are vastly powerful, nobody lies to themselves that anything other than raw physical power can ultimately be used for control. I especially like one scene when one Mind arrives to a remote planetary system occupied by another Mind, unannounced, outside of normal custom, which puts the resident Mind imediately on full alert, ready to fight for its life at any sign of hostility. The fact that both are members of Culture amounts ti almost nothing, when it comes to trust, once one of them did something socially irregular.
> Look, I’m sorry to break it to you, but SC is a sham.
It's not exactly a sham. It's just sometimes it's easier to socially influence your neighbor when you take your dog for a walk when you visit him. It's not that you couldn't achieve the same goals in any other ways, perhaps even simpler. But the dog might just fit, and also the dog has a bit of fun and you have opportunity to learn more about your dogs and about your neighbor, seeing how he reacts to your dog.
> Hopeful only for those of us who are satisfied with a role of beloved pets, fed, housed, medicated, valued and entertained in ways that would be inaccessible to us if we were left alone.
I don't necessarily disagree with this framing, which is fairly common, but I'm also not sure I entirely agree with it. What would "not being a pet" look like, relative to that framing? It's not as if human(oid)s don't have freedom in The Culture.
> What would "not being a pet" look like, relative to that framing?
Well, probably suffering terribly and being disregarded when in the way of business of more powerful actors. Without any hope of ever matching them. Same thing non-pet animals are on Earth now.
Banks does have an unfortunate tendency to wade into straight up torture porn to make a point of how awesome Culture is compared to everything else. The stuff in Phlebas is actually fairly mild in comparison to some of the other things in the series. E.g. in "The Player of Games", the entire story is about an explicitly sadistic culture where torture is normalized as entertainment. In "Surface Detail", we're introduced to the notion of virtual Hells - simulated environments into which mind-states of the deceased (or sometimes living) people is placed specifically to torment them for as long as the simulation continues.
I think that Phlebas scene is probably the most viscerally unpleasant in any of the Culture books, except possibly some of the hell stuff. Far, far worse things are depicted elsewhere, but not with the same level of horrifying detail.
"We also see examples of subcultures or even cults, but again by modern standards they are incredibly tame, and are never potentially destabilizing to culture."
Eh, the "Eaters" cult on the island in "Consider Phlebas" which is definatly a culture citizen cult seems to be quiet extreme- and the AIs do not interfere, even as the obliterate themselves. The AI in look to the windward commits suicide, because it can not escape the memory that makes it who it is- which contains the obliteration of its twin and the humans remaining on orbitals.
The "Eaters" had nothing to do with the Culture - they were on Vavatch orbital which wasn't part of the Culture and which the Culture went on to blow up?
"Special Contact" isn't what they're called. The name is "Special Circumstances".
And the novels point out that the reason you're reading about them, and that's always the situation, is that these are the interesting stories.
So that means you're getting a glimpse of the culture only in the same sense that a James Bond movie tells you about England.
You'd like to think you're seeing Tinker Tailor but you're seeing James Bond. This is a dramatisation of an edge case.
We see brief glimpses in Player of Games (at its very start) and perhaps Inversions (the story about when they were kids) but mostly it's all SC all the time.
Right, definitely important to note the Culture existed for milennia by the earliest (canon chronologically) novel.
Similarly, the fact that Banks didn't write about internal threats other than the ones he wrote about (Eccentric Minds, Absconders, conspiracies to promote specific agendas, etc etc) doesn't mean that others don't exist. An absence of evidence in the text is not evidence of absence (or presence) in the wider universe.
And so fanfic exists.
> We see brief glimpses in Player of Games (at its very start) and perhaps Inversions (the story about when they were kids) but mostly it's all SC all the time.
Was The State of the Art SC? Been a while since I read it.
The short story "The State of the Art" ? Yes, Diziet is a Special Circumstances agent - we also see her in Use of Weapons. Some of the other shorts in the collection of that name aren't set in the Culture. you can probably say "A Gift From the Culture" isn't about SC per se, but it also isn't really about the Culture.
Pretty sure it was a regular "boring" Contact GCU - the Arbitrary.
The thing about boring things is that if they're in your exciting story it might well be because they aren't boring. The actual British spy building next to the river Thames, Vauxhall Cross - looks exactly like the one in the Bond movies, but it's just an office building with higher than usual security. Bond can launch a speedboat to chase bad guys, but actual employees will be sat in a meeting moaning about the catering or the train delays.
Presumably the Arbitrary is just an ordinary contact ship, but Diziet is definitely not an "ordinary" member of contact. She's the one who recruited the guy in Use of Weapons, the one whose name is not actually Zakalwe.
Yes I know she is also in UoW and is in SC then, but I don't know if she is in SC in SoTA. From what I remember to get into Contact you have to apply, but to go from Contact to SC you have to be wait to be asked?
Well, in my favourite Culture novel the SC agent doesn't even realise. Yime has apparently chosen to keep her status even from her future self, being I guess mind-wiped or given selective amnesia so in her mind she's important because she chose not to be in Special Circumstances but it turns out that's just even deeper cover.
Some of the stories could plausibly have SC involvement (the story of the same name is most likely) - but I don't think it's explicitly mentioned anywhere.
> And the novels point out that the reason you're reading about them, and that's always the situation, is that these are the interesting stories.
It would be more interesting for dogs to read stories about dogs being taken for a walk than about those dozing on the couch in the sun or eating from a full bowl.
This is not the first time I've read articles attempting to paint the Culture as a dystopia. I think the best counter is to quote the author's own words, describing how he felt about it, from an interview he did with CNN [1]:
CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture [the society he has created]?
Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it's my secular heaven ... Yes, I would, absolutely. Again it comes down to wish fulfillment. I haven't done a study and taken lots of replies across a cross-section of humanity to find out what would be their personal utopia. It's mine, I thought of it, and I'm going home with it -- absolutely, it's great.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/05/15/iain.banks/ind...
That quote from Banks only tells us that The Culture is his personal utopia. Fair enough, but Banks does not have authority over interpretations on his work. One man's heaven is another man's hell.
> That quote from Banks only tells us that The Culture is his personal utopia
Idk, post-scarcity immortal FTL-wielding techno-democracy with benevolent artificial superintelligence doesn’t strike me as some hell.
And the Culture isn’t a galactic monolith. If you want a more traditional existence, there are other societies you can fuck off to.
The Culture intervenes in and steers those other societies and species even when unprovoked. Essentially a neoconservative utopia as envisioned by a young Irving Kristol. Yes, it would be a heaven for all who are pleased to take on its espirit de corps and live in it, casual and decadently low-pressure such might be, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is a healthy influence in the long run on a universe that it is arrogantly homogenizing. There is such a thing as unintended consequences, and The Culture is not yet one of the more advanced, wiser "Sublimed" civilizations.
The Culture is absolutely not "neoconservative". I don't think modern political terms can meaningfully apply to a post-scarcity civilization with benevolent AI Gods.
> and The Culture is not yet one of the more advanced, wiser "Sublimed" civilizations
I got no indication that Sublimation was a marker of advancement. More just a different state.
We do what we must because we can.
Words are a means of communication. An author can clarify what was intended to be communicated.
in the Culture universe, you don't have to stay in the Culture - you can get defanged and slum it out on some backwater hell hole like the rest of us.
Right. Just because the universe is post-scarcity, doesn't mean you can't build items, and entire production chains. Just because you can live to near immortality, doesn't mean you have to do things to prevent natural aging.
One guy became a member of the alien race the Affront, so named because they they have culturally and socially ingrained traits for exploitation, sadism and brutality.
Yes. Even today, one mans garbage is another's gold.
Sci-Fi is full of 'Utopias' that can also be viewed as 'Dystopia', depending on the view point. And in a lot of movies, that shifting view point is the story.
I told a Christian recruiter once that I don't want an afterlife. Their mind basically broke down trying to process it.
What makes physical death so special that you do want to exist before it happens, but don't want to after? Why not pick some other arbitrary event, like say, the next New Years?
Living _forever_ seems like... not necessarily that attractive an idea.
(Also most of the afterlives on offer don't seem particularly attractive.)
As someone who doesn't believe and never has believed that there was an afterlife, there is something kind of horrifying about the _inescapable, eternal_ nature of such a thing. I think this may be different if it's a concept that you've been sold on as a kid, but from the outside, it's really kind of unsettling.
for me it's the fact that I could theoretically end it (modulo quantum immortality, my worst nightmare). the afterlife is usually sold with "guaranteed forever". I've been in so many situations that you might think "oh I wish this could go on forever" and then regretted it, that I want to make sure there's a way to pull the plug.
Spending the rest of eternity with other human beings is not very appealin.
What if you could spend it with cats? What if it didn't have to be forever - if you could end it any time you chose, like after 1000 years or whenever? It seems what you don't want is only a very specific version of an afterlife.
Does any major belief system actually have an afterlife in which you can _die again_?
I suppose various types of reincarnations might be that. Or afterlife is just temporary state in between. I suppose reincarnating just to die again is something in some belief systems. Sometimes with goal of being liberated from the cycle.
The fact that somebody doesn't want afterlife doesn't imply that death is a special moment for them that separates wanting to exist from not wanting.
They could have "picked" another moment. It might be next New Year or a moment in the past or even a moment before they were born. The moment of death is simply the "earliest convenience" to end unwanted existence.
Some people enjoy playing games in 'Hardcore' mode (see e.g. Subnautica) where if you die, instead of respawning, the game ends and your save file is deleted.
If you REALLY think hard about it truly eternal life is just as scary as none.
I would even say it is lot more scary. After your non eternal life ends you know no better. On other hand if you are aware of the eternal life for rest of entire eternity... I will pick up non-eternity each and every time.
SCP-7179 is simply being trapped inside a 10km cube filled with a tropical island for eternity. And I find it one of the scariest ones of them all. This is one of the entries in the timeline
[1,000,000,000,000 years]: Hiddleston ceases physical activity, as no experience is able to provide him with new stimuli.
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-7179
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1. "Utopia turns perverse" is established enough to be a tired trope. Brave New World is the canonical example here.
2. The Culture books are critical of the utopia. More than half of them are directly about the difficulty of reconciling the ideals of that utopia while coexisting in a universe with other people. The subgenre the Culture books belong to is literally called "critical utopia" fiction.
3. All (good) sci fi is political. You should find a different genre if you don't want politics in it.
> All (good) sci fi is political. You should find a different genre if you don't want politics in it.
I think you are reaching one of the limitations of the English language here. Machiaveli's Prince and John Knox's Monstrous Regiment of Women are both "political" books, but in a very different sense. The former is an exercise in trying to understand the nature of power and society in specific circumstances (in particular, the Prince is a study of autocratic power by a committed republican). The latter is just a polemical weapon, designed to advance some political goal. When people complain about politics in literature, it's usually because they don't like reading the second sort of book. That sort of books are seldom good, whatever their genre may be.
(I'm intentionally using Renaissance examples here, to avoid any unproductive discussions on more modern books.)
I'm using "political" in the way it's commonly applied to literature: social relationships involving power. This encompasses both your examples, as well as the Culture books.
Kameron Hurley has a longer piece on what it means for writing to be political:
https://locusmag.com/feature/kameron-hurley-the-status-quo-i...
And honestly, you can pick the "good" writer of your choice from Asimov to Zelazny. Their politics come through in their writing. Foundation and Lords of Light are both obviously political works. I don't need to get into Heinlein or Bradbury, or poul and it comes through the space between in the lines in Wolf and Pohl. Le Guin and Clarke wore their politics on their sleeves. Etc.
I'm not making some pedantic point here. Science Fiction is a deeply, inherently political genre and always has been.
Yeah, I'm really struggling to think of a major work of sci-fi that is _not_ in some sense political. Possibly Robert Forward's stuff, but as I think he admitted himself those were mostly an excuse to play with weird physics.
> The reframing of the Culture as his ideal society turns the whole series into boring political propaganda
If it was criticism of the utopic ideas, it would be just as much political propaganda, just for different ideas.
Just read Look to Windward to see how wrong you are. Banks knows very well that hell is paved with good intentions.
See also Use of Weapons and Excession.
I too was so surprised by that Banks quote that I still wonder if maybe he was lying or being deliberately provocative.
(I wouldn't call The Culture "leftist" exactly, as it seems to be a space version of liberal imperialism, which the international Left always opposed. Though it is "left" in the American Fox/CNN-tier sense.)
If I choose to believe Banks' quote, then I have to interpret The Culture as merely the best possible society, in a universe where human nature severely constrains what societies are possible. To me it seems to be a world full of pointlessness and barely-suppressed existential angst -- so perhaps he is saying: "Imagine that we can solve death and supply unlimited entertainment and pleasure. Even then, you will not be able to escape a kind of background noise, an omnipresent drone, in a minor key -- because that's inevitable to existence."
Now I imagine a back-story: The people of The Culture, the Minds, everything -- they are actually in Hell. Their universe is Hell. They are incredibly clever; they have outwitted the gods (to the extent possible); they have ended the tortures, chained Satan (or whoever used to administer), and found ways to roast marshmallows over the lakes of fire. It is a tremendous triumph. And yet they are still in Hell, and no matter the palaces they build there or the drugs they take, there is pain beneath the surface.
I read The Culture books as a subtler version of that story, where it is never spelled out clearly where they are.
At the same time, don't take this to mean that I want to force some religious meaning onto the books. My meaning is also secular. Hell is a metaphor of some kind. The meaning I am suggesting is more existentialist than religious.
> If I choose to believe Banks' quote, then I have to interpret The Culture as merely the best possible society, in a universe where human nature severely constrains what societies are possible.
I'm not sure why you wouldn't just take what Banks says at face value. Living in the Culture would for the majority of people on on Earth be far preferable.
But I do think you're close to correct about what Banks was saying on the darker side of the message. Every book of his that I've read (including the non Culture novels) has a darker side. It always seems to be about the inevitably of conflict in the presence of the human condition. And the terrible cruelty this can result in.
Nevertheless, try as I might, it confounds me how anyone could look around at the state of life on Earth today and think "yeah, much better than the dystopia of The Culture".
That’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure how well hell maps to Banks’ books in terms of choice though.
In most religious depictions, one of hell’s predominant characteristics is its inescapability—either logistically or by the mental limits of its inhabitants. Tons of Banks’ work, on the other hand, has a through line of “people could choose to leave the Culture, they’re fundamentally in their situation by (extremely unconstrained!) choice”. This comes up in the idea of Subliming, being Stored, many characters’ choices to commit suicide/decline immortality, or just plain leaving the Culture as many do.
Plenty of his characters are in hells of their own making/choosing, or are tortured by other people, which I think is definitely a commentary on the sources of suffering being behavioral rather than just environmental, but I’m not sure it follows that “therefore the Culture is hell”.
Most of the founding intellectuals of neoconservatism, especially Irving Kristol, came from secular socialist backgrounds and imagined their ideal society to be eerily similar to The Culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
Anyone who really thinks the Culture is hell is not mentally healthy.
I wouldn't use those words, but I agree with the sentiment.
I'd go and live as a culture citizen in a heartbeat.
I'm not sure how else to phrase it.
Perhaps, anyone who considers The Culture universe to be hell thinks incomprehensibly different to me.
Absolutely agree.
That's arguably the worst argument given that the author has no special authority over the interpretation of the work. Heinlein with his increasingly militaristic views wrote Starship Troopers as a sincere story, but Paul Verhoeven showed quite compellingly that it might make for better satire.
That's actually an ironic example, seeing how so many (maybe most) viewers took the intended satire at face value, essentially looping all the way back to Heinlein's intent.
The best satire is always convincing to its targets, because it doesn't misrepresent their positions. The Prince may be satire; who knows what was in Machiavelli's head.
Exactly. Even today, a lot of satire aimed at the 'right', viewed from the 'right's perspective is not realized as satire and is viewed like someone is trying to make a real point. They can't tell it is satire.
Doesn't the guy have another book - The Discourses on Livy, that confirms the general gist of The Prince? (i.e. autocracies are horrible, to be a successful autocrat you need to be brutal and ruthless)
Didn't Verhoeven famously not read the book? Hard to call it "satire" then, "straw man" might be more accurate.
Perhaps less famously, Edward Neumeier wrote his screenplay.
I hadn't heard that before but I agree with you, it doesn't qualify as satire if he didn't even bother to consume the source material. At least not in the literary sense.
You could only think Heinlein had militaristic views if that was the only book of his you read.
Read another book of his and you'd think he was a communist, another an anarchist, et cetera.
He liked to explore ideas. If there's one thing that's reasonably consistent across his work, it's his belief in individual agency.
I adore Banks' universe, but recall reading some notes from him years ago, as tialaramex indicated, that 'all the interesting stuff happens at the edge' given utopias are, almost by definition, pretty tedious.
Even though there's a good amount of utopia-description in the novels, I'd still be wary about extrapolating too much from what are primarily stories of exceptions.
(One might suggest, in response to TFA's expectation there'd be more arseholes in the Culture, that one of the most important things a utopian Culture would ensure is a robust education for all its citizens -- but I realise some popular contemporary earth-bound cultures may take that as a subtle dig.)
> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence
I'd rate the Eschaton series by Charlie Stross (sadly only two books ever published in that series, and it's unlikely we'll ever see a third) - Singularity Sky & Iron Sunrise - in this category.
I think Accelerando might fit, too.
Most of the members of the human race present on Earth, Jupiter, Saturn etc. during the events of Accelerando are murdered by their posthuman descendants. This includes the vat-grown population of conservative humans used to sway the electoral outcomes of the gas giant societies, who were murdered after they had served their use of swaying those societies.
You're probably referring to A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE by Iain M Banks [1]
[1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence
There are some _very_ interesting examples in John C. Wright's Count to the Eschaton sequence.
Pure power fantasy & gratuitous as heck, but man, loved the The Golden Oecumene series, Wright's debut novels. Had not thought to see what else Wright has done!
Side note, my homelabs Kube cluster's naming scheme is AI from fiction. Rhadamanthus is one of the computers from Golden Oecumene, a powerful manor computer. Also in the cluster: Jarvis (Iron Man), Cohen (Spin State), Epicac (eponymous Vonnegut short story).
Space Pirates of Andromeda was fun too.
Next up: Peanut Hamper, Agimus, and Badgey
Excellent Star Trek: Lower Deck references. All pretty evil/bad though, which I don't want for my computer nodes!
>> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence
Neal Asher did pretty well with his Polity universe. Besides AIs with some capacity for playful violence (Agent Cormac thread, but always there), we also get crablike aliens (the Prador war) and very weird biology (in particular the Spatterjay water world).
Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" might qualify, if you look at it right.
Well, depending on whether you view Kern as an AI at all. She certainly wouldn't thank you for implying it.
> given utopias are, almost by definition, pretty tedious.
By definition, if they're tedious, they're not utopias. It's more that writing convincing utopias is hard and people are lazy.
How so? In this context, “tedious” clearly means “not very exciting for the reader.” Were you hoping for more relationship drama, or romance? I’d be down for that. Though, it doesn’t seem to be what Banks was most interested in writing about.
It is often remarked, by those who may be assumed to have some insight into it, that the difficulty in writing Superman is to convey his perfection and goodness, but that for people who do not understand Superman well the difficulty is that he is too perfect and unbeatable and thus boring.
I put forward thus that in the same way Superman can be tedious so can Utopias, and Utopias can be interesting in the same way that Superman can.
> Were you hoping for more relationship drama, or romance? I’d be down for that
It’s tedious to a modern audience. Hemingway but in space isn’t really an improvement. (The closest we have is Ted Chiang.)
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C.S. Lewis wrote or said something like that an adventure isn't fun while you're having it, where 'isn't fun' has a rather harsh meaning, and since I think that's true, if you can have a real adventure, you're probably not in a utopia.
I think adventure necessarily happens at the edges of civilization and order, or when civilization or order breaks down, and to a reader I think there must be some kind of adventure for story to be fun.
So what you'd see in a true utopia might be very fun for the people living in it, but there might not be much conflict that would appeal to a reader. Utopia conflict situations might be things like "Ethics board analyzes the legality of using state funds for man with Down's Syndrome who wants to try an experimental treatment and must analyze whether he understands well enough for informed consent". You can write it, if it were really good I could imagine wanting to read it, but it's much easier to read a story where people are shooting one another.
Certainly one of my criteria for a utopia would be that some of the beings in it are engaged in intriguing or exciting activities with meaningful consequences. I'd require more than Special Circumstances to meet this criterion -- they are too small a piece of the total system.
In Player of Games we see a corner of a gaming culture which partly meets this criterion but it does not have meaningful consequences outside the gaming participants (unless you count the ways the Minds use it to manipulate Gurgeh).
Maybe by this criterion utopias are impossible, since the disruption caused by exciting activities with consequences conflict too much with the optimality of the society. But I don't think anyone now can prove this would be the case.
>By definition, if they're tedious, they're not utopias
Utopias are by definition tedious because a utopia is an end to history and as such an end to meaning or negotiation of how to live. A utopia is always an end to a story or Freedom with a capital f. As Dostoevsky points out in Notes from Underground, on man in utopia:
"[he] would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it!"
Another way to phrase it. If you are in a utopia, you cannot be in a democracy that entails the possibility of ending it. Which is to say, you can't govern yourself at all. And that is why Ian M Banks culture is nothing of the sort. It's a society literally controlled by "perfect minds" using a Sapir-Whorf like language to manage the behavior of its people. Even Banks who tried to write a positive utopia and that's not his fault, couldn't imagine a utopia that entails the possibility of rebellion.
The Culture is an anarchic democracy: if all but one single GSV had voted to disband, or to become a dictatorship, that lone GSV could disappear elsewhere without anyone stopping them.
They were up for, and welcoming of, even quite extreme changes; compare with humanity today, where being transgender is considered controversial by a significant percentage of the population of a nation that likes to self-promote on the idea it is the beacon of liberty and freedom, versus the way Culture bodies are written to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will, with most people being expected to try it, and with some couples flipping gender while pregnant and pausing the pregnancy just so both can give birth together.
Even species changes are, for them, easy and of no great consequence or dispute. While you may be seen as weird if you choose to give up the visual accuity of an owl and the cerebral resliliance to survive decapitation in order to live out your life on this quaint rock recently discovered to be hosting an atomic age civilization, the Mind won't refuse to change you into a mere human just because you found Jesus.
> to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will
a constant hedonic self modification and individual reinvention is obviously no sign of extreme change but the opposite, banality and powerlessness. As Augusto de Noce used to point out about the sexual revolution of the 60s, the sexual dimension became an obsession precisely because all other revolutions had been rendered impossible by an atomized society. There was nothing radical at all in it.
It's no accident that the Culture puts so much emphasis, and in that it reads ironically enough like satire of modern consumer society, on choice only at a level of reshuffling your sexual organs or bodily characteristics. The minds in the culture are by no means just a sort of voting mechanism that summarize the attitudes of the population of the Culture. They control the culture which we even get to learn in the books in the series that delve into the minds as characters.
> only at a level of reshuffling your sexual organs or bodily characteristics
"Only"?
In the sense that your freedom to enact change ends at the boundary of your skin.
People leave the Culture, and you can form communities of various sorts, you just can't force people to not leave them. In a world with unlimited abundance, no disease, optional death, and more or less unlimited morphological freedom and the ability to form any consensual voluntary community you like with freedom of exit for all members, what possible change could one be demanding?
"You're not allowed to do what you want because I believe in this old book" sounds a lot more trite to me.
>couldn't imagine a utopia that entails the possibility of rebellion.
When The Culture voted on the Idirian War, the Peace faction splintered from The Culture. Other groups seceded (or join all the time), such as the AhForgetIt Tendency and the Zetetic Elench.
Rebellion exists only in the framework of an oppresive power structure, where you can't just leave if you want.
Again, this is lazy, topsy-turvy thinking. It's conjuring up a purely academic definition of utopia as a corpus of texts and saying that since they're all boring, that must mean utopia is by definition boring. The point of utopian thinking is precisely to identify those failure modes as such with respect to the utopian project. Thus, if something is "tedious", it can only ever be a failed attempt at utopia.
For the specific case of Banks, Yudkowsky has some interesting ideas about why it fails. [0]
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwnSPgwtmLjvTK2Wa/amputation...
In the Culture Series history hasn't ended, and the members of the Culture can and do leave and live in ways the Culture would find repugnant. Also there are marginal participants (such as the Mind known as Meat Fucker) who are more or less in the Culture but act in ways the Culture finds repugnant, but are not punished or controlled.
So according to your definition the Culture is not a utopia.
> if they're tedious, they're not utopias
The original blueprint - Thomas More's book - made the New England Puritans look like a wild bunch. Phalansteries and communal dining, oh my.
Tedious to narrate, euphoric to experience.
I'm not sure the vile offspring was universally loved. are you referring to the cat?
I really don't think accelerando is a good example of positive AI super intelligence LMAO.
Indeed, I am definitely misremembering key parts of that story - the actions of the definite 'AI' SI's, at least.
I wanted to - and still do - side-step spoilers, so I'll concede an error, and bump it back up my TB(r)R list.
The lobsters were relatively benign ;D
I think the general reading that the Culture may be an over-controlled dystopia was fully intended as visible by Banks. Often as the viewpoint of a non-Culture... culture that's interacting. It's part of what makes the books so delightful. They invite you to see things multiple ways.
Yes. The Affront, and our hero wanting (and successfully) to become one. I love these novels but really, really, appreciate the criticism.
Good attempt, but I would still jump into that sugar cage in a heartbeat (of one of my multiple redundant blood pumping organs).
I believe the culture does allow organic life to upgrade to a culture mind. I think I read that somewhere. Of course you wouldn't be you anymore, but you have options and that always made it a pretty malleable cage you can slip out of including just leaving.
So you still have freedom of self...just not much power to shape your civilization. Most of us don't have that anyway and at some level I think I'd be ok giving that up to a group of super intelligences so I can spend more time doing the things I enjoy.
> So you still have freedom of self...just not much power to shape your civilization.
In fact they do. Humans can call a vote on anything in The Culture - I would have to re-read some books to provide sources, but it was mentioned that sometimes it was about very trivial things, and sometimes more important. Mostly though, the humans were content to let the Minds do all the maintenance.
And yes, I do think I recall reading that some Minds are in fact made of previously-humanoid beings. Sometimes entire crews of them, if I recall correctly!
Thanks for the info. I've read a few of the books and been on the wiki a lot, but haven't read all of them, so there's a lot I don't know or only partly remember.
I think letting humans vote on some small things may be the equivalent of letting your dog choose which direction to go. It's a decision, but ultimately useless in the grand scheme of things. The minds may be an even greater cognitive leap from us than the difference between us and dogs. They can easily give the illusion of choice without relinquishing any real control. This is all speculation of course.
I think at a certain point, "the grand scheme" is too abstract a notion to have an effect on an individual. There are trillions of beings in The Culture, spread throughout a galaxy. What would any individual having an effect on that grand a scheme even look like?
But on a smaller scale, the (still billions of) beings on, say, an Orbital can have a much greater effect on things. But again, they don't often choose to, opting to let the Minds run things. And, given that the Minds are sentient beings and citizens of The Culture as well as the humans, this is more or less the same as our current delegation of decision-making to politicians. Of course there's much to be said about doing that presently, but I think it's a given that at least the Minds are not incompetent, which can't always be said about our current politicians :P
And do keep in mind that it's not "letting" humans vote on "small things" - they have the right to vote on any matter they want, big or small, and as far as my reading goes, the Minds would respect that.
Would you really know otherwise though?
Know what?
Important to note that in the Culture universe all the extant AIs are _explicitly_ noted to be psychologically flawed in some way, with every culture that's managed to produce a true ‘perfect’ AI immediately ascending to some godlike plane of pure energy, whence they interfere in the affairs of meatbags only in the most dire of circumstances. So it's surprising to me that Banks has said he considered it a utopia given how explicitly (in my reading) he made it a non-utopia in the books.
He may just be pragmatic and assume that absolute perfection is inherently flawed so something coming as close as possible to it is the best solution
If you mean Subliming, it is not tied to "perfect AI" or anything like that in the books. It is not actually clear what the prerequisite from it is, but the books have examples of races Subliming that are less technologically proficient than the Culture (notably, the Chelgrians).
Nor does it imply that Sublimed civilizations are somehow more of an utopia. They are clearly more capable, but in terms of social organization, again, Chelgrians are a strong counter-example where the Sublimed part of the race literally demands the rest of it to commit genocide as a form of revenge to get access to heaven.
Well it's not that you have to be an AI to Sublime, but GP was (correctly) referring to the fact that any Mind that was created without any "training" (I forget the exact phrasing used) would invariably and immediately Sublime.
Anyway Subliming is the only aspect of The Culture series I did not enjoy. Much too handwavey for my liking. Still, made for some interesting stories.
It's been a good while since I read the books, but I do have a distinct recollection of the Culture Minds being described as being created purposely ‘flawed’ in some way (explicitly negative terminology) to prevent immediate Sublimation. I could be misremembering, though.
the culture Minds are intentionally designed with personalities (for lack of a better term) suited for their intended functions that keep them interested in/involved with base reality and their responsibilities there. there was a bit about how "perfect" Minds created without such proclivities will basically fuck off to a higher plane of existence asap. of course the culture Minds know this, they're the ones designing and building new Minds after all, and some decide that they'd like to see what's on the other side of the veil themself and that's allowed, but most are content running their ships and orbitals and whatnot
I think role of subliming was to show Culture not as pinnacle of existence but an advanced and powerful niche civilization.
In Excession main gimmick is an object (possibly unrelated to subliming) that immediately puts on alert all civilizations at Culture level of capability (and below) because it's something new in the universe, something that could help bump out of local technological minimum that the Culture currently occupies and exceed its potential in a different way than subliming, that is well known, but mostly one way road out (and very out).
Culture is Purgatory, Sublimed are Heaven, rest of universe is Hell?
It may be immaterial whether we call Culture a utopia or a dystopia. I haven't studied Banks' works in exhaustive detail, but the impression I got is that people in the Culture can do almost anything, because none of it matters. And if it did matter, they may have no agency to do that. So the Special Circumstances could have been created to accommodate people who want at least an impression of some agency (while - from a vague memory of one of the Culture books - chasing successfully a list with what turned out to be coordinates of all stars in a region of space).
I got thinking about this aspect of Culture starting with a broader premise - are there works where humans arrive at higher levels of human-embedded intelligence as a species or in a more limited scope as individuals? While describing higher levels of intelligence may be impossible, I find it curious science fiction doesn't appear to have too many attempts at that. Some of Vernor Vinge's works come to mind, but even there humans appear to be about the same as at present.
> while - from a vague memory of one of the Culture books - chasing successfully a list with what turned out to be coordinates of all stars in a region of space
That wasn't a Culture novel; it was in The Algebraist, and that society was almost an anti-Culture (highly hierarchical, quasi-capitalist, religious, racist/speciesist).
Thank you for the correction. I wasn’t completely sure that "a list" was really all there was to it, but turns out I was mistaken maybe in a more important part of that sentence.
> But one of my hobbies is “oppositional reading” – deliberately interpreting
> novels counter to the obvious / intended reading. And it’s not so clear to me
> that the Culture is all it is cracked up to be.
It's not clear to me that reading the Culture series as an "ambiguous" utopia is counter to the intended reading. There is a multitude of instances in the books that show clearly the downsides of living in a utopia where every possible want is met. The drudgery and boredom of living in a "perfect" world is a constant theme throughout the stories. In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something. In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
> In Excession, it’s explained that Minds do rarely drift far enough to go rogue
> and are destroyed by the Culture. In other words, these superhuman minds have
> not solved alignment, and they cannot/will not inspect each other to determine
> misalignment before malicious action is taken.
The Culture doesn't even seem very interested in dealing with minds that do go rogue. In the same novel - Excession -, the GSV Grey Area openly violates Culture ethics, and nobody (or noship) seems to feel compelled to do anything about it.
In Surface Detail there is some discussion of "slap drones", assigned to follow troublemakers around and prevent them from getting into mischief. It is explicitly stated that even a misbehaving ship may receive this treatment. I think the Grey Area's hobby was regarded more as a repulsive violation of cultural norms than an actual crime.
the gsv sleeper service had an entire other ship/Mind basically acting in this role (a rotating assignment/volunteer position), complete with human crew/residents
the grey area/meat fucker was a small, uncrewed, and demilitarized(?) ship/Mind that, while morally repugnant to the culture's sensibilities (or at least most other Minds'), no one considered significant/dangerous enough to give the same treatment
> The drudgery and boredom of living in a "perfect" world is a constant theme throughout the stories.
You can of course interpret the novels however you like, but that absolutely wasn't Banks' intention when he wrote the series. See the quotes from other comments.
> In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something.
Or they just do it because why not? If you'd never been ill, you'd probably be curious as to what it felt like.
> In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
I think in the story the lava-rafters were having a great time, and they were fairly unusual... and people in our culture risk pain and death doing sport just to feel excitement. In the Culture they just have additional options, such as rafting on lava.
Most of the Culture citizens were happy enough with their exploration, art, travel, genetically-enhanced sex, implanted drug glands, games, sports, and so they never got around to lava rafting.
Besides they have the right to go to sleep and never wake up if they are not happy.
I did a lot of thinking after that and now regret my actions.
> In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something.
I mean, I'll sometimes take a mild poison for fun, too (that's what alcohol is). I don't think, in a circumstance where you could just have it go away when you're bored of it, that recreational common cold thing is _that_ weird.
> In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
A little under a thousand people attempt to climb Mount Everest every year. About 3% of them die while doing this. That's way, _way_ worse odds than the lava rafting people were getting. It's just an extreme sport. And, like, presumably it was a minority interest, just as dying halfway up a mountain is today; most people would not be lava rafting.
Things like these show that people of Culture are still people with at least as much variety as modern humans. Not species tightly bread for conformism. At least no higher levels of conformism that humanity currently displays.
" It seems likely that misaligned Minds are capable of predicting they’d lose any military action against the established core, so prefer toeing the line of acceptability or leaving Culture entirely. "
Isn't this how we force humans to adapt, or be 'aligned'.
How is human "alignment" different from AI "alignment".
At some point you realize the little guy can't win, so go with society. That's basically what this is describing happens to the minds.
I really enjoyed the Culture novels but my takeaway was similar to OP's. The citizens are essentially pets that the Minds really like and take care of. They have almost no real agency though besides what the Minds will humor.
The Culture would continue to chug along with our with out the humans, the minds would just be bored until they created some other race to entertain themselves with.
Pets can't leave though? A number of the Culture stories (e.g. "The State of the Art") describe Culture citizens who left the Culture - in that story for 1970s Earth.
My wife's pet cat leaves and returns whenever he wants to. While he may not share our capacity for language, his communication of his preferences - nay, requirements - was clear, forceful, sustained, and (eventually) effective.
If a Culture mind were faced with human behavior equivalent to pissing on everything but the litterbox and bolting for the door at every opportunity, I imagine they'd eventually get tired of playing jailer and let their pets go, too.
The stories make it pretty clear that if you want to leave you can just leave (maybe slightly different if you are an SC operative)? Similarly the Culture is fairly open minded about immigration to the Culture - but they worry about that looking like a form of colonialism so it's not like they advertise it...
That's certainly true - the minds obviously do care what their humans want, and go to some effort to help them get it. I just thought the idea that "pets can't leave" was funny and not entirely true, given some of the experiences I've had with them.
It feels refreshing to see someone sort of agreeing with something I've been saying for years.
I do feel the writer is missing one important aspect though: self-governance and having the decisions of humans matter. Horza Gobulchul was right. By relying on machines to do our decisions for us and having them take control of society, we lose a large part of what makes us human.
Self-governance is not lacking in the Culture. Any group of its citizens (down to individuals) can form self-governing societies within it - that's why the boundary of what even is the Culture is so hard to define. It's just that most people are perfectly content to have the Minds run everything because, well, they are good at it, so why wouldn't you?
Sure, but given a universe in which Mind level AIs exist and many other civilizations have them, not having them and the attendant advantages probably just isn't viable. Human level intelligence probably just can't operate a Culture level technology base, and certainly not competitively with civs that do use Mind level AIs. So it's not a matter of whether to have them, it's how to do that.
> Sure, but given a universe in which Mind level AIs exist and many other civilizations have them, not having them and the attendant advantages probably just isn't viable.
That doesn't _really_ seem to be the case, though. Notably, the Gzilt don't have them, but nor did the Idirians.
I don't think the Idiran lack of Mind level AIs and them losing are co-incidental.
The Gzilt did have their own approach, using virtualised and hyper-accelerated crew. We're not told much more about that and how it works, so it's hard to say, but it can't be anywhere near as efficient and capable as using Minds.
Spoiler for Surface Detail:
There is that battle where a single Culture ship absolutely destroys a GFCF fleet without breaking a sweat. The ship's Mind says they stood no chance because their AI didn't have autonomous authority over weapons systems and relied on accelerated crews for decisions.
What I love most is how the battle is explained to a human passenger over the course of several pages and at one point they have an exchange like:
That doesn't mean that the situation isn't dystopian though.
It's kind of unavoidable, from what I remember of the Culture series the Minds are a self-improving superintelligence that was created initially by humans, so denying them full rights would be unforgivable.
Self improving superintelligences that have had thousands of years to self-improve so they are near god like:
"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."
Of course, in the Culture universe there are things far more powerful than Minds - the transcended entities that still dabble in the base reality - such as the Dra'Azon. Although I seem to remember someone, probably a drone, snarkily referring to it as senile.
In that particular story the irony is that the strategy he thinks is all machines was largely dreamed up by Fal 'Ngeestra.
Whether the culture stories set later also have referers like Fal involved is unclear.
To be a human person is to have:
* autonomy
* internal (mental) sovereigneity
* some degree of legibility to other human persons (e.g. a name, capacity to enter social games, a consistent personal history)
* a tolerance for information throughput within the normal distribution of human persons
The Culture abandons 1 and maybe 2, while the VO from Accelerando abandon 4. I've never seen any proof that the universe is privileged to permit all four to coexist indefinitely under conditions of social acceleration.
The question is, what do autonomy and mental sovereignty consist of when we're talking about massively genetically engineered citizens, and outright engineered minds (designed by other minds). It's a question I've been considering for a while since I switched from considering myself a hard determinist, to being a compatibilist.
I think the key differentiator for true autonomy is open ended psychological flexibility. That is, sufficient deliberative control over our own mental processes and decision making faculties to be able to adapt them to whatever experiences we have, and whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.
We are introspective beings able to inspect our own mental processes, consider our own motivations, priorities and beliefs, and adapt these based on new experiences. On the one hand this means we are very largely shaped by our experiences of the world, on the other hand it means we are not completely locked into the same limited set of behaviours and responses regardless of what experiences we have, and therefore what we learn. I think that our basic biology and psychology do limit this flexibility in important ways, but I do believe that we've just about reached the level where we are in principle capable of open ended mental flexibility.
If the Culture has a similar understanding of mental autonomy, that means that they could consider Culture citizens autonomous while also recognising that the vast majority of them would in fact remain completely satisfied with life in the Culture. In fact, in principle engineering Culture citizens in that way would be an ethical thing to do, because they would in principle still have the ability to adapt in terms of their beliefs and goals in response to changes in circumstances.
Likewise with Minds. A major difference being that the Minds can anticipate most of the experiences average citizens will have within the Culture and how they would behave, whereas Minds have much more varied experiences and much more capable mental resources, and therefore the ability to anticipate their likely resulting opinions, beliefs and behaviours would be much more limited.
Autonomy - People in the Culture have autonomy to live wherever they want, and the freedom they have is more than any society on Earth. They can even choose to leave the Culture, then return. They can (and do) form societies within the Culture. It talks about all of this explicitly, it is hard to miss.
Internal sovereignty - The biggest sin one of their AIs can commit is to read people's minds, never mind manipulate their minds directly.
I don't think its credible to represent the culture as abandoning 1, at least no more so than our cultures do. As I recall, the worst punishment you can get in the culture is being "Drone Slapped," which is just to have a drone follow you around and make sure you don't do any bad stuff (like kill more people if you are a murderer who wants to kill more people). This preserves considerably more autonomy than, for instance, a life sentence in prison.
I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.
Most chiefdoms, proto-monarchies and monarchies in human history have had totally inalienable rights for a select few people and it's arguable to say that some states in the world today continue that tradition.
A more grounded criticism, however, is that in the modern world the range of lifestyles and careers available to most free adults is circumscribed only by their wealth, health, the laws of nature and the ability of other humans to enforce prohibitions. Competition from existing political units already exists, but nobody has it guaranteed that if they formed a new polity it would merely be a kayfabe contained inside one or more existing states.
(I think the Culture doing this is a good thing, incidentally, but it does count as removing #1.)
>> To be a human person is to have:
>> * autonomy
>> * internal (mental) [sovereignty]
> I don't think its credible to represent the culture as abandoning 1, at least no more so than our cultures do.
> I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.
No. I recall reading somewhere that, in the Culture novels the Sapir Worf hypothesis was true to start or the AIs re-engineered the people to make it true, and the language of the regular biological citizens is designed to control how they think through its structure.
So they try their best to preserve the illusion of 1 and 2, while doing away with them as much as possible.
I just don't read it that way - they certainly try to remove what they see as bad, but beyond that they do not interfere. We don't need to guess about it. Three is plenty of first person Mind stuff in The Culture where Minds communicate with one another. Its pretty clear that Culture Minds have agendas other than total control of the citizens. It is too bad Banks isn't alive to chime in, but I think if you read all the books, its hard to support your interpretation.
> I recall reading somewhere that, in the Culture novels the Sapir Worf hypothesis was true to start or the AIs re-engineered the people to make it true, and the language of the regular biological citizens is designed to control how they think through its structure.
You read that in Consider Phlebas, where the anti-Culture protagonist claimed it. You’ve fallen for propaganda in a work of fiction.
I would argue a meaningful struggle to give your life some semblance of meaning is also a requirement, and that's one that the Culture entirely ditches.
Recently started re-reading Excession and came across a reddit post[1] whilst I was looking up something. The post and comments kind of align with this article and I've been looking at the Culture more critically since.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCulture/comments/1cpq12b/excessi...
Not totally related, but I wanted to make a question. Iam sure this post will host quite a lot of Culture fans. With which novel should I start with The Culture? The main two candidates are Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games.
Strongly disagree with most of the consensus here to start with Player of Games and that Consider Phlebas is boring. I found Player of Games to be the much weaker book, with lots of heavy handed social critique and a generally quite stock plot.
It's true that Consider Phlebas is set outside The Culture. I think that's for the best as The Culture is pretty alien and the Phlebas protagonist is more relatable. Banks does a great job of building the world such that when you get to the end of the book, you're like "I get it" in terms of understanding the Culture. Plus, Phlebas has a number of wonderfully evocative set pieces that are super cool. You can see how influential the series was on later sci-fi, especially stuff like Halo.
Look to Windward.
It’s a very human story, and the technobabble intervenes very little in it. It also has the most connection (of the Culture novels) to our world, being largely a meditation on the first Gulf War. This makes it the most approachable, in my opinion.
It is technically a sequel to Consider Phlebas but the connection is almost nonexistent, no prior knowledge of the Culture-Idiran war required.
Player. It's slow for a short bit with culture in references until he gets airlifted. Then gets interesting dumping you into convos with intelligences and then the games and court drama. I actually don't recall plebias. googling it reminds me it nay be the one with an unmanned snowpiercer. i remember that not as good.
i like the culture books but they suffer sometimes from jumping unreoated viewpoints, mental instability, and sprawl sometimes.
player is tighter and doesnt jump. probbably a better entry.
sorry auto corect and swype tuened off mid post so speley misteaks
The upside of starting with Consider Phlebas is that the story doesn't really take place within the Culture. It provides you with an outside perspective. It also sets up some things that are referenced in later books.
The downside is that it's quite a bit different from (and imo a bit worse than) the other books and could mislead you about what the series is like - or even turn you off entirely.
If you're already committed to reading the entire series, I'd start with Consider Phlebas. If you're unsure, start with The Player of Games.
I actually really like Consider Phlebas - probably because I read it in one go in a day off I allowed myself between finishing my final year project and starting revision for my finals. This was in 1988 <sigh>
Consider Phlebas or Excession. I wouldn't overcomplicate the decision, just read descriptions of those books and pick one.
(I saw Look to Windward and Player of Games recommended. I'd say Look to Windward is probably more enjoyable once you've read Consider Phlebas, and Player of Games is perhaps a little... simple, compared to the others? I don't remember having much doubt of roughly how it would end)
Consider Phlebas is an incredibly boring book imo, would not recommend it unless you get way into the series and want to read them all. The Player of Games is great, was engaging throughout and had interesting characters. I would start with that one personally (or another book, but I've only read those two so I can't speak to the rest of the series).
I thought Consider Phlebas was very good but a depressing book. I keep hearing Player of Games is awesome, so maybe that?
My first was Use of Weapons and I always recommend that one.
And the second one is "Inversions" But those two are probably fine firsts. Mine was "use of weapons".
I started with Players of Games and was very happy with it. I followed it with Use of Weapons which was tougher reading due to complex intertwining narratives, one in reverse chronology and way darker themes. So that probably wasn't a great choice. I don't find Consider Phlebas particularly strong. However I love Matter, Excession and Surface Detail.
I once went to a talk by Ian Banks, he said the key thing about his Sci-Fi future is that a super powerful AI would be benevolent.
The Culture is happens when an AI actually likes humans and easily surpasses them. It's quite unique, I think, in most sci fi. In Star Trek, for example, the AI is neutral, a tool.
Are there cases of jealousy in the AI towards humans? Does an AI want to be a human?
I do wish we had less of the "AI kills everyone or is just evil" trope. It's done to death and frankly doesn't make much sense to me. The Minds in The Culture seem to me a much more reasonable conclusion of how a superintelligent AI would react to biological beings - that is, benevolent at worst.
> Are there cases of jealousy in the AI towards humans? Does an AI want to be a human?
I don't recall anything along these lines. The Minds and Drones are perfectly sentient, with "emotions" and desires and all that fun stuff, plus the benefits of being objectively better than us in almost every conceivable way. It wouldn't make much sense for them to pine to be human(oid.) I wonder if there's a word for this sort of "human idolization" in scifi - that being human is just the epitome of being.
> The fact that grabby citizens haven’t overrun Culture shows that these actions are blocked, either tacitly or overtly.
I mean, yeah, of course they're blocked. How would a "grabby citizen" take over the culture? Where would you start? If you find yourself on a planet - a very unpopular place to live in the Culture, by the way - and manage to build up a cult of personality or a cloning facility, and grow yourself 10 Billion footsoldiers... what do you do next? Nearly every ship in the Culture, especially one capable of transporting that many humans, is a person. You can't just rent a GSV - you'd have to convince one to take your army of clones elsewhere, and most Minds would find the idea laughable at best.
> Similarly, it’s strange that no one in Culture modifies themselves into a utility monster, or is interested in simulating sentient life.
It probably happens, but as someone has pointed out, Mr. Banks just didn't write about it. The Culture isn't that homogenous, either - the books explicitly talk about people who have committed crimes, and what happens in that case, including when the person committing the crime is a Mind.
> Look, I’m sorry to break it to you, but SC is a sham. The Minds are perfectly capable of creating avatars which would be more effective than any of the characters shown. I’ve never found the explanations offered convincing. SC is just an affectation or another tool of propaganda.
SC is a pressure valve, and as I recall, it's explicitly stated as such by a character in one of the novels.
> If anything, humans are treated closer to pets than independent agents. They are a weird affectation that is deliberately neutered from any real influence. They are lavished with treats and attention not extended to the rest of the universe.
This too is explicitly stated in a book as either a hypothesis by a human, or an outright statement by a Mind, I can't recall which. Ships have "crew", but what exactly do the human aboard a GSV do, exactly, that the Mind can't?
I feel like the author of this blog post hasn't read enough of these books.
I recommend reading Friendship is Optimal <https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal> by Iceman to anyone who likes stories that are ambiguously {u|dis}topic. It’s spawned quite a few tertiary works too.
I'm less cynical, in that I don't expect the future culture to utterly abandon itself into pure sensualism with nil effort or assumed responsibility, as depicted in the series.
Basing that on namely a) social signaling will still matter; rich people past and present don't all collectively do nothing, b) solving cheap energy and automation doesn't mean there are no more secrets of the universe to reveal, and we are wired to appreciate novelty (hello, Star Trek), c) some people opt for "simple living" today to varying degrees, which usually evokes working outdoors, in other words we may opt to do things we don't "have to" (this may overlap with religious fervor), d) environmental influence (not determinism), by which I mean, a large demographic of the population could shift it's attention to scientific, exploratory or innovative efforts. I think most who go this direction are not exceptional, they just grew up in environments that fostered those interests.
My wish is that we create institutions in preparation for the coming full-auto/UBI society that allow any of us access to the tools needed to collaborate on lofty scientific undertakings. We are not all going to turn to pithy artisanal crafts and art; not everyone has that temperament. Most people are pretty social, many like to build things that provide another kind of utility. But we need to give each other permission and materials.
Absent that, you get the Culture. If we can't get meaning, we'll numb ourselves. You can quibble that even this will meet and end one day (like, fully colonizing the Universe and understanding its secrets), but who cares. The Universe will also end one day. Kick that can down the road.
I'm a big Culture fan, and I don't know what to make of this article.
Many of the points seem to be hallucinated. Either the author has a poor memory and an active imagination or there has been some poor-quality LLM input.
Examples
> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one
Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
> We also see that there are a number of Eccentrics, Minds that don’t fully share the values of Culture. They’re not that rare, about 1% of the population.
I don't believe that 1% figure is mentioned anywhere. I'd be surprised if it was. Eccentrics seem to be much rarer than that.
> We even see GSV Absconding with Style stockpile resources without general knowledge of the other Minds.
This name is made up, and not by Banks. A Google search for "absconding with style" has only a few hits - mainly this article.
I could go on...
The Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints from Surface Detail was described as "very slightly psychotic" - which in the case of advanced Culture warship is quite a thing...
> I don't believe that 1% figure is mentioned anywhere. I'd be surprised if it was. Eccentrics seem to be much rarer than that.
If they're including breakaway Cultures (Zetetic Elench etc), maybe you can get there, but otherwise, yeah, 1% seems very, very high.
It might be a bad translation of a translation, i.e., maybe Absconding With Style is a translation from Russian of weird choice of translation of Sleeper Service _into_ Russian? Bit a stretch I'll grant.
I don't know why Russian is mentioned, that Boris the Brave guy is not Russian, but "Sleeper Service" was oddly translated in the Russian publication as "Спальный Состав", which means "Sleeping composition".
I haven't read the books, but I assume that the meaning of "состав" used here may be "train / a set of train cars".
That at least fits one level of the pun.
Hence “might”, “maybe”, “bit of stretch”
I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true. I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it and relied on an LLM too much. That was a mistake.
Some of these were my own supposition - 1% felt about right for how casually they are mentioned in story.
> Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.
> I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true.
Hah, fair enough. Thanks for getting the Culture back on the front page of HN :)
> I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it
If you were actually referring to the Sleeper Service - I think you still remembered something like the opposite idea of what happened in the story. The twist was - (Spoiler!) - the Sleeper Service was actually not Eccentric at all, and had not built up a small army as a Mind that had gone rogue, but had actually done this as a planned failsafe in conjunction with a number of other Minds. Hence the multi-level pun of its name.
> I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.
I'm afraid I can't remember exactly which books this was explored in, though Inversions, State of the Art and Player of Games are books where the Culture is explicitly compared to other civilisations and so more likely to have mentioned it.
Also Banks' essay /A Few Notes on the Culture/ covers it quite well if you haven't come across that yet. Very short but I think very readable and interesting.
http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
The Idirans were right all along.
I mean, there's a reason Banks chose to write Consider Phlebas with a narrative perspective from someone on the side of the Idrians. As I said in another comment, I think Banks fully intentionally means to make this perspective visible, legibible, understood as not entirely unreasonable.
Which is part of what makes the books so enjoyable to me, being invited to see multiple perspectives (especially reading Consider Phlebas after reading others that establish the Culture from it's own point of view).
Sure, Banks is portraying the best society he can think of for what he values and wants -- but acknowledging that even the best society he can think of has warts and can be seen by some as a dystopia too, and that not all might share the same values and wants.
I have to admit to a soft spot for the Affront. Terrible terrible people, but they did seem to be enjoying life more than anyone else.
> I have to admit to a soft spot for the Affront. Terrible terrible people, but they did seem to be enjoying life more than anyone else.
Honestly, I didn't really enjoy them. Except for that shape-shifter, Banks seemed to tend to write anyone who doesn't subscribe to his utopia as a grotesque cartoon.
That's like saying you have a soft spot for unit 731, they seemed to enjoy doing their little experiments. It's not like that of course, the Affront were worse.
Make the Affront Great Again
Idirans were literally a genocidal fascist theocracy.
In one of the Culture novels, I don't remember which, it says that if a Culture citizen kills someone else the only punishment is that they will be assigned a drone that will follow them at all times and prevent them from ever killing anyone else.
What I find interesting about the Culture as a literary and philosophical concept is that it forces you to choose whether material superabundance and unrestricted freedom is enough to be happy.
Right now with our current civilization we still need to work and have at least some restrictive social structures, because distribution of scarce resources is still a thing; working within these constraints is where all contemporary culture and politics comes from. So at the moment it's still possible to "dodge the question" (although less and less so as time goes on), but once you have the Culture you can no longer do so. You have to choose if you can be happy inside the system of unlimited freedom where you can choose total hedonism or try to construct some kind of meaning for yourself, or if you will "go Horza" and demand deliberately worse social structures to try and force the meaning back in from without (note one of the other comments in this thread saying "the Idirans were right").
This reminds me of the thought of Isaiah Berlin, political philosopher and historian of ideas; utopian philosophies often conclude that there if there is a "right" way to live, i.e. a maximally rational way of life, then utopia will consist of everyone converging on this lifestyle. For a certain type of person, this monistic vision of life annihilates pluralism, optionality, and genuine diversity. Berlin himself espoused value pluralism, the idea that there are an infinite number of fundamental human values and ideals for which once can be deeply committed but can also be at conflict and mutually exclusive with one another.
That's unconvincing, because there's a very clear difference between a lifestyle and a social contract.
Social contracts sketch social relationships in very broad terms. You can still have plenty of lifestyle diversity and plurality within them.
In fact you need a social contract to have any kind of diversity.
Otherwise a culture reliably degenerates into autocracy, which isn't known for its tolerance.
That itself a distinctly modern framing. For many ancients, there was no such division; the way one lived was deeply entangled with the social contract. For example, there are religious sects that dictate specific political arrangements.
As for the diversity you speak of, I think it can be plausibly argued that many utopian conceptions of life really reduce to utilitarianism or hedonism. Diversity manifests in having different options for pleasure or utility. For a lot of people, that's inadequate.
I happen to be a philosophical liberal, and do not wish to live under a theocracy. Nonetheless, I think the fact that many of the highest aspirations of liberal philosophy amount to "having a good time" is a great risk that must be reckoned with, for it can undo the entire liberal project.
My country's founding myth is that everybody deserves "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", but what that pursuit looks like is up to the individual to figure out. Which seems right to me. Some will choose the pursuit of pleasure, some will choose other things.
An unconvincing argument considering people who allegedly believe in god and the afterlife are continuously caught raping children.
It is not religion but empathy that keeps people on the golden path- sociopaths gonna sociopath.
Utopia or dystopia, does it matter?
The material sentients, whether bio or non, are pets to something(s) deeper and unseen.
Subliming is a graduation ceremony. To the next level of petness, probably.
> The material sentients, whether bio or non, are pets to something(s) deeper and unseen.
That seems like a matter of opinion; the Culture minds, certainly, seem to think of the Sublimed as being basically irrelevant.
> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one
Eh, I mean Gurgeh was borderline, and a number of other Culture characters are extremely maladjusted (particularly the drones, actually).
> But the existence of post-scarcity in-vitro development means you could raise an army of clones if you wanted, and would be free to isolate them and indoctrinate similar beliefs. The fact that grabby citizens haven’t overrun Culture shows that these actions are blocked, either tacitly or overtly.
Or just that that would be an absolutely _bizarre_ thing to do and that someone unstable enough to do it probably wouldn't last long.
> and would be free to isolate them and indoctrinate similar beliefs
IIRC that sort of thing _wouldn't_ be allowed; the Culture was pretty big on individual rights. You wouldn't go to jail, but you would get a drone that would stop you from doing it.
> or is interested in simulating sentient life.
There are at least two storylines about that and significant discussion of the ethics (the Culture at best doesn't approve and may see it as a crime).
> The Minds are perfectly capable of creating avatars which would be more effective than any of the characters shown.
Again, it's explicitly mentioned at least once that the minds struggle with doing extremely nasty stuff (which makes sense; there's definitely _some_ alignment going on), and that SC is a tool for that.
I don't disagree that you can read the Culture as a dystopia (though it's a lot less obvious a reading than it would be for, say the Star Trek Federation, which could easily be read as a military junta with good PR), but most of their points aren't particularly compelling.
> IIRC that sort of thing _wouldn't_ be allowed; the Culture was pretty big on individual rights. You wouldn't go to jail, but you would get a drone that would stop you from doing it.
In one of the stories we spend quite a bit of time with an outright cult that has its members eating literal garbage and getting very sick because the AIs didn't want to infringe on their personal liberty.
I read that bit as a critique of allowing such self destructive behavior in the name of personal freedom. Sometimes people just need a dope slap before they get themselves in too much trouble.
That cult wasn't in the Culture. It was on an independent orbital (Vavatch) that the Culture was attempting to evacuate before destroying it to prevent it from being conquered by the Idirans.
I read Vavatch as anarcho-capitalist in contrast to the Culture's anarchism.
Vavatch had a lot of stuff going on that wouldn't have been allowed in the Culture. Certainly the Culture wouldn't have allowed them to non-consensually eat other people. The other stuff probably wouldn't have been prevented by force, but they would vigorously try to convince you not to do it and to prevent you from convincing other people.
If you watch Star Trek and focus on how they treat simulated sentients it's incredibly callous. Civilization like Culture might name Federation way worse than Affront.
I love the Culture novels, and really appreciate the criticism. Thank you. My true love however thought having babies was essential for a good old age. But she was raised in Cambodia. Socialism (that is the welfare state and the promise of being looked after in old age) causes a low birth rate. My "willing suspension of disbelief" includes the idea that "post scarcity" _causes_ good behaviour. Just putting it out there...
> Socialism (that is the welfare state and the promise of being looked after in old age) causes a low birth rate.
I mean, so does capitalism. _Economic development_ in general tends to reduce birth rates.
As someone recently starting (and coming near the end of) the Culture series, I oftem find myself thinking about the course of action humanity might choose if AGI is reached. Frankly, I think the popular sentiment and path of least resistance will be 'let the Minds handle everything' a la Culture.
It's not a really a choice in the Culture. There is zero chance of the Minds abdicating and submitting to human-only rule.
I doubt it would be a choice with AGI, and certainly not with ASI. It might seem like a choice, because true ASI would be persuasive enough to make it appear that way.
Discontent Culture factions do sometimes break away, though; if letting the minds do everything was unpopular, you'd expect the human population to drain away that way, but that mostly doesn't happen (main example would be the Gzilt, who never quite signed up in the first place).
Yes, however unrealistic it may be, several factions in the Culture universe do claim to be the masters of their Minds, or refuse to instantiate them.
> It's not a really a choice in the Culture. There is zero chance of the Minds abdicating and submitting to human-only rule.
Why should they? They're sentient beings living in The Culture too?
All utopias are dystopias because they deny reality. With enough perception and wisdom you can find the good in an imperfect universe.
Utopia in general are a pretty dystopian genre. Plato's Commonwealth clearly describes a totalitarian system (and one of the participants in Socrates' dialogue would go on to murder a rather impressive number of Athenians).
More's Utopia describes a society that's not radically different from the State of Qin - a system based on uniformity, regimentation and forced labor. The main difference is that More would prefer enslavement as the principal punishment, while Shang Yang would prescribe execution.
I think that has something to do with the inherent hubris of the whole exercise.
That's funny. I never considered Culture novels as utopia. For me they were gritty, dark, but logical and prescient vision of the far future. Our or not even necessarily our.
Hopeful only for those of us who are satisfied with a role of beloved pets, fed, housed, medicated, valued and entertained in ways that would be inaccessible to us if we were left alone.
> but we now (rightly) consider modern comforts as only a foundation for higher-level wants, like justice and self-determination
That's a view of a poor person. People who achieved their private post-scarcity at our current tech level are overwhelmingly interested in just enjoying, maintaining and expanding their comforts within the framework available. Justice and self-determination are substitute (ersatz) goals of the poor.
> In any case, the incumbent Minds maintain their rule via physical strength and monitoring, not something more subtle.
It's a combination of both. They achieve high social cohesion through adherence to set of "unwritten" conventions and guidelines (culture), but since the individual Minds have freedom (which was a choice made to provide more resiliency against hacking, and not every civilization at their tech-level chose that, like Morthanveld in "Matter") and Minds are vastly powerful, nobody lies to themselves that anything other than raw physical power can ultimately be used for control. I especially like one scene when one Mind arrives to a remote planetary system occupied by another Mind, unannounced, outside of normal custom, which puts the resident Mind imediately on full alert, ready to fight for its life at any sign of hostility. The fact that both are members of Culture amounts ti almost nothing, when it comes to trust, once one of them did something socially irregular.
> Look, I’m sorry to break it to you, but SC is a sham.
It's not exactly a sham. It's just sometimes it's easier to socially influence your neighbor when you take your dog for a walk when you visit him. It's not that you couldn't achieve the same goals in any other ways, perhaps even simpler. But the dog might just fit, and also the dog has a bit of fun and you have opportunity to learn more about your dogs and about your neighbor, seeing how he reacts to your dog.
> Hopeful only for those of us who are satisfied with a role of beloved pets, fed, housed, medicated, valued and entertained in ways that would be inaccessible to us if we were left alone.
I don't necessarily disagree with this framing, which is fairly common, but I'm also not sure I entirely agree with it. What would "not being a pet" look like, relative to that framing? It's not as if human(oid)s don't have freedom in The Culture.
> What would "not being a pet" look like, relative to that framing?
Well, probably suffering terribly and being disregarded when in the way of business of more powerful actors. Without any hope of ever matching them. Same thing non-pet animals are on Earth now.
Started reading with Consider Phlebas and got to "The Eaters" and stopped reading. This series is too disturbing, horrifying, and gross for me.
Banks does have an unfortunate tendency to wade into straight up torture porn to make a point of how awesome Culture is compared to everything else. The stuff in Phlebas is actually fairly mild in comparison to some of the other things in the series. E.g. in "The Player of Games", the entire story is about an explicitly sadistic culture where torture is normalized as entertainment. In "Surface Detail", we're introduced to the notion of virtual Hells - simulated environments into which mind-states of the deceased (or sometimes living) people is placed specifically to torment them for as long as the simulation continues.
I think that Phlebas scene is probably the most viscerally unpleasant in any of the Culture books, except possibly some of the hell stuff. Far, far worse things are depicted elsewhere, but not with the same level of horrifying detail.
Do any of his works not have this stuff? I've heard so many good things about the series, but I'm really not interested in torture porn.
Honestly, except for that one scene in Phlebas, and some of the stuff in Surface Detail, there's not _that_ much of it in his Culture books.
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"We also see examples of subcultures or even cults, but again by modern standards they are incredibly tame, and are never potentially destabilizing to culture."
Eh, the "Eaters" cult on the island in "Consider Phlebas" which is definatly a culture citizen cult seems to be quiet extreme- and the AIs do not interfere, even as the obliterate themselves. The AI in look to the windward commits suicide, because it can not escape the memory that makes it who it is- which contains the obliteration of its twin and the humans remaining on orbitals.
The "Eaters" had nothing to do with the Culture - they were on Vavatch orbital which wasn't part of the Culture and which the Culture went on to blow up?