Still reading through Surface Detail but it only just hit me that one of the ships is called Bodhisattva and, since that's a pretty Earth specific word, made me think Earth might have actually joined the Culture
Hi, I'm new to this subreddit, but I have been a big fan of Iain Banks' Culture series since I was a teenager.
I just recommended Consider Phlebas as a book to try in a sci-fi book club that I'm taking part in. No-one else in the group has read any of the Culture series before, and a discussion came up as to what extent Horza was being manipulated by the Culture minds throughout the book.
To me, it seems quite plausible that Horza was being used by the minds all along, as a tool to achieve their goal of retrieving the lost mind. The ending seems highly convenient for the Culture, that despite things deteriorating into quite a messy gun/train fight, Balveda is ultimately the only person that emerges unscathed from the train tunnels with the lost mind recovered and ready to return to the Culture. It also seems highly convenient that she and her drone were part of Horza's group that were able to gain access to Schar's World. So, the ending seems to perhaps be intended to show the subtle manipulative powers of the minds - that even in such a messy situation, they were able to use their predictive calculations and subtle influence to help tilt things towards a conclusion that was favorable for them. I.e. Horza and his ship were deliberately allowed to escape from the GSV; Balveda was planted on purpose, as an agent to help influence things on the ground.
It also seems to tie in with the very interesting choice to choose a main character for his first Culture book who is an enemy of the culture and philosophically opposed to it. My take on this is that, as well as Phlebas giving something of a 'tour' of his universe, he also wanted to demonstrate the subtle manipulative powers of the Culture minds. And the best way he could think of to do that was to put the reader in the shoes of a character who was an enemy of the Culture, but was nevertheless being manipulated by it, as a hapless pawn to unwittingly do their bidding. So, the point of the book is partly to give the reader a sense of what it is like to be manipulated and used by these super-intelligent AI beings (which to me seems quite clever and subtle).
I'm just wondering if this makes sense and whether other people who are familiar with the books would agree with this interpretation.
I've read Phlebas and The Player of Games and want to keep going but which should I read next of the options I have currently from the library:
Hi all, I just thought about the scene in CP where one of Horzas posse jumps the railing on the mega ship, thinking his AG would catch him and plummets to his death. Reason is, AG can't interact with an Orbital the same way as you would with a solid planet. So far so good.
In later books though, there are a lot of instances where drones and other vessels use AG to fly around on culture Orbitals with no problem whatsoever.
The drone visiting Ghurgeh in PoG is one example.
Am I just overthinking this or did Banks change how AG works in later books?
I've got a bit of a heretical opinion on the Culture novels--or is it? I don't know.
I first read Iain Banks maybe around 2012; I got randomly interested during a long vacation, and I decided to read Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons, and Look to Windward rather quickly. I tried Inversions but couldn't get into it. Then, I took a long hiatus, distracted by a number of other things, and then very recently picked up Hydrogen Sonata and am currently getting through it.
Anyway, as I read Hydrogen Sonata, after having read a ton of other science fiction by different authors recently, I'm consolidating my opinion of the Culture novels, which, frankly, isn't too different from my opinion from over a decade ago. I think that the Culture is one of my favorite fictional societies, and I very much enjoy the ongoing literary problem that Banks tackles: how do you have interesting stories in/about a genuine honest-to-God utopia? I love the worldbuilding, and the hopeful and fantastical possibilities the Culture provides.
But here's where you might strongly disagree with me: I really don't know if I like Banks' prose.
To be clear, Banks is not a bad writer, not by a long shot. He's much, much better than the average SF writer. And yet... Something about his writing annoys me. There are two aspects that I have a lot of trouble with. First, I think he is overly descriptive. And the way that he describes, in his first person omniscient voice, most of the world, it's largely in the assumption that the reader is someone foreign to that world. There is, I believe, too much over-explanation, in a way that prevents an immersive seal into this wonderful universe of his. It is written in such a way that I am constantly reminded that I am not a part of his universe, because it is being explained to me as if I was a foreigner. This, of course, happens to be true, but it does a poor job of drawing the reader in to engage in the fantasy of living in a universe with the Culture.
Second--and this might simply be because I'm not Scottish or British and don't have the same tastes--I regularly find the humor/"wit" more irritating than entertaining. There's something I find unpleasant about the Douglas Adams-esque jokes, and the near-universal snark of most of the characters. There's a smugness to it, an arrogance to it, that I find off-putting in a utopian setting. I contrast this to, say, Ursula Le Guin's writing. The Dispossessed is full of a kind of lush poetical sensibility and earnestness, which, to me, feels so much more appropriate in sketching out a utopian society. The rawness of emotion makes society more approachable, while I find the ongoing evasion through wit in the Culture exhausting. Utopia might actually be nightmarish if it's full of a bunch of AIs who think they're Oscar Wilde or W. S. Gilbert (note: Look to Windward was my favorite Culture novel partly because the Mind was experiencing grief rather than spouting snark).
Anyway, I'm not sure why I felt the need to write this out, but I guess I wanted to see if anyone felt the same way? Or is my opinion more common than I thought? Am I being ridiculous?
Okay, long post, but I think this community in particular will get it.
I started reading the Culture when I was twelve. I'm almost forty now. Already as a kid I had the sense Banks had written the one utopia I was willing to commit to. Anti-imperial, anti-priestly, very funny, and willing to take its own moral expense seriously (which is why Special Circumstances exists). I've re-read most of them more than six times.
The figures building the technologies the Culture would presuppose (frontier AI, energy infrastructure, longevity, neural interfaces) are reading Banks and citing him by name. Naming SpaceX drone ships after his Minds. Quoting him as a self-descriptor on Twitter. And then building, carefully and at scale, the institutional conditions the Culture novels and Banks would diagnose as pre-Culture barbarism.
You all remember Joiler Veppers. Surface Detail, 2010. Richest man on Sichult. Made his money in entertainment, finance, infrastructure. Charming on television, describes himself when pressed as a kind of civilizational steward. Runs as a side business a network of virtual Hells, afterlife environments engineered for the eternal torture of digitized minds, leased to client governments and faith cultures for a per-soul fee. Banks's narrator says he does this not out of cruelty exactly, but because the business is good and the demand is real. In the novel the Culture removes him, of course
Banks wrote Veppers already in 2010. Before Brexit. Before the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Before Anthropic existed. Before Musk's 2018 tweet ("If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks" which has been discussed much). The figure has since become several specific people. The same charm; the same stewardship-language; the same indifference to what is being engineered when the engineering is profitable. The Musk–Veppers parallel is the thing that made me write the essay.
The same people quote Player of Games approvingly, which is the part that gets me, because Player of Games is structurally a parable about labs running optimization games as political acts, and Gurgeh plays the imperial game to defeat the empire, not to scale it.
I wrote it down, around five thousand words, sourced, if you want to follow. The essay walks through Andreessen's manifesto, the Musk eight-year arc of keeping Banks's word and discarding the politics, the SpaceX ship-names, the harder Amodei case (he has read Banks; he is still building the lab). And it tries gently, with the books still on the table to take Banks back from the figures who learned his name and skipped Surface Detail.
I think the misreading will get worse before it gets better, and getting the diagnostic on the page now, with sources, felt necessary. I'm posting it here because if any community in the world is going to read this generously and also tear it apart accurately where it deserves it, it's this.
Banks's afterlife is one of the stranger things in contemporary tech culture. Nearly thirteen years after his death he's shaping more high-stakes institutional thinking than almost any twentieth-century novelist working in the genre. We see his villains' template get adopted, sincerely, by his most enthusiastic readers. He would have laughed and warned us. Wait, he did warn us. It's in the books.
https://matiasseidler.substack.com/p/on-reading-iain-m-banks
Can someone paste the passage from a Culture novel where they say humans are lucky Minds are benevolent? I’m not able to find it…
Okay so I slept on Halo back in the day and I'm now playing through the series as all the discourse on Marathon 2026/Rampant AI made me want to see Cortana's story. (And finish Durandal's by playing the rest of the Marathon series but that's not relevant.)
As I play, I feel like the Halo is really not that far removed from an orbital? Did Bungie totally crib from Banks? What is the actual difference?
This is more related to Iain's non-M stuff, but, as the biggest sub dedicated to his work, this might be the best place to ask.
If you were going to do a tour of Scottish locations that have been mentioned in his novels, what would they be?
I think you'd start in Edinburgh, then cross "The Bridge" to North Queensferry to see Iain's house (right by the station exit, complete with his old Toyota Yaris in the drive), up to Dumfermline (mentioned in several books)... beyond that, there's various places in the Highlands mentioned, there's Arisaig on the West Coast, then several locations in Glasgow, including Espedair Street.
What might you add to this list? Where, for instance, would Isis Whit's commune have been? I know Luskentyre is on the Isle of Harris, but that's not where the commune was. Where was The Wasp Factory supposed to have been set? I think it was only ever referred to as "the island" in the book. There's the unfinished bridge in Glasgow that Weird visits in Espedair Street - was it ever finished? Only ever been to Glasgow once and wasn't able to look for it at the time!
I love hard sci-fi. I really do, and I think I'm able to ignore the small details that don't quite add up once you think too hard about it because it's necessary for the story to be told as intended.
I'm also an ameteur physicist.
As far as the Culture universe is concerned, my major gripe is with signals/information travelling orders of magnitude faster than matter (ships), such as directed ship-to-ship signalling in four dimensions.
I've read all the books, many of them several times, but I'm not quite able to fit this feature into my "mind-verse", as it were.
Have I just misunderstood something, am I over-analyzing things, or is there an explanation hidden away in one of the novels I just haven't internalized yet?
To expand: >!A ship has to use its engines to gain traction with the energy grids in order to substantially exceed lightspeed. Even if a mere signal was able to do the same, I'm sure I've read some passages that would only be possible if signals/information travelled faster than the 233.000 kilolight record set by the Sleeper Service in Excession using several cubic kilometers of engine to achieve such a velocity.!<
I've been building OpenFiction, a free character tracking database for fiction. Nine Culture novels now have chapter summaries, character tracking, and a 50-entry glossary covering the Culture civilisation, Contact, Special Circumstances, external species (Idirans, Affront, Chelgrians, Gzilt), technology (Minds, GSVs, effectors, displacement, knife missiles, neural laces, gridfire), and key concepts (Subliming, Outside Context Problems, the Idiran War, Marain).
Each novel's characters are tracked with per-chapter appearances, relationships, and group memberships (The Culture, Special Circumstances, Clear Air Turbulence, etc.). The three non-Culture Banks SF novels (Against a Dark Background, Feersum Endjinn, The Algebraist) are also covered.
It's spoiler-filtered based on reading progress - if you're working through the series and don't want later-book reveals on character pages, it handles that.
Free, no ads, open for contributions. The descriptions were written to capture what makes each novel distinctive without spoiling outcomes.
(Mods – happy to remove if this isn't appropriate for the sub.)
Slight spoiler.
I’m listening, again, to Excession and am in awe of Banks’ depiction of the end of The Attitude Adjuster. It was incredible, both Banks’ writing and Peter Kenny’s narration.
Like you know how in stuff like star trek or starwars space is basically just substituting for the ocean. Like with planets as the equivalent of island nations, humanoid aliens as different ethnic groups, and the space ships substituting for sailings ships. The Culture universe also mostly works like that and presumably because Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons as meant as deconstructions of stories that are told in universes like that. I wonder if Banks would have made the universe so …standard if he hadn’t established most of the basic world building in those stories? Like we see in stuff like Against a Dark Background and The Algebraist that he would create very non standard sci-fi settings.
Firstly, I love the world building. Banks does a great job of communicating scale, technology and the stakes of galactic, thousands years old civilisations.
I don't believe that every narrative has to be tied up unambiguously, in fact, Banks does this very well occasionally _but_ having just finished _Look to Windward_, I'm getting the distinct impression that Banks forgot what characters are even for. So many named characters appear only to die or disappear or fizzle out having served no purpose nor relate to the themes of the overarching story.
This was most apparent in _Excession_ which appears to have a cult like following because I guess the concept of the story is cool but the execution is excruciating.
It's strange because _Player of Games_ and _Use of Weapons_ showed that he can write compelling characters that drive the story. There is a journey they go through that changes the character or us as the reader.
At this point, I'm on the fence about reading the remaining books.
I had heard of the culture series and was very intrigued in reading the books. I decided to read them in publication order and went out and bought Consider Phlebas. After buying it, I heard many people saying to read the others first (namely Player of Games or Use of Weapons). I just finished Consider Phlebas and I thoroughly enjoyed it, as well as the introduction to the Culture. I have ordered Player of Games and will read it soon, but I am just wondering why it seems like this book has a bad wrap and why people think it is not a good starting point.
To be honest, I didn’t really like it. It felt like each scene was done well, but the overall plot just didn’t grip me. I felt similarly about Excession, but I liked that more to be honest.
When I say each scene was done well, I mean within each scene or context in the book (for example Vyr being on the water world with QiRia) the imagery was clear and detailed, and the writing was very poetic at times. Each scene was narrated to great effect.
The problem I had with it was it felt like there were a lot of dead ends or loose ends. Every time I was excited for a reveal, there either was no reveal or it felt unsatisfying.
One thing I did like was when Agansu leaves behind an android body with the Girdle City. At first, I was like, ok you missed your chance buddy. Vyr is already gone. But then I thought further, knowing how Banks writes, this is definitely Chekhov’s Gun, and we will be back. As soon as the Culture finds out QiRia doesn’t have the memories anymore, that he removed them, you just KNOW that the body modder has them.
I really liked the scenes with Ximenyr. Amazing character. His and QiRia’s life story in snapshots would have been more interesting to me than the rest of this book I think.
Agansu’s existential crisis, good. The Zoologist discussing subliming, good. Vyr’s personal struggle with feeling she has to play the Sonata, good. Though, it would have been more in line with the rest of the book if she did just let go of it, much like how the Minds let go of the truth of the Gzilt.
Yeah, I liked a lot of parts of the book, but I just had a bad feeling about it all and the end didn’t sell it for me. Is it Culture, sure, but I wish it wasn’t.
What are the community’s thoughts? Till now I thought this book was highly regarded but next to Matter and Surface Detail it feels kind of mid, so I’m wondering why. Those books had much more compelling worldbuilding in my eyes.
I'll start with a one from LtW.
>!It turned to look at him again. There was an expression of terrible sorrow on its face. ∼ You’ve wanted to die since you realised you’d lost her, since you recovered from your wounds, haven’t you, Quilan?!<
>!∼ Yes.!<
>!It nodded. ∼ Me too.!<
>!He knew the story of its twin, and the worlds it had destroyed. He wondered, assuming it was telling the truth, how many lifetimes of regret and loss you could fit into eight hundred years, when you could think, experience and remember with the speed and facility of a Mind.!<
>!∼ What will happen to Chel?!<
>!∼ A handful of individuals - certainly no more - may pay with their lives. Other than that, nothing. It shook its head slowly. ∼ We cannot let you have your balancing souls, Quilan. We will try to reason with the Chelgrian-Puen. It’s tricky territory for us, the Sublimed, but we have contacts.!<
>!It smiled at him. He could see his broad, furred face reflected in the image’s delicate features.!<
>!∼ We still owe you for our mistake. We will do all we can to make amends. This attempt does not absolve us. Nothing has been balanced. It squeezed his hand. He had forgotten they were still holding each other. ∼ I am sorry.!<
>!∼ Sorrow seems a common commodity, doesn’t it?!<
>!∼ I believe the raw material is life, but happily there are other by-products.!<
>!∼ You are not really going to kill yourself, are you?!<
>!∼ Both of us, Quilan.!<
>!∼ Do you really--?!<
>!∼ I am tired, Quilan. I have waited for these memories to lose their force over the years and decades and centuries, but they have not. There are places to go, but either I would not be me when I went there, or I would remain myself and so still have my memories. By waiting for them to drop away all this time I have grown into them, and they into me. We have become each other. There is no way back I consider worth taking.!<
>!It smiled regretfully and squeezed his hand again.!<
>!∼ I’ll be leaving everything in good working order, and in good hands. It’ll be a more-or-less seamless transition, and nobody will suffer or die.!<
>!∼ Won’t people miss you?!<
>!∼ They’ll have another Hub before too long. I’m sure they’ll take to it, too. But I hope they do miss me a little. I hope they do think well of me.!<
>!∼ And you’ll be happy?!<
>!∼ I won’t be happy or unhappy. I won’t be. Neither will you.!<
>!It turned more towards him and held out its other hand.!<
>!∼ Are you ready, Quilan? Will you be my twin in this?!<
>!He took its other hand.!<
>!∼ If you will be my mate.!<
>!The avatar closed its eyes.!<
>!Time seemed to expand, exploding all around him.!<
>!His last thought was that he’d forgotten to ask what had happened to Huyler.!<
>!Light shone in the sky above the Bowl.!< - Look to Windward, 16 - Expiring Light
Hello all. I have been intrigued by The Culture series for a little while now but have put off really giving it a try until I got some other series off my plate. My TBR is going to open up a bit in the summer and it feels like the right time to give this a try. I read Inversions a couple years ago and liked it enough. The only other books that I’m really interested in are Use of Weapons, Excession, and The Hydrogen Sonata.
Could I get away with reading just those three in that order? Is there any context that I might be missing from other books that would take away some of the impact or weight of these three books? Any info would be much appreciated!
I'm reading 'Surface Detail' and told my wife about the concept of 'Slap Drones' where your punishment is to be followed by a drone to ensure you don't repeat offend. She bought up the thought of how it would interfere with your life. How people, would react to you having it following you all the time (friends, family, employer? (if there is such a thing)).
Are peoples' reactions to these drones mentioned? Are they obvious in what they are or do they look like regular drones? What kind of stigma would there be on someone with one of these (it's going to be a lot more obvious than an ankle monitor). Are these drones proven (or not) to be effective?
>a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.
Every single meeting I'm in is this. Working from home means that last sentence translates to reading something in another window until I hear my name, whereupon I make whatever agreeable noises are expected of me and the proceedings move on.