When entering the Girdle City from orbit, The Mistake Not basically did the Adama manouver, just better, and with more finesse than the Galactica ever could.
There's a term I'm convinced I got from a skimming of The Culture series and I'm blanking on it's name. The details are it's the term used to describe challenges and phenomena that are outside their current frame of reference. Something like an O something P?
It's killing me I'm blanking on this. Course I may have my sci-fi worlds mixed up, as well.
Edit: Oh, Jesus. That was fast. Yes. That's it. Outside Context Problem. Thank you. Needed it for a roleplay that's gone from my character giving away copies of his omnipotent assistant being a good idea to discovering some of the instanced assistants others have are being /hunted/, and the only visual evidence we have of by what is a graphic artist who drew a comic of his assistant being pulled into nothing...by a hand that came from OUTSIDE THE COMIC IMAGE FRAME.
Hence, what I think we're dealing with.
Outside
Context
Problem
How would Contact or SC make your typical fantasy setting denizens want to adopt Culture values like abandoning monarchy, banning slavery, etc? Especially in a setting where you have superhuman warriors and mages and gods with actual powers?
In Look to Windward, I keep >!on coming back to the true conspirators behind the Chelgrian terror cell (led by that sanctimonious priest and sociopath albino), but the real culprits who installed the wormhole tech inside Quilan's pre-existing skull augment (the so-called "soulkeeper") and mediated with Quilan's group through unfamiliar looking conical drones were never revealed.!<
The Masaq Hub's Mind >!personally mused the conspiracy's king pins may have been a rogue Mind (or Minds) while Quilan personlly suspected another rival galactic power to Culture. Either way the conspirators being revealed would have serious geopolitical ramifications - if a rogue Mind or cabal of Minds got exposed, they'd face the Culture equivalent of high treason, conspiracy, and terror charges (or/and diplomatic relations with an Involved foreign power linked to the Masaq plot would deteriorate drastically).!<
Is it
Turns out, it's both! Chapter 13 ("Some Ways of Dying") in LTW and Chapter 19 in SD give the exact same name for these two widely disparate crafts.
How come? Banks' has never been one who could be called "lazy" when it comes to imagining and inventing anything...
This discovery left me genuiniely puzzled.
Just seen on another feed, the image from Anish Kapoor All is Nothing, a red ellipsoid in a space by some stairs. It brought to my head what the Mind in the tunnels might look like in Phlebas. I can't share it here but it really seems to fit.
Finished in order of release, I thoroughly enjoyed the books but this is more of preaching to the choir here so I am going to do a best of with minimal spoilers:
Edit: Corrected Matters being mentioned twice instead of the missing book Inversion. I read them one after the other which can be seen as a mistake since I wanted to read them by order of release but I did find it fascinating reading two books based on low-tech (by culture standard) and how they both functioned as stories.
9: Matter - felt like I wasn't able to see myself in the story half the time. The characters, world building and everything was coherent but the last third of the book feels like it came out of no where. I also prefer my science fiction to be more of a 'in space' story rather than with what I recall more low tech ish compared to the rest of the books. edit: >!The main shellworld the protoganist lived in primarily!<(correct me if I am wrong please) >!I also dislike the two 'plot twists' here the most compared to the rest of the series. !<Still worth reading overall though.
8: Consider Phlebas - >!Consider sucking my nuts. !<As my first foray into Iain's universe, he didn't do a lot of favours by putting us in the shoes of someone outside of the Culture. The story was still great and I still remember certain scenes in the story but he definitely expands more of the namesake's civilisation rather than the protagonist in this story. >!This is the only book where I couldn't think of the main plot twist at the end.!<If I was at gunpoint and was forced to skip a Culture Series book, I would tell them to fire. In all seriousness, if you don't fancy this book I would rather you move on to the next book in the series than giving it up all together.
7: Surface Detail - I don't like reading NSFW stuff, >!I loathe reading all the parts of hell, but that's probably what Banks was banking on. !<A person's ability to see themselves, a world or story in a book I have come to realise is both an asset and a curse. Outside of the NSFW sections I quite enjoyed, edit: Especially the dynamics between a mind and one of the leading characters. The plot twist I did not see coming. >!The last two words made me yell out 'WHAT' which is a first for me. I also now want to one day call someone a 'ghastly cunt'. Let me know what other things you all now want to say to someone thanks to these books giving you the idea.!<
6: Inversions - Remember when I said that I prefer my science fiction to be more of a 'in space' story? Yeah I think I'm a liar. I found the characters to be well fleshed out and whilst the story is small, it still matters to the philosophy of the culture. >!I also found this the second easiest plot twist to figure out.!<
5: Use of Weapons - It's chapter order is basically going to force me to reread it one day. I had trouble understanding the plot, especially when I wasn't consistently reading the book during my time with it. In hindsight, I still like it but I bet I will put this book a bit higher on the list later. >!The plot twist at the end is also a big reason why I want to reread the book.!<
4: Excession - The mind of the minds are so fascinating, hilarious and quite frankly, frightening. I didn't care much about what was in the box but how what is everyone going to do with the box? >!Interesting times gang is a very interesting name for a group.!<
3: Hydrogen Sonata - This one is fresh in my mind, it is the perfect send off to the series and to the author himself (though this was not originally the case). The interview was also a great read and I would say is an addition to the notes on the culture. >!Kinda knew that the book was made up as some sort of experiment but it was still cool to see it through. !<This is the last book I would recommend to read despite my rankings. >!I too would find tussling with fields homo erotic.!<
2: Look to Windward - The one that made me cry, the one that questions what is true justice. The vastness of AI and how we are light years away from comprehending even the kindest ones. >!Wasn't the hugest fan of now knowing some parts of the book just leads to nothing as a twist of 'oh the culture knew all along' but meh, still cool.!<
1: Player of Games - I found this one to be the most coherent of a story (not as a slight or positive compared to the rest of the books) but I remember the grotesque, the fascinating and how the Culture can view other civilisations. >!The easiest twist to see coming but nonetheless fun throughout. !<
If you read this through, thanks for your time. I have The Algebraist, Feersum Endjinn and Against a Dark Background to read but I might give them a break and come back to it at a later point. What other Iain M Banks books would you recommend for me to add to my collection?
I suggest not googling it to avoid spoilers. A great contemporary Detective Noir with a twist (hard to avoid being a bit spoilery just by the fact that I'm posting this in this group). Really well written and beautifully filmed.
Reading Diaspora by Greg Egan, I can't help but wonder about those Culture folks who live in VR, abandoning the real world entirely. It's a shame Banks never really wrote a book about them.
I can imagine one Orbital whose citizens are all just people who prefer living in virtual worlds because they have a lot more freedom in it. Like the Citizens in Diaspora said, you can go really weird in VR because you're not limited to real world physics. And if you go full digital, you can make it so a day in the real is equal to a year in vr.
This might sound like heresy but I have quite a few of his books that just sit in a box in my room. I bought them as they came out, some are 1st edition and some are signed. But as I've read them, they are not new to me so there's no thrill on reading them again. Should I donate them to a school library or try to sell them? Not World of Books as I would expect more than 11p if I sold them. Thoughts appreciated.
(Wasp Factory, Feersum, Phlebas, Algebraist, Hydrogen, Windward, Inversions, Surface, Crow Rd X2, Complicity, Raw Spirit, Transition, The Quarry, Song of Stone, Business, Garbadale, Dead Air, Stone mouth. Excession has been excessively reread as has UoW and AADB and stay)
Or do I grow old with them and leave them in my will to grandchildren in the hope that one of them will enjoy them?
Obviously the main focus of Pog is.. guess what. Mr Banks also references games frequently in other books, most notably off the top of my head, Matter and Complicity.
I'm sure he must have a decent interest in games to be able to come up with the board games, strategy, VR, etc explained in the books but I'm wondering what games he would have enjoyed here on earth. Does anyone know?
Ps PLS DONT SPOIL THE END OF MATTER. I've not finished reading it yet, thank you.
Having re-read"Look To Windward" a couple of time, I just noticed something that I seem to have glossed over in previous readings:
Ambassador Ischloear, Drone Tersono and Composer Ziller are frequently adressed in the book as "Ar", "Dn," and "Cr", respectively.
I have always wondered: Is this a misprint or one of these affectations that Culture people in general and the inhabitants of Masaq' in particular sometimes employ?
I thought I'd share a wee bit of information I picked up the other day, that I've not seen elsewhere on the internet.
I've purchased prints of a couple of Culture novel covers from the artist, Mark Salwowski.
(https://www.salwowski.com if you're interested. He also is selling the original artwork for other author's books.)
One was for the cover for Look to Windward, which he has listed with the title 'Peer Group'.
I asked why the alternate name. He responded
"... the working title of ‘Look to Windward’ was ‘Peer Group,’ and the manuscript I worked from was labelled as such. I believe there was some kind of tiny test print run for promotional purposes that had the title too."
I can imagine Banks maybe wanted to obscure the background of this book until release time. The final title clearly tells readers it is related to Consider Phlebas.
The particularly interesting bit is that note about the tiny preproduction run with the working title... which must be in someone's collection, somewhere...
So I just watched this Terence Tao clip about high dimensional geometry and it made me think of the Culture Minds again.
https://youtu.be/GHwflk-l008?si=15rEqdzd2i2-YO8S
Basically Tao was saying that once you get into really high dimensions, shapes stop working the way our brains expect. Like a circle inside a square takes up a lot of the square, and a sphere inside a cube still takes up a decent amount. But if you do the same thing in like 100 or 1000 dimensions, the “ball” takes up basically none of the “cube”.
Which is insane and very unintuitive.
And the reason this matters now is that LLMs kind of live in higher dimensional spaces. Words and concepts get represented as vectors with hundreds or thousands of dimensions. So “meaning” is not stored like a normal file or sentence, it’s more like relationships in this giant weird mathematical space.
Anyway, that made me think about Banks describing Culture Minds as working largely in hyperspace. Not just “big fast computers”, but intelligences whose actual processing/storage is happening in spaces humans can’t really visualize.
Obviously Banks didn’t literally predict ChatGPT or transformers or whatever. AI existed as an idea way before that.
But I do think he got something really important right, which is that a true machine superintelligence probably wouldn’t just be a human brain but faster. It would think and store information in ways that don’t map cleanly onto normal human 3D intuition.
Modern AI is maybe like the baby version of that higher dimensional vector spaces for language and meaning.
Culture Minds are the insane sci-fi version godlike AIs using hyperspace and alien geometry as part of how they exist. Idk, maybe this is obvious to everyone else, but it made the Minds feel even cooler more plausible to me.
NOTE: I probably blurred two meanings of “dimension” here physical hyperspace in Banks vs mathematical vector dimensions in machine learning. Those are not the same thing. But the connection that still interests me is that both push against the same naive intuition intelligence doesn’t have to be organized in ways that feel spatially or cognitively natural to humans.
Hey all! After finishing Baxter‘s entire Xeelee Sequence a couple months ago, I jumped straight into The Culture and have been loving it the whole way.
Something about me is that I take the order in which I consume media very seriously, and always try to find the best, most fulfilling, and most satisfying order to read things in—even if that sometimes contradicts publication order or chronology. After much deliberation, I ended up starting the series with Consider Phlebas (a choice I now realize was the correct one).
I‘m now coming up on the end of Inversions. The next book in order is Look to Windward, but that is my dilemma. Everything I’ve learned of LtW seems to point to it being a great candidate to end the series. The obvious connections with CP, the generally lower-intensity story, and some of the themes I’ve heard people discuss in passing.
Whats y’all’s thoughts and recommendations? Which book, LtW or Hydrogen Sonata, provides a more satisfying and thematically sound conclusion to the series? Thanks!
To celebrate Banks' wonderfully deep imagination, let's guess from which of the Culture novels this quote is and its context (should be pretty safe from googling/AI searching - especially AI confabulates a lot and seldomly gets obscure quotes right):
"What you have there, Mr Olsule, is a piece of jet in the shape of a ceerevell, explosively inlaid with platinum and summitium. From the studio of Ms Xossin Nabbard, of Sintrier, after the Quarafyd school. A finely wrought work of substantial artistry."
Earlier in Matter, Vollird is described as such:
>Vollird was a tall, thin, darkly intense fellow with a look that could, as now, verge on insolent. He usually regarded the world with his head tipped downwards, eyes peering out from beneath his brow. It was by no means a shy or modest aspect; rather it seemed a little wary and distrusting, certainly, but mostly mocking, sly and calculating, and as though those eyes were keeping carefully under the cover of that sheltering brow, quietly evaluating weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and the best time to strike.
Later, after his companion Baerth was killed by Oramen in the failed assassination attempt, and Oramen himself had been attacked by the Iln machine and lying in bed, and after Tyl Loesp’s attack and takeover of the settlement, Vollird approaches Tyl Loesp like this:
>“It is, sir! It’s me! Your good and faithful servant, sir!” Vollird cried. “We did all we could, sir! We nearly got him! I swear! There were just too many!”
>Tyl Loesp stared at the fellow. He shook his head. “I have no time for you—”
>“Just save me from the ghosts, tyl Loesp, please!” Vollird said, his knees buckling underneath him and the guards on either side having to take his weight. Vollird’s eyes were wide and staring, foam flecking his lips.
>“Ghosts?” tyl Loesp said.
>“Ghosts, man!” Vollird shrieked. “I’ve seen them; ghosts of all of them, come to haunt me!”
>Tyl Loesp shook his head. He looked at the guard commander. “The man’s lost his wits. Take him—” he began.
>“Gillews, the worst!” Vollird said, voice breaking. “I could feel him! I could still feel him! His arm, his wrist under—”
>He got no further. Tyl Loesp had drawn his sword and plunged it straight into the man’s throat, leaving Vollird gurgling and gesticulating, eyes wider still, gaze focused on the flat blade extending from his throat, where the air whistled and the blood pulsed and bubbled and dripped. His jaw worked awkwardly as though he[…]”
It felt like something had happened to him. Maybe the Iln machine had affected his mind somehow, although he was never in close proximity to it like Oramen. It’s never fully explained though. Does anyone have any ideas?
I was just idly wondering what would happen, particularly in the first stages. What do you think? Would they allow themselves to be seen in orbit for a few days before making contact? Perhaps a worldwide greeting on all media channels? Countless ship avatars popping up, knocking on doors to personally introduce themselves to us?
We've seen that The Culture respects (or pretends to respect) the governmental systems of other civilisations, establishing embassies, making treaties etc so I guess the most probable, and most boring, scenario is that they'd contact governments or the UN first, maybe with a bit of foreshadowing such as revealing their existence in a way that only small groups of scientists could detect. How would that work? Land a ship near a military base and wait the humans to come? Start off with a message from off planet? Send a delegation in person to the UN HQ?
Edit: I used the wrong practise/practice in the title. Wish I didn’t feel the need to mention it but I do.
I wanted to get some Marain characters tatted with neat line work, my initial thought was to get “Av Anam“ or “Av Anamnesis” tatted on my wrist but in marain characters. It’s a reference to the starship I pilot in space engine which is a General Contact Vehicle with the name “Anamnesis”, so it’s kinda meta in a way.
Thoughts on how to give it a more culture “flare” and where to find the official characters ?