"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
exactly; in fact I encountered that quote years ago, shortly after reading Player of Games and Consider Phlebas and found it so shocking, and annoying, that he intends the Culture to be actual Heaven and not a criticism of how certain utopic ideas can be perverse (which I would have found far more compelling, since the Culture is horrifying to me in various ways), that I stopped reading the rest of the series.
The reframing of the Culture as his ideal society turns the whole series into boring political propaganda, in a way, like a very long leftist version of Atlas Shrugged
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.)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
>> 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).
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).
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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
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).
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>
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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...
> 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.
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.
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.
" 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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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").
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Words are a means of communication. An author can clarify what was intended to be communicated.
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.
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.
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?
Spending the rest of eternity with other human beings is not very appealin.
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.
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.
exactly; in fact I encountered that quote years ago, shortly after reading Player of Games and Consider Phlebas and found it so shocking, and annoying, that he intends the Culture to be actual Heaven and not a criticism of how certain utopic ideas can be perverse (which I would have found far more compelling, since the Culture is horrifying to me in various ways), that I stopped reading the rest of the series.
The reframing of the Culture as his ideal society turns the whole series into boring political propaganda, in a way, like a very long leftist version of Atlas Shrugged
fucking snore
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.)
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.
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)
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.
Didn't Verhoeven famously not read the book? Hard to call it "satire" then, "straw man" might be more accurate.
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.
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
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.
> 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).
Next up: Peanut Hamper, Agimus, and Badgey
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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
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).
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>
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".
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Make the Affront Great Again
Idirans were literally a genocidal fascist theocracy.
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.
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 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 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".
Hence “might”, “maybe”, “bit of stretch”
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...
> 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.
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 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.
" 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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").
"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?
All utopias are dystopias because they deny reality. With enough perception and wisdom you can find the good in an imperfect universe.