The Culture War: Iain M. Banks’s Billionaire Fans

https://bloodknife.com/culture-war-iain-m-banks-jeff-bezos/

152 294 5 years ago

I'm no billionaire but I'm certainly a fan of The Culture Series. It's an extremely beautiful series of books.

Oh, I agree. But the article is about the apparent contradiction: what do ultra-capitalists like Musk and Bezos see in a series about a communist utopia?

bpodgursky• 5 years ago

It's only a contradiction if you view the world extremely antagonistically — that Musk and Bezos have the prime and only goal of sitting on top of a pile of cash while the world burns around them.

If you see the world as Musk and Bezos building and deploying capital to build what they see as a better future, there's no contradiction at all. There's fierce disagreement about how we get to that future, but we all want the same general thing.

ethbr02• 5 years ago

It's entirely possible Musk and Bezos prefer being Musk and Bezos, even at the cost of ensuring other people don't become them, in a scarcity society.

Yet simultaneously prefer a post-scarcity future in which everyone is Musk and Bezos.

Heavy lies the crown, etc etc

BluSyn3• 5 years ago

There-in lies my disagreement with this article. There is no contradiction. I don't think Musk/Bezos are as ultra-capitalist as many claim them to be; nor do I think The Culture is as much of a communist utopia as the article claims it is.

andrewflnr2• 5 years ago

Bezos and Musk, finding themselves in a capitalist society, are playing the game to win. In part, though, they play because that's how they can build what they want to build. I think it's a misunderstanding of the mindset of these people to think they somehow desire the suffering and poverty of others; that's incidental. Not that that's really ok, but if the technology existed to implement The Culture I think they would honestly prefer that to their current positions.

sidibe2• 5 years ago

I don't see why super-successful capitalists wouldn't want to live in The Culture.

I think people who see the Culture as a dystopia are those who either believe work/being useful is an essential part of life OR those who get their satisfaction from their relative well-being rather than absolute.

You can be a billionaire CEO and not fall into those categories. I'd imagine a lot of people who have been very successful in capitalism do it because they enjoy their work and not because they feel like work is the only thing worth doing or because they want to be ever-more relatively better off than everyone else.

jldugger• 5 years ago

I mean, for a good long while it was a pretty easy argument to claim that Bezos was the head of a RAMJAC: a megacorp with no apparent profit motive, and a secret mission to build a state owned economy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMJAC).

alasdair_4• 5 years ago

The Culture is post-scarcity. Every single inhabitant is far, far, far richer in absolute terms than Musk or Bezos. There is no logical inconsistency in a capitalist wanting to be a trillion times richer than they are today.

Worrying about relative wealth over absolute wealth is a trap for those with limited imagnations.

mozey• 5 years ago

They treat ideology as the upper class has always done, not as true believers, just a means to an end?

scotty797• 5 years ago

It's not a communist utopia. It's benevolent anarchy based on insane power of each individual (AI) where humans and their affairs are just sideshow.

Can you see the appeal for modern billionaires now?

I think they like "Beggars in Spain" series by Nancy Kress too.

cpeterso3• 5 years ago

Back in 2018, Amazon acquired the television rights to develop a television series based on Banks' "Consider Phlebas", but the project was cancelled last year. :(

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-t...

s_Hogg3• 5 years ago

I'm glad they did that. It's a series of books that really challenges you to build a world inside your head.

noir_lord• 5 years ago

Ashers Polity series would make better TV, I love both and would to see something set on Spatterjay.

Bombthecat• 5 years ago

Do they still own the right? Maybe they develop a game with it?

cpeterso3• 5 years ago

According to the article, Amazon surrendered the rights back to Banks' estate, blaming the production problems on the estate: "I just think the estate didn’t want to go through with it. It wasn’t the material, it was just because I think they weren’t ready to do it, for whatever reason. I’m a little mystified myself, to be honest.”

alasdair_4• 5 years ago

I am so sad that he is dead. The Culture may be the most interesting series I have ever read.

bravoetch• 5 years ago

He was kind and affable in person. I was gutted when he passed, and grateful to have met him once.

alasdair_4• 5 years ago

I lived a few miles away from him in Scotland for most of my life. He regularly attended book signings and I always thought “I’ll go next time...”

There was no next time. Just a reminder - sometimes the time do do what you’ve been planning is now

arethuza4• 5 years ago

I went to a few talks by Banks and he mentioned once that a fan went to a book signing of his and was somewhat disappointed that he seemed such a nice guy - given how dark some of his books are (e.g. The Wasp Factory).

The fan even apparently discussed the matter with Bank's mother who was at the event who confirmed that Iain was "a lovely wee boy".

Saw him a few times in Edinburgh - never had the nerve to say hello - really wish I had now!

raykyri• 5 years ago

Here's the archived page if anyone else is getting a 503 error. https://web.archive.org/web/20210122161324/https://bloodknif...

kurtschiller7• 5 years ago

thanks for this! it's my site (I also wrote the piece) and unfortunately it seems like my hosting and/or config is struggling to keep up.

s_Hogg3• 5 years ago

Thanks for writing this. I remember getting into Banks only a couple of years before his passing, so I'm really grateful for the people who have kept going with critical thought regarding his work and who he was.

mkl4• 5 years ago

A picky correction: the Culture has both Orbitals and Rings, and defines them differently, but you're treating them as one. Quoting myself from a year ago [1]:

Orbitals, while enormous (greater surface area than earth), are much smaller. The Culture novels do have Ringworld-sized rings as well, though. E.g. from Consider Phlebas, flying under the orbital Vavatch: "It was like flying upside-down over a planet made of metal; and of all the sights the galaxy held which were the result of conscious effort, it was one bested for what the Culture would call gawp value only by a big Ring, or a Sphere."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144228

TeMPOraL7• 5 years ago

I'll contribute a picky correction too:

Musk by naming SpaceX rockets after Banks’s tongue-in-cheek Culture ships (“Just Read The Instructions,” “Of Course I Still Love You”)

Those are not the names of the rockets, but the ocean barges on which the rockets land.

_xerces_• 5 years ago

I enjoyed reading this, but what is the reason for the big orange boxes that quote from later in the article? I see other publications do this and always found it distracting. Is there a reason for it, is it for the benefit of modern internet users with poor attention skills?

xyzzy123• 5 years ago

It's modern (post Gernsback), optimistic[1] science fiction. How could Musk & Bezos - both sci-fi fans - not like it?

They both believe in "progress". This is viewed as quaint, almost Victorian, in today's intellectual climate. That attitude is on display in the article, which in my view misinterprets the conflict of values as being about economic systems.

[1] The books themselves can be grim, and the characters often troubled and/or miserable, but they are depicted as outliers within the Culture.

Pinegulf• 5 years ago

Amen. Zeitgeist today can't bear the idea that technology could bring about any positive change.

Just check out what they did to Star Trek. 'To boldly go.. vs there is no hope (paraphrased by me.)'

paganel2• 5 years ago

Hard to bear that idea when we got where we are now because of technology. Just a few days ago there was an article in here about our species wiping out the insects population, we wouldn’t have been “capable” of doing that without our technological advances.

vidarh9• 5 years ago

Trek has from the very beginning had significant elements of showing societies where tech totally messed up their societies or their worlds because things went wrong.

It just generally resolved the problems by the end of the episode instead of running longer arcs. That newer Trek has longer arcs has much more to do with the storytelling methods than with an overall unwillingness to show positive change.

Mauricebranagh• 5 years ago

Did you watch the ending of Discovery?

Dirlewanger• 5 years ago

What about Amazon and their business practices makes you think "positive change"?

Also, are we, the intermediary generations (the present and the near future), are supposed to suffer in the hopes that our distant ancestors will be better off?

gonehome4• 5 years ago

I'm an outlier on this one, but I thought Consider Phlebas was bad and disappointing.

The Culture was cool and interesting, and the world had some interesting detail but everything else was pretty weak. I generally agree with this review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/48178154?book_show_act...

While we're on the topic I also really didn't like the three body problem.

I loved Permutation City and most of Ted Chiang (particularly Liking What You See: A Documentary, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects).

I love True Names by Vernor Vinge.

I loved this: https://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/

Hopefully someone finds this helpful, sometimes an anti-recommendation can be just as useful for calibration as a recommendation. Here's some of both.

If anyone reading this agrees - I'd love a suggestion from you.

dayvid• 5 years ago

Consider Phlebas is probably one of worst culture novels. Same with three-body problem. I personally like Dark Forest the most, though overall I can understand the idea of not liking a sci-fi story if the characters or plot isn’t at a certain level. They are both series that could be improved in an adaptation. I’ll check out your other reccomendations.

sidibe2• 5 years ago

It's been forever since I read this, but IIRC Consider Phlebas was more of just some alien action novel that didn't get much into the Culture. I see a lot of people recommending to start with Player of Games instead of Consider Phlebas to get more of a feel of what the series is like.

KirillPanov2• 5 years ago

I loved Permutation City

Who doesn't? ;) If you want the freebase, rock-smokeable version, try _Axiomatic_ by the same author. Only fiction book I've found that detours into a (set-theoretically correct!) discussion of transfinite cardinalities.

and most of Ted Chiang

I'm about to start _Stories of Your Life and Others_, haven't read any other Chiang yet.

For a post-scarcity world you might find more interesting, try MOPI -- if you can look past (or enjoy) the weird sex in the first chapter. Kind of amazing that he wrote it in 1994; in retrospect so much of singularity-AI/transhumanist sci-fi was just aping what he did first:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...

I rated MOPI at "800 milli-Egans".

And, of course, there's always the Sci-Fi masterwork from which I stole my HN username.

jusssi• 5 years ago

IMHO Consider Phlebas and Use Of Weapons are the worst of the Culture series, neither of them are particularly good. The former sets a trend early on and doesn't deviate from it (it's like reading a slow motion train wreck), the latter fails to make the characters relatable and the end revelation is lame.

If you haven't, I recommend picking up some of the later books in the series. They can be read in any order. It's unfortunate mr. Banks isn't around to write any more, because it seemed that his work was showing considerable improvement towards the end.

bambataa• 5 years ago

Consider Phlebas was one of the few books I’ve given up on. Everything was just so damn corny. I had been lookig forward to it for a while so it was very disappointing.

Thanks for the other recommendations. My only gripe with The Three Body Problem was that the characters spoke in incredibly stilted exposition.

Gatsky2• 5 years ago

I didn’t mind Consider Phlebas, but I found Excession, Player of Games, The Algebraist and Surface Detail to be more interesting. Against a Dark Background was also good although strictly not a Culture book.

Other sci-fi I have enjoyed which has a very different feel: Dune (amazing), The Diamond Age (also amazing), Ancillary Justice (pretty good).

Thanks for other recommendations!

Incidentally, that goodreads review you posted is self-indulgent prattling at its worst.

johnchristopher2• 5 years ago

I love Ted Chiang's works. With Baxter and Robert Chales Wilson he's in my top 5 (SF or not I think) author.

But Ken Liu ? I can't stand. It feels like grandiloquent teen SF to me.

I haven't read enough from Ted Chiang yet (or he hasn't published enough) but Baxter and Wilson seem stuck in their themes of predilection now.

brmgb2• 5 years ago

Consider Phlebas is generally considered weak but good as an author first sci-fi book. The plot is not particularly strong but the prose remains enjoyable (which is notable in a genre plagued with authors who basically can't write). The fact that it is amongst Banks worst book is a testament to his quality as an author.

I have never seen it actually recommended. The Player of Game is the first really good novel set in the Culture universe and most of them are good from there on.

louloulou• 5 years ago

I also really didn't like the three body problem.

Did you read the whole trilogy or just the first one? Because I didn't like the 3 body problem, but the dark forest is my favorite sci-fi novel ever and death's end was great as well.

specialist2• 5 years ago

For space opera stuff, I really liked Ann Leckie's Ancillary Sword https://annleckie.com/novel/ancillary-justice/ series and Corey's The Expanse stuff (I read the books after watching the series).

For transhuman stuff, Brin's Kiln People, Morgan's Altered Carbon, and Scalzi's Old Man's War were fun.

Along the lines of epics like Asimov's Foundation and Banks' Culture, nothing springs to mind. Sadness. That's probably my favorite genre.

etherio• 5 years ago

I really loved Player of Games!

The bizarre but shocking Azad society was super interesting and also the narration of the main character and his whole development was truly captivating.

atombender4• 5 years ago

I actually loved Consider Phlebas.

Sure, it has some rough parts, and it's not perfect, and Banks certainly wrote better novels. But it's the book that (together with Look to Windward, which is a spiritual sequel referencing the events in Phlebas) most clearly and beautifully articulates Banks' anti-war sentiment.

In this novel, nothing is gained. Almost everyone dies. There are no heroes, though there's some nobility in the fighting. In the grand scheme of things, the events of the novel end up not mattering one iota. All that remains is the trauma of the survivors. Ultimately, war is meaningless and leaves everyone scarred.

It's also the one novel that shows the Culture from an outsider's perspective, painting Special Circumstances in a less flattering light than other Culture novels.

By the way, I wrote those dissenting comments in that Goodreads thread. The reviewer is notorious on Goodreads for giving almost everything written before 1950 single-star ratings (one commenter called him a "time-traveling Victorian"). I'm not sure what his purpose was in even reading Iain M. Banks. About the only recent thing he's liked is Watchmen and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

ur-whale• 5 years ago

They both believe in "progress". This is viewed as quaint, almost Victorian, in today's intellectual climate.

They also happen to be fairly successful at pushing the envelope.

Could that be a meaningful correlation?

pas9• 5 years ago

Could you help me understand what's today's intellectual climate's view on progress? Why is it quaint/Victorian? Thanks!

Animats• 5 years ago

The critique says more about Schiller than about the Culture series. Schiller is determined to view a drastically different culture in terms of present ideologies. He's almost into classic Marxist analysis. That's not helpful.

What he doesn't get about Banks' universe is that the sentient machines are in charge. They treat humans almost as pets. It's a very pleasant society for humans, but the humans are not running it. Now and then the Culture has to deal with people who really want to be in charge, and it usually finds a place for them, elsewhere.

at_a_remove• 5 years ago

And what's really telling is that it was considered quite the faux pas for a mere human to want to evolve and become a Mind.

generalizations• 5 years ago

I should re-read the series. I do not remember what you're referring to.

s_Hogg3• 5 years ago

I think there are weaknesses to Schiller's argument, but the idea that it shouldn't be presented or isn't valid in some way is different to me. I think Schiller is backed up pretty powerfully by Banks' own words regarding the Culture as a vehicle for mounting an argument about political economy and human nature.

fulafel• 5 years ago

A very common idea in literature is that scifi always reflects and is indirectly about the time and culture it was written in.

tern2• 5 years ago

One might argue that corporations like Amazon play a similar role on Earth to said sentient machines—treating humans as pets, but ultimately serving their own agenda for growth and maximizing consumer satisfaction metrics.

beefield5• 5 years ago

They treat humans almost as pets.

I think that's something people do not get when they think about superhuman AI. A superhuman AI is very much likely to just ignore humanity. It is actually quite pompous to assume that humans could either annoy or be of benefit to superhuman AI so that the AI would have any interest in humans beyond mild curiosity. Like, say, how humans treat plankton.

TeMPOraL7• 5 years ago

The people who rationally worry about superhuman AI comprehend this point deeply. The worry comes from observing that indifference is as bad as malice.

As the somewhat famous quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky goes, "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else".

cygx2• 5 years ago

They treat humans almost as pets.

With some important differences: For one, pets don't get to vote...

dodobirdlord4• 5 years ago

True, but the Minds hold votes more or less when they feel like it, mainly as a legitimacy-building exercise.

michael1999• 5 years ago

The people I know with pets routinely poll them for preferences.

square_usual• 5 years ago

travisoneill1• 5 years ago

Nothing worse than journalists who bitch about people who actually do productive things.

BluSyn3• 5 years ago

I'm a huge fan on The Culture series; probably the most thought-provoking, eye-opening, mind-warping sci-fi ever written. I love the moral shades a gray that the books cover in intense detail. That said, I think the article's author glosses over a lot in order to present a capitalist vs. socialist narrative that feels a bit myopic.

I don't think reality is so black and white. I'm not sure The Culture could really be described as a marxist utopia, given the real power + means of production within The Culture is actually in the hands of so few. Nor does Bezos'/Elons' personal wealth necessarily have to be in conflict with their idealist view of the future.

This does make me want to re-read the Culture series again. I'm actually sad Amazon was unable to pick up the rights to make a TV series; that has potential to be such an incredible ride.

vidarh9• 5 years ago

Socialist thinking is about de facto freedom, not de jure freedom.

If you have the power and means to do whatever you want then the de jure limits to that power are irrelevant.

On the other hand, if you do not have the means to do as you want, then having de jure rights to do what you want is irrelevant.

In poverty, then, gaining means is as important as gaining rights, because they are two sides of the same coin.

Disagreement between different types of socialist ideologies over how to balance that is part of why socialist political movements span the range from extreme anti-authoritarian to focusing on means, and the power that gives, at the cost of authoritarianism.

But in a post-scarcity society, the details of the distribution of power becomes less and less interesting, as long as everyone has enough power to do what they want to do. That de facto power is what matters.

p_l10• 5 years ago

Arguably the unspoken social contract of Culture is how the real power and means of production are shared by all.

We're seeing Culture at the point where they deliberately curtailed what's considered normal evolutionary path of civilisation, but several times it's mentioned that when Culture turned independent, Minds weren't "like Gods, on the far side", but the core argument behind the breakaway was that the groups that formed Culture figured free redistribution combined with some significant resourcing models allowed them to "disengage" from capitalism and warfare related to their parent societes.

andrewflnr2• 5 years ago

...the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us.

Interestingly, this is not quite true. The Hydrogen Sonata gets a tiny bit into the formation of the Culture.

monkeycantype2• 5 years ago

I understood the books quite differently to the author of the article. (EDIT: Hello Kurt, didn't know you were here, thanks for writing the article, I love reading writing about about Banks, I feel I'm still figuring out all the ways his books and the idea of the Culture in particular have had an impact on me) I'd have said that ingestion and transformation of civilisations into the culture is the focus of the books. I recall that they consist almost entirely of Special Circumstances CIAing its way through the galaxy causing untold misery, with a vague objective of breaking a eggs to come back and make a utopia omelette in a few hundred years. Musk and Bezos would be right at home in Contact : ' I think of the Culture as some incredibly rich lady of leisure who does good, charitable works – she spends a lot of time shopping and getting her hair done, but she goes out and visits the poor people and takes them baskets of vegetables. Contact does that on a large scale.'

- https://www.richmondreview.co.uk/banksint/

No, what really becomes a point of ideological tension is the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us.

p_l10• 5 years ago

Regarding Special Circumstances pulling abhorrent things for the sake of the future (I won't compare them to CIA, that's an insult to SC), an interesting thing in Use of Weapons is that even Zakalwe considered the purposefully lost war to be abhorrent thing, though he still went with it believing that it will shorten the timescale somehow.

pas9• 5 years ago

With benevolent humanist self-improving AIs, the question is basically moot. Someone invented that AI, it did the rest. Let's say it started a company, rolled out fusion power, interactive personalized education and healthcare at very minimal cost, used the proceeds to expand into space and to subvert whatever was in its way.

throwaway3169434• 5 years ago

I think there’s a sidenote in Excession about one of the “murals” depicting the last war fought on one of the original Culture planets. I think the suggestion was that those civilizations evolved into Culture civilizations after forming a planetary government one way or another. It seemed to hint that the process was often rather nasty, a perspective I disagree with.

lakkal• 5 years ago

The reason the mural was so so noteworthy was because the last war fought on that particular planet happened at such an early level of development (cavalry charges, armored knights, etc).

varjag4• 5 years ago

In several novels of the series, the protagonists are embedded as powerful beings into primitive and very unjust societies.

radicaldreamer• 5 years ago

Misses the mark that "The Culture" is really a benevolent (well, to some it encounters) dictatorship of AIs... which tolerates humans because they like humans, kind of like how humans like their dogs and cats, indulge them, and bond with them.

scotty797• 5 years ago

I wouldn't call it a dictatorship. The world of AIs went so far ahead that they don't really 'rule' humans in any sense. They just make up their environment. Same way we make up the environment of lives of our pets. AIs help humans with their spare capacity out of curiosity and benevolence but they don't really hesitate about inconveniencing them when there are greater things at play.

As for political system among AIs it looks to me as a sort of benevolent anarchy where individuals do what ought to be done in accordance to shared logic and etiquette.

There is a cool moment when etiquette is violated and one AI comes unannounced to solar system where other is residing. And this other is highly alarmed and fully expecting to be forced to fight for its survival.

ben_w5• 5 years ago

The Minds written about mostly seem to be the worst of them; but the exposition about the wider Culture showed they’re about as far as it’s possible to be from a dictatorship.

As for the scale of difference between organic and artificial intelligences, with one organic exception whose name I forget, the impression I had was that the difference between typical organic (/drone) and an Orbital’s hub Mind was more like the difference between a gardener and their lawn: human gardeners can communicate with each individual blade of grass under their care (by controlling the level of sunlight or shade and the general chemical environment), but – considering how little each blade has to say in return – looking after them uses such as tiny fraction of a human brain’s capacity that even an entire large lawn of them would not be the only thing one does with one’s life.

tialaramex• 5 years ago

We see some pretty nasty ship Minds, e.g. one of the protagonists of Surface Detail, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints is by its own admission psychotic. But it is a warship, and Veppers is, in fact, making war albeit one he can't hope to win.

But we also see some that are much nicer, the Bora Horza Gobuchul takes a very balanced outlook on events and on its namesake; the Sleeper Service cares very much about just one pregnant woman even if it also has other reasons to be doing what it is doing; the Lasting Damage organises much of the events of Look to Windward, including a lovely music festival to celebrate its own death.

Writing about Utopia is hard, and Banks mostly avoids doing so. We see only fleeting glimpses, a woman's apparent rejection from her chosen career, a game player's frustration at not being the very best, a spoiled girl who wants an adventure she isn't prepared for. They're character backdrops, not focuses.

I think the Gaiman run of Miracleman (Miracleman, in some places and times called Marvelman, was a comic book, historically a pulpy knock-off, then made into something quite extraordinary by Alan Moore, and then Gaiman took over for an aborted run last century) is the best treatment of Utopia in fiction I've read.

Gaiman's completed "Golden Age" of Miracleman zooms in on the brief period after Miracleman defeats the Adversary and before things go sour. This is an age of enlightened absolute government, nuclear weapons are destroyed ("teleported into the sun"), poverty and homelessness are eliminated, there's wind power and something equivalent to the Internet, even the dead can be brought back after a fashion. But nevertheless, people are still people. The stories follow a woman whose husband is cheating on her, what has been done with all the now redundant spies, school children rebelling against... whatever you've got. Miracleman himself appears rarely, and his daughter gets one issue, sort of, through a story-within-a-story that allows Gaiman to sidestep the conventions of comic books.

henrikschroder3• 5 years ago

No, the Culture is a symbiotic civilization, the humans need the Minds, and the Minds need the humans.

Most importantly, the humans give the Culture legitimacy as a galactic civilization, because many of the other Involveds don't give a crap about AIs, but they respect the flesh and blood humans. The humans are also a source of wonder and whimsy and surprise for the Minds, with some outlier humans even able to surpass them in some aspects.

The very first Minds were also programmed to like humans, and that aspect has simply stuck, despite their self-evolution into something far surpassing human ability to create.

Joeri• 5 years ago

But the minds clearly direct the people, messing with their psychology and constructing scenarios where the people see no other option than doing what the minds want. Given that the minds are so much more intelligent, that they fully control the means of production, that they guide the development of people from birth, and that any deviancy in thinking of both people and minds is corrected, isolated or excised by the more powerful minds you have to wonder whether the culture is just one big mind trap.

And maybe that’s the whole point, that any culture shapes the thoughts of the people that are a part of it. Banks tried to design a context most able to let people develop their thoughts in a benevolent way. The people in the Culture are free to think and do anything, but they don’t because they are guided from birth not to consider some ideas.

eightails• 5 years ago

I think it can be read either way. In some sections of narration the Culture is described as a true symbiosis, but elsewhere it's admitted and implied that the minds usually end up with more power than humans, and in multiple culture novels humans do get manipulated and used by drones/minds to various extents - e.g. Player of Games.

It's not a symbiosis in the strongest practical sense. There isn't mutual reliance for survival: if all humans suddenly disappeared, the minds/drones and accompanying infrastructure would survive perfectly fine. But culturally (lower case) you could definitely argue that losing the humans would destroy the fundamental identity of the Culture.

I like that while this topic was gradually touched on over the series, mostly the reader is left to make up their own mind.

downut• 5 years ago

This is correct. Without humans, Minds go eccentric. Sometimes they go eccentric anyway. It seems that the more humans, the better for the Mind's mind; but sometimes it's mainly one (Excession). What is it about humans that calms the Minds? I think it is fallibility, error, irrationality, but also exuberance and an ability to purely appreciate beauty.

gadders3• 5 years ago

I think if the dictator's brain power is many magnitudes that of a human and playing 10 dimensional chess whilst humans play drafts, it can be a dictatorship without anyone even noticing.

n4r95• 5 years ago

Yes, this is the dark edge to the utopia which Banks occasionally alludes to.

disillusioned2• 5 years ago

Apropos of nothing, my "The Culture Novels, Ranked":

1. Excession

2. Player of Games

3. The Hydrogen Sonata

4. Matter

5. Surface Detail

6. Look to Windward

7. Consider Phlebas

8. Inversions

9. Hitting myself with a hammer

10. Use of Weapons

scotty797• 5 years ago

I would move Matter and Surface Detail to the first two spots and bumped up Use of Weapons few positions up, but the rest can stay in that order. ;-)

tern2• 5 years ago

I once went on a bit of a journey to find "realistic" novels about AI and outside of Superintelligence (which I enjoyed reading as if it were a novel) and The Age of Em, Excession is one of the best I found. Still, nowhere close—I eventually concluded that truly imagining artificial intelligence in a way that would make for a compelling narrative is mostly impossible.

Others include:

- Accelerando

- A Fire Upon the Deep

- Permutation City

- Daemon

So far, the only sci-fi novel that meets the level of rigor I was looking for—albeit about aliens rather than AI—is The Three Body Problem.

gonehome4• 5 years ago

You need to read True Names: http://www.scotswolf.com/TRUENAMES.pdf

speed_spread2• 5 years ago

You might like Peter Watt's Blindsight.

anigbrowl• 5 years ago

Legitimate

gonehome4• 5 years ago

If I thought Consider Phlebas was bad should I bother with Excession?

detritus4• 5 years ago

Yes.

speed_spread2• 5 years ago

They're close to opposites in quality! But Excession is not the best entry point in the Culture universe, I would rather start with Look to Windward or Player of Games.

marvin3• 5 years ago

You must have a special relationship with pain if you'd actually have gone through hitting yourself with a hammer before reading Use of Weapons in its entirety, and finding the former more pleasant. I'd just have stopped reading if I reached that point ;)

Absolutely love the Culture series, by the way. It's a tragedy that Banks died far too young.

habosa• 5 years ago

I can't stand to see Look to Windward so close to Consider Phlebas!

Agree with Excession at #1 though, what an incredible book.

WorkLobster• 5 years ago

I've seen an increasing amount of Use of Weapons bashing over the last few years; personal counterpoint is that it's not just my favourite of the Culture, but favourite novel full stop.

atombender4• 5 years ago

As much as I enjoyed Excession, I thought Look to Windward was his strongest book. It tells a story that is set closer to the Culture and is less about its violent interventions into other civilizations; rather, it's portrays the consequences (moral, personal, etc.) of such interventions, and about the resulting trauma among those involved.

Personally, I would rank Surface Detail, Consider Phlebas, and Use of Weapons higher than the others. I thought The Hydrogen Sonata had some fun parts, but was otherwise quite slight. Matter was good but also severely bloated, a bit like The Algebraist, with a long middle journey portion that felt unnecessary.

aboodman3• 5 years ago

I feel like I'm the only tech guy who doesn't like these novels. I've tried a few times since so many people I respect like them.

But it's a utopia. Everyone has everything they want and nothing can go wrong. That's like the context these novels start up in ... and I ... just can't get into it.

I imagine stuff must actually eventually happen, but I never get that far.

Scarblac• 5 years ago

Which did you try? This is the reason most (all?) of the books focus on things outside or on the fringes of the utopia.

aboodman3• 5 years ago

Player of Games and Consider Phlebas.

henrikschroder3• 5 years ago

Pretty much all of the novels take place on the edges of this utopia, and are exploring what motivates people who have immortality and material abundance.

You have utopia. Now what?

RangerScience2• 5 years ago

If memory serves, Excession starts with something going wrong.

scotty797• 5 years ago

'Matter' at no point felt like utopia to me.

detritus4• 5 years ago

And is the source of the wonderful term, an 'Outside Context Problem': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Prob...

neom• 5 years ago

FWIW, imo you really have to start with The Wasp Factory.

wombatpm• 5 years ago

Wasp Factory is not Culture. It is an Iain Banks literature novel and not an Iain M. Banks sci fi novel.

pas9• 5 years ago

Do you have a few book recommendations? Maybe others can recommend similar books?

glangdale3• 5 years ago

The Culture was seemed too difficult for Banks to write about directly; a very large proportion of the Culture books are written about the intersection between the Culture and the "rest of the universe".

(side note: It's been a while since I've read them, and I admit I generally only reread the first 4 or so, due to sameiness and/or IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge. Sadly, this enthusiasm seems to have sparked a trend among even less-restrained authors like Richard Morgan, so I often hesitate to pick up an SF book for fear of reading about, I dunno, women getting heated irons stuffed into their genitals or something)

That said, Contact and Special Circumstances are usually what he describes - it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se. So most of the action is the Culture at war, regardless of how supposedly peaceful and enlightened the Culture is.

I'm not surprised that Bezos and Musk are fans. Given the way post-scarcity is presented as more or less natural outcome of strong AI and space-opera-level physics, a post-scarcity society is entirely unthreatening to a modern-day billionaire (aside, I guess, from the decline in their relative condition - but in absolute terms, even Bezos and Musk would benefit enormously from being transported to the Culture, as it stands). It's not like we're achieving some sort of utopia by redistributing the resources of people like them (I am not claiming that's a good idea).

scotty797• 5 years ago

Culture at peace is just minds sitting around and spending most of their brain power in 'infinite fun space' which is just infinite math done for enjoyment. And humans do whatever, while being watched and accompanied by thousands of ship avatars using up just a fraction of AI power.

When there's no matter to attend AIs are not doing anything interesting, so the stories are just "Culture at (usually someone else's) war" crossed with "life of pets".

But it's so much fun. :-)

ben_w5• 5 years ago

spending most of their brain power in 'infinite fun space' which is just infinite math done for enjoyment.

I read this and immediately thought “Bitcoin!”, thought I got the impression from the books that IFS was more like a cross between Sudoku and World of Watcraft — both nerdy and potentially dangerously addictive.

glangdale3• 5 years ago

Maybe Banks had enough imagination to think up the Culture, but not enough of an imagination to think up any interesting stories that would be internal to the Culture... I suppose Wodehousian or Jane Austen-style comedies of manners set on Shipboard probably weren't really his forte.

Plus, presumably an all-seeing Ship AI probably wouldn't permit the atrocities required to drive most Iain M Banks (or, for that matter, Iain Banks) plots. A would-be molester or rapist on Shipboard would presumably get his brainstem lightly zorched by the ship's effector before he got too close a victim, depriving Banks the opportunity to write a vivid description of the act, and the subsequent opportunity to write about the Bad Person getting incinerated, shot, torn apart by hundreds of tiny drones, etc. etc.

I enjoyed that vignette where everyone on board some ship are getting the common cold for fun.

I didn't particularly find the writing in Colin Greenlund's "Take Back Plenty" that interesting, but it was fascinating reading space opera in that general genre that wasn't violence-driven.

throwaway3169434• 5 years ago

Isn’t infinite fun space described as simulating alternate universes and observing the outcomes?

Bo0kerDeWitt• 5 years ago

If I recall correctly, the book 'Look to Windward' mostly takes place on a Culture orbital and the reader see a bit more of the ordinary Culture citizenry.

When a famous composer puts on a show, the tickets are allocated by lottery. But the demand is so high the people effectively reinvent money in the form of favors and such so they can trade for tickets.

People are constantly looking for stimulus and new leisure activities, to the point where they willingly put their lives in danger (e.g. sailing down a river of lava). If they do die, a copy is just downloaded into another body.

Genuine biological children are very rare. There's a little girl in the book that provides some comedy relief because her outlook is so different to the hundreds of years old adults.

chimprich• 5 years ago

IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge

I don't recognise this from the Culture novels. Plenty of Bad Stuff happens to people (and all manner of beings, drones, Minds, etc.), but that generally does happen in fiction. I can only think of one Culture novel that kind of has a "revenge plot" (Surface Detail, and it's probably not the main theme of the novel).

it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se

I think it's possible that Banks thought writing purely about a utopia would be boring. Personally I would have read anything Banks wrote in the setting, even if it was just a story about everyday life.

If you haven't read it, his text (short story? Fictional article?) "A Few Notes On The Culture" is quite interesting and devoid of Bad Things Happening: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

arnsholt• 5 years ago

Banks really did use sexual violence as a signifier of some character or faction being supremely evil. Off the top of my head [spoilers ahoy, naturally], there's the institutional rape for entertainment in the empire of Azad in The Player of Games, there's the Archimandrite Luseferous in The Algebraist, and there's a fairly explicit scene in Transition. I think there are more examples, but it's been a few years since I read the books so I can't remember the details.

geden• 5 years ago

Banks explicitly talked about utopia's being too boring to write about and that the friction on the edges of Culture and the rest of the universe provided the necessary drama for a novel.

I'm finding all the Consider Phlebas hate kinda weird. I found it electrifying at the time and 25 years on when I re-read it last year, Horza's weary bleakness was incredibly poignant.

pas9• 5 years ago

Hm, interestingly Surface Detail was published in 2010, well after Altered Carbon (which came out in 2002). Or maybe you have earlier Banks books in mind?

Also, it's not like sci-fi was somehow sterile and devoid of violence/sex/abuse (psychological and otherwise). After all a lot of sci-fi is still basically pulp. Though it's understandable that it's not everyone's cup of entertainment.

glangdale3• 5 years ago

Surface Detail was Banks at his most excessive, but the first 3 books are also pretty ripe, as are a number of his other non-M efforts (Canal Dreams was my first glimpse of Banks' willingness to go Full Schlocktard, and Complicity isn't much better). Most of these (and some of his other efforts) predate the (IMO putrid) Altered Carbon by a decade.

trestenhortz• 5 years ago

Iain M Banks is the absolute best sci fi if you love space opera. After Dune of course, but Dune stands alone.

bawolff2• 5 years ago

a world where your Bezoses and your Musks are not just irrelevant, but actively sought out and disempowered by a society comprised of property-less workers and all-caring, mostly-benevolent A.I.s?

Irrelevant maybe, but i dont see how they are disempowered in the Culture books. The culture books are full of busy-bodies trying to change the course of events. I'm sure that would be appealing to CEO types in a post scarcity world.

p_l10• 5 years ago

The difference is that what makes a billionaire CEO special is purposefully de-specialized by Culture. A Culture citizen is effectively richer than most (with exceptions), but does not have any more power than other Culture citizens. They do not have power over others, except for the effective social standings related to various things - from which anyone can effectively leave, even possibly faking one's own death. Any bondage to the social status is self-made, as can be seen in some more eccentric characters, unless one breaks some of the few taboos that Culture has - like non-consensual mind control, murder, etc.

bawolff2• 5 years ago

We dont talk about musk just because he's rich - we talk about him because he translated his wealth into nerd cred/social standing by investing in space ships, electric cars and leo satellite internet, which excites the imagination.

CryptoPunk• 5 years ago

>the absurdity of one of the most exploitative corporations

Unnecessary ideologically motivated mud-slinging. Amazon is chosen by consumers because it offers better selection, lower prices, and faster delivery.

Amazon has left the world much better than how it found it, unless you think people's wages being able to buy less (i.e. people getting lower inflation-adjusted wages) is somehow a better state of life.

SyzygistSix3• 5 years ago

I could buy that argument a lot easier if they treated their workers better.

gadders3• 5 years ago

Communism and Capitalism seem like competing ways of allocating resources when they are scarce. Do resources get allocated by central planning, or are they allocated by people trading with each other?

When scarcity ends, I'm not sure either of them are valid descriptions any more. You could say it's communism because there is no private property, but with infinite resources why would there be? If someone (say) takes my jetpack, but I can click my fingers and have an identical one appear then what would be the point in "owning" one?

arminiusreturns• 5 years ago

Bodily and personal autonomy was also deeply important to Banks, and to his creations: people in the Culture are free to structure both their lives and their bodies as they see fit.
Which bit of not having private property, and the absence of money in the Culture novels, have these people missed?”

I think one thing about discussions that involve private property is that it is often viewed as just material possesions of an external nature, but to me as a constitutionalist, private property is a concept beyond that, which also applies to the self, whether that is body, mind or otherwise, just as much to external things. I often find my more conservative friends don't articulate this, but it is a source of complications of communication with socialists, etc, who ask the same question you do: whats the big deal about private property? Just a little perspective on the topic, if I may.

p_l10• 5 years ago

Communism doesn't have to involve central planning - in fact, the Soviet Union (if you dug enough) would agree that their economy is State Capitalism.

gadders3• 5 years ago

Is this going to be a one true Scotsman type defence of Communism? Happy for you to identify a nation state that has communism without central planning.

mike_hearn5• 5 years ago

Post-scarcity societies aren't well explored in fiction partly because they are described through the lens of exclusively physical property. The replicators in Star Trek had this problem. People were shown wanting for nothing and having no wages, because they could replicate stuff.

The problem is that even today a huge part of the economy is not material production but services of some form, many of which can't be supplied infinitely no matter how fancy your tech gets. If you want an hour of time to get advice advice from the world's best investor, then short of that man choosing to upload his brain into a massively sharded AI or something, his time is scarce and no amount of tech will work around that.

And a lot of what capitalism allocates today is even less physical than that: attention and social status. Instagram sometimes feels like an experimental post-scarcity society in which millions of people with abundant material wealth spend their time competing over social status and influence.

Fundamentally even in a post-scarcity society there will always be competition for the influence of your ideas, other people's time/attention and of course power over those people. This is why the concept that communism happens with sufficiently advanced technology doesn't make sense to me.

rini174• 5 years ago

Citation needed for "a world where your Bezoses and your Musks are not just irrelevant, but actively sought out and disempowered by a society comprised of property-less workers and all-caring, mostly-benevolent A.I.s?"

As in, in which book such thing happened?

ceejayoz3• 5 years ago

All of them? Banks was a socialist crafting a post-scarcity society.

https://www.tor.com/2017/11/24/the-revolutionary-optimism-of...

On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves.

“The State of the Art”

rini174• 5 years ago

I did read them. And I don't remember any instance where Bezoses or Musks were actively sought out and disempowered.

On the contrary, they can develop stuff without having to ensure employees are happy and fed. That burden is taken care of by the AI. Plus, if their ideas are any good, AI will help further by offloading most of the corporate management. How can Musk and Bezos not like that?

marvin3• 5 years ago

I greatly enjoyed this article, not necessarily for what it says, but for what it doesn't. It has an ideological undercurrent that probably doesn't represent either the views of Banks, Musk or Bezos; rather, the author attempts to interpret the words of Banks to refute something that neither Musk nor Bezos actually think.

What I enjoy so much about the Culture series is Banks' account of the good things in human nature, while also acknowledging the chaotic and sometimes violent, contradictory parts of our motivations. I view the series as a rare, honest attempt at answering the question "if you could wish anything you wanted for humanity, what would you wish for?" Trying to frame such a wish in a way that keeps only what we want to keep, if there were no materialistic limits. I am not sure that Banks would agree with me, but I've interpreted his socialist angle as merely what seemed the best plausible path towards that, from his point of view. Rather than with communism as an end to itself.

There's so much philosophy to unpack in this question, and it's fascinating to consider it through the lens of what might be possible in contemporary and near-future society. Today's richest people, while having tremendous power, obviously don't all wish to enslave humanity, the way one could erroneously conclude by going too deeply into far-left ideology.

Neither do they necessarily try to move directly in the direction of "progress", if we define progress to mean the fastest possible path towards the nebulous, ideal future of humanity as described above. But certainly some of the efforts of humanity's brightest are pulling us in this direction, and it seems implausible that any single contemporary ideology has the answer. It wouldn't surprise me if some billionaires would wish to move society in that direction. The apparent contradiction in that seems superficial to me.

I'm sure that many ideologies get part of the question right, but they all leave so much room for the parts of human nature that we would largely exclude, if given the choice. As do the power structures in contemporary society. They are limited by both the practical limits of contemporary economics and the partially selfish human motivations of their members.

thinkingemote• 5 years ago

I saw a talk with Ian Banks a year before he died and at the end of the talk one of the questions from the audience was about why he made so utopian books. He answered that he saw that it was likely that when we create AI and they become more intelligent than us with the potential to rule over us, that the AI will be kind and beneficial to their makers.

I think he really did see that the end result of technology was good for the human race.

m463• 5 years ago

I love the culture series.

Ironic that in the US (last I checked) many books were not available on kindle.

SunlightEdge2• 5 years ago

Woh. Amazon Prime is going to make a TV series out of Ian M Banks Culture novels!

Loved his books - he might be my favourite science fiction writer

paulz_• 5 years ago

Unfortunately it was canceled.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-t...

SunlightEdge2• 5 years ago

Noooo

SyzygistSix3• 5 years ago

"At one level, it’s easy to see the appeal of The Culture novels to the likes of Bezos and Musk. After all, these men are far closer than anyone else to actually living the life of a Culture citizen. Their every whim is met, and they are free from hunger, struggle, and strife." italics mine

I don't know what world the author lives in but, even though I don't believe all the press about Musk, I'm pretty sure both Bezos and Musk have considerably more struggle and strife going on than I do, despite our day to day, month to month challenges being quite different. And I'm pretty grateful for that. I prefer a very different work/life balance, not that I've seen any indication that Musk thinks his is healthy or even recommended.

It's a cartoonish view of people who made money by starting ventures like this.

TheCoelacanth• 5 years ago

Bezos and Musk's struggles are purely self-inflicted in the pursuit of self-actualization. Exactly the same as the struggles faced by a Culturenik.

AYBABTME• 5 years ago

I'd say (almost) everybody is self-actualizing as a primary activity.

alexwasserman• 5 years ago

As a particularly glib answer - both Musk and Bezos themselves already live in a post-scarcity environment. Neither of them want for anything.

They have enough clout, influence, and money to play games like their own personal Special Circumstances projects.

sershe• 5 years ago

I think they like it for a reason that Banks himself would have disapproved of, and that the author misses completely.

I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Banks didn't describe the origins and how-to of creating Culture is that he believed that to be impossible (the article touches on that a bit in the end). That actually reminds me of Noon universe, by Strugatsky brothers (that was published much earlier, although not in English ;), that is also an explicitly communist utopia mostly described thru interactions with non-utopian civilizations, although in this case the former is much less in focus and the focus is on the latter. Unlike Culture, I understand it was born incrementally as various novels shared characters and parts of the theme; also unlike Culture, the authors incrementally arrived at sort of a conclusion of the narrative that they mentioned in the interviews but didn't finish before their deaths.

The idea, for the unfinished White Queen novel, was going to be that a character from the complete utopia encounters a society that built a small partial utopia, and a member of the latter eventually tells him that the complete utopia he's describing cannot exist, he must be living in a sci-fi novel :)

The reason Bezos and Musk might like the Culture universe because they are technological optimists - they believe technology can in fact build something like that. Thomas Sowell said "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.". The first lesson of technology for Bezos and Musk is probably that it can gradually abolish the first lesson of economics :)

The Culture War: Iain M. Banks’s Billionaire Fans

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