The Culture series or Culture cycle refers to a series of novels and short fiction written by Scottish author Iain Banks. The stories center around the Culture, a post-scarcity semi-anarchist utopia consisting of various humanoid races and managed by very advanced artificial intelligences. Their main theme is the dilemmas that an idealistic hyperpower faces in dealing with civilisations that do not share its ideals and whose behaviour it sometimes finds repulsive. In some of the stories action takes place mainly in non-Culture environments, and the leading characters are often on the fringes of, or non-members of, the Culture, usually acting as agents of Culture plans to civilise the galaxy.
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The Culture is a post scarcity society formed by various humanoid races and artificial intelligences about 9,000 years ago. Since the majority of its biological population can have virtually anything they want without the need to work, there is little need for laws or enforcement, and the Culture is libertarian also, arguably, anarchist.[1][2] Its members live mainly in spaceships and other off-planet constructs, because its founders wished to avoid the centralized political and corporate power-structures that planet-based economies foster.[1] Most of the planning and administration is done by Minds, very advanced AIs.[3]
Although the Culture has more advanced technology and a more powerful economy than the vast majority of known civilizations, it is just one of the "Involved" civilizations that take an active part in galactic affairs. The Homomda are slightly more advanced[4] while the Morthanveld have a much larger population and economy.[5] Some civilizations that take no part in galactic politics are vastly more powerful, such as the Dra'Azon, whom the Culture are reluctant to antagonize despite the need to rescue a Mind stranded on a planet set aside by the Dra'Azon as a memorial, and the Behemothaurs, of whom little is known except the civilizations that meddle with them have a habit of disappearing.[2][4][6]
Some other civilizations hold less favorable views of the Culture.[7] At the time of their war with the Culture, the Idirans and some of their allies regarded the control that the Minds exercised over the Culture as a form of idolatry.[2][8] The Homomda regard the Culture as idealistic and hyper-active.[9] Some members of the Culture have seceded and formed a similar but less activist civilization, the Zetetic Elench,[6] while others simply drop out temporarily or permanently.[10]
| Title | First published | Date in which set | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consider Phlebas[8] | 1987 | 1331 CE[4] | An episode in the Culture's only full-scale war, told mainly from the point of view of an enemy special agent who belatedly realises how much he has in common with the Culture.[7] |
| The Player of Games[11] | 1988 | 2083 CE[4][12] | A bored member of the Culture is blackmailed into being the Culture's agent in a plan to a subvert a brutal, hierarchical empire that may be a threat at some time in the distant future. His mission is to win an empire-wide tournament by which the ruler of the empire is selected.[7] |
| Use of Weapons[13] | 1989 | 2092 CE[14] | Chapters describing the current mission of a Culture special agent born and raised on a non-Culture planet alternate with chapters that describe in reverse chronological order earlier missions and the traumatic events that made him who he is.[15] |
| The State of the Art[16] | 1991 | various (title story takes place in 1977 CE) | Collection of stories, two set in the Culture universe. In the title story, the Mind in charge of an expedition to Earth decides not to make contact or intervene in any way, but instead to use Earth as a control group so that the Culture can compare the effects of intervention and non-interference.[6] |
| Excession[10] | 1996 | 2067 CE (approximate)[17] | An alien artefact far advanced beyond the Culture's understanding is used by one group of Minds to lure into war a civilisation of whose behaviour they strongly disapprove; another group of Minds eventually foils this conspiracy. A sub-plot covers how two humanoids make up their differences after traumatic events that happened 40 years earlier.[10] |
| Inversions[18] | 1998 | (unspecified) | Not explicitly a Culture novel, but recounts what appear to be two concurrent Culture Contact missions on a planet whose development is roughly equivalent to medieval Europe. The interwoven stories are told from the viewpoint of several of the locals, not of the apparent Culture agents.[19] |
| Look to Windward[9] | 2000 | 2170 CE (approximate)[20] | The Culture has interfered in the development of the Chelgrians with disastrous consequences. Now, in the light of a star that was destroyed 800 years previously during the Idiran War, plans for revenge are being hatched.[7] |
| Matter[21] | 2008 | 2087 CE (approximate)[22] | A Culture special agent who is a princess of a feudal society on a huge artificial planet learns that a Regent is trying to usurp the throne.[23] When she returns in order to stop the Regent, she finds that an alien war machine is about to destroy the planet.[21] |
| Surface Detail[24] | 2010 (October) | 2770 CE [24](approximate) | A young woman is helped by the Culture to take revenge on her murderer. Meanwhile, the digitised souls of the formerly dead are preparing to spread their wars in cyberspace into the real world. |
Since the Culture's biological population commonly lives as long as 400 years[3] and have no need to work, they face the difficulty of giving meaning to their lives when the Minds and other intelligent machines can do almost anything better than the biological population can.[25] Many try, a few successfully, to join Contact, the Culture's diplomatic service, or Special Circumstances, Contact's secret service division.[10] Banks described the Culture as "some incredibly rich lady of leisure who does good, charitable works... Contact does that on a large scale."[26] The same need to find a purpose for existence led the Culture as a whole to embark voluntarily on its only full-scale war, to stop the expansion of the theocratic and militaristic Idirans – otherwise the Culture's economic and technological advancement would have been a pointless exercise in hedonism.[4]
All of the stories feature the tension between the Culture's humane, anarchist ideals and its need to intervene in the affairs of less enlightened and often less advanced civilisations.[2][27] The first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas (1987), describes an episode in the Idiran War, which the Culture's Minds foresaw would cause billions of deaths on both sides, but which their utilitarian calculations predicted would be the best course in the long term.[4] In The Player of Games (1988), a Culture citizen is blackmailed into being the agent of a Culture plan to destabilise a repressive empire.[2][11] Use of Weapons explores the thoughts and dark secret of a mercenary whom the Culture employs for various regime change operations. The main thread in Excession (1996) is about some Minds' attempts to foil a plot by other Minds to provoke a war with a rapidly-expanding and revoltingly sadistic race.[10] In Look to Windward (2000), the Culture has to avert an atrocity planned by the Chelgrians in retaliation for the Culture's attempt to democratise the Chelgrian's rigid caste system, which led to a devastating civil war between the new regime and the old elite; after preventing disaster, the Culture takes a sadistic revenge on the chief plotters – Banks commented that in order to prevent such atrocities "even the Culture throws away its usual moral rule-book."[28] Andrew M. Butler noted that, "Having established the peaceful, utopian, game-playing tendencies of the Culture, ... in later volumes the Culture’s dirty tricks are more exposed."[29]
The Culture stories have been described as "eerily prescient".[30] Consider Phlebas (1987) explicitly presents a clash of civilizations,[31] although this phrase was coined by Samuel P. Huntington in 1992.[32] This is highlighted by the novel's description of the Idirans' expansion as a "jihad" and by its epigraphic verse from the Koran, "Idolatry is worse than carnage".[31][33] However it was as much a "holy war" from the Culture's point of view.[31]
Much of Look to Windward is a commentary on the Idiran-Culture war, from a viewpoint 800 years later, mainly reflecting grief over both personal and large-scale losses, and guilt over mistakes made in the war, including the rejection of peace offers from the Idirans. It combines these with similar reflections on the attempt to reform the Chelgrians' rigid caste system; although the book describes the casual murder of an unresisting low-caste Chelgrian, preventing such injustices does not compensate for the disastrous consequences of the intervention. The book illustrates the limitations of power, and also points out that Minds and other AIs are as vulnerable as biological persons to grief, guilt and regrets.[31]
When the first Culture stories appeared, science fiction was dominated by cyberpunk, a pessimistic sub-genre that worried about but offered no solutions for the offshoring of jobs to countries with lower costs or less strict regulations, the increasing power of corporations and the threats to privacy posed by computer networks. The Culture stories are space opera, making no attempt at scientific realism, and Banks uses this freedom extravagantly in order to focus on the human and political aspects of his universe; he even rejects the inevitability of capitalism, which both cyberpunk and earlier space operas had assumed, in creating an anarchistic society with a socialist flavour.[34] Space opera had peaked in the 1930s, but started to decline as magazine editors such as John W. Campbell demanded more realistic approaches. By the 1960s most space operas were satires on earlier styles, such as Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and Bill, the Galactic Hero stories,[35] while televised and film space operas such as Star Trek and Star Wars were thought to have dumbed down the sub-genre. The Culture stories did much to revive space opera.[3][29]
Banks is "an incorrigible player of games" with both style and structure – and with the reader.[36] In both the Culture stories and his work outside science fiction, there are two sides to Banks, the "merry chatterer" who brings scenes to life and "the altogether less amiable character" who "engineers the often savage structure of his stories".[37] Banks uses a wide range of styles. The Player of Games opens in a leisurely manner as it presents the main character's sense of boredom and inertia,[38] and adopts for the main storyline a "spare, functional" style that contrasts with the "linguistic fireworks" of later stories.[36] Sometimes the styles used in Excession relate to the function and focal character of the scene: slow-paced and detailed for Dajeil, who is still mourning over traumatic events that happened decades earlier; a parody of huntin', shootin'and fishin' country gentlemen, sometimes reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse, when describing the viewpoint of the Affront; the ship Serious Callers Only, afraid of becoming involved in the conflict between factions of Minds, speaks in cryptic verse, while the Sleeper Service, acting as a freelance detective, adopts a hardboiled style. On the other hand Banks often wrong-foots readers by using prosaic descriptions for the grandest scenery, self-deprecation and humour for the most heroic actions, and a poetic style in describing one of the Affront's killings.[34]
He delights in building up expectations and then surprising the reader. Even in The Player of Games, which has the simplest style and structure of the series, the last line of the epilogue reveals who was really pulling the strings all along.[36] In all the Culture stories, Banks subverts many clichés of space opera. The Minds are not plotting to take over the universe, and no-one is following a grand plan.[34] The darkly comic double-act of Ferbin and Holse in Matter is not something most writers would place in "the normally po-faced context of space opera".[37] Even the names of Culture spaceships are jokes – for example Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill, Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall (part of a running gag in the series[28]), Liveware Problem (see liveware).[39]
Banks often uses "outsiders" as viewpoint characters,[40] and said that using an enemy of the Culture as the main character of Consider Phlebas, the first story in the series, enabled him to present a more rounded view of the Culture. However, this character realises that his attempts to plan for anything that might conceivably happen on a mission are very similar to the way in which the Culture makes all its decisions, and by the end suspects he has chosen the wrong side.[7]
The focal character of The Player of Games is bored with the lack of real challenges in his life,[7] is blackmailed into becoming a Culture agent, admires the vibrancy of the Azad Empire but is then disgusted by its brutality, and wins the final of the tournament by playing in a style that reflects the Culture's values.[7]
Use of Weapons features a non-Culture mercenary who accepts the benefits of association with the Culture, including immortality as the fee for his first assignment, and completes several dangerous missions as a Culture agent, but complains that he is kept in the dark about the aims of his missions and that in some of the wars he has fought maybe the Culture was backing both sides, with good reason.[7]
Look to Windward uses three commentators on the Culture, a near-immortal Behemothaur, a member of the race plunged into civil war by a Culture intervention that went wrong, and the ambassador of a race at similar technological level to the Culture's.[27]
The action scenes of the Culture stories are comparable to those of block-buster films.[41] In an interview, Banks said he would like Consider Phlebas to be filmed "with a very, very, very big budget indeed" and would not mind if the story were given a happy ending, provided the biggest action scenes were kept.[42] On the other hand The Player of Games relies mainly on the psychological tension of the games by which the ruler of the Azad Empire is selected.[38]
Banks is unspecific about many of the background details in the stories, such as the rules of the game that is the centrepiece of The Player of Games,[38] and cheerfully makes no attempt at scientific credibility.[43]
Banks says he conceived the Culture in the 1960s, and that it is a combination of wish fulfilment and a reaction against the predominantly right-wing science fiction produced in the USA.[44] In his opinion, the Culture might be a "great place to live", with no exploitation of people or AIs, and whose people could create beings greater than themselves.[45]
Before his first published novel, The Wasp Factory (1984; not science fiction), was accepted in 1983, Banks wrote five books that were rejected, of which three were science fiction.[46] In Banks' first draft of Use of Weapons in 1974, his third attempt at a novel,[47] the Culture was just a backdrop intended to show that the mercenary agent was working for the "good guys" and was responsible for his own misdeeds. At the time he persuaded his friend Ken MacLeod to read it and MacLeod tried to suggest improvements, but the book had too much purple prose and a very convoluted structure. In 1984, shortly after The Wasp Factory was published, MacLeod was asked to read Use of Weapons again, and said there was "a good novel in there struggling to get out", and suggested the interleaved forwards and backwards narratives that appeared in the published version in 1989.[45] The novella The State of the Art, which provides the title of the 1991 collection, dates from 1979, the first draft of The Player of Games from 1980 and that of Consider Phlebas from 1982.[47]
Inversions won the 2004 Italia Science Fiction Award for the Best International Novel.[48]
The American edition of Look to Windward was listed by the editors of SF Site as one of the "Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2001" after the UK edition had missed out by just one place the previous year.[49]
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