Iain M Banks The Culture

[Bob The Skutter]

Has anyone read Iain M Banks' sci-fi series The Culture? A friend bought me Matter for Christmas and I just found out it's actually the 7th book in the series, so I was wondering if it's a series you need to read in order? Or is it just a collection of disparate stories set within the same universe?

I don't want to read Matter out of order if it's going to spoil the overall story.

 

[Baldus885]

The Culture books I've read have all been standalone stories, the reading order shouldn't make any difference.

They are great books.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

Great, thanks. Now I know I can just read it without having to get the others first.

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

Now you just have to worry about getting the others eventually. They're brilliant.

 

[Verteron]

The Culture stories all take place within the same incredible future megacivilization but are mostly standalone stories. That said, there are a couple of back-references you should know about.

Since you're reading Matter already, it won't spoil much if I tell you there was a major war between The Culture and the Idirans. Consider Phlebas is set during this period, and Look to Windward makes significant references to the events of the war and has some significant retrospective on it as part of its story.

Realistically I suspect that you could read Windward before Phlebas without too much damage, but if there's any ordering to the novels, this would be the most significant, and I'd recommend doing things in the correct order for those two books at least.

A couple of other books reference the events of the war, but certainly not to the same degree as Windward and not in a way that will mess up your understanding of those novels.

I'd go ahead and read Matter - but if you're a lover of sci-fi novels you'll undoubtedly get hooked on The Culture - the storytelling is fantastic and the imagined universe is astonishingly well thought-out (and very different to the typical futureverse we see in televised sci-fi or films), so for your next read, consider what I've said above.

 

[Australis]

I'd read Consider Phlebas first, just so you get some basic info on The Culture first, and it's very good. After that, as said above, they're pretty much standalone. Use of Weapons is one of the very best novels I've ever read (though not an easy read, there's a scene that rocked me on my heels), and Look to Windward is a great sequel to Phlebas (and, as said above, it doesn't need to be read straight afterwards). And Excession. Hell, all of them are good!

As I often say, if I was given a choice between living in the Federation or The Culture, I'd be a citizen of The Culture every time.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

I'd read Consider Phlebas first, just so you get some basic info on The Culture first, and it's very good. After that, as said above, they're pretty much standalone. Use of Weapons is one of the very best novels I've ever read (though not an easy read, there's a scene that rocked me on my heels), and Look to Windward is a great sequel to Phlebas (and, as said above, it doesn't need to be read straight afterwards). And Excession. Hell, all of them are good!

As I often say, if I was given a choice between living in the Federation or The Culture, I'd be a citizen of The Culture every time.

Thanks, I'll add it to my list to buy.

 

[Christopher]

As I often say, if I was given a choice between living in the Federation or The Culture, I'd be a citizen of The Culture every time.

They're not that different, really. Reading the Culture books helped me understand what motivates the Federation. Both are civilizations that are so perfected and idyllic that their citizens feel compelled to explore and do good works so that they can believe they're doing something meaningful to justify their cushy existence.

The thing that bugs me about the Culture books, though, is how the Culture's "humans" are actually a mix of half a dozen unrelated humanoid alien species that came together long before the Culture ever encountered Earth. Humanoid aliens are an implausible idea, and if they're humanoid, they aren't human. Aside from that one story where the Culture contacts Earth, I don't see why he couldn't have set it in the distant future and had the "humans" be actual Homo sapiens from Earth.

 

[Australis]

I actually think The Culture is very different to the Federation. The Minds run everything, and the humans are encouraged to explore their interests and abilities, wherever they take them, in an anarcho-lefty-freespirited kinda way. The Federation is based more on each citizen doing its duty. The only people in The Culture who know about duty are those in Special Circumstances.

 

[Christopher]

Well, yeah, I never said they were exactly identical in every way. I said that I found some interesting resonances between them.

 

[Australis]

Fair enough. And either of them would be better than here & now!

 

[ProtoAvatar]

As I often say, if I was given a choice between living in the Federation or The Culture, I'd be a citizen of The Culture every time.

They're not that different, really. Reading the Culture books helped me understand what motivates the Federation. Both are civilizations that are so perfected and idyllic that their citizens feel compelled to explore and do good works so that they can believe they're doing something meaningful to justify their cushy existence.

The thing that bugs me about the Culture books, though, is how the Culture's "humans" are actually a mix of half a dozen unrelated humanoid alien species that came together long before the Culture ever encountered Earth. Humanoid aliens are an implausible idea, and if they're humanoid, they aren't human. Aside from that one story where the Culture contacts Earth, I don't see why he couldn't have set it in the distant future and had the "humans" be actual Homo sapiens from Earth.

I actually liked the ideea of the Culture being unrelated to Earth.

Most sci-fi stories have humans being at the center of everything, making the tough decisions, becoming the dominant civilization.
In the Culture series, we see a different perspective, where humans are so far behind the important players, it's amusing. Also, it most likely reflects much more accurately our position among the other intelligent species that exist in the Milky Way.

About humanoid aliens being unlikely: they are necessary. The readership is made of humans who must empathise with the characters. Most characters, not just the ones the author developed until we can understand/emphatise with their alien values and way of thinking.
And humanoid aliens may be unlikely, but hardly impossible. Maybe the humanoid form gives an intelligent species certain decisive advantages we haven't discovered yet.

 

[Kaijima]

Actually, Banks sort of gives away the probable origin of the Culture's human-like people in a non-Culture novel, called The Algebraist. It's a kinda easter egg for Culture fans since he doesn't seem to want to complicate the Culture novels with a sprawling origin story. (They're complicated enough already.)

I'm not going to mark spoilers as it's a bit long, so if you haven't read The Algebraist, skip this. No spoilers for the actual storyline in the book, just the backstory laid out over the course of the novel.

Okay, deep breath.

In The Algebraist there is a practice of extracting DNA samples of primitive sapients - such as proto-humans from Earth - and raising them to be gleeming pretty space-faring evolveds. Then, when the retrograde original race grows up and reaches Outer Space, members of their own species come to greet them and help them overcome culture shock.

However, this is all a rig. The galactic civilization that approves of this practice uses it to effectively enslave new species of subjects by integrating their "advanced" (such as aHuman) forerunners into galactic civilization. By the time the retros (such as rHuman) make it space, they find that their kind are already citizens of the great empire and they're infinitely outnumbered. There's no real way to resist being incorporated into the established galactic civilization for long. This is done so that no new species can get out there, establish themselves, and propagate independently. Their own kind are seeded in advance and limit what the remaining "retros" can accomplish.

Now, floating around in space are a shady sort of nomadic space vagabonds. These wanderers are looked upon as gypsies and savages by galactic civilization and there are humans, for example, among them. They seem to organize attacks on the key facilities that hold the galactic empire together that have one end result: cutting off communication around the planets of the empire for long periods of time.

A final piece of the puzzle is that the overall galactic civilization is that AI is banned. Totally banned. In fact, there is a mythology in place that once upon a time, organic life in the galaxy was nearly destroyed by rampaging AIs of ultimate cold, calculating destruction. People have been conditioned to fear machine intelligences, because, they are told, it has been proven time and again that abstract machine intelligences prove to be unstable and incapable of empathizing with organic beings. So will feel nothing about wiping them out.

Except the big secret is that the wandering space gypsies are hiding out rogue AIs among them. They're allies; and the AIs are not at all what legend and propaganda makes them out to be.

So, what about the Culture?

Well, the origin of the Culture that we are suppose to infer (this is the agreed-upon theory I've most often read analyzing The Algebraist) is that in the Culture universe, an alien empire once visited Earth and extracted human DNA, to seed space with human subjects - among other client races. However, groups of humans and a few similar species broke away and, after a few thousand years of wandering and planning, work together with machine intelligences to create a new, decentralized machine-human civilization geared towards surviving wholesale in deep space on massive city-ships and in mobile space habitats. They succeed in either overthrowing or outlasting the advanced galactic civilization that attempted to use humans as another slave/client race, and sowed the seeds of the Culture. The Culture's devotion to personal freedom and absolute opposition to exploitation of intelligent beings stems directly from its genesis in the shadow of this oppressive civilization.

Therefore, in the Culture setting, descendants of Earth stock humans exist across the galaxy, though the way Banks writes the Culture stories suggests that nobody has hard facts on which planet the original human DNA was extracted from. When a Culture ship wanders by Earth in the story "The State of the Art" they don't have it in their database as the legendary home of humanity or anything. They just presume that it's another world full of humanoid stock that came to be tens of thousands of years ago in some dim pre-history. One would assume that if the Culture comes back and examines Earth in more detail, they'd find evolutionary history and signs that Earth may be the source of human genetics that have been strewn about the galaxy.

Banks has never really drawn much attention to the Culture stories taking place "now" and not in the future, save for The State of the Art. I can see it coming across as weird and implausible for people who catch on, and I suppose that Banks did this so that he could have a human-populated civilization with none of the baggage attached with having to come up with an excuse for them to have evolved directly out of present day Earth. Also, the backstory of The Algebraist universe may have been Banks little in-joke - a long, buried, roundabout way of explaining just how the pre-history of the Culture universe is laid out.

Of course, if you read The Algebraist and are aware of the Culture novels, I think you're supposed to come away with a sort of optimism for the not-that-nice universe of The Algebraist. The Culture represents what the Space Gypsies and their AI cohorts could one day achieve. There's a line at the end of the novel to suggest that this is what the reader is supposed to imagine, creating a bit of an uplifting note if you take the long view.

Okay, story time over, and hopefully this helps people enjoy the Culture novels a bit more.

 

[Christopher]

^Uh, I'm confused, since Wikipedia says The Algebraist is Banks's first non-Culture SF novel that couldn't potentially be in the Culture universe. And it's set 2000 years in the future, so I don't see how it's consistent with the backstory you describe.

 

[Kaijima]

^Uh, I'm confused, since Wikipedia says The Algebraist is Banks's first non-Culture SF novel that couldn't potentially be in the Culture universe. And it's set 2000 years in the future, so I don't see how it's consistent with the backstory you describe.

No, they're not the same universe.

Banks yanks out the Culture origin story floating around inside his head and uses it in a parallel scenario that is detailed in The Algebraist.

Readers of stories in each universe can see the parallels that go both ways: how The Algebraist reveals how humans are taken and seeded across the galaxy, then roaming nomadic factions hook up with AI, become allies, and begin the seeds of a new "culture". And the Culture books hint at what the future may be like in The Algebraist if the wandering human-AI fleets keep evolving and become a major force in the galaxy.

 

[Australis]

I will have to read The Algebraist now.

 

[Arpy]

I started it but couldn't finish. It was my first foray into Banks' work and to date my only. I'd really like to learn about The Culture though. Which is the best book to learn the most about it, to really get a sense of it?

 

[Verteron]

I started it but couldn't finish. It was my first foray into Banks' work and to date my only. I'd really like to learn about The Culture though. Which is the best book to learn the most about it, to really get a sense of it?

Interesting, I actually really enjoyed The Algebraist - more so than some of the Culture stories. The only book by Banks I've not been able to get through is Feersum Endjinn, simply because (and I know this may sound somewhat pretentious) I simply could not bring myself to read the chapters written in his proto-1337speak apparently penned by an imagined "dyslexic".

I found the task of deciphering what each word was supposed to be so arduous that it broke the storytelling completely.

Anyway, as for the first Culture book to read, I'd still suggest Phlebas - not only is it a reasonably exciting story it contains quite a lot of info about "The Culture" viewed by those on the periphery, so a fair amount of explanation and so forth about how it all works.

It's also Banks' first work and the earliest chronologically... so it seems to be the one to go for.

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

Personally, I think the first three novels (Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons) are the best, with "Use of Weapons" being my favorite Culture/Banks book. The latter ones are not as good IMO.

 

[Australis]

Agree with Phlebas best starting point, which is set during the Culture-Idiran War, which is a good background for learning about a civilisation.

The first three probably are the best, but I also rate Excession and Look to Windward pretty highly. I do have to say I didn't enjoy the most recent one, but it's certainly deep. Maybe it doesn't have enough Culture in it for me, or the Ships.

Wait 'til you see the Ship names.

Good article in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture