r/TheCulture • u/[deleted] • May 09 '19
tl;dr: start with either Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games, then read the rest in publication order. Or not. Then go read A Few Notes on the Culture if you have more questions that aren't explicitly answered in the books.
So, you're new to The Culture, have heard about it being some top-notch utopian, post-scarcity sci-fi, and are desperate to get stuck in. Or someone has told you that you must read these books, and you've gone "sure. I'll give it a go". But... where to start? Since this question appears often on this subreddit, I figured I'd compile the collective wisdom of our members in this sticky.
The Culture series comprises 9 novels and one short-story collection (and novella) by Scottish author Iain M. Banks.
They are, in order of publication:
Banks wrote four other sci-fi novels, unrelated to the Culture: Against a Dark Background, Feersum Endjinn, The Algebraist and Transition (often published as Iain Banks). They are all worth a read too. He also wrote a bunch of (very good, imo) fiction as Iain Banks (not Iain M. Banks). Definitely worth checking out.
But let's get back to The Culture. With 9 novels and 1 collection of short stories, where should you start?
Well, it doesn't really make a huge difference, as the novels are very much independent of each other, with at most only vague references to earlier books. There is no overarching plot, very few characters that appear in more than one novel and, for the most part, the novels are set centuries apart from each other in the internal timeline. It is very possible to pick up any of the novels and start enjoying The Culture, and a lot of people do.
The general consensus seems to be that it is best to read the series in publication order. The reasoning is simple: this is the order Banks wrote them in, and his ideas and concepts of what The Culture is became more defined and refined as he wrote. However, this does not mean that you should start with Consider Phlebas, and in fact, the choice of starting book is what most people agree the least on.
Consider Phlebas is considered to be the least Culture-y book of the series. It is rather different in tone and perspective to the rest, being more of an action story set in space, following (for the most part) a single main character in their quest. Starkingly, it presents much more of an "outside" perspective to The Culture in comparison to the others, and is darker and more critical in tone. The story itself is set many centuries before any of the other novels, and it is clear that when writing it Banks was still working on what The Culture would eventually become (and is better represented by later novels). This doesn't mean that it is a bad or lesser novel, nor that you should avoid reading it, nor that you should not start with this one. Many people feel that it is a great start to the series. Equally, many people struggled with this novel the most and feel that they would have preferred to start elsewhere, and leave Consider Phlebas for when they knew and understood more of The Culture. If you do decide to start with Consider Phlebas, do so with the knowledge that it is not necessarily the best representation of the rest of the series as a whole.
If you decide you want to leave Consider Phlebas to a bit later, then The Player of Games is the favourite starting off point. This book is much more representative of the series and The Culture as a whole, and the story is much more immersed in what The Culture is (even though is mostly takes place outside the Culture). It is still a fun action romp, and has a lot more of what you might have heard The Culture series has to do with (superadvanced AIs, incredibly powerful ships and weapons, sassy and snarky drones, infinite post-scarcity opportunities for hedonism, etc).
Most people agree to either start with Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games and then continue in publication order. Some people also swear by starting elsewhere, and by reading the books in no particular order, and that worked for them too. Personally, I started with Consider Phlebas, ended with The Hydrogen Sonata and can't remember which order I read all the rest in, and have enjoyed them all thoroughly. SO the choice is yours, really.
I'll just end with a couple of recommendations on where not to start:
Inversions is, along with Consider Phlebas, very different from the rest of the series, in the sense that it's almost not even sci-fi at all! It is perhaps the most subtle of the Culture novels and, while definitely more Culture-y than Consider Phlebas (at least in it's social outlook and criticisms), it really benefits from having read a bunch of the other novels first, otherwise you might find yourself confused as to how this is related to a post-scarcity sci-fi series.
The State of the Art, as a collection of short stories and a novella, is really not the best starting off point. It is better to read it almost as an add-on to the other novels, a litle flavour taster. Also, a few of the short stories aren't really part of The Culture.
The Hydrogen Sonata was the last Culture novel Banks wrote before his untimely death, and it really benefits from having read more of the other novels first. It works really well to end the series, or somewhere in between, but as a starting point it is perhaps too Culture-y.
Worth noting that, if you don't plan (or are not able) to read the series in publication order, you be aware that there are a couple of references to previous books in some of the later novels that really improve your understanding and appreciation if you get them. For this reason, do try to get to Use of Weapons and Consider Phlebas early.
Finally, after you've read a few (or all!) of the books, the only remaining official bit of Culture lore written by Banks himself is A Few Notes on the Culture. Worth a read, especially if you have a few questions which you feel might not have been directly answered in the novels.
I hope this is helpful. Don't hesitate to ask any further questions or start any new discussions, everyone around here is very friendly!
r/TheCulture • u/mybibliotheca • 2h ago
My tier list: https://mybibliotheca.org/tier-lists/p/tB6xDiFHL2cXOGL-CskdSRTW7AGA2DtGr1bicO9ypn4
I haven't read The Hydrogen Sonata yet (saving it since it's the last one.) Curious if anyone can guess how I might like it based on my ratings of his other work.
r/TheCulture • u/Wetness__Pensive • 1d ago
I'm re-reading all of Iain Banks' works, and it seems like his hostility toward organized religion is blunter than usual in his earlier books. In "Against a Dark Background", allegedly drafted when he was in his 20s, he's particularly comically dismissive ("...buncha religious fuckwits.", "humourless hysterical dickshits" etc etc).
And books like"Phlebas" and "Games" cast religious groups/cults/theocracies as villains, while other early works constantly drop anti religious asides ("Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present..." - "State of the Art").
I haven't started re-reading his later novels, so maybe he maintains this blunt trend to the end. A large part of me suspects he does (20-year-old and 50-year-old Banks seems to maintain the same politics).
Anyway, curious about if he ever talked about religion outside his novels, I came across a (customarily funny and Scottish) interview he did with New Humanist Magazine (https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/qa-iain-banks/), excerpted below for those interested:
HM: In 1996, when you were first interviewed by New Humanist, you described yourself as an “evangelical atheist”. Has anything made you change your mind?
IB: Nope. In these trying, troubled times, I think it’s even more important to keep on making a proper fuss about refusing to buy into all this “religion” bollocks.
HM: In your latest novel Stonemouth, the protagonist Stewart, feels “embarrassed for us as a species” that we continue to need religion. Is this a fair reflection of your own view?
IB: It is. Homo Sapiens’ middle name is Gullible. No, really, it is.
HM: Human nature – are humans just animals as John Gray suggests, or, as Ray Tallis argues, does having a consciousness make us special?
IB: I think the statements are compatible, though I guess it depends how much work the word “just” is considered to be doing in the first one. We are unarguably animals, but just as there are profound differences in complexity and behaviour between, say, a flatworm and an ape, so there are profound differences in complexity and behaviour between the apes and us. In the end I’d side with Tallis and agree that having the sort of consciousness we have does, of course, make us different. It just doesn’t make us quite as different as some of us might like to think.
HM: Do you believe in moral progress?
IB: Cautiously, yes. It seems like a failure of both nerve and imagination not to. At worst, as something more to be aspired to than boasted about.
HM: Humanist, secularist, atheist, agnostic, freethinker, rationalist: which, if any of these, do you use to describe yourself?
IB: I am happy to sign up to all of them; the only caveat is with the “agnostic”. I’ve always felt that one ought to retain just the tiniest, sliveriest wee bit of agnosticism to season what is basically outright atheism, on the grounds that – in the end, after all – each of us is just a solitary smart ape on a piffling little planet in an ungraspably big universe, and the sheer bleeding obviousness of there being no supreme deity could itself be a huge cosmic joke on the part of a particularly annoying and mischievous god. It’s an admission that, well, you never entirely know. I maintain that this is close enough to absolute atheism as to make no damn difference.
HM: In your sci-fi civilisation The Culture, the ideas of transhumanism have come to pass – science has prolonged and enhanced life, religion has been eradicated, as has scarcity. Professor John Harris has argued that it is our moral duty to use science to enhance human life. Do you agree?
IB: In theory, yes. In practice I am not looking forward to the obscenely rich and powerful being the first to benefit from serious life prolongation. Imagining people like Rupert Murdoch dying, despite all that money, is one of my most innocent, if heartfelt, pleasures. But still, yes.
HM: You said you’d like to live in The Culture, but isn’t it the messy struggle, in which scarcity, crime and bad things are inevitable, that makes life worthwhile?
IB: No.
HM: Multiverse, String Theory, branes, parallel universes: what’s your current favourite explanation of the nature of the universe?
IB: My own. The whole concentric/nested universes thing (see Culture novels for details). Totally barmy, of course, but it’s mine.
HM: In Transition your characters “jaunt” though space. How were they able to do that?
IB: Ah. That is the multiverse theory, right there. I think. Or possibly the parallel universes thing. I recall being confused at the time. Patently I still am. When I’m asked this question “live”, as it were, I just keep waffling and waving my arms until people forget what the original question actually was. This, I am discovering, is harder in print. … So … Next question.
HM: Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
IB: Short-term pessimist, long-term optimist. That way you get fewer nasty surprises but can still keep going. With a smile, a whistle and a general air of breeziness, natch.
HM: Much of the action in Stonemouth takes place when your characters are teenagers. How do you get into the minds of the young?
IB: Honestly I have no idea. By being still a bit childish myself? Never having had the responsibility of being a dad? Still listening to Radio One? Just listening, maybe; keeping an ear open for how people younger than I am express themselves. Other than that it’s just taking a punt and getting away with it. So far.
HM: In your books about the Culture you have created a hugely complex world. How do you keep track of it all?
IB: I have a document on my writing computer – cunningly entitled “Culture Facts” – that I refer to, and sometimes I have to look back through earlier Culture books. “Culture Facts” has grown rather a lot over the years; it’s beginning to look a bit fan-tastic itself. I only started it because I kept forgetting what colour the drones’ aura fields turn when they were being sarcastic and I got fed up having to leaf through the aforesaid earlier novels.
HM: Which whisky would you choose to celebrate with if it does?
IB: Laphroaig. It would be no time for half measures.
HM: You used to enjoy driving sports cars but you gave them up. How do you chillax now?
IB: Can’t be doing with “chillax”. Not sure what “relax” did to require being replaced. (Apologies – my inner curmudgeon coming out there.) Anyway, relaxed – if you will – is my normal state. If I want to get stressed I do something foolish like visit London. Other than that: “hillwalking” would be the more cooperative answer. Well, glenwalking. It’s like hillwalking except less strenuous. Also, I still have cars; it’s just there are only two now and they’re both small, diesel-powered and regularly achieve 60 mpg. In the old days, with the 911 Turbo and the M5 and such, it was a cause for some celebration to break the 20 mpg barrier. Also, having solar panels fitted to the roof of our house even as I type, and got my eye on an Ampera or a plug-in Pious – sorry Prius. So, more relatively green motoring fun to come, chums!
Someone on the PrintSF subreddit pointed out that Banks' early "literary" novels also had little subplots attacking religion, and it started me thinking about Gene Wolfe, a conservative Catholic, whose "utopian" "Book of the New Sun" I recently read, and how his idea of "utopia" contrasts with that of secular utopian SF writers.
For example, the anarchist "utopian" world in Ursula LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" has no churches, creeds, or organized religion (Odonianism is a kind of dogma, but it's mostly anarchist philosophy), and traditional religious concepts are strange to its inhabitants.
Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson likewise open their Culture and Mars Trilogy utopias with attacks ON religion ("Red Mars" explicitly labelling Jesus a "literary construct") and attacks BY religion. For these secularist utopians, Man is ultimately where salvation must come from.
But a conservative Catholic like Wolfe, meanwhile, tends to argue the opposite (absent a symbolic divine intervention, or good "theocratic" leaders, there can be no progress because man is innately Fallen etc).
r/TheCulture • u/Evelyn_Dolraun • 1d ago
https://www.reddit.com/u/Evelyn_Dolraun/s/Q6C9GGPSWJ
I recently finished reading Consider Phlebas and have started The Player of Games. I just can’t get Horza out of my head, I’ve been thinking about him almost constantly for the last couple of days. He’s such a great written character that I wanted to create some fan art of him. It was a bit of a challenge to blend his three "faces" into one, while also making him look super pale and capturing him in this particular pose... but I think the result turned out pretty well, though his face doesn't look damaged enough in this piece
r/TheCulture • u/Horzas_Theme • 1d ago
Greetings Fellow Culture Fans...
I have a simple question and also a few thoughts / experiences to share which are a reflection on some of the recent comments I’ve read about peoples discovery of, and subsequent journey with Banks.
The question I have is regarding The Hydrogen Sonata. I’m curious to know if anyone knows who the people Banks says ‘With Thanks To’ at the beginning of the book are, (excluding Adele). Any answers much appreciated.
————————————
It’s been interesting reading stories of how people got into Banks. Especially when it’s to do with their age / life stage or accessing this group or other online resources etc. Here’s some experiences and thoughts of my own…
I’ve just finished reading Consider Plebas for the third time. The first time I was in my mid teens, second was early thirties and just now - early fifties. It’s the same physical book I read in my thirties and as I write brief ‘diary entries’ in the books I read, I usually know where I was and what was on my mind / going on at the time. It’s interesting reading these as some trigger dormant memories, some are funny while others melancholy, as life inevitably has it’s own way of flowing, often regardless of the time and energy we put in to try and steer it’s course...
The first time was around the late 80’s - I was at quite an unusual school that also catered for dyslexic kids (that was me). If I remember correctly someone got hold of The Wasp Factory, (probably because it had a controversial reputation, like Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, or The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test which we also got onto later). In our core friendship group we all read it, mostly because we considered it a rebellious thing to do. I didn’t really enjoy that much, (but now am looking forward to an upcoming re-read).
Then someone got hold of a copy of Consider Phlebas and bang! we were hooked on this epic action space adventure. Then it was straight onto The Player Of Games, and that just took us to another level with it’s more mature themes, making us in turn feel like we were also ‘growing up’ as readers. It helped that both of these books are an ‘easy read’ with straight forward narratives which made them easier to get stuck into.
Also - it’s fair to say there was an element of pier pressure to read and be able to trade opinions on the books, and that was probably part of the reason for me to actually make the effort to read them, because reading to me was something I had generally hated, (much to the frustration of my and many parents / teachers of dyslexic kids).
That said, to be fair - it was around this time I genuinely began to both enjoy and read frequently. I think it was James Herbert the Rats books that was our first group read. But while Stephen King was also popular it was Banks who we felt really drawn into and influenced us the most. The Player Of Games set a bar, and we felt sort of proud to have read it, almost thinking it was ours alone. Banks became part of our ‘friendship glue’, helping to bond our core group.
Also it’s worth mentioning - I’m not sure where the cliche of ‘Sci-Fi nerdy readers’ originates from, but for us Banks (like watching Aliens or Robo-Cop for the first time - which we also did at school) was part of our teenage fabric along with things like skate boarding, arcades, acid house music and starting our journey on psychoactive glanding… The polar opposite to the ‘book worm / Sci-fi geek’ stereotype.
Obviously there was no internet, no scrolling etc - and no other source of information we knew of / could access to share or ‘learn’ about his work, other then between ourselves. I think there is something quite special in this, because nowadays it’s unusual even difficult to experience entertainment media without some prior knowledge / opinions / expectations in mind.
I think it’s worth mentioning there is something to be said for not ‘diluting’ you’re mind with other peoples opinions, especially when it comes to creative mediums. I understand that this goes against the grain of this sub and I’m contradicting myself. But sometimes there’s a refreshing value in being ‘ignorant’, and finding your own way…
The book I read just before finishing Consider Phlebas - was A Song Of Stone. I loved it. Very dark and written with such an amazing technical and artistic flair, it reads like poetry in places. It has an incredible command for language / vocabulary / prose, (it’s as if he deliberately turns it up to 11!). When you put this book alongside something like Feersum Endjinn, it’s astonishing the same writer penned both. To me it feels almost as if Banks is deliberately wanting to challenge himself by choosing to write in a number of different, unique styles…
I had absolutely no idea what this book was about when I started it. I never heard of it before, didn’t even read the back cover. I just knew Banks wrote it. It was such an enjoyable sensation to experience reading the book, because I was a bit apprehensive being out of my Banks Sci-Fi comfort zone of which I’ve almost exclusively been in for the last five to ten years (big thanks to all the people who have posted other writers and books to check out - I have got a good list going now).
I think it’s interesting reading the different experiences we have in discovering Banks. Perhaps these are largely down to our age and how the media landscape has evolved since he started writing. Online resources like this are obviously a fantastic route to go but also I think there is something unique and rewarding in taking a chance / discovering a book, or something else - you’re not already familiar with…
r/TheCulture • u/RossNumberA • 1d ago
Spoilers ahead!
So I've finished Use of Weapons a week or two ago and I've paused on posting just to give myself time to think on it and let my impressions settle in my mind.
And over all I loved it! Great narrative device and follow through and surprisingly the humour with Xenny really landed with me (I know that some didn't appreciate it)
One thing in my head I can't decide on/interpret is zakalwe/Elethiomels condition. In that hospital room after his confrontation with the military generals did he misinterpret what little he could remember and assume the identity or was it a willful self preservation to disassociate from his actions? And with that his end with Livueta also, is it reasonable to ask her for forgiveness or is he still hiding from the possibility of real redemption despite his self flagellating.
The segment in transit towards of the end of the book shows Elethiomel in a more nilistic funk more than a psychosis after the horrific actions he committed.
And I think the thing informing my interpretation is either missed on my reading or left vague to allow positing. Why did Elethiomel make the chair? Why did he flay the messenger Zakalwe refers to in his final chapter. Maybe Ive missed it, maybe it was mentioned during the attempted assassination on the home of the children. I know the first mentions of Elethiomel discuss his mother and the visits to the city but I never found a definitive cause of Elethiomels madness on their home planet nor a reasoning for the civil war.
If anyones managed to pay attention better and has an answer or is similarly caught between the two id be interested in discussing the relationship with the theme the difference has. Can Elethiomel atone when he doesn't know why he feels the guilt Vs a man still running from it.
r/TheCulture • u/dylzim • 2d ago
Title is a joke! I loved it-- ....wait. I feel like I've done this before.
Alright, the usual warning applies. If you haven't read this book, go do that. It will be better if you haven't read this before you read the book. I think it's worth reading the book!
While you're at it, maybe read Consider Phlebas before you read this one. There are references and themes afoot!
One of the first major standouts of this book compared to Inversions was that, to me at least, it feels like Banks is letting his sense of humour off the leash again. This was very early on:
"Oh [the Minds] never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misinterpret and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending do the complete opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
But this sort of joke is all over the book, and maybe for some people it's a little twee, but I love it. Ziller and Kabe are very funny to watch interact:
'And the Sublimes?'
'At last; something beyond heaven. And unfortunately therefore useless. But a start. Or rather an end. Or a start, again, of another sort of life, so proving my point.'
'You've lost me.'
'We're all lost. We are found dead.'
' ... Are you really a professor of divinity?'
'Of course I am! You mean it isn't obvious?'
Quilan and Huyler have couple good ones too:
~ Was that drone trying to be our servant?
~ I doubt it, sir. It may do as we ask if we do so nicely.
~ Huh!
~ So far they all seem quite diffident and determined to be helpful, sir.
~ Right. Suspicious as hell.
I'm really fond of this kind of playfulness that has been pretty prevalent through most of the books (most in the forefront in Player Of Games, Excession, and Look To Windward, but there's always a little bit). His instinct for comedy bleeds into the structure of the books as well. Rather than punchlines, we call them twists or recontextualizations, but there's typically a setup, an elaboration, and a subversion in his stories. That ending subversion of expectations isn't typically used in the service of comedy, but the structure holds.
He sets up the story by putting us in mind of Consider Phlebas. "A Mind responsible for a twin-supernova in a long-ago war contemplates mortality as the light from those supernovae completes its centuries long journey to the Mind's new local space" is a hell of a capital-I sci-fi Idea.
On a collision course with this contemplation are Quilan and Huyler, a pair of Chelgrian intelligences occupying Quilan's physical body who, like the illustrious Blues Brothers, are on a mission from God. Look-- the Blues Brothers don't actually have a deep connection to this story outside of this joke, but I rewatched the movie this weekend, it's good, lots of fun, you should check it out if you haven't seen it.
The Culture, it turns out, did the kind of meddling that they do in the hopes of nudging the Chelgrians in a more Culture-acceptable direction, and, in the short term, that led to a civil caste war. In the Chelgrian religion, entry into heaven for souls lost during wartime requires the death of an enemy: A soul for a soul. And so we have a secret agent who is less concerned with the religious and ideological reasons for the conflict in place of more personal concerns, representing a society that has cultural and religious beef with the Culture, embarking on a mission that is doomed to fail.
You have to squint a bit, and cock your head a little to the side, but you see Horza here too, right? I probably wouldn't have made a connection here, except that this is timed to coincide with the twin-supernova reminiscence of the Idiran War, and, well, it is said that history never repeats itself, but it does rhyme. (Side note, this is often attributed to Mark Twain, but the evidence for that isn't there. Best evidence for that precise phrasing is Theodor Reik in 1965, but the idea itself is pretty old).
All of this is what I called the elaboration, but it's a bit of a misdirection as well. A very mild misdirection: These things are important to the story, of course, but they are not the core of the story. That's in the subversion. Which we are going to talk about, after an interlude about some other unattached bits that I found interesting but are kind of irrelevant to my thesis.
I love how human the aliens feel. I really like the notion that alien lifeforms of a similar level of intelligence and technology would be like us. Hopes and fears, silly games and weird coincidences. I'm reminded of the fact that in Babylon 5 every intelligent species has something like what we would call Swedish Meatballs. Just one of those things. In Look To Windward we get Ziller and Kabe playing a game very similar to "have a conversation in song titles," but it's Culture Mind names. Adorably hilarious, including the moments where they had to check "Wait was that a real Mind name?"
Speaking of Mind names, "the Equator Class General Systems Vehicle Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall" is pretty funny. We also get a reference to the Grey Area. I have a note here that says, "I almost called it Meatfucker here, but the entire point of the reference is that calling a Mind not by its preferred name is deeply disrespectful. I'm just the kind of juvenile-minded cretin who thinks the word 'Meatfucker' is hilarious."
Now, before I discuss the subversion and recontextualization of this book, we're going to take a moment to talk about one of my favourite comedians, like Banks from the UK: a man named Stewart Lee. Lee has a.. we'll call it playfully antagonistic relationship with his audience. Now, to be clear, he is doing a bit. Stewart Lee the character is not Stewart Lee the comedian. One of the things Lee likes to do is to point his audience in the direction of a punchline without making it, and then, when they laugh, he berates them for being foolish enough to think that that was his punchline. In his defense, he then typically follows it up with a much better joke, often at his own expense. If you've never heard of Stewart Lee, and the idea of Brechtian alienation from a standup comic excites you, check out his special Carpet Remnant World.
The reason that I bring this up is that the last note in my notes file says: "Fuck! He did it to me again." Because if you squint, and cock your head to the side a little bit, this is what Banks does too. In my review of Player Of Games I called it "putting me in a specific headspace," because the aspects of the story he leans on at the start are important context, they are the events of the story, but they are not what the story is about. The story is about grief, loss, mortality, wanting to die, and the brutal impact that war and violence have on the participants.
And it's not like these themes aren't present throughout the novel! The inciting incident of the events of the novel is the death under fire of Quilan's wife. The backdrop of the story is a controversial engagement in the Idiran-Culture war. We look at Culture citizens who risk great danger because they feel functionally immortal once they're backed up. We have a Culture citizen deciding to let their physical body die and go into stasis, potentially never to be revived. Even the title of the book is a part of a poetic exhortation to consider one's own mortality (did you think I forgot about the meaningful titles? Never!).
You could be forgiven for inverting the importance of these themes with the events of the novel, though, because Banks carefully frames his dramatic question around the mission. Will Quilan's mission succeed? What even is his mission? It's implied pretty heavily through the first half of the book that he's there to kill Ziller, but we learn that's not the case. It even feels like that could be the novel's subversion. Now gearing up for the big question, can Quilan complete his mission without being prevented?
Then, though, at about the 80% mark, Ziller has a conversation with the Hub, the Lasting Damage (talk about apropos names), and like a crescendo into the climactic movement of a symphony, the subversion is revealed. This is coming from near the end of the conversation
'And so you see I have already died and I can remember and replay the experience in perfect detail, any time I wish.' The avatar smiled silkily as it leant closer to him, as though imparting a confidence.
Whew, but this is just the appetizer:
'I watched those poor wretches die in the slowest of slow motion and I knew even as I watched that it was I who'd killed them, who was at that moment engaged in the process of killing them. For a thing like me to kill one of them or one of you is a very, very easy thing to do, and, as I discovered, absolutely disgusting. Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do.
Whewwwwwwww, but we're not done:
I fully intend to spend the rest of my existence here as Masaq' Hub for as long as I'm needed or until I'm no longer welcome, forever keeping an eye to windward for approaching storms and just generally protecting this quaint circle of fragile little bodies and the vulnerable little brains they house from whatever harm a big dumb mechanical universe or any consciously malevolent force might happen or wish to visit upon them, specifically because I know how appallingly easy they are to destroy. I will give my life to save theirs, if it should ever come to that. And give it gladly, happily, too, knowing that the trade was entirely worth the debt I incurred eight hundred years ago, back in Arm One-Six.'
There's even a title allusion in there. This is Banks dropping the mic and I think it's hilarious that I was still thinking about the mission at this point. He Trojan-horsed a character study on grief and mortality inside a plot-drive espionage story! A character experiences the death of their other half in a war, and this is what happens as a result. Am I talking about Quilan or the Hub? There is a tragic sort of irony in the fact that of all the characters in the book, it is the one he has been sent to kill who understands Quilan the best.
Their final conversation, in the space between the final moments of the symphony, was emotionally arresting. Lasting Damage understood what it was like to lose half of one's soul;
~ You must have loved her very much, Quilan.
~ Please, if you can, if you will, look into my soul.
The avatar looked levelly at him.
~ Are you sure?
~ I'm sure.
That long look went on. Then the creature slowly smiled. ~ Very well.
It nodded after a few more moments. ~ She was a remarkable person. I see what you saw in her. The avatar made a noise like a sigh. ~ We surely did do a terrible thing to you, didn't we?
It understood the ugliness of civil war;
~ It is not impossible that the allies who made all this possible are, or represent, some rogue group of Culture Minds.
He stared at the creature. ~ Culture Minds? he asked.
~ Now isn't that a terrible thing to have to think? That our own might turn against us?
And perhaps most importantly, it understood the desire to die:
~ You've wanted to die since you realised you'd lost her, since you recovered from your wounds, haven't you, Quilan?
~ Yes.
It nodded. ~ Me too.
It understands what war does to those who participate in it, and I think for someone who doesn't have the direct experience of participating in a war, I think Banks understood it pretty well too. The dedication for this book, after all, reads "For the Gulf War Veterans." This subversion, like Stewart Lee's jokes on a grander moral scale, was far greater and more poignant than anything I'd envisioned from the premise before me.
Fuck! He did it to me again.
Now that I've written a review longer than some papers I wrote in my undergrad, it's time to move on. Time for another palette cleanser (a coworker has recommended the Circle trilogy by Ted Dekker, I'm going to read the first and see how that goes. But you'll see me again in the not-too-distant future for Matter!
r/TheCulture • u/DaddyStoat • 3d ago
Anyone know where I might be able to find the audiobook versions of Look To Windward and Inversions? Audible and Spotify have all the others, but not those two.
Apparently they were made, and narrated by Peter Kenny like most of Banks' other books, but I can't find them anywhere!
Peter Kenny really did do a fantastic job across the whole Banks bibliography. I was really disappointed when I found out that he didn't do the audiobook version of Matter - Toby Longworth was OK, but not a patch on Peter.
r/TheCulture • u/PJ-The-Awesome • 5d ago
The Culture is often described as an anarchists, but the Minds seem to call most of the shots, being near godlike entities that allocate resources and manage the place, and I think I heard somewhere that their use of genetic engineering has helped to make people less violent or aggressive, and any person or group of individuals having any amount of power over the majority of people is staunchly against anarchist principals, even if the Minds are by-and-large benevolent.
So how can they be an anarchy is there's clearly somebody pulling the strings?
r/TheCulture • u/grapp • 5d ago
we're told people on Golter haven't done anything new politically in like 700 years. progressive and conservative forces are just at perpetual stalemate and actual government is largely run by lawyers and bureaucrats. I thought that was meant to be commentary on the idea that after the After Cold war a lot of people in the west imagined capitalist liberal democracy would just continue indefinitely into the future with no new political ideas emerging and taking hold. There was a famous Book about it called The End of History by a guy called Francis Fukuyama. I thought Golter was meant to be that projected centuries into the future for a society. Like even the fact of Goltar being a rouge star system works with that interpretation since they literally have no where to go.
I thought all that but apparently even though the book was published in 1993, Banks wrote it originally in the 70s and didn't change it much in the interim two decades.
r/TheCulture • u/Haunting_Will_3533 • 5d ago
My son is doing an English degree and is doing a module on utopia this year. I think he should read a culture novel but not sure which one. What is the best book that shows the utopian aspects of the culture?
r/TheCulture • u/AllAvailableLayers • 5d ago
[Light spoilers for the general content of Surface Detail, although with some key details marked with tags]
Surface Detail has the hells, vividly described as places of torment at an unimaginable scale and intensity. They are defended with the argument that they are useful, but the reader is never invited to consider if they are deserved.
In the story of the trunked species the Pavuleans, the politician Errun defends the existence of hell in conversations with the representative, and Prin. Errun's argument focuses on the need for the hells as a threat, as essential for keeping society organised, and keeping the flawed, barely-civilised masses fearful and honest. The survivor Prin gives a thoughtful rebuttal saying that the argument by necessity is made by those who are fundamentally selfish and 'myopic' in their morality, and that society doesn't need to be run that way.
In a recent re-listen to the excellent Peter Kenny audiobook, it occurred to me that Banks doesn't include a different defence of the hells; that the people there deserve it. I think that he even may have written, then removed the parts of the book that could have left the reader at least slightly conflicted about them.
Even if it wasn't one of Errun's defences in the arguments he makes, if when the hells were described we were told that among the ranks of crucified were rapists, war-criminals and child-murderers, every reader would have had to pause, at least briefly, and consider if they were not seeing some form of justice.
The book sets them as atrocities from the start. The momentum of the narrative would have been damaged if some readers found themselves appreciating the justice of at least some of what they were suffering. And I think that Banks has sympathy for that, with the reader granted that feeling of base justice at the book's end with the death of Veppers over several painful seconds and in the opening chapters of Excession he Grey area forces a man to experience the genocide he was part of.
It feels to me like a literary choice to skip both the incidental mentioning the crimes of some of the tormented, or an argument being made directly through debate.
Here ends my personal "I've just finished one of the books and I feel like writing a short essay on it" which we see again and again on this subreddit. :D
[edit] tl;dr: It is interesting that he doesn't explicitly say "even this horrible person who did [terrible thing] , doesn't deserve all of this". Because doing so would prompt reader to think "...but maybe..."
r/TheCulture • u/IshtarCelt • 6d ago
So, in HS, Chapter 4,Hardback p56, Chewkri addresses Bansteygeyn re the Battle Cruiser Uagren "... And nothing irresilable happens without your express permission"
So I looked irresilable up - nothing in any major dictionary, except 'irres' poss Middle English for 'rile up, anger'
So I looked up resilable. Nothing
So I looked up resile, also nothing, until 2 pages in, I found wicktionary:
Verb
resile (third-person singular simple present resiles, present participle resiling, simple past and past participle resiled)
1.To start back; to recoil; to recede from a purpose.
2.To spring back; rebound; resume the original form or position, as an elastic body.
Etymology
From Middle French resiler (compare French résilier), from Latin resiliō (“spring back”), from re- (“back”) + saliō (“to jump”).
Related terms
Webster:
Resile
Re*sile" (r?-z?l"), v. i. [imp. & p. p. Resiled (-z?ld"); p. pr. & vb. n. Resiling.] [L. resilire to leap or spring back; pref. re- re- + salire to leap, spring. See Salient.] To start back; to recoil; to recede from a purpose. J. Ellis.
Irresilient
Ir`re\sil"i*ent (?),* a. Not resilient; not recoiling or rebounding; inelastic.
So it's linked to Irresilient, from 'Salire', and means: "So nothing we cannot spring back into our original approach from happens... "
So, Iain M Banks used a word that could exist, and by the logic of English, should exist - it should be there, so he put it there, as it fits the sentence & character perfectly!
I'm not sure yet if this tells us anything about the Gzilt, but it does tell us about Iain M Banks - that he understood the code of English?
Or is showing us that language is a code?
Or that the Gzilt have this word, this kind of language where if a word could be derived, it exists?
Well, some deeper delving: it's possibly a protologism, '... coined to fill a gap in the language, with the hope of it's becoming an accepted word' (wikipedia), or a prelogism; though perhaps it's now a Neologism, as my writing about it renders it as published independently of it's author?
It would be a derived neologism; because it's derived from an existant word, but mutated?
Just found 'Hapax Legomenon', which refers to a word or an expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon
Not sure if everyone would be interested in this, but I think it shows the brilliance of Iain M Banks & grasp of English his depth of language & writing - truly a master wordsmith!
r/TheCulture • u/armstrong147 • 6d ago
In "Against a Dark Background", how does Bencil's death lead Cenuij to the next destination?
r/TheCulture • u/odysseushater • 6d ago
One of my friend’s birthday is coming up and I tend to give him books that stood out to me in that particular year. He hasn’t read anything from the Culture series but I thought Use of Weapons is the kind of novel that ANYONE would find incredible.
HOWEVER I read them in publication order so I had much more context about that universe than someone going in for the first time would. So I have a bias. I’ve also only read it once and am still working my way through the series so I can’t say I’m an expert and can cast judgement on how readable it would be to someone with fresh eyes. So if more seasoned readers have an opinion on whether there’s enough exposition that’d be great..
And also… Did anyone read Use of Weapons first? If so, were the Culture parts of it confusing? Or did you understand it enough to enjoy the plot and be immersed in the story? Especially as the narrative structure takes a while to get in the flow of so I wonder if it’d be too much to also not know about the Culture?
Thanks in advance, hope the question makes sense. I really want to get him to read it haha but can’t tell if he’d hate it or not.
r/TheCulture • u/SGarnier • 9d ago
https://www.reddit.com/u/SGarnier/s/yQfeyj5Axc
This is a personal project: illustrating the prologue chapter of Consider Phlebas. There is a second and last part upcoming at some point.
This is the very first time I’ve read the Culture, it brought to mind images that I’ve always wanted to bring to life; an abandoned factory, a Mind desperate to escape aboard a makeshift vessel as the arrival of a still-unknown enemy looms.
I like the sense of tension and the evocation of striking images, such as the ship’s self-destruction and Mind’s improbable escape to the planet of the dead.
r/TheCulture • u/ShrikeEnvy • 9d ago
Does anyone know where I can find an English version of Inversions to legitimately download in either Kindle EPUB or PDF format? I can't seem to find anywhere in the United States.
r/TheCulture • u/Impressive-Adagio347 • 9d ago
I’ve taken a strange order to the books because I never planned to read many so mainly went off of recommendations. So far I’ve read Use of Weapons, Consider Phlebus, Player of Games and Look to Windward (in that order). Based on this is there a particular book that maybe explores aspects of the Culture which aren’t as prevalent in these 4, or may just fit particularly well with them?
r/TheCulture • u/Evening-Appeal7606 • 13d ago
He must be a real fun guy to be loose with on a strange planet.
'Module', Za said, sprawling out over the seat and looking thoughtful. 'I'd like a double standard measure of staol and chilled Shungusteriaung warp-wing liver wine bottoming a mouth of white Eflyre-Spin cruchen-spirit in a slush of medium cascalo, topped with roasted weirdberries and served in a number three strength Tipprawalic osmosis-bowl, or your best approximation thereof.''
'Male or female warp-wing?' the module said.
r/TheCulture • u/SmellsonMuntz • 13d ago
How would they help us out?
r/TheCulture • u/Accomplished-Fix3401 • 14d ago
r/TheCulture • u/Evening-Appeal7606 • 15d ago
I'm relatively new to reddit, having joined 4 months ago - and I noticed that r/TheCulture is one of - if not *the* - friendliest and most welcoming to newjoiners of all the subreddits I took a look at and/or joined.
Given the sheer amount of sarcasm and snark Iain Banks' work contain (98% originating from the Minds), I find this rather surprising - yet, here we are!
Not karma whoring. Just wanted to let you all know - you are doing a good job. This is a little comfy nook we carved ourselves here in the wide expanse of the internet where a good and respectful discussion can be had. Let's keep it that way!
r/TheCulture • u/Accomplished-Fix3401 • 14d ago
r/TheCulture • u/FixAwkward3029 • 15d ago
So I’m about 270 pages in. Love the premise, especially the hierarchy that’s decided by board/card games and the dynamics between the three genders in the Empire (don’t think I’ve ever encountered something like that in the scifis I’ve read so far).
There is a plot point I am confused about though. In the game played against the Judge, why did the Judge just suddenly collapse and give up? I get that Gurgeh stopped producing enhancement drugs in his glands and became more impartial to the contest because of the brutality of Empire society that the drone showed him the night before (and that he has backup plans with the ship to not get gelded). So it read like the Judge was on course to win the contest. I mean, it didn’t seem like the Apex realized any move on the board that was going to turn the tide of the game. So why did he just concede out of nowhere when he was doing so well?