The Culture: A Beginner's Guide

First, the basics. The Culture is Banks’ fictional intergalactic civilisation, and it can be vaguely described as an anarchist utopia in space. He’s published ten Culture books, beginning with Consider Phlebas in 1987, with the latest, The Hydrogen Sonata, hitting the shops right now. The books all take place in a shared Universe rather than forming a continuing story.

Banks notably writes all of his science fiction novels using the name Iain M Banks. The M stands for Menzies, which is his middle name. Sort of. Not on official documentation, because his dad somehow managed to leave it off the birth certificate, but the family continued using it in any case. Whatever this may say about naming law, it does seem appropriate that Banks publishes science fiction under  a non-existent name.

Gigantic trans-galactic civilisations are pretty common in sci-fi – see ‘The Empire’ in Star Wars. However, while the point of The Empire was effectively that it would get defeated in a final conflict (which involved lightning hands and teddy bears with spears, which seems odd looking back) The Culture is a permanent fixture. When he does Q&A sessions, Banks is asked whether we’ll ever see a book that either describes the start  or end of The Culture, almost more than he’s asked ‘where do you get your ideas from’. His answer is the same: Nope. It’s here to stay, and he’s not going to be tempted to change that.

With that said, Excession (the fifth Culture book) depicts a situation where The Culture does come under threat when a mysterious, gigantic sphere appears on the edge of Culture Space, and appears to be older than the Universe. The Culture’s Minds investigate – and by ‘Minds’ we here mean the term used for the massive hyper-intelligent computers that usually inhabit their own spaceships, and play a large part in ‘governing’ The Culture, in as much as it is governed. This is as close, Banks has said, as he’s ever going to get to ending The Culture.
Though The Culture novels are not one continuing saga, they do progress roughly chronologically. Each new book doesn’t always take place after all the others, but there’s been a rough and gradual, two steps forward, one step back kind of progression so far. So the fact that there have been five books written since Excession should hint at whether The Culture ended there or not.

The new Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata, does allude to the start and the end of intergalactic civilisations, when a civilisation called The Gzilt, that helped set up The Culture, but backed out of joining it in the end, decides to ‘sublime’, which is to ascend to another, formless, plane of existence. The Culture generally regards this step suspiciously – in fact, sci-fi in general views ‘subliming’ warily. David Tennant’s last episode of Doctor Who showed the Time Lords attempting to do this, but being stopped by The Doctor, because it would end time. This would make this a curiously mainstream suspicion.

The Gzilt decide to sublime by holding a referendum. The Culture novels haven’t alluded to contemporary politics in any specific way in the past, so this probably isn’t a comment on Scottish Independence. Probably.

The beginning of The Culture, for readers, was in Consider Phlebas, where the protagonist, Horza, is actually working against them. He’s a mercenary working for the Idirans, a competing, and religious, intergalactic civilisation The Culture is at war with. A curious way to begin the series, but the book is very accessible. It's often suggested that the second book, The Player of Games, is a better introduction to reading the series, but Consider Phlebas is greatly enjoyable and certainly no barrier to entry.

Consider Phlebas includes descriptions of the relationships between people and computers in The Culture that are very important to the series as a whole. The Minds are of course massively more intelligent than individual people, but each sentient being is afforded the same rights. People are more numerous than Minds, though, and so the very intelligent amongst them can sometimes solve problems that elude The Minds, a process Banks describes as ‘sleight of neuron’. This annoys The Minds.

In broad terms, computer intelligence in science fiction either regards itself as beyond biological life forms and becomes antagonistic – see HAL9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey – or runs everything and keeps people, like pets. The Culture bridges this gap with Minds that have individual personalities, often of the rational humanist type, and who have decided to value biological beings with sentient minds. More than just value, they get on with people, people get on with them, and so it goes in The Culture.

‘People’ are not earth-humans as such, but humanoid beings. The differences from earth-humans are that humanoid citizens of The Culture have evolved themselves biologically. They now have better sex lives, they have improved immune systems to the point where they can re-grow severed limbs, they can produce their own (potent, but non-addictive) drugs through glands in their body, and they can even change sex at will, though that does take time.

Gurgeh, the title character and protagonist of The Player of Games has never changed sex, which is considered slightly unusual. However, he’s a genius at the sort of strategy games Banks likes to play, and occasionally write about – a game called Damage features in Consider Phlebas, and crossing over to Bank’s ‘straight’ books, Cameron Colley in Complicity is hooked on a computer game called Despot, which is basically Civilisation 2, which Banks was addicted to at one point. This is why Gurgeh is recruited for a special mission to a games-obsessed planet.

Who recruits Gurgeh? The Culture has an agency of sorts called Contact, which deals with contacting other, usually slightly less advanced, civilisations, to see if they want to assimilate with The Culture. Usually they do. A more extreme branch of Contact is Special Circumstances, who play a large part in Banks’s novels, though they’re only a small part of The Culture as a whole.

Banks has said that since The Culture is so balanced a society, it wouldn’t be that interesting to set a book inside its heart, because there’s not enough conflict. So the books tend to be about the periphery of The Culture, and usually involve Contact, and Special Circumstances.

Inversions is only debatably a Culture Novel, because the Culture is only alluded to. The book is set on an alien planet that The Culture, and almost certainly Special Circumstances, is involved with, but it’s not explicit how or why they’re doing this, in a way that makes it possible to read the book without noticing The Culture at all. It remains a good book, but it’s not the one to start with if you want to get into the Culture Novels.

A book that is undeniably a Culture Novel is Matter, which builds up to a specific Special Circumstances mission to the centre of a shell world, a planet with many different levels inside, which is good for dramatic tension. This said, Banks' notion that only the periphery of The Culture is dramatically interesting is a good working approach, but I’m going to say he’s wrong.

Any time his novels reference events in The Culture itself, they’re pretty fascinating – in The Player of Games Gurgeh has an old cast-iron cannon that he fires into a nearby lake, largely just because he can, which is pretty appealing. In Surface Detail, there’s an account of Culture citizens realising they can fix up anti-gravity oxygen bubbles to… well, anything they want, and then fly, for example, houses around in space. Also pretty appealing.

All of this lovely nonsense is completely justifiable by the fact that The Culture is a post-scarcity society. Meaning they’ve discovered how to produce matter and energy, so it won’t ever run out. That’s quite necessary for utopian conditions. It also means The Culture has abandoned living on planets, preferring instead to construct Orbitals, gigantic structures that run round the entire orbit of a star. They’re mostly geo-formed to be covered in earth-like terrain too, rather than being cold, metal, constructs.

At the start of the Idiran War, the Idirans unexpectedly attacked The Culture by destroying enough of some Orbitals to loosen the rest of the structures, which then went flying through space, killing the people on them, who didn't expect these kinds of attacks. This is one disadvantage of living in such an advanced society.

The Culture’s advanced technology and intelligence eventually engineers a complete victory over the Idirans. This is one advantage of living in such an advanced society. In Look to Windward – which is related to Consider Phlebas in that it concerns this war, and in that both titles come from Eliot’s The Waste Land – one of the major characters is composing music to commemorate the anniversary of the war’s end.

The Minds don’t compose music; if they did, it’d be much too incredibly perfect. And so they’re not allowed to, by common consensus. This said, the Minds are fully formed personalities, and they, like the rest of the Culture, do pursue fun. They just don’t do it in ways that would detract from the endeavours of other Culture citizens.

An idea of how much of a sense of humour Banks ascribes to the Minds can be seen in the names they choose for their own spaceships. These names are justly admired by the readers of The Culture novels. Some examples are the ships Pure Big Mad Boat Man, Poke It With A Stick, No More Mr Nice Guy, Just Read The Instructions, Of Course I Still Love You, Very Little Gravitas Indeed, Well I Was In The Neighbourhood, Appeal To Reason, Anything Legal Considered, and the very in-jokey Eight Rounds Rapid. Very In-Jokey could be a ship name in itself.

A debatable point, but let’s go for it: Banks’ Culture, and sci-fi novels as a whole have been more consistently excellent than his ‘straight’ novels. A theory I’ll advance is that his ‘normal’ books have had greater highs as well as greater lows, but the space-based tales have definitely achieved a higher average. Well, kind of sort of definitely (another ship name there). Feel free to read them and argue the point.