Culture Series

Recently, I binged through the Culture series by Ian M. Banks. It was an amazing read and I thought a write up about it might help ground the experience and help the books stick a little better in my mind. I don’t recall that I’ve done this for any other books, series or otherwise. Partly it’s because I’ve only recently started seriously considering the benefits of writing but it’s also because reading through the Culture series left enough of an impact on me that I thought writing about it would be beneficial.

This blog post provides a summary of each book as well as the overarching themes across the series that stood out to me. So why read this? I imagine there are 3 types of readers out there:

• Those of you who have read the series and would like to see what someone else (me!) who also read it, made of it.
• Those of you who haven’t read the series but have heard about it and want more information than a brief synopsis before committing to a full read yourself. Also, you’re not too fussed about spoilers.
• Like the group above but you do care about spoilers. This post has spoilers so turn back now!

Whichever category you fall into, I hope that you have a better appreciation for this wonderful series once you’re done reading my post.

I actually read my first Culture book, The Player of Games, over a year ago. It’s the second book in the series but someone gifted it to me and so it was my starting point. I had been considering starting the series around that time, curious after a few tweets about it came from Elon Musk. Fast forward to the present, July 2018 to be precise, I decided it was time to complete the series. I started with the first book, Consider Phlebas, and read them in chronological order. While reading the first few books, I was also reading another book simultaneously. The Culture series was for my commute and I would read something else before hitting the hay. As I progressed through the series however, I felt it exert a tighter grip on me and I abandoned my bedside book in favour of more reading time for the Culture series.

Consider Phlebas

I found the pace of this book a tad odd. Given that the setting of the book was the Culture-Idiran war, a significant event that would be referenced several times throughout the series, there was really very little focus on the war itself. Instead, despite the high stakes at hand, the focus centers around the protagonist Horza. It was interesting to follow his story, slowly start to warm to him, and become more invested in him. Strangely though, I didn’t feel let down by his untimely, almost insignificant demise. It felt oddly suited. There’s a war going on. Sure, this one person matters but when their light is snuffed out, who’s looking?

Even though Horza was strongly anti-Culture and several arguments are presented from his point of view, there was just too much to love about the Culture to buy what he was selling. While this was the second Culture series book that I read, it was here that I grew to appreciate the Culture as a model for society. Here’s a snippet that captures one of the aspects of the Culture that I strongly resonate with:

… the Culture had placed its bets … on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machine, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture.

It would be nice to be able to use this line of reasoning when trying to explain my motivation for being in the field of machine learning but the anti-machine sentiment held by Horza is much stronger in today’s society and the grounds for it are far more fertile. It’s hard to argue against the concept of the Minds of the Culture, which I believe are demonstrably better than humans. These are minds that can output in a second, more than I ever could in a lifetime whereas the machines of our time struggle with the most basic of tasks: looking, speaking, walking, etc. I’m still hopeful though. Machines are more rational than humans but for the time being it’s up to us to increase their capabilities.

On an even more personal level, here’s another quote that resonated even more strongly with me:

The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless.

It’s interesting that the phrase is ‘not to feel useless’ as opposed to ‘not to be useless’. By striving, I’m definitely working towards the former while hoping I’m achieving the latter.

These snippets are just some of the great writing Ian has to offer. I’ll end this summary with one of his funnier quotes:

Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.

The Player of Games

This was my introduction to the Culture series and it was a fun starting point. I did get a little lost at points. Banks throws you right into the universe with scarce an explanation of what is going on. What are Minds and Drones? What are their capabilities? What’s the Culture about? Even if I had read Consider Phlebas first, I still would have been quite lost. At the time, I enjoyed the deep dive into the universe, piecing together this jigsaw of a universe as I went along. Having read the whole series, I think that this is perhaps what he intended: learning a little bit more about the Culture and the universe they’re set in with each passing book.

This was the one book I didn’t read on my Kindle so I didn’t highlight the sections I enjoyed. Unfortunately, I also didn’t take any notes down so I’m going to have to go by my faded impressions (with no quotes to boot). One aspect I enjoyed about this novel was that it was a lot more cohesive than some of the others. There was a clear, driven plot centered around the protagonist, Gurgeh, that kept marching forward. There weren’t as many distractions with ‘side-quests’ and delving into other characters (not too many anyway). I found this approach much more engaging.

Likely, viewing life as a game (i.e. there are objectives to achieve, players with cooperating and competing interests, rules to adhere to, etc) is an approach taken by many and I think Banks is simply formally crystallizing this view by having a society explicitly based around a game.

At the time of writing this, I couldn’t find a good implementation of this game in our universe.

Use of Weapons

There are two narrative streams and the book alternates between them every other chapter. While a fun read, this structure was slightly confusing and difficult to comprehend at times. One stream moves forward and I think I enjoyed this one more. This ‘normal’ flow is much easier to follow and as I saw characters develop, I found myself better relating to them. The other stream moves backwards in time and centers around one of the characters: Zakalwe. Since it moves backwards, there are lot of references to events that have happened that we as the reader are not privy to yet. Hence, many allusions don’t make sense till much later, by which point my mind had already shifted focus. I think I would get a lot out of a second reading. Perhaps one day.

Confusion aside, I would recommend this book if for nothing for the twist at the end which does a good job of tying the two streams together.

As usual, there are a lot of memorable quotes.

I’m saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

I wonder if Banks thought about how long Use of Weapons might last. Small as it might be, I daresay that this summary here prolongs Use of Weapons ever so slightly.

Love, she maintained, was a process; not a state. Held still, it withered.

I’ve definitely heard lines similar to this but none put so eloquently. A solid piece of advice that I think could be applied to relationships in my life to their benefit.

What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?

This probably has been pilfered and remixed from other texts but I liked it nonetheless.

An electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organised differently; what is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal brain that they can claim themselves to be conscious, but would deny a quicker, more fine-grained device of equivalent power - or even a machine hobbled so that it worked with precisely the same ponderousness - a similar distinction?

I think this is a very valid question. One that a machine won’t ask us anytime soon but I doubt we will be able to find a satisfactory answer by the time they do. When I first learned about machine learning, and more specifically, neural networks, I thought that we were very close to producing these ‘conscious’ machines. The brain after all is simply a collection of neurons. We receive input in the form of sensory information and we produce output like speech and motor actions. Since then, my understanding of machine learning has helped me recalibrate my expectations but it hasn’t made this question disappear. If we’re around long enough to actualize the possibility of these machines, which attributes shall we assign them and which shall we deny?

I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.

Enough said.

I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you’re supposed to argue about, come later. They’re the least important part of the belief. That’s why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.

On the one hand, I’d like to believe that I am a rational human being whose mind can be changed by sensible arguments. I also want to believe that this applies to society in general. Yet, I find myself increasingly seeing situations where this quote rings true. That’s depressing. Want to hear something even more depressing?

‘So what do you suggest one does, Professor, if one is not to indulge in this futile … arguing stuff?’ ‘Agree to disagree,’ he said. ‘Or fight’.

There may be overwhelming evidence that arguments are incapable of changing someone’s cherished beliefs but I’ll ignore it because I believe that given the appropriate evidence presented in the appropriate context, people do change. Choosing to disbelieve Bank’s argument in favour for my more optimistic belief sounds slightly suspicious…

The State of the Art

This is a collection of short stories. On the one hand, shorter pieces are sometimes forced to pick up the pace and make for a lighter reading. On the other hand, short stories allow for experimentations that could result in nightmares. I’m looking at you Scratch. Goodbye punctuation. Goodbye grammar. Goodbye coherence. I still don’t understand what the point of that story was and it’s was painful enough that I won’t be looking up an analysis anytime soon I think.

However, there are too many gems in this collection to be put off by a couple of … ugh.

I think Odd Attachment is my favourite story in this collection. So short, so detached, and yet so horrific! It’s quite the chilling tale but there’s definitely some humour in it. I was confused about what I was supposed to be feeling but I definitely enjoyed the read.

In amongst these short stores is a longer short story (sharing a name with the book itself): The State of the Art. A couple of familiar faces present themselves: Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw (main characters in Use of Weapons). Names aside however, these aren’t too many connections with their previous adventures in. Really it could have been anyone else’s name and it would have likely read the same.

Most of the quotes that I enjoyed came from The State of the Art. There was one from another story though:

Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present. And coincidence convinces the credulous.

I don’t know that this is particularly deep or meaningful but it had a certain cadence to it that I liked.

The State of the Art is set on Earth, somewhere just after WWII I believe. Up to this point, I think I had always assumed that the Culture was what lay in the future of Earth. Earthlings founded the Culture even. How very geocentric of me. This story squashed that assumption and tackled a very interesting question: What would the Culture make of Earth? Spoiler alert: Not impressed.

This particular quote captures the attitude of Sma quite succinctly:

What’s one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet? It would be appropriate. When in Rome, burn it.

Yikes! A harsh statement but an understandable one. Life has improved since the 40s but I think ‘violent zoo planet’ is not an entirely inaccurate description.

One of the characters however, Linter, is quite fond of us violent Earthlings:

They’re real because they live the way they have to. We aren’t because we live the way we want to.

I strongly resent this attitude. I’ve never met anyone who holds this exact belief but I’ve definitely met people who believed it was better to struggle than rely on a piece of technology. As an engineer, I’m always trying to improve my life through the use of technology. The idea that someone might look down on such an attitude and choose to ‘live they way they have to’ is truly horrifying. If I don’t improve, then what’s the point? I want a life that I’m living the way I want.

They expect capitalists in space, or an empire. A libertarian-anarchist utopia? Equality? Liberty? Fraternity? This is not so much old-fashioned stuff as simply unfashionable stuff.

Some of our richest capitalists are racing to space. I do think however that times have shifted forward such that they are aiming for this libertarian-anarchist utopia instead of trying to establish some capitalist, space empire. Equality, liberty, and fraternity are back in fashion for now.

They always had too many stories, I believe; they were too free with their acclaim and their loyalty, too easily impressed by simple strength or a cunning word. They worshiped at too many altars.

This was one of the last sentences in the story and I think it’s a fair description of humans.

Excession

It took awhile for me to warm up to this one but it has definitely secured its place as one of my more enjoyable Culture reads. There are a lot of interacting Minds in this books which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was really exciting seeing situations and plans from their perspective and watching them play strategic games with a lot of lives. However, the format used whenever Minds were speaking takes a bit of getting used to. In particular, there’s a lot of what seems like gibberish text that often precedes their communications. I take it that this is part of the Minds’ communication protocol and while seeing it does emphasize their non-humaness, it did make for sluggish reading at times.

While we see in other books that the Minds operate at a much higher level than humans, it is in this novel that we truly see what some of these operations can bear out. They trick members of their own, all in the name of the greater good. While this makes sense, it’s still very hard to swallow. I think it’s an interesting question whether what they did is right or not. Sacrifice millions to save billions.

I also got the sense that they chose particular routes not just based on effectiveness but also on how interesting it would be to them.

SO WHAT? My dear ship, which of us has not taken part in some scheme, some ruse or secret plan, some stratagem or diversion, sometimes of quite a sizable and labyrinthine nature and involving matters of considerable import? They’re what makes ordinary life worth living!

This mentality might be harmless among a group of friends but in this novel, we get to see how a few thinking this way might impact multiple civilizations. Right or wrong, it’s definitely quite a ride.

Inversions

This novel takes place in a slightly different setting. I’m not sure if medieval is the right word but we find ourselves faced with much older technology, castles, and wild-boar hunting. I think you get the picture. There are two main storylines with each alternating chapter focusing on a different one. Both stories however focus on characters that are implied to be from the Culture. It appears that sometime ago, these two individuals disagreed on how advanced societies such as the Culture should interact with more primitive ones (such as the ones depicted in this novel). One believed in minimizing interference and just helping them very subtly. The other believed in a more proactive approach that included sharing tech and trying actively to advance the more primitive society. The alternating storylines seems to each choose one of these approaches to focus on.

The stories in themselves had decent plots but they definitely weren’t the most engaging that I’ve read. One aspect in this novel did strike me was the tension. I could never quite put my finger on it but there was always something in the air. Very often, I would find myself worrying that something dramatic was about to happen. This didn’t always take place yet that tension was consistently held. This element of Bank’s writing here really impressed me.

Look to Windward

Onto number seven. This time we are back in the Culture proper and mostly on an orbital. We’ve seen orbitals before but I think the most detail is provided here. What feats of engineering! It was quite fun every now and again to remind myself of what this looks like and how it works as characters move through vastly different regions.

While one of the main characters, Major Quillan, is a villain (he is out to destroy an entire orbital after all), I found that I never really thought of him that way. He’s presented in a manner that makes it easy to emphatise with him. I guess it also helps that the full details of his suicide mission only present themselves to him gradually as a security measure. So it takes sometime before the reader is fully aware of what he has embarked to do.

The backdrop of the Chelgrian War is also interesting as it offers us an example of where Culture meddling failed. For all their statistical modeling, it looks like every now and again, as one would expect, things go south.

I enjoyed the pace of the novel and I especially liked the conclusion. It seemed like plans were on track and the Orbital was destined for a dramatic ending yet in the end, it’s just the Major and the orbital’s Mind that we say good bye to. It’s almost as if they were both weary of carrying the burdens of the aftermath of the war. Quillan lost his wife and now it’s up to him to get his civilization’s souls from limbo to the beyond. And the Mind seems to constantly live with the regret of their role during the war and doing all they can as the orbital caretaker, presumably to make amends for their past. It was bittersweet to see these two enemies finally say ‘Enough’ and shrug off their roles and responsibilities. It was as if they both recognised that the war had already taken a large enough toll and it was up to them to stop the hate from perpetuating.

Here are some great lines from the novel.

We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they but point the way to future triumphs. But the universe does not have our own best interest at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes.

Believing that past successes is a sign of future successes is a common cognitive bias though I’ve never heard it put as eloquently.

They spend time. That’s just it. They spend time traveling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something they think they’ll find in the place they’re heading for will somehow provide them with a fulfillment they feel certain they deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing … Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of traveling itself offers, if not fulfillment, then relief from the feeling that they should be feeling fulfilled.

I don’t travel much but I desire to. Yet if I were to ask myself why I want to travel, perhaps I would end up somewhere here. Perhaps it’s best I don’t think on it too much.

I think it is only natural, and a sign that one has succeeded as a species, that what used to have to be suffered, as a necessity becomes enjoyed as sport. Even fear can be recreational.

There are a lot of daring activities out there, many thrills to be chased. I had never considered viewing the ability to choose to do this, as opposed to being forced to, as a luxury but I think this statement is right. Still, I’ll choose boring and safe almost every time.

The dead escape death in heaven, and the living escape life in dreams.

I think that as society progresses, this statement becomes less true. We are being given more and more ways to escape life and its hum-drum. Nevertheless, dreams will always be the most universal way of doing so.

Fear was there for a purpose. It was wired into any creature that had not completely turned its back on its evolutionary inheritance and so remade itself in whatever image it coveted. They more sophisticated you became, the less you relied on fear and pain to keep you alive; you could afford to ignore them because you had other means of coping with the consequence if things went badly.

I look forward to a complete remaking, a remodeling, and saying good-bye to fear. Some may worry that a loss of fear would make them soft. I wonder if that was one of the overarching themes Banks was exploring in this book. A suicide solider is sent into the midst of a civilization that fears very little and is assumed to be complacent. Thanks to the orbital’s Mind, there is no rude awakening but is the threat and the lack of awareness something to be afraid of?

Well, I shall take that as I hope you meant it rather than as I suspect; hope is a more pleasing emotion to the spirit than suspicion.

Yet so often, suspicion is so much easier and safer!

Yes. But even if all the other stuff seems a bit esoteric just think of all those other avatars at all those other gatherings, concerts, dances, ceremonies, parties and meals; think of all that talk, all those ideas, all that sparkle and wit! … Think of all that bullshit, the nonsense and non-sequiturs, the self-aggrandisement and self-deception, the boring stupid nonsense, the pathetic attempts to impress or ingratiate, the slow-wittedness, the incomprehension and the incomprehensible, the gland-addled meanderings and general suffocating dullness.

The second half is someone responding to the individual who spoke the first. I enjoyed how the first statement seemed quite grand and put me in a happy disposition towards such events only to be one-upped by the second.

The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweat buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they’d wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages.

At first glance, this made a lot of sense. But the longer I dwelled on it, the less sense it made. Perhaps it’s just the primitive society we live in (relative to the Culture) but there aren’t a lot of easy shortcuts to achieve goals. Yes there’s cheating but I don’t think that’s what this statement was referring to. Here we’re talking about enjoying a goal more because there was a struggle to achieve it. If we take the example of climbing, I don’t know that people would opt for a hard climb if they could take a vehicle straight to the top. We often simply do not have the option of the latter so we have to struggle to reach the peak. Other journeys, for example, cross-country cycling are often about the fitness aspect, I think. I’ve never done it myself. Come to think of it, I generally avoid physically intense activities. Perhaps it is about the struggle and I’m just lazy. I don’t think I’m an outlier though. Given two options to achieve the same goal, easy it is.

Matter

Hello novel 8. At the core of this story is a Shellworld, another very intriguing concept from Banks. Shellworlds are artificial planets consisting of nested concentric spheres. Aside from the core of the planet, each sphere is inhabited by a particular species, getting more advanced as we move from inner to outer spheres. Additionally, some of these species choose to mentor more primitive ones, forming a chain. At the core of the planet lies a slumbering individual of a species long thought to be extinct, worshiped by some other levels as the ‘WorldGod’. While the idea of nested spheres took a little while to wrap my head around, eventually I could easily accept it. The chained mentoring on the other hand was not that easy to grasp because it involved some of the more primitive species dealing with technology way ahead of their time and they were surprisingly blase about it. Surely they would be clambering to get their hands on more advanced technology and drive their civilization forward? But we don’t really see this happening. They simply accept that their mentors are way more technologically advanced, accept their advice occasionally, and get on with their lives.

Story-wise, the focus is on three siblings: Oramen, Ferbin, and Anaplian. All three are members of the Sarl royalty, one of the more primitive races on the Shellworld. Anaplian however left to become a citizen of the Culture at a young age and is now part of SC so her exposure to technology and the world in general is far more broad. (This too I found strange: Why did the Culture want to recruit someone from such a primitive society? What did they hope to gain out of it?) After their father’s murder, Ferbin, the next in line to the throne, flees to recruit Anaplian’s help. Oramen, thinking his brother Ferbin dead, becomes Prince Regent, while his father’s murderer (unknown to most), tyl Losep, assumes command until Oramen comes of age.

For a lot of the book, the story focuses on the development of these three siblings and hints at the eventual convergence. We see a sort of coming-of-age for each. We have Oramen, the young prince regent learning how to be a leader. Ferbian, being forced to shed his pampered lifestyle and cushy upbringing to bring his father’s murderer to justice and save his family. Anaplian, coming home to a much more primitive life and confronting a past she would much rather leave behind (realizing just how barbaric her roots truly are). All this seems warm, fuzzy, and predictable. Until it’s not.

We have different mentors vying for power and playing the more primitive races against each other in pursuit of something greater. One of the more advanced races, the Oct, believe that on the ninth level lies buried a member of the highly advanced race who built the Shellworld. They are desperate to unearth this individual as they believe they are descended from it and proving this could give them a leg up over a competing, equally advanced race, the Aultridia.

Unfortunately for them, and for most of the world really, the being turns out to be an imprisoned, psychopathic machine, intent on destroying the creature at the core of the Shellworld, even if it means taking out the entire Shellworld. It fails to do so, thanks to the valiant efforts of Anaplian, Ferbin, and their posse but does kill all three siblings (Oramen when it’s unearthed, Ferbian during the fight, Anaplian blows herself up in close proximity to it to deliver the killing blow).

Looking back now, the juxtopositioning of the development of the three siblings and their converging threads against this overpowering threat seems quite absurd but perhaps that’s the point. We are drawn into their lives and are lulled into forgetting about the fact that these three lives belong to quite a primitive civilization and ultimately don’t really matter. Most members of their civilization probably live and die without much fanfare yet here, these three are drawn into a much bigger plot but ultimately, they too die, with perhaps slightly more significance.

In the epilogue, we see Ferbian’s servant Holse return to the Sarl nation and take up a role as a politician, with the Culture’s backing (the latter had previously chosen to stay uninvolved in this Shellworld as one of the more advanced races, the Morthanveld are on par with them and have an uneasy truce, contingent on the Culture’s uninvolvement in this world). The planet is almost destroyed and yet we have Holse just choosing to carry on, almost as if nothing had happened. More absurdity.

Let’s move on to lines that jumped out, shall we?

She had realised that he was just another strong man, in one of those societies, at one of those stages, in which it was easier to be the strong man than it was to be truly courageous.

There are quite a few lines like these related to Anaplian as she confronts what a brutal society she used to live in. It’s really interesting to see her balance out her current morality against what she had previously grown up with.

He had long suspected that the WorldGod was just another convenient semi-fiction supporting the whole structure that sustained the rich and powerful in their privilege.

If the first quote summarized Anaplian’s development, this quote summarizes Ferbian’s. As he moves through the levels in the Shellworld, confronting civilizations and technology he had never been exposed to, he gets a crash course in seeing just how backwards his society is and recognizing that while he might have been living a very pampered lifestyle as Sarl royalty, it was at the expense of others and that the wars the royalty fought were really just serving the wants of the societies above him. The Shellworld is just one big, long food chain. Normally, a monarchy would be on top but here, due to the nature of the construction of the Shellworld by Banks, we get to see a setting in which there’s always a bigger fish. Especially through the actions of the Oct, we see what happens when you forget that you’re not at the top of the food chain.

The stage is small but the audience is great…

This was in reference to a Sarl belief that although they were very far down the technological food chain, that their actions mattered. Oramen contemplates on this, believing it to be false and we as the reader are initially encouraged to believe so as well. While members of the Sarl did save the Shellworld at the end of the day, encouraging us readers to disagree with Oramen’s belief, dwelling on the fact that it could never have happened without the Culture’s intervention in the form of their techonology undercuts the actions of Ferbian and Anaplian. So we come a full circle.

Avoid self-destruction, recognise - and renounce - money for the impoverishing ration system it really was, become a bunch of interfering, do-gooding busybodies, resist the siren call of selfish self-promotion that was Subliming and free your conscious machines to do what they did best - essentially, running everything - and there you were, millennia of smug self-regard stretched before you, no matter what species you had started out from.

I noted this sentence down because it is an accurate summary of the Culture.

… the quaint belief that the very fervency of a belief, however deluded, somehow made it true. They were all of them fools. There was no right and wrong, there was simply effectiveness and inability, might and weakness, cunning and gullibility.

While I do admit that there are many who clutch desperately at false beliefs, I’m not sure I would agree there’s no right and wrong. That statement came from tyl Losep, one of the more villainous characters in this story yet it’s unclear if Banks believes this to be true or not.

It was no more wrong to kill a king than any man, and most men could see that all lives were cheap and eminently disposable, including their own. They held that in such high regard only because it was all they had, not because they thought it meant much to the universe; it took a religion to convince people of that.

I think the jab at religion might have been a bit harsh there though there is a grain of truth in some cases. Religion aside, I do wonder if people truly only value their lives because it’s all they have.

In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to be told they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter and thankless, some reward would be theirs after death. Happily for the governing class, a well-formed faith also kept people from seeking their recompense in the here and now, through riot, insurrection or revolution. A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock for ever.

Yet another expressive jab.

If they ever did get back he’d certainly be blamed for turning up alive after being dependably dead.

This was by Holse, thinking not-so-fondly of his return to his wife. Looking back now, I think it was sentences like this that solidified the character of Holse as a middle-class man. His character definitely provided a lot of dry humour.

In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.

How depressing.

One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.

This was quite a funny way of stating survivorship bias.

Have the bravery to risk looking foolish…

Sound advice.

A good death. Well, he thought, given that you had to die, why want a bad one?

Fair enough.

Surface Detail

This book was scarring. I needed to say that first before the memory got drowned in words and lost in my ramblings. One of the key concepts in this book was the idea of artificial Hells, virtual realities where members of society are tortured after they ‘die’. Their deaths were simply the cessation of their physical bodies but their minds were forced to live in these Hells. As these places are virtual, time can be sped up or slowed down, dragging minutes in the real world into perceived eternities.

Bank’s depictions of these Hells was what I found scarring. He imagined some truly gruesome, twisted, horrific scenarios, and used his masterful command of language to create a visceral experience. Yet, there was a sense of detachment to the descriptions of these scenarios, almost an apathy, that made them even scarier.

When I think back on this book, this is what I remember most. There was an convoluted plot, about the war between the pro-Hell and anti-Hell faction, called the ‘War in Heaven’. Pro-Hell factions wanted to keep these Hells around as a way to control the behaviour of their population. Whereas the anti-Hell factions wanted these simulated Hells destroyed out of compassion. This was a very clear critique of religion and especially of the use of the afterlife to control behaviour in the here and now.

As far as the book goes, there were some very memorable characters but I think that they were drowned in convoluted, interleaving plot lines. Here is an example. One of the main characters Y’breq is a slave to another, Veppers. Veppers tries to kill Y’breq but she survives thanks to the intervention of a Culture Mind. She swears revenge and so begins what seems to be a classic revenge tale. However, Veppers is slowly revealed to be a major player in the War in Heaven, owning a lot of the infrastructure that the Hells run on. We see him involved in various double-dealings as he tries to maximize his profit and minimize his risk within this war. Now add on top of this, Vatueil, a soldier in the War in Heaven. Early on, it’s uncertain where his affiliations lie in this war and moreover, every time he dies in the simulated war, he is reincarnated without all the memories of his previous life. His different war experiences take place across a range of scenarios, seemingly unrelated but for his constant involvement. These three different plot lines all seem to have different levels of complexity. I think that while these plots would have been fine on their own, trying to meld them all together meant that I was constantly jumping between an ‘easy’ revenge tale to a more complex industrial spy scenario to war stories. It felt very messy and made it difficult to keep track of what was going on. And like I mentioned before, it was harder to enjoy the characters and savour their experiences in the midst of all this. Also, while I only mentioned three characters and their roles within three of the plot lines, there were several more characters, each adding something to the mix, entangling another plot line within the mess.

I do have to give a special shout-out to the Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints, a Culture Abominator-class Offensive Unit. This Mind was an extremely fun character to read. Most of the time, Culture Minds don’t seem to be overly aggressive or flaunt their offensive capabilities. Not so with the Falling Outside…. They knew what they were built for and enjoyed every second they fulfilled their purpose and were very vocal about it. They were introduced fairly late into the book, once the plots had started to coalesce so it was easy to keep track of them and grow attached. This character is definitely one of my favourites in the Culture universe.

Here are some of the lines that stood out to me:

It could always be unreal - how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat it as anything different? You gave it the benefit of the doubt, until something proved otherwise.

This was a statement of simulated environments. I guess there’s no easy way of knowing if life as we know it is a simulation or not.

Utility is seven eights Proximity.

I found this particular restatement of the adage, “It’s about being in the right place at the right time” particularly catchy.

There were few better ways of knocking the fights out of people than by convincing them that life was a joke, a contrivance under somebody else’s ultimate control, and nothing of what they though or did really mattered. The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously.

(At the time of writing this, I’m reading The Three Body Problem. I mention this because a similar idea is explored there and it’s quite an interesting. For those piqued by this concept, I strongly recommend the read.)

And what was glory but something that reduced the more there were of you to share it?

While this strikes me as quite an unhealthy definition of the word glory, I can see how it is quite apt with regards to real life. However, to truly experience this form of glory, one person is insufficient. For who would admire the glorious?

You build the means to build the fleets rather than build the fleets themselves, the means of production being inherently less threatening to one’s neighbours than the means of destruction.

I can’t articulate precisely why I picked up this particular sentence. It seems well written and strikes me as perhaps being true in real life (though my knowledge of history is insufficient to confirm this).

The Hydrogen Sonata

The final book in the series. I enjoyed this, unsurprisingly, but I think it pales in comparison to some of the others.

One of the key ideas explored in this book is ‘subliming’ which has been mentioned frequently in the Culture series but always with a sense of mystery. Subliming seems to be the process of moving from this plane of existence into a higher one. In the Hydrogen Sonata, there’s still a lot left unexplained about it but we get to view a society, the Gzilt, preparing for it. Through their experience, we learn about all the logistics that go into preparing a civilization to sublime and the expectations that subliming holds.

While preparing to sublime, the Gzilt are approached by a envoy of the Zihdren-Remnant, the remnants of a previously sublimed society, who wish to confess a long kept secret. Before their message can be delivered, a Gzilt battleship destroys them, in an attempt to ensure that there is no interference with the Sublimation. Before being destroyed however, this secret is leaked to the 14th Regiment, dissenters of the Sublimation. They task one of the members, Vyr Cossont, to confirm this secret.

Most of the book follows the exploits of Cossont in her attempts to confirm this secret. Obviously, the Culture has to get involved and tries to verify this secret as well, both by providing assistance to Cossont and also conducting their own independent investigation.

Eventually, the secret is verified. Before I reveal it here, some context is required. The Book of Truth is an important ‘holy’ book within the Gzilt culture. Unlike other religious texts, as time passed, the technologies and events spoken about in the book of truth come to pass, lending it incredible credibility. This book forms a core part of the Gzilt civilization, of their identity. And here is the secret: the Book of Truth was actually a sociological experiment carried out by a few fringe scientists of the Zihdren. If the Gzilt were to learn about this now, the whole process of Sublimation could be halted and the civilization thrown into chaos. However, the Minds who confirm this decide to keep the secret. So does Cossont although she decides not to join the others in Sublimation.

There were several interesting concepts explored in this book. First, the namesake: Hydrogen Sonata. This is a an incredibly complex piece of music designed for the elevenstring instrument. I found it difficult to picture both the instrument and to imagine what the song would be like but I think that’s part of the point. I wonder if this is also a metaphor for Subliming: there’s a lot of talk about it but what is it really?

Another interesting aspect was the structure of Gzilt society. While there is a parliament and president, all members of society belong to military factions. It seems like they might carry out something similar to national service as practiced by some countries but the difference being that once you join a regiment, you join it for life, even if you’re not actively on duty. This is how Cossont gets dragged into all this. While she is presently just a musician, her regiment realizes that she knows someone within the Culture, QiRia, who might be able to confirm the secret and so they task her with confirming the validity of it.

An overarching theme explored within this book is balancing the good of the collective versus the good of the individual. While we have most of the Gzilt government in favour of the former, we also have groups such as the 14th Regiment, who seem to lean towards the latter. The government will do whatever it takes to ensure that Sublimation happens while the 14th Regiment wants everyone to know the truth, even if this destabilizes society as a whole. It’s interesting that at the end of the day, the Culture decides to keep the truth a secret and let the Gzilt get on with Sublimation. But if anyone can sleep just fine with white lies, it’s the Culture.

It was fun to be able to follow Cossont and experience personal adventures. In a similar vein to some of his other books, there may be a huge event afoot, in this case an entire civilization subliming, but it’s the journey of the individuals that are the most enrapturing. And at the end when Cossont decides not to sublime, not to join all her kin in what is probably going to be an exciting, joint experience, we can sympathize with her. She enjoys being a unique individual and will continue to do so. Banks did a very good job highlighting the importance of individuality, even within the context of such a huge civilization in which it seems that a single life might not matter that much.

So now that I’ve got the summary and my take out of the way, let’s look at some of Bank’s brilliant writing:

Yeah, that’s us: first amongst the Altruists; the emperors of nice. We’re not competitive about it, but - if we were - by fuck we’d be the best.

This was said by one of the Minds investigating the secret. It struck me as a very acute summary of the Culture and especially of its Minds.

One should never mistake pattern … for meaning.

I think very often the problem is finding patterns where there are none. This quote is interesting in that it takes things one step further: even if there is a pattern, don’t read too much into it.

The Simming Problem boiled down to, How true to life was it morally justified to be?

This was the first time I had the Simming Problem explained to me. I won’t go into too much detail about it here but I’ll try to summarise. The better your simulations are, the more lifelike objects within your simulations will be. If your simulation simulates life, at what point is that life actually life and what responsibilities do you now have towards that life?

The Chaos Problem meant that in certain situations you could run as many simulations as you liked, and each would produce a meaningful result, but taken as a whole there would be no discernible pattern to them, as so no lesson to be drawn or obvious course laid out pursue; it would all depend so exquisitely on exactly how you had chosen to tweak the initial conditions at the start of each run that, taken together, they would add up to nothing more useful than the realization that This Is A Tricky One.

While the Simming Problem rang some foggy, distant bell, the Chaos Problem did it less so. I think that the above is quite a good summary of it and it’s an interesting idea to be sure. I haven’t yet encountered a simulation like this nor heard of a real life case of this, though I should look it up. I think partly that to encounter such a problem would require a very high fidelity simulator which we currently lack.

Thinking is what we do. And obsession is just what those too timorous to follow and idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.

A little snarky but motivating nonetheless.

We all think we’re special, and in a way we are, but, at the same time, that feeling of being special is one of the things that’s common to us all, that unites us and makes us the same as each other. And when that feeling of … specialness is questioned, we feel threatened, naturally.

Summary

When I first started reading this series, my mind latched on to a few ideas and focused on honing in on these in each subsequent book I read. However, since writing this blog and a summary for each book, I realise that each book had some much nuance. This is part of what made it such a great series. Nonetheless I promised a summary of the overarching ideas and shall do my best to deliver it here. I’ll stage them from what I believe is least impactful to most.

To meddle or not to meddle? That is the question we often see the Minds faced with. If you know with great confidence (not absolute certainty) that you know better, is the right thing to do to step in and take action? Or is it correct to let others make their own mistakes and learn from them? While explored in some of his books, Banks never provides a thorough discussion of this or a clear answer. Though perhaps the latter isn’t present in his writing because it may not exist.

In several of his books, Banks explore the tension between the singular and the whole. How important is just on person? How much impact can one person truly have? We are often introduced to lone characters set against a huge backdrop. Sometimes their actions are of no consequence in the grand scheme of things yet at other times, they are able to change the course of history, albeit unnoticed by the majority. On top of this, we often see characters scarified for the greater good. These themes are an almost constant undertone in a lot of Bank’s writing.

Banks is clearly a proponent of critical thought. He often calls out foolish behaviour such as arguing for the sake of it, acting dogmatically, and neglecting critical thinking. Generally this comes through in dialogue as opposed to being an important plot feature or a core character trait but it does feature in all his books. While a lot of what he wrote was not new to me, his elegantly crafted sentences have helped these ideas better stick with me.

I really adored the Minds of the Culture and the general representation of artificial intelligence in Banks’ books. It was so refreshing to view AI that had surpassed humanity but continued to act in humanities’ best interest. This stands in start contrast to so much of the AI fear-mongering that goes on today. Not only does most of this fear-mongering rely on technology that we do not even have yet but it completely disregards cases like the Minds where AI turns out to greatly benefit our society (which by and large is what I believe the weak AI we have today does already!). While it is true that I enjoyed the Minds because as a concept they are more aligned with what I wish to happen, I also enjoyed exploring this facet of the AI discussion as it provided a bright counter-point to the doom and gloom that is mainstream presently. The other aspect I relished concerning the Minds is that Banks did very well to depict them as persons. There was no placing humans on a pedestal and constantly trying to find one more thing that humans were better at and hence claiming that humans were superior. The Minds were better, across the spectrum. However, they were designed to keep the interests of humanity at the center and they did so. While the Minds were depicted as persons, it was clear they were not humans. Banks did a very good job representing them as other, beings we could never fully understand. While there were anthropomorphic aspects to them, I imagine this is simply because truly other AI could not be condensed into a book for reading. So overall, the representation of AI in the form of Minds of the Culture is one of the best I’ve ever come across.

What I enjoyed most throughout this series was the optimism surrounding the future and how it’s shaped by technology. It was so invigorating to immerse myself in a society that had continued to advance technologically, implicitly overcoming so many of the fears we’ve had throughout history. Here in the Culture, there was no surveillance state, no capitalist overlords, no automating the masses into poverty. Here was utopia. Here was hope. When I recommend this series to others, this ideology is my main reason for doing so. I want them to understand that technology could make our lives better. I’m not discarding the possible paths where technology does get abused but I do not think we should be dominated by our fears of these paths. Let’s focus on achieving the good outcomes and press on.

That brings me to a close. I do not think that I’ve done this series sufficient justice in this blog but I’ve been dragging out completing this for too long. Perhaps I’ll come back and edit this, perhaps not. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this summary and perhaps even enticed you to explore this amazing universe yourself.