While he’s working on getting humans into space, SpaceX CEO/CTO Elon Musk hasn’t forgotten the greats who propelled us out of the stratosphere through fiction long before him. Today, Musk tweeted that he’s named two of his spaceport drone ships in the most fitting way: after ships from science fiction writer Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels.
SpaceX’s autonomous spaceport drone ships are custom-built ocean platforms designed to accommodate the landing of booster rockets after they have sent spacecraft into orbit. The company is still in the testing phase, but decided to christen their first completed ship of its kind:
@elonmusk … In honor of IMB, RIP.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 23, 2015
Lest the other drone ships feel left out, Musk added:
West Coast droneship under construction will be named “Of Course I Still Love You”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 23, 2015
Just Read the Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You are two of the sentient, planet-sized Culture starships which first appear in Banks’ The Player of Games. Just as the Minds inhabiting each Culture ship choose their names with care, you have to imagine that Musk did the same here.
Banks already lives on through an asteroid, but it’s heartening to see the reach of his work on our current forays into space.
Cover art from The Player of Games
And hope that the future world will look like the Culture: https://yannickrumpala.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/anarchy_in_a_world_of_machines/
Or see: Yannick Rumpala, “Artificial intelligences and political organization: an exploration based on the science fiction work of Iain M. Banks”, Technology in Society, Volume 34, Issue 1, 2012.
Every so often I’ll be reminded that he’s gone. And then I’m sad for a while, and I’m reminded of this quote from Surface Detail:
“So I’m dead?” she said, still not fully comprehending.
“Well,” Sensia said, “obviously not so dead so you can’t ask that question, but, technically, yes.”
The Culture ships are not “planet-sized.” They’re not even Moon-sized.
(The Culture does have a few Ringworlds, and Dyson Sheres, but they are extreme aberrations, and are not ships. The GSV class are described as cubes, a few kilometres per side.)
From Consider Phlebas: “Although it was only four kilometres in height, the Plate class General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal was fully fifty-three in length, and twenty-two across the beam. The topside rear park covered an area of four hundred square kilometres, and the craft’s overall length, from end-to-end of its outermost field, was a little over ninety kilometres. It was a ship-construction rather than accommodation biased, so there were only two hundred and fifty million people on it.” Later books, set ~1000 years later, have much bigger GSVs, 200 km in length with 4+ billion human population.
Favorite Culture ship name: Prosthetic Conscience.
Culture ship names appear in the first novel in the series, Consider Phlebas (The Player of Games is the second), but as far as I can determine from a very quick scan, not until the Dramatis Personae at the end of of the novel. First one I see mentioned is the Nervous Energy. Others include Irregular Apocalypse and Profit Margin. The prologue introduces a nameless ship with a mind but no crew, but much of the story takes place on the non-Culture pirate/mercenary vessel Clear Air Turbulence. Some other action takes place on the Idiran war vessel The Hand of God 137.
Culture ships tend to be metropolis- or even nation-sized, depending on their purpose. Enormous habitat ringworlds fabricated from asteroids and other collected raw material are known as Orbitals.
Those are both good names, but my favorite remains You Call This Clean?
There’s an account on twitter called @CultureShipName that tweets new ship names from the recent news (such as this following the Charlie Hebdo massacre: ROU: Yeah, The Pen’s Still Mightier).
When IMB announced his cancer they tweeted just one thing.
ROU: The Worst Possible News
(and now I’m tearing up again damnit)
Favourite name for an offensive unit, A Frank Exchange of Views.
Mars Colonial Transporter: BIG SEXY BEAST
Okay, that is some good news.
@7 phuzz – I got a bunch of retweets from that account and its followers when he died with my suggestion of GSV Fuck Cancer
https://twitter.com/Radlein/status/343776275036508160
Just when you thought Musk just couldn’t get any cooler – he does this.
Bravo!
And here was me hoping one of them would have the word “gravitas” in there.
That’s awesome!
I thought he was one of the guys all freaked out about AI. I think things may be more like Culture: the computers have a lot bigger things to worry about than humans, but they occasionally use to meet those ends. By the way, my iphone is named Clear Air Turbulence.
Currently starting the second to last Culture book in my collection, once Look to Windward is done, I will have read all of the Culture books.
We lost the greatest science fiction author of the space opera genre since E.E. Doc Smith. No…Banks even surpassed him.
RIP dear sir, your Culture is a ideal to aspire to.
Elon Musk just tweeted a picture of the drone ship’s name being painted on:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/560909571691380736
All this argument about what size the various entities are, and nobody pointed to my favorite: the Culture’s (and hence the galaxy’s) largest battle cruiser is the Size Doesn’t Matter
Elon is the best. Just the best.
@5 Kinsey, thanks for elaborating on Orbitals; I’ve been trying to figure out what the difference is betwen them and Ringworlds
@15, I like your style, and I’m tempted to do the same, maybe with the mischievous Mawhrin-Skel…but iPhones just don’t have the battery life to live up to the hype:)
While reading Consider Phlebas and Player of Games it boggled my mind to think that even moderately sized GSVs could house many millions of people. Obviously because of the 3 dimensions as opposed to our “flat” world. But still!
Photo now available: https://instagram.com/p/4U7-5Xl8cZ/
My favourite – GSV ‘No more Mr Nice guy’
Stumbled on this page following the somewhat happy but equally disconcerting news amazon might be adapting Consider Phlebas.
As previously mentioned Culture ships aren’t planet sized, GSVs (ie. the biggest ship) can be 80KM long or bigger, orbitals are bigger than planets though 1/1,500 the mass.
As for it being “extremely cool” or “Elon being the best, just the best”? Put the tongues away lads and have some dignity, do you’ve any idea who Iain Banks was? That kind of mindless sycophantic worship of the disgustingly wealthy is the anti-thesis of everything Banks was about and stood for, he was an anarchist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and very much anti the kind of gross inequality, artificial scarcity, misery and exploitation that makes such a vulgar thing as billionaires possible, he certainly would not have found the prospect of space being privatised in anyway ‘cool’, the naming thing would have been flattering sure, and no doubt he wouldn’t turn down a tour or a chat, but this kind of worship of the abhorrently rich I’d expect from Ayn Rand admires, not readers of the one and only Iain Menzies Banks, for shame.
Oh and that 80KM culture ship (not the biggest in the galaxy* (the Culture are one of a number of level 8 civilisations in it’s universe, literally nowhere in the books is it said their ships are ‘the biggest’), not a cruiser (GSVs are war capable but not warships)) was called ‘Size isn’t everything‘.
*”The Culture’s largest vessels – apart from certain art-works and a few Eccentrics – are the General Systems Vehicles of the Contact section” -Iain Banks, A Few Notes on the Culture
Per IMB: “Money implies poverty”