I was all set to finish a piece on the characters who inhabit the world of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, the advanced space-humans and artificial intelligences that drive the novels with their struggles and adventures. I’ve gotten distracted from that original plan, though. For one thing, a bad case of news poisoning has endowed the following paragraph from Banks’s 1994 essay “A Few Notes on the Culture” with a lot more grim humor than they had around this time last year:
The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is—without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset—intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.
This particular moment in history—when unfettered capitalism, oligarchy, and toxic forms of nationalism all too often tend to be the order of the day—is quite a time to be reading about a socialist post-scarcity interstellar civilization, and one can definitely be forgiven for approaching the novels in a spirit of escapism. But one can also find inspiration in the progressive and optimistic worldview that underpins Banks’s novels, which was neatly summarized by the man himself.
“A Few Notes on the Culture” was posted to rec.arts.sf.written (a Usenet newsgroup; google it if you’re too young to remember) on 10 August 1994. At that point, Banks had already published Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons, and the novella The State of the Art (one of these four works is, in my opinion, Banks’s finest; which one and why I think so is a matter for another, longer examination). The essay provides an overview of the philosophical foundations of the Culture, a glancing look at its history (much of which, alas, will forever remain unexplored in the wake of Banks’s death in 2013), and the biology and sociology of its inhabitants.
What he describes in the piece is what a lot of people might consider a utopia: a society that has overcome problems of scarcity and resources and in which much mundane labor has been automated, leaving the biological and machine citizens the time to pursue whatever activity might give them the most personal fulfillment—hedonism, exploration, scholarship, art. Malcontents and troublemakers are not so much punished as reallocated into positions where they can cause the least damage. Physical ailments are all but eliminated; lives span centuries; people can change gender at will and produce drug-like chemicals from glands in their own bodies.
It’s easy to fixate on the funtime elements of the Culture, and—because life in paradise is not necessarily going to be where the most exciting conflicts arise—the novels are primarily focused on those places where the Culture intersects with the rest of the universe, whether that be an intervention in a society at a crucial point in history to set it on a better path for its citizens, an “outside context problem” in the form of a technological incursion even beyond the Culture’s vast understanding, or simply studying a planet and determining that it will be left untouched, to see how it evolves without Culture interference. “A Few Notes on the Culture” isn’t burdened with the need to create an interesting plot, however, so this is where you get a largely unmediated taste of Banks’s own ideas on how a society like that might come to exist. And this is where Banks’s revolutionary optimism comes into play.
Space opera, as it’s generally understood, tends to lend itself to certain types of stories: broadly-drawn struggles between Good Guys and Bad Guys; stirring adventures of space mavericks who, out on their own in the vast dark vacuum, play by their own rules, often against some vast hegemonic space government. Banks takes a more complicated view. On one hand, there’s a strong streak of anti-authoritarianism. Space, Banks argues, being an inherently hostile place, requires any given unit—a ship, a habitat—to be self-sufficient, and therefore resistant by nature to any kind of controlling empire or state:
To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. […] The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.
Now in a lot of literature, particularly of the post-apocalyptic sort, isolation requiring self-sufficiency is generally seen to result in a Lord of the Flies sort of situation, with people organizing themselves into internal hierarchies and ultimately turning on one another. For a reader comfortable with these tropes, Banks’s vision of socialist mutuality can come as a bit of a shock:
Concomitant with this is the argument that the nature of life in space—that vulnerability, as mentioned above—would mean that while ships and habitats might more easily become independent from each other and from their legally progenitative hegemonies, their crew—or inhabitants—would always be aware of their reliance on each other, and on the technology which allowed them to live in space. The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is—in the long run—independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.
When you think about it, the sheer level of optimism involved here is almost breathtaking. Banks dares to imagine a society of more-or-less human sentient beings capable of working toward a common good, cooperating and supporting one another instead of simply climbing on top of someone else’s shoulders to get ahead. Some might find such a vision laughable, reading it in a world where, among other things, people can’t agree on the causes and mitigate the consequences of anthropogenic changes that are transforming the global climate for the worse. It couldn’t happen here, says the cynic. And anyway, the Culture isn’t without its problems. Even Banks would have conceded its imperfections.
Well—yes. Hence the novels, hence—for example—the interrogation of the morality of Culture (non-)interference that constitutes The State Of the Art, and the ways in which the Culture employs others to do its dirty work in Use of Weapons. It’s nevertheless inspiring, hopeful even, to imagine the possibility of humans learning to behave in a way that’s not totally destructive. Anyway, as Banks points out, the Culture has had a long time to get to this point. Implicit alongside the optimism is a warning: we very likely don’t have that kind of time. So why don’t we learn to think outside our own limitations and selfish desires and cooperate for the good of the species and of the world? No, such a movement will not be perfect, but it could be better. In creating the Culture, with brilliant morbid humor and an abundance of ideas, Banks has imagined what such a world—such a galaxy—might look like.
Top image: Excession cover art by Paul Youll, Bantam Spectra edition (1997).
This article was originally published in May 2017 as part of Space Opera Week.
Karin Kross lives and writes in Austin, TX. She may be found elsewhere on Tumblr and Twitter.
“Breath-taking optimism” hopefully doesn’t sum up the Culture, but I suspect that many sf authors would far prefer the sort of libertarian paradise that has never been instantiated because it simply won’t happen: history has shown that minimal government, free-market above all systems far more likely to evolve into a plutocratic hell of inherited privilege than a meritocracy.
Attempts at socialistic government haven’t worked out very well either. The problem with socialism is it is inherently statist and authoritarian. ‘From each according to his ability, from each according to his need.’ Who decides ability and need? And by whom and how is it enforced?
I find most libertarian authors, indeed most libertarians in general, abhor the idea of post-scarcity environments.They like intense scarcity environments where they use their macho-machoness to rise to the top of the heap. See, it is only ever libertarianism for them, it is doing what they are told for everyone else.
Post scarcity means that you genuinely can do something else, anything else, without chastisement or suffering long term consequences. That is anathema to libertarians. It is also why you cannot really use terms like socialism or communism (different things, btw) to describe post-scarcity environments. Like capitalism and libertarianism, communism and socialism exist to cope with scarcity of varying degrees. Once you move beyond practical scarcity then you are out of our current political dictionary.
Iain M Banks is a true visionary though. His works are optimistic and posit a future where freedom cannot be taken nor lack of adherence to another’s will punished, but you can choose to cooperate. Nobody works for someone else, but they can choose to work with them. It makes everyone much politer at meetings (as one of his fans once said). That is something we should all aspire to. It is a shame so few people have the imagination to do so.
My personal and depressing conviction is that it is impossible to create a system that human beings can’t subvert and corrupt.
That is no reason to not try to create that system, nor make a leap of imagination to read/watch one.
Besides, with The Culture the Minds are so much smarter than organics so are able to not only effortlessly head those bad actors off at the pass but to find places where they can still be assholes who support and expand Utopia and even think it is there own idea to do so.
The history of attempts to create Real World Utopian societies is a singularly unfortunate one. Creating such a society in fiction is harmless and thought provoking entertainment.
Attempts to order society always run into the same problem: maintaining an order requires someone to have power, creating an elite, and then running into the same problems that required an ordering of society in the first place.
It creates conflict, which is not without benefits because at least we can read and write stories about it.
I don’t find the Culture remotely inspiring because, like most utopias, it has government by Fairy Godmother. Everyone, we are told, can have everything they at no cost to anyone else. The author is just wishing the problems of life away.
And as soon as his system does hit a problem it cannot wish away, we get things like the intelligence service blackmailing a Culture citizen into its service, or a GSV coming to the brink of war with a faction within that service. They cannot pay anyone to do anything, after all. That would not be socialism any more.
In a sense. We already have ships of a kind, travelling through an element inherently hostile to humankind, dependent on the people aboard them working together in their common interest to survive. They are called ships.
By Banks own argument, life in the Culture ought to be like life in the Navy or the merchant service, if the ships never put into port and there was no home leave. He certainly takes an optimistic view about what life aboard such a vessel would be like.
This is presumably why he needs the ships Minds to play Fairy Godmother, and actually do all the work.
“To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”
Many of the comments here are coming from a parochial point of view: invoking contemporary political theory and historical experience to constrain the possibilities of Banks’s Culture. I don’t think that’s useful in the least.
Because really, and c’mon: the entire project of the Culture appears to be an attempt to imaginatively transcend contemporary constraints of concept. This is a noble project in speculative fiction, and one that is very rarely attempted. A couple of examples that come to mind are Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, and Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep. Very different books; but alike in that, rather than imposing contemporary political and cultural norms on the SFnal canvas, they try to imagine entirely new ways of organizing cultures and societies and individual consciousness, premised on entirely new resource and technological bases, entirely new contexts, and a projective depth of historical process unlike anything we’ve yet seen.
Our attempts to evaluate the Culture in terms of what we already know are going to be wrongfooted, pretty much by definition.
Still, in defense of those comments, it’s an entirely reasonable approach, and to be expected — we are all creatures of our lived context, and we use the tools we have. Banks himself used the terms “socialism” and “anarchy”in his Notes. I’d argue, though, that he meant those terms as suggestive heuristics, rather than didactic definitions. He could have said “intensive collaboration within, arms-length negotiated interactions without”, but… that’s not succinct.
The Culture busts our preconceived notions in many ways. Two of the most important are, first, that the Culture’s humans are not the same as we are, anymore; and second, that the Culture is (far from being “government by Fairy Godmother”) a symbiotic relationship between biological beings and AIs.
In terms of systems theory, the Culture is so many orders of magnitude more complex than our current planetary civilization that, from our point of view, it is able to transcend limitations that we so wisely and smugly and justifiably regard as impassable.
11) If every human being in the Culture disappeared, the Minds that run things would continue just fine; If the minds disappeared the humans would probably be doomed. That is not symbiosis, it’s parasitism.
And if you are going to talk about “complex systems” within the Culture, I would like an example of them. Saying that something is “really complex”is not so much a description of something as a refusal to describe it. (For example, if someone told you that the Holy Roman Empire was a complex system, what would that tell anyone about the Empire that they did not know before?)
All descriptions of something are simplifications – and what could it mean to say that an entirely imaginary construct like the Culture is “too complex to describe”? Calling the Culture complex is another cop-out. It allows you to tell people how wonderful the Culture is without having to describe to people how it manages to be so wonderful.
@11, In other words the Culture is pure fantasy and should be read as such. That makes sense.
In fact it sounds s lot like Clarke’s Diaspar except Diaspar is presented as problematic not ideal.
@2 Anyone who thinks that Socialism is “statist” does not understand what Socialism actually is. As a cure, might I suggest the works of the late Mike Harrington? He’ll show how the statist Communism is not, in any way shape or form, socialism and why it and demorcracy are our last best hopes.
The issue remains, WHO decides means and needs and by who and how are those decisions enforced. How can such a system function without big government oversight?
How can any society function without government, or at least assemblies of people talking things through?
Government is necessary. Government bureaucracies which are both powerful and unaccountable are a problem. Nor are governments necessarily sensitive to the people’s wishes. Arranging its powers so that it is is a genuine problem as our Founders would agree.
@12 Without organic people the Minds would suffer from creative sterility and lack of purpose, and they know it. They might not need the organics for physical needs, like the organics need the minds, but they need them for spiritual needs. That is what makes it symbiosis, they do need the organic people and the organic people need the mechanical people. Those two halves are what makes up The Culture as a unique society (in-universe and out).
@12
Human beings have all sorts of gut bacteria. They convert things we eat into more useful sugars and compounds.
If we die, those in us die. If they die, we get pretty sick for a while and can die. That’s pure symbiosis.
In the Culture, humanity is somewhere between a form of useful bacteria and a pet as far as the Minds are concerned – there are teeming multitudes of them, most of them don’t do anything very relevant, and a proportional few of them are crucial to the ongoing wellbeing of the Minds. A lot of that is as a constant source of mental stimulation.
It’s not that the concept doesn’t make good reading, it’s that it’s not revolutionary or optimistic. So it diesn’t inspire me.
Handwaving away human nature to create an ideal society has been done so many times in literature that writing a world that embraces human nature as its found in ACTUAL nature would be revolutionary.
I also can’t see a world where fairy godmothers of the infinite nanny state run everything as optimistic.
@9,
Ships on Earth are far from independent of land; they’re merely transport mechanisms for the land-based economies. Naval vessels aren’t even that; at best they’re a protective mechanism for the land-based economies and at worst, a parasitic infestation, although navies tend to be that latter much less often than do armies. Of course, the libertarian fairy godmother is the Free Market, which worked, oh so well, during Gorta Mor.
Just started reading Paul Kincaid’s new book on Iain M Banks. The forming argument appears to be that each of the Culture novels serve as a critique on the Culture. The use of Special Circumstances acknowledges that it’s not perfect. It has an expansionist, imperialist foreign policy (much like certain superpowers in our world) that seeks to export its enlightened views onto the “barbarians,” less civilized societies surrounding it. The first published novel, Consider Phlebas, may be the best example of this interrogation from an “outside context.”
Banks himself said in 1989 (from the book): “Look, there is a possibility of something really good in the future. Here’s a genuine, humanist, non-superstitious, nonreligious, functioning utopia where no one is exploited; where they have no money; where they don’t have laws to speak of, my idea of a perfect society–and it’s obviously not capitalist–but it’s so communist it’s beyond anything in a way. Something like the Culture could just about evolve from capitalism.”
This suggests that current political ideological brackets don’t truly apply to what’s presented in the novels. Banks is reaching toward something else. Not rebellion, nor revolution, but evolution. It starts with dropping systems that should be vestigial by now, not reviving. Lose anything that relies on supernatural claims. Lose keeping score in the form of currency that ensures some will not have enough for basic subsistence. Yes, it’s optimistic as all hell, and some will never be able to even imagine it, or let go if the past.
@20 Good news for you Chuck. In The Culture, where the only real law is “mutual consent”, if you wished to live a manly man life of rationed scarcity and financial suffering then you’d be able to. Assuming you found others to willingly consent to living that lifestyle with you. What you wouldn’t be able to do is force others to partake of that lifestyle too and you’d have to recognise that anyone playing with you in that lifestyle could walk away if they decided to stop consenting. Now the big problem might be getting others to willingly consent to live under such an ideology, but, to The Culture, that would be a fault with your ideology not their society.
The optimism is in that people would be able to have the imagination to learn that ranting about “nanny states” is a dumb thing to do and accept that if you get everything you want including the freedom to not have everything you want if you don’t want it, is not a failure state but a success.
@22 I would disagree that The Culture is imperialist in the traditional way we would use that word. In accordance with the rule of mutual consent they seek to persuade other nations to consent to The Culture’s model, and merely use Special Circumstances to stack the deck by making sure they can make Informed Consent on the merits of The Culture’s social systems. It is still laden with cultural chauvinism, but it is not imperialism as we understand it.
23. random22: Agreed. The term is an imperfect fit and used as an analogy, in the same way some critics see the US as imperialist for attempting to export its ideologies. Special Circumstances are essentially black ops. What they do may never be known to the general Culture population, and it’s unclear what the average citizen could do if he/she was unhappy with any Mind’s decision. Many of SC’s agents are from outside the Culture, some bribed or coerced in working on their behalf.
One novel, Inversions, never explicitly acknowledges that its medieval society is being manipulated by SC (and countered by an opposing agent). A knife missile makes it clear it’s a Culture intrusion. There is no consent because the local society are not even aware of an outside context or choice.
Incidentally, my favorite Mind name is the warship Mistake Not… whose full name is: Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath
Ah well, with the reasoning that makes sense only to a Mind with refined views on the subject, what they are doing is not so much violating the consent of that society as just arranging things so that the inhabitants of that society will eventually reach a state where they can comprehend and compare the values of The Culture with their culture and make a choice which is informed by both the virtues of The Culture and the failings and social controls imposed by their own rulers.
The individuals involved still consent or not to interact with the two agents (albeit not as agents of a specific foreign nation, although I believe they still identify as foreigners of some description), so technically individual mutual consent is upheld even if cultural mutual consent isn’t, because of the lack of cultural ability to give informed consent at that stage of cultural development. Its splitting a hair to a level where electron microscopes are still called imprecise, but that is what makes it Special Circumstances. After all, if they could just rock up in a spaceship and expect to have their way of life comprehended then that would be ordinary circumstances.
;)
In other words Minds are good rationalizers. They’re more Human than I thought.
An interesting example of a fictional post scarcity society is Asimov’s Spacer culture whose needs are attended to by positronic robots. The result has been a loss of social cohesion with shallow interpersonal relationships and an impatience and intolerance for conflict of any kind.
Oh yes. the Minds have personalities. Some are even classified as Eccentric. Some, very rarely, are rumored to have gone insane. Some have secrets and they bicker among themselves (a lot). Perhaps they should be called APs or IPs, artificial or intelligent personalities. Some expand their consciousness buy adding storage strata. Some of their pursuits are never made known to the Culture’s biological citizens.
The novel Excession is the most Mind centric, where they have to deal with an “outside context problem,” an incursion from another brane or strata in space-time, while trying to start a war with a race they find offensive (actually calling them The Affront). In one novel, Surface Detail, they deal with the concept of (digital) Hell. The agony of the “souls” is convincing.
In the last, Hydrogen Sonata, an entire civilization at a comparable level to the Culture is about to Sublime, which is ascending to a higher energy state, essentially. Some Minds have individually sublimed in the past. It’s clear from that novel that the Culture wants to stay on the material plane, perhaps because of its imperfections. The other culture is definitely aware of it’s drawbacks and actively hides their hypocrisy and lies about their origins. They chose to sublime by popular vote and some are stuck with the majority decision. Perhaps this is another indirect critique of the Culture.
I found Sonata melancholy, especially after finding out Banks was ill. It was hard not to read something into back to back novels examining and largely debunking concepts of the afterlife.
I don’t think the Minds are Fairy Godparents. More like precocious children that love their parents very much in spite of the imperfections.
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut does a MUCH better story of a real human utopian society and why it fails because of HUMAN NATURE.
Socialism like Bank’s utopian society fails because it ignores human nature, no system can last long that ignores our nature.
@29,
The Culture is not socialism; it’s post-scarcity. Indeed, it’s a post-scarcity libertarian society, in that government is largely non-existent and behaviors are regulated by nothing except social norms; it’s just that the scoring mechanism of money has disappeared. Such societies don’t exist, and there are persons and ideologies which are firmly of the belief that some people must be in relative penury.
Don’t think “libertarian” is the right term to use in this context. The rest of what you say is true of Banks’ vision, but he would’ve disagreed with calling the Culture libertarian. It’s supposed to have evolved beyond any capitalist ideologies. He started writing science fiction in reaction to libertarian US writers like Heinlein, who had made the genre into stale power fantasy.
As currently used (at least in a US context), a libertarian should theoretically be left-wing on social issues and extreme right-wing on fiscal ones. So, OK with an issue like gay marriage, but not OK with progressive taxation. They don’t want to pay for government even more than standard issue Republicans (if there are any left). Not sure what the line is in discussing real world politics here, but there are politicians who are truly heartless when it comes to helping the disadvantaged and poor. Banks’ Against a Dark Background (non-Culture novel) looked at a world of extreme capitalism, where everything had a cost.
@26,
PrincessRoxana, I don’t think that the Spacer culture is post-scarcity. Instead, I think it’s a slave society; it was no more a post-scarcity society than that of plantation class of the ante-bellum South or than that of the large land-owning aristocrats of Ireland during Gorta Mor. Neither group ever had to deal with worrying about necessities or luxuries, and neither group cared about the lives or deaths of their social inferiors.
But the Spacer’s slaves are robots programmed to serve. Not even advanced models like Daneel have any other aspirations. Still you’re right about it having the look and feel of a slave society.
@33, exactly.
I think Asimov was, to some extent, making a social commentary about his perception of the sort of class system that put some people into a post-scarcity economy while relegating others to servitude. The Spacers had their robots; the ante-bellum southerners had their slaves.
Of possible interest, from another (more political) angle:
“Artificial intelligences and political organization: an exploration based on the science fiction work of Iain M. Banks,” Technology in Society, Volume 34, Issue 1, Februrary 2012. URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X11000728
@29
Ahem. If it fails because of “HUMAN NATURE” it wasn’t a fricking utopia. It was a Just So story.