I found this on the Internet this morning
(http://lucid.cba.uiuc.edu/~rkeogh/banks/), should be interesting to any
Iain M Banks fans...
Paul.
Paul Ilsley
Paul.Ilsley@, tel 0171 434 8728 (work)
Pauli@, tel 01784 431150 (home)
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A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE
by Iain M Banks
#
Firstly, and most importantly: the Culture doesn't really exist. It's
only
a story. It only exists in my mind and the minds of the people who've
read
about it.
#
That having been made clear:
#
The Culture is a group-civilisation formed from seven or eight humanoid
species, space-living elements of which established a loose federation
approximately nine thousand years ago. The ships and habitats which
formed
the original alliance required each others' support to pursue and
maintain
their independence from the political power structures - principally
those
of mature nation-states and autonomous commercial concerns
- they had evolved from.
The galaxy (our galaxy) in the Culture stories is a place long
lived-in,
and scattered with a variety of life-forms. In its vast and complicated
history it has seen waves of empires, federations, colonisations,
die-backs, wars, species-specific dark ages, renaissances, periods of
mega-structure building and destruction, and whole ages of benign
indifference and malign neglect. At the time of the Culture stories,
there
are perhaps a few dozen major space-faring civilisations, hundreds of
minor
ones, tens of thousands of species who might develop space-travel, and
an
uncountable number who have been there, done that, and have either gone
into locatable but insular retreats to contemplate who-knows-what, or
disappeared from the normal universe altogether to cultivate lives even
less comprehensible.
In this era, the Culture is one of the more energetic civilisations,
and
initially - after its formation, which was not without vicissitudes - by
a
chance of timing found a relatively quiet galaxy around it, in which
there
were various other fairly mature civilisations going about their
business,
traces and relics of the elder cultures scattered about the place, and -
due to the fact nobody else had bothered to go wandering on a grand
scale
for a comparatively long time - lots of interesting 'undiscovered' star
systems to explore...
#
The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of
the
idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of
civilisations
which will thrive there.
The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state
are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends
on
the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space,
lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane
(that
the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the
fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution,
determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an
aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.
Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power
systems
cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a
degree
of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.
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. On a planet, enclaves
can
be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or
corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to
prevail.
In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control,
especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile
habitats. 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.
Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour
encouragez
les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but
all
the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that
concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated -
dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if
in
a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then
rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the
day
is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred
or
more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the
military and political mind. Rebellion, then (once space-going and
space-living become commonplace), becomes easier than it might be on the
surface of a planet.
Even so, this is certainly the most vulnerable point in the time-line
of
the Culture's existence, the point at which it is easiest to argue for
things turning out quite differently, as the extent and sophistication
of
the hegemony's control mechanisms - and its ability and will to repress
-
battles against the ingenuity, skill, solidarity and bravery of the
rebellious ships and habitats, and indeed the assumption here is that
this
point has been reached before and the hegemony has won... but it is
also
assumed that - for the reasons given above - that point is bound to come
round again, and while the forces of repression need to win every time,
the
progressive elements need only triumph once.
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.
Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to
be
profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more
productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market
forces.
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.
It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and
in
that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other
moral,
philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind
displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity
and] -
through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of
others - a kind of synthetic evil.
Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next
aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them;
the
same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the
market
can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the
market
merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out
coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for
such
a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies
of
our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive
participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals,
and
designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards
them.
Of course, there is a place for serendipity and chance in any
sensibly
envisaged plan, and the degree to which this would affect the higher
functions of a democratically designed economy would be one of the most
important parameters to be set... but just as the information we have
stored in our libraries and institutions has undeniably outgrown (if not
outweighed) that resident in our genes, and just as we may, within a
century of the invention of electronics, duplicate - through machine
sentience - a process which evolution took billions of years to achieve,
so
we shall one day abandon the grossly targeted vagaries of the market for
the precision creation of the planned economy.
The Culture, of course, has gone beyond even that, to an economy so
much
a part of society it is hardly worthy of a separate definition, and
which
is limited only by imagination, philosophy (and manners), and the idea
of
minimally wasteful elegance; a kind of galactic ecological awareness
allied
to a desire to create beauty and goodness.
Whatever; in the end practice (as ever) will outshine theory.
#
As mentioned above, there is another force at work in the Culture aside
from the nature of its human inhabitants and the limitations and
opportunities presented by life in space, and that is Artificial
Intelligence. This is taken for granted in the Culture stories, and -
unlike FTL travel - is not only likely in the future of our own species,
but probably inevitable (always assuming homo sapiens avoids
destruction).
Certainly there are arguments against the possibility of Artificial
Intelligence, but they tend to boil down to one of three assertions:
one,
that there is some vital field or other presently intangible influence
exclusive to biological life - perhaps even carbon-based biological life
-
which may eventually fall within the remit of scientific understanding
but
which cannot be emulated in any other form (all of which is neither
impossible nor likely); two, that self-awareness resides in a
supernatural
soul - presumably linked to a broad-based occult system involving gods
or a
god, reincarnation or whatever - and which one assumes can never be
understood scientifically (equally improbable, though I do write as an
atheist); and, three, that matter cannot become self-aware (or more
precisely that it cannot support any informational formulation which
might
be said to be self-aware or taken together with its material substrate
exhibit the signs of self-awareness). ...I leave all the more than
nominally self-aware readers to spot the logical problem with that
argument.
It is, of course, entirely possible that real AIs will refuse to have
anything to do with their human creators (or rather, perhaps, the human
creators of their non-human creators), but assuming that they do - and
the
design of their software may be amenable to optimization in this regard
- I
would argue that it is quite possible they would agree to help further
the
aims of their source civilisation (a contention we'll return to
shortly).
At this point, regardless of whatever alterations humanity might impose
on
itself through genetic manipulation, humanity would no longer be a
one-sentience-type species. The future of our species would affect, be
affected by and coexist with the future of the AI life-forms we create.
The Culture reached this phase at around the same time as it began to
inhabit space. Its AIs cooperate with the humans of the civilisation;
at
first the struggle is simply to survive and thrive in space; later -
when
the technology required to do so has become mundane - the task becomes
less
physical, more metaphysical, and the aims of civilisation moral rather
than
material.
Briefly, nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is
essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes,
with
human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a
hobby. No machine is exploited, either; the idea here being that any
job
can be automated in such a way as to ensure that it can be done by a
machine well below the level of potential consciousness; what to us
would
be a stunningly sophisticated computer running a factory (for example)
would be looked on by the Culture's AIs as a glorified calculator, and
no
more exploited than an insect is exploited when it pollinates a fruit
tree
a human later eats a fruit from. Where intelligent supervision of a
manufacturing or maintenance operation is required, the intellectual
challenge involved (and the relative lightness of the effort required)
would make such supervision rewarding and enjoyable, whether for human
or
machine. The precise degree of supervision required can be adjusted to
a
level which satisfies the demand for it arising from the nature of the
civilisation's members. People - and, I'd argue, the sort of conscious
machines which would happily cooperate with them - hate to feel
exploited,
but they also hate to feel useless. One of the most important tasks in
setting up and running a stable and internally content civilisation is
finding an acceptable balance between the desire for freedom of choice
in
one's actions (and the freedom from mortal fear in one's life) and the
need
to feel that even in a society so self-correctingly Utopian one is still
contributing something. Philosophy matters, here, and sound education.
Education in the Culture is something that never ends; it may be at
its
most intense in the first tenth or so of an individual's life, but it
goes
on until death (another subject we'll return to). To live in the
Culture
is to live in a fundamentally rational civilisation (this may preclude
the
human species from ever achieving something similar; our history is,
arguably, not encouraging in this regard). The Culture is quite
self-consciously rational, sceptical, and materialist. Everything
matters,
and nothing does. Vast though the Culture may be - thirty trillion
people,
scattered fairly evenly through the galaxy - it is thinly spread, exists
for now solely in this one galaxy, and has only been around for an
eyeblink, compared to the life of the universe. There is life, and
enjoyment, but what of it? Most matter is not animate, most that is
animate is not sentient, and the ferocity of evolution pre-sentience
(and,
too often, post-sentience) has filled uncountable lives with pain and
suffering. And even universes die, eventually. (Though we'll come back
to
that, too.)
In the midst of this, the average Culture person - human or machine -
knows that they are lucky to be where they are when they are. Part of
their education, both initially and continually, comprises the
understanding that beings less fortunate - though no less intellectually
or
morally worthy - than themselves have suffered and, elsewhere, are still
suffering. For the Culture to continue without terminal decadence, the
point needs to be made, regularly, that its easy hedonism is not some
ground-state of nature, but something desirable, assiduously worked for
in
the past, not necessarily easily attained, and requiring appreciation
and
maintenance both in the present and the future.
An understanding of the place the Culture occupies in the history and
development of life in the galaxy is what helps drive the civilisation's
largely cooperative and - it would claim - fundamentally benign
techno-cultural diplomatic policy, but the ideas behind it go deeper.
Philosophically, the Culture accepts, generally, that questions such as
'What is the meaning of life?' are themselves meaningless. The question
implies - indeed an answer to it would demand - a moral framework beyond
the only moral framework we can comprehend without resorting to
superstition (and thus abandoning the moral framework informing - and
symbiotic with - language itself).
In summary, we make our own meanings, whether we like it or not.
The same self-generative belief-system applies to the Culture's AIs.
They are designed (by other AIs, for virtually all of the Culture's
history) within very broad parameters, but those parameters do exist;
Culture AIs are designed to want to live, to want to experience, to
desire
to understand, and to find existence and their own thought-processes in
some way rewarding, even enjoyable.
The humans of the Culture, having solved all the obvious problems of
their shared pasts to be free from hunger, want, disease and the fear of
natural disaster and attack, would find it a slightly empty existence
only
and merely enjoying themselves, and so need the good-works of the
Contact
section to let them feel vicariously useful. For the Culture's AIs,
that
need to feel useful is largely replaced by the desire to experience, but
as
a drive it is no less strong. The universe - or at least in this era,
the
galaxy - is waiting there, largely unexplored (by the Culture, anyway),
its
physical principles and laws quite comprehensively understood but the
results of fifteen billion years of the chaotically formative
application
and interaction of those laws still far from fully mapped and evaluated.
By Godel out of Chaos, the galaxy is, in other words, an
immensely, intrinsically, and inexhaustibly interesting place; an
intellectual playground for machines that know everything except fear
and
what lies hidden within the next uncharted stellar system.
This is where I think one has to ask why any AI civilisation - and
probably any sophisticated culture at all - would want to spread itself
everywhere in the galaxy (or the universe, for that matter). It would
be
perfectly possible to build a Von Neumann machine that would build
copies
of itself and eventually, unless stopped, turn the universe into nothing
but those self-copies, but the question does arise; why? What is the
point? To put it in what we might still regard as frivolous terms but
which the Culture would have the wisdom to take perfectly seriously,
where
is the fun in that?
Interest - the delight in experience, in understanding - comes from
the
unknown; understanding is a process as well as a state, denoting the
shift
from the unknown to the known, from the random to the ordered... a
universe
where everything is already understood perfectly and where uniformity
has
replaced diversity, would, I'd contend, be anathema to any
self-respecting
AI.
Probably only humans find the idea of Von Neumann machines
frightening,
because we half-understand - and even partially relate to - the
obsessiveness of the ethos such constructs embody. An AI would think
the
idea mad, ludicrous and - perhaps most damning of all - boring.
This is not to say that the odd Von-Neumann-machine event doesn't
crop
up in the galaxy every now and again (probably by accident rather than
design), but something so rampantly monomaniac is unlikely to last long
pitched against beings possessed of a more rounded wit, and which really
only want to alter the Von Neumann machine's software a bit and make
friends...
#
One idea behind the Culture as it is depicted in the stories is that it
has
gone through cyclical stages during which there has been extensive
human-machine interfacing, and other stages (sometimes coinciding with
the
human-machine eras) when extensive genetic alteration has been the norm.
The era of the stories written so far - dating from about 1300 AD to
2100
AD - is one in which the people of the Culture have returned, probably
temporarily, to something more 'classical' in terms of their relations
with
the machines and the potential of their own genes.
The Culture recognises, expects and incorporates fashions - albeit
long-term fashions - in such matters. It can look back to times when
people lived much of their lives in what we would now call cyberspace,
and
to eras when people chose to alter themselves or their children through
genetic manipulation, producing a variety of morphological sub-species.
Remnants of the various waves of such civilisational fashions can be
found
scattered throughout the Culture, and virtually everyone in the Culture
carries the results of genetic manipulation in every cell of their body;
it
is arguably the most reliable signifier of Culture status.
Thanks to that genetic manipulation, the average Culture human will
be
born whole and healthy and of significantly (though not immensely)
greater
intelligence than their basic human genetic inheritance might imply.
There
are thousands of alterations to that human-basic inheritance -
blister-free
callusing and a clot-filter protecting the brain are two of the less
important ones mentioned in the stories - but the major changes the
standard Culture person would expect to be born with would include an
optimized immune system and enhanced senses, freedom from inheritable
diseases or defects, the ability to control their autonomic processes
and
nervous system (pain can, in effect, be switched off), and to survive
and
fully recover from wounds which would either kill or permanently
mutilate
without such genetic tinkering.
The vast majority of people are also born with greatly altered glands
housed within their central nervous systems, usually referred to as
'drug
glands'. These secrete - on command - mood- and
sensory-appreciation-altering compounds into the person's bloodstream.
A
similar preponderance of Culture inhabitants have subtly altered
reproductive organs - and control over the associated nerves - to
enhance
sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to
a
certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in
its
development; again, as willed. An elaborate thought-code,
self-administered in a trance-like state (or simply a consistent desire,
even if not conscious) will lead, over the course of about a year, to
what
amounts to a viral change from one sex into the other. The convention -
tradition, even - in the Culture during the time of the stories written
so
far is that each person should give birth to one child in their lives.
In
practice, the population grows slowly. (And sporadically, in addition,
for
other reasons, as we'll come to later.)
To us, perhaps, the idea of being able to find out what sex is like
for
our complimentary gender, or being able to get drunk/stoned/tripped-out
or
whatever just by thinking about it (and of course the Culture's
drug-glands
produce no unpleasant side-effects or physiological addiction) may seem
like mere wish-fulfilment. And indeed it is partly wish-fulfilment, but
then the fulfilment of wishes is both one of civilisation's most
powerful
drives and arguably one of its highest functions; we wish to live
longer,
we wish to live more comfortably, we wish to live with less anxiety and
more enjoyment, less ignorance and more knowledge than our ancestors
did...
but the abilities to change sex and to alter one's brain-chemistry -
without resort to external technology or any form of payment - both have
more serious functions within the Culture. A society in which it is so
easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender
better than the other; within the population, over time, there will
gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding
to
be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the
individuals
- will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality
and
hence numerical parity is established. In a similar fashion, a society
in
which everybody is free to, and does, choose to spend the majority of
their
time zonked out of their brains will know that there is something
significantly wrong with reality, and (one would hope) do what it can to
make that reality more appealing and less - in the pejorative sense -
mundane.
Implicit in the stories so far is that through self-correcting
mechanisms of this nature the Culture reached a rough steady-state in
such
matters thousands of years ago, and has settled into a kind of
long-lived
civilisational main sequence which should last for the forseeable
future,
and thousands of generations.
Which brings us to the length of those generations, and the fact that
they can be said to exist at all. Humans in the Culture normally live
about three-and-a-half to four centuries. The majority of their lives
consists of a three-century plateau which they reach in what we would
compare to our mid-twenties, after a relatively normal pace of
maturation
during childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. They age very slowly
during those three hundred years, then begin to age more quickly, then
they
die.
Philosophy, again; death is regarded as part of life, and nothing,
including the universe, lasts forever. It is seen as bad manners to try
and pretend that death is somehow not natural; instead death is seen as
giving shape to life.
While burial, cremation and other - to us - conventional forms of
body
disposal are not unknown in the Culture, the most common form of funeral
involves the deceased - usually surrounded by friends - being visited by
a
Displacement Drone, which - using the technique of near-instantaneous
transmission of a remotely induced singularity via hyperspace - removes
the
corpse from its last resting place and deposits it in the core of the
relevant system's sun, from where the component particles of the cadaver
start a million-year migration to the star's surface, to shine -
possibly -
long after the Culture itself is history.
None of this, of course, is compulsory (nothing in the Culture is
compulsory). Some people choose biological immortality; others have
their
personality transcribed into AIs and die happy feeling they continue to
exist elsewhere; others again go into Storage, to be woken in more (or
less) interesting times, or only every decade, or century, or aeon, or
over
exponentially increasing intervals, or only when it looks like something
really different is happening...
#
Culture starships - that is all classes of ship above inter-planetary -
are
sentient; their Minds (sophisticated AIs working largely in hyperspace
to
take advantage of the higher lightspeed there) bear the same relation to
the fabric of the ship as a human brain does to the human body; the Mind
is
the important bit, and the rest is a life-support and transport system.
Humans and independent drones (the Culture's non-android individual AIs
of
roughly human-equivalent intelligence) are unnecessary for the running
of
the starships, and have a status somewhere between passengers, pets and
parasites.
The Culture's largest vessels - apart from certain art-works and a
few
Eccentrics - are the General Systems Vehicles of the Contact section.
(Contact is the part of the Culture concerned with discovering,
cataloguing, investigating, evaluating and - if thought prudent -
interacting with other civilisations; its rationale and activities are
covered elsewhere, in the stories.) The GSVs are fast and very large
craft, measured in kilometres and inhabited by millions of people and
machines. The idea behind them is that they represent the Culture,
fully.
All that the Culture knows, each GSV knows; anything that can be done
anywhere in the Culture can be done within or by any GSV. In terms of
both
information and technology, they represent a last resort, and act like
holographic fragments of the Culture itself, the whole contained within
each part.
In our terms, the abilities of a GSV are those of - at least - a
large
state, and arguably a whole planet (subject only to the proviso that
even
the Culture prefers to scoop up matter rather than create it from
nothing;
GSVs do require raw material).
Contact is a relatively small part of the whole Culture, however, and
the average Culture citizen will rarely encounter a GSV or other Contact
ship in person; the craft they will normally have the most to do with
are
cruise ships; interstellar passenger vessels transporting people from
habitat to habitat and visiting the more interesting systems, stars,
nebulae, holes and so on in the locality. Again, this type of tourism
is
partly long-term fashion; people travel because they can, not because
they
have to; they could stay at home and appear to travel to exotic places
through what we would now call Virtual Reality, or send an
information-construct of themselves to a ship or other entity that would
do
the experiencing for them, and incorporate the memories themselves
later.
There have been times, especially just after the relevant VR
technology
was perfected, when the amount of real 'physical' tourism shrank
drastically, whereas during the time the stories are set (apart from
during
the most intense phase of the Idiran war), anything up to a tenth of the
Culture's citizens might be travelling in space at any one time.
#
Planets figure little in the life of the average Culture person; there
are
a few handfuls of what are regarded as 'home' planets, and a few hundred
more that were colonised (sometimes after terraforming) in the early
days
before the Culture proper came into being, but only a fraction of a
percent
of the Culture's inhabitants live on them (many more live permanently on
ships). More people live in Rocks; hollowed-out asteroids and
planetoids
(almost all fitted with drives, and some - after nine millennia - having
been fitted with dozens of different, consecutively more advanced
engines).
The majority, however, live in larger artificial habitats, predominantly
Orbitals.
Perhaps the easiest way to envisage an Orbital is to compare it to
the
idea that inspired it (this sounds better than saying; Here's where I
stole
it from). If you know what a Ringworld is - invented by Larry Niven; a
segment of a Dyson Sphere - then just discard the shadow-squares, shrink
the whole thing till it's about three million kilometres across, and
place
in orbit around a suitable star, tilted just off the ecliptic; spin it
to
produce one gravity and that gives you an automatic 24-hour day-night
cycle
(roughly; the Culture's day is actually a bit longer). An elliptical
orbit
provides seasons.
Of course, the materials used in the construction of something ten
million kilometres in circumference spinning once every 24 hours are far
beyond anything we can realistically imagine now, and it is quite
possible
that the physical constraints imposed by the strength of atomic bonds
ensure that such structures will prove impossible to construct, but if
it
is possible to build on a such a scale and subject such structures to
forces of these magnitudes, then I'd submit that there is an elegance in
using the same rotation to produce both an acceptable day-night cycle
and
an apparent gravity which makes the idea intrinsically attractive.
Usually, rather than construct whole Orbitals in one operation, the
Culture starts with Plates; a pair of slabs of land and water (plus full
retaining walls, of course) of not less than a thousand kilometres to a
side, spinning in a similar orbit, attached by tensor fields to each
other,
and behaving like sections of a completed Orbital; this variation
provides
greater flexibility when responding to population increase. Further
plate-pairs can then be added until the Orbital is complete.
The attraction of Orbitals is their matter efficiency. For one
planet
the size of Earth (population 6 billion at the moment; mass 6x1024 kg),
it
would be possible, using the same amount of matter, to build 1,500 full
orbitals, each one boasting a surface area twenty times that of Earth
and
eventually holding a maximum population of perhaps 50 billion people
(the
Culture would regard Earth at present as over-crowded by a factor of
about
two, though it would consider the land-to-water ratio about right).
Not,
of course, that the Culture would do anything as delinquent as actually
deconstructing a planet to make Orbitals; simply removing the sort of
wandering debris (for example comets and asteroids) which the average
solar
system comes equipped with and which would threaten such an artificial
world's integrity through collision almost always in itself provides
sufficient material for the construction of at least one full Orbital (a
trade-off whose conservatory elegance is almost blissfully appealing to
the
average Mind), while interstellar matter in the form of dust clouds,
brown
dwarfs and the like provides more distant mining sites from which the
amount of mass required for several complete Orbitals may be removed
with
negligible effect.
Whatever the source material, Orbitals are obviously far more
mass-efficient in providing living space than planets. The Culture, as
is
made clear in Use of Weapons, regards terraforming generally as
ecologically unsound; the wilderness should be left as it is, when it is
so
easy to build paradise in space from so little.
An idea of how the day-night cycle appears on the surface of an
Orbital
can be gained by taking an ordinary belt, buckling it so that it forms a
circle, and putting your eye to the outside of one of the belt's holes;
looking through the hole at a light bulb and slowly rotating the whole
belt
will give some idea of how a star appears to move across the sky when
seen
from an Orbital, though it will also leave you looking rather silly.
As indicated, the usual minimum for the width of an Orbital is about
a
thousand kilometres (two thousand if you count the sloped, mostly
transparent retaining walls, which usually extend to five hundred
kilometres or so above the plate land-sea surface). The normal ratio of
land to sea is 1:3, so that on each Plate - assuming they are being
constructed in the balanced pairs described above - a (very) roughly
square
island rests in the middle of a sea, with approximately two hundred and
fifty kilometres from the shore of the land mass to the retaining walls.
Orbitals, though, like everything else in the Culture, vary enormously.
One thing almost every Orbital - whether just two Plates or a
completed
("closed") Orbital - does have, is a Hub. As its name implies, the Hub
sits in the centre of the Orbital, equidistant from all parts of the
main
circumferential structure (but not physically joined to it, normally).
The
Hub is where the Orbital's controlling AI (often a Mind) usually exists,
running, or helping to run, the Orbital's transport, manufacturing,
maintenance and subsidiary systems, acting as switchboard for
trans-Orbital
communications, library and general information point, traffic control
for
approaching, departing and close-passing ships, and generally working as
the Orbital's principle link with the rest of the Culture. During the
construction phase of a Plate-pair, the Hub will normally control the
process.
The design of a Plate sometimes incorporates the deep - or strategic
-
structure of the surface geography, so that the Plate medium itself
contains the corrugations that will become mountains, valleys and lakes;
more commonly, the Plate surface is left flat and the strategic
structures
on the inner surface - also constructed from Plate base material - are
added later. Under either method, the Plate's manufacturing and
maintenance systems are located within the indentations or hollows of
the
strategic structure, leaving the land surface free to assume a rural
appearance, once the tactical geomorphology has been designed and
positioned, the Plate's complement of water and air has been emplaced,
the
necessary weathering has occurred, and the relevant flora and fauna have
been introduced.
The surface of the Plate base is pierced by multitudinous shafts
allowing access to the factory and maintenance volumes, and to the
sub-surface transport systems. (Almost invariably, these include
restricted single-aperture concentrically rotating airlocks paired in
sequence.)
Existing on the outer surface of the base material, an Orbital's
rapid-transport systems operate in vacuum, with the resulting advantages
the lack of air-resistance confers; the relatively uncluttered nature of
the Orbital's outer surface (whether flat, allowing the systems to
operate
next to that surface, or corrugated, requiring sling-bridges under
unoccupied mountain indentations), means that the systems can be both
high-capacity and extremely flexible. Journey starting-points and
destinations can be highly specific for the same reason; an isolated
house
or a small village will have its own access shaft, and in larger
conurbations a shaft will usually be within a few minutes walk.
Surface transport on Orbitals tends to be used when the pleasure of
making the journey is itself part of the reason for travelling; air
travel
is common enough (if still far slower than sub-surface travel), though
individual Plates often have their own guide-lines concerning the amount
of
air travel thought appropriate. Such guide-lines are part of one's
manners, and not formalised in anything as crude as laws.
The Culture doesn't actually have laws; there are, of course,
agreed-on
forms of behaviour; manners, as mentioned above, but nothing that we
would
recognise as a legal framework. Not being spoken to, not being invited
to
parties, finding sarcastic anonymous articles and stories about yourself
in
the information network; these are the normal forms of
manner-enforcement
in the Culture. The very worst crime (to use our terminology), of
course,
is murder (defined as irretrievable brain-death, or total personality
loss
in the case of an AI). The result - punishment, if you will - is the
offer
of treatment, and what is known as a slap-drone. All a slap-drone does
is
follow the murderer around for the rest of their life to make sure they
never murder again. There are less severe variations on this theme to
deal
with people who are simply violent.
In a society where material scarcity is unknown and the only real
value
is sentimental value, there is little motive or opportunity for the sort
of
action we would class as a crime against property.
Megalomaniacs are not unknown in the Culture, but they tend to be
diverted successfully into highly complicated games; there are entire
Orbitals where some of these philosophically crude Obsessive games are
played, though most are in Virtual Reality. Something of a
status-symbol
for the determined megalomaniac is having one's own starship; this is
considered wasteful by most people, and is also futile, if the purpose
of
having it is to escape the Culture completely and - say - set up oneself
up
as God or Emperor on some backward planet; the person might be free to
pilot their (obviously non-AI controlled) ship, and even approach a
planet,
but the Contact section is equally free to follow that person wherever
they
go and do whatever it thinks appropriate to stop him or her from doing
anything injurious or unpleasant to whatever civilisations they come
into -
or attempt to come into - contact with. This tends to be frustrating,
and
Virtual Reality games - up to and including utter-involvement level, in
which the player has to make a real and sustained effort to return to
the
real world, and can even forget that it exists entirely - are far more
satisfying.
Some people, however, refuse this escape-route too, and leave the
Culture altogether for a civilisation that suits them better and where
they
can operate in a system which gives them the kind of rewards they seek.
To
renounce the Culture so is to lose access to its technology though, and,
again, Contact supervises the entry of such people into their chosen
civilisation at a level which guarantees they aren't starting with too
great an advantage compared to the original inhabitants (and retains the
option of interfering, if it sees fit).
A few such apparently anti-social people are even used by Contact
itself, especially by the Special Circumstances section.
The way the Culture creates AIs means that a small number of them
suffer
from similar personality problems; such machines are given the choice of
cooperative re-design, a more limited role in the Culture than they
might
have had otherwise, or a similarly constrained exile.
#
Politics in the Culture consists of referenda on issues whenever they
are
raised; generally, anyone may propose a ballot on any issue at any time;
all citizens have one vote. Where issues concern some sub-division or
part
of a total habitat, all those - human and machine - who may reasonably
claim to be affected by the outcome of a poll may cast a vote. Opinions
are expressed and positions on issues outlined mostly via the
information
network (freely available, naturally), and it is here that an individual
may exercise the most personal influence, given that the decisions
reached
as a result of those votes are usually implemented and monitored through
a
Hub or other supervisory machine, with humans acting (usually on a rota
basis) more as liaison officers than in any sort of decision-making
executive capacity; one of the few rules the Culture adheres to with any
exactitude at all is that a person's access to power should be in
inverse
proportion to their desire for it. The sad fact for the aspiring
politico
in the Culture is that the levers of power are extremely widely
distributed, and very short (see entry on megalomaniacs, above). The
intellectual-structural cohesion of a starship of course limits the sort
of
viable votes possible on such vessels, though as a rule even the most
arrogant craft at least pretend to listen when their guests suggest -
say -
making a detour to watch a supernova, or increasing the area of parkland
on-board.
#
Day-to-day life in the Culture varies considerably from place to place,
but
there is a general stability about it we might find either extremely
peaceful or ultimately rather disappointing, depending on our individual
temperament. We, after all, are used to living in times of great
change;
we expect major technological developments and have learned to adapt -
indeed expect to have to adapt on a more or less continual basis,
changing
(in the developed world) our cars, our entertainment systems and a whole
variety of household objects every few years. In contrast, the Culture
builds to last; it is not uncommon for an aircraft, for example, to be
handed down through several generations. Important technological
advances
still take place, but they don't tend to affect day-to-day life the way
that the invention of the internal combustion engine, heavier-than-air
flying machines and electronics have affected the lives of those who
have
lived during the past century on Earth. Even the relative homogeneity
of
the people one would meet when living on the average Orbital - with
relatively few children and physically old people - would tend, for us,
to
reinforce the feeling of sameness, though the scattering of genetically
altered, morphologically extreme people around would help compensate for
this.
In terms of personal relations and family groupings, the Culture is,
predictably, full of every possible permutation and possibility, but the
most common life-style consists of groups of people of mixed generations
linked by loose family ties living in a semi-communal dwelling or group
of
dwellings; to be a child in the Culture is to have a mother, perhaps a
father, probably not a brother or sister, but large numbers of aunts and
uncles, and various cousins. Usually, a mother will avoid changing sex
during the first few years of a child's life. (Though, of course, if
you
want to confuse your child...) In the rare event of a parent
maltreating a
child (a definition which includes depriving the child of the
opportunity
for education) it is considered acceptable for people close to them -
usually with the help of the relevant Mind, ship or Hub AI, and subject
to
the sort of small-scale democratic process outlined above - to supervise
the child's subsequent development.
#
In general the Culture doesn't actively encourage immigration; it looks
too
much like a disguised form of colonialism. Contact's preferred methods
are
intended to help other civilisations develop their own potential as a
whole, and are designed to neither leech away their best and brightest,
nor
turn such civilisations into miniature versions of the Culture.
Individuals, groups and even whole lesser civilisations do become part
of
the Culture on occasion, however, if there seems to be a particularly
good
reason (and if Contact reckons it won't upset any other interested
parties
in the locality).
Just who and what is and isn't Culture is something of a difficult
question to answer though; as has been said in one of the books, the
Culture kind of fades out at the edges. There are still fragments -
millions of ships, hundreds of Orbitals, whole systems - of the Peace
faction of the Culture, which split from the main section just before
the
start of the Idiran War, when ships and habitats voted independently on
the
need to go to war at all; the minority simply declared itself neutral in
the hostilities and the re-integration of the Peace faction after the
cessation of hostilities was never totally completed, many people in it
preferring to stay outside the majority Culture as long as it did not
renounce the future use of force.
The genofixing which established the potential for inter-species
breeding at the foundation of the Culture is the most obvious indicator
of
what we might call Culture-hood in humans, but not everybody has it;
some
people prefer to be more human-basic for aesthetic or philosophical
reasons, while some are so altered from that human-basic state that any
interbreeding is impossible. The status of some of the Rocks and a few
(mostly very old) habitats is marginal for a variety of reasons.
Contact is the most coherent and consistent part of the Culture -
certainly when considered on a galactic scale - yet it is only a very
small
part of it, is almost a civilisation within a civilisation, and no more
typifies its host than an armed service does a peaceful state. Even the
Cultures's prized language, Marain, is not spoken by every Culture
person,
and is used well outside the limits of the civilisation itself.
#
Names; Culture names act as an address if the person concerned stays
where
they were brought up. Let's take an example; Balveda, from Consider
Phlebas. Her full name is Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda
dam
T'seif. The first part tells you she was born/brought up on Rabaroan
Plate, in the Juboal stellar system (where there is only one Orbital in
a
system, the first part of a name will often be the name of the Orbital
rather than the star); Perosteck is her given name (almost invariably
the
choice of one's mother), Alseyn is her chosen name (people usually
choose
their names in their teens, and sometimes have a succession through
their
lives; an alseyn is a graceful but fierce avian raptor common to many
Orbitals in the region which includes the Juboal system); Balveda is her
family name (usually one's mother's family name) and T'seif is the
house/estate she was raised within. The 'sa' affix on the first part of
her name would translate into 'er' in English (we might all start our
names
with 'Sun-Earther', in English, if we were to adopt the same
nomenclature),
and the 'dam' part is similar to the German 'von'. Of course, not
everyone
follows this naming-system, but most do, and the Culture tries to ensure
that star and Orbital names are unique, to avoid confusion.
#
Now, in all the above, there are two untold stories implicit. One is
the
history of the Culture's formation, which was a lot less easy and more
troubled than its later demeanour might lead one to expect, and the
other
is the story which answers the question; why were there all those
so-similar humanoid species scattered around the galaxy in the first
place?
Each story is too complicated to relate here.
#
Lastly, something of the totally fake cosmology that underpins the
shakily
credible stardrives mentioned in the Culture stories. Even if you can
accept all the above, featuring a humanoid species that seems to exhibit
no
real greed, paranoia, stupidity, fanaticism or bigotry, wait till you
read
this...
We accept that the three dimensions of space we live in are curved,
that
space-time describes a hypersphere, just as the two dimensions of length
and width on the surface of a totally smooth planet curve in a third
dimension to produce a three-dimensional sphere. In the Culture
stories,
the idea is that - when you imagine the hypersphere which is our
expanding
universe - rather than thinking of a growing hollow sphere (like a
inflating beach-ball, for example), think of an onion.
An expanding onion, certainly, but an onion, nevertheless. Within
our
universe, our hypersphere, there are whole layers of younger, smaller
hyperspheres. And we are not the very outer-most skin of that expanding
onion, either; there are older, larger universes beyond ours, too.
Between
each universe there is something called the Energy Grid (I said this was
all fake); I have no idea what this is, but it's what the Culture
starships
run on. And of course, if you could get through the Energy Grid, to a
younger universe, and then repeat the process... now we really are
talking
about immortality. (This is why there are two types of hyperspace
mentioned in the stories; infraspace within our hypersphere, and
ultraspace
without.)
Now comes the difficult bit; switch to seven dimensions and even our
four dimensional universe can be described as a circle. So forget about
the onion; think of a doughnut. A doughnut with only a very tiny hole
in
the middle. That hole is the Cosmic Centre, the singularity, the great
initiating fireball, the place the universes come from; and it didn't
exist
just in the instant our universe came into being; it exists all the
time,
and it's exploding all the time, like some Cosmic car engine, producing
universes like exhaust smoke.
As each universe comes into being, detonating and spreading and
expanding, it - or rather the single circle we are using to describe it
-
goes gradually up the inner slope of our doughnut, like a widening
ripple
from a stone flung in a pond. It goes over the top of the doughnut,
reaches its furthest extent on the outside edge of the doughnut, and
then
starts the long, contracting, collapsing journey back in towards the
Cosmic
Centre again, to be reborn...
Or at least it does if it's on that doughnut; the doughnut is itself
hollow, filled with smaller ones where the universes don't live so long.
And there are larger ones outside it, where the universes live longer,
and
maybe there are universes that aren't on doughnuts at all, and never
fall
back in, and just dissipate out into... some form of meta-space? Where
fragments of them are captured eventually by the attraction of another
doughnut, and fall in towards its Cosmic Centre with the debris of lots
of
other dissipated universes, to be reborn as something quite different
again? Who knows. (I know it's all nonsense, but you've got to admit
it's
impressive nonsense. And like I said at the start, none of it exists
anyway, does it?)
#
Anyway, that's more than enough of me pontificating.
#
With best wishes for the future,
Iain M Banks
Copyright 1994 Iain M Banks
Commercial use only by permission.
Other uses, distribution, reproduction, tearing to shreds etc. are
freely encouraged provided the source is acknowledged.
(http://lucid.cba.uiuc.edu/~rkeogh/banks/), should be interesting to any
Iain M Banks fans...
Paul.
Paul Ilsley
Paul.Ilsley@, tel 0171 434 8728 (work)
Pauli@, tel 01784 431150 (home)
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A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE
by Iain M Banks
#
Firstly, and most importantly: the Culture doesn't really exist. It's
only
a story. It only exists in my mind and the minds of the people who've
read
about it.
#
That having been made clear:
#
The Culture is a group-civilisation formed from seven or eight humanoid
species, space-living elements of which established a loose federation
approximately nine thousand years ago. The ships and habitats which
formed
the original alliance required each others' support to pursue and
maintain
their independence from the political power structures - principally
those
of mature nation-states and autonomous commercial concerns
- they had evolved from.
The galaxy (our galaxy) in the Culture stories is a place long
lived-in,
and scattered with a variety of life-forms. In its vast and complicated
history it has seen waves of empires, federations, colonisations,
die-backs, wars, species-specific dark ages, renaissances, periods of
mega-structure building and destruction, and whole ages of benign
indifference and malign neglect. At the time of the Culture stories,
there
are perhaps a few dozen major space-faring civilisations, hundreds of
minor
ones, tens of thousands of species who might develop space-travel, and
an
uncountable number who have been there, done that, and have either gone
into locatable but insular retreats to contemplate who-knows-what, or
disappeared from the normal universe altogether to cultivate lives even
less comprehensible.
In this era, the Culture is one of the more energetic civilisations,
and
initially - after its formation, which was not without vicissitudes - by
a
chance of timing found a relatively quiet galaxy around it, in which
there
were various other fairly mature civilisations going about their
business,
traces and relics of the elder cultures scattered about the place, and -
due to the fact nobody else had bothered to go wandering on a grand
scale
for a comparatively long time - lots of interesting 'undiscovered' star
systems to explore...
#
The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of
the
idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of
civilisations
which will thrive there.
The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state
are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends
on
the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space,
lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane
(that
the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the
fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution,
determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an
aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.
Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power
systems
cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a
degree
of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.
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. On a planet, enclaves
can
be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or
corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to
prevail.
In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control,
especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile
habitats. 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.
Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour
encouragez
les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but
all
the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that
concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated -
dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if
in
a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then
rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the
day
is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred
or
more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the
military and political mind. Rebellion, then (once space-going and
space-living become commonplace), becomes easier than it might be on the
surface of a planet.
Even so, this is certainly the most vulnerable point in the time-line
of
the Culture's existence, the point at which it is easiest to argue for
things turning out quite differently, as the extent and sophistication
of
the hegemony's control mechanisms - and its ability and will to repress
-
battles against the ingenuity, skill, solidarity and bravery of the
rebellious ships and habitats, and indeed the assumption here is that
this
point has been reached before and the hegemony has won... but it is
also
assumed that - for the reasons given above - that point is bound to come
round again, and while the forces of repression need to win every time,
the
progressive elements need only triumph once.
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.
Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to
be
profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more
productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market
forces.
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.
It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and
in
that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other
moral,
philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind
displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity
and] -
through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of
others - a kind of synthetic evil.
Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next
aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them;
the
same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the
market
can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the
market
merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out
coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for
such
a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies
of
our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive
participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals,
and
designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards
them.
Of course, there is a place for serendipity and chance in any
sensibly
envisaged plan, and the degree to which this would affect the higher
functions of a democratically designed economy would be one of the most
important parameters to be set... but just as the information we have
stored in our libraries and institutions has undeniably outgrown (if not
outweighed) that resident in our genes, and just as we may, within a
century of the invention of electronics, duplicate - through machine
sentience - a process which evolution took billions of years to achieve,
so
we shall one day abandon the grossly targeted vagaries of the market for
the precision creation of the planned economy.
The Culture, of course, has gone beyond even that, to an economy so
much
a part of society it is hardly worthy of a separate definition, and
which
is limited only by imagination, philosophy (and manners), and the idea
of
minimally wasteful elegance; a kind of galactic ecological awareness
allied
to a desire to create beauty and goodness.
Whatever; in the end practice (as ever) will outshine theory.
#
As mentioned above, there is another force at work in the Culture aside
from the nature of its human inhabitants and the limitations and
opportunities presented by life in space, and that is Artificial
Intelligence. This is taken for granted in the Culture stories, and -
unlike FTL travel - is not only likely in the future of our own species,
but probably inevitable (always assuming homo sapiens avoids
destruction).
Certainly there are arguments against the possibility of Artificial
Intelligence, but they tend to boil down to one of three assertions:
one,
that there is some vital field or other presently intangible influence
exclusive to biological life - perhaps even carbon-based biological life
-
which may eventually fall within the remit of scientific understanding
but
which cannot be emulated in any other form (all of which is neither
impossible nor likely); two, that self-awareness resides in a
supernatural
soul - presumably linked to a broad-based occult system involving gods
or a
god, reincarnation or whatever - and which one assumes can never be
understood scientifically (equally improbable, though I do write as an
atheist); and, three, that matter cannot become self-aware (or more
precisely that it cannot support any informational formulation which
might
be said to be self-aware or taken together with its material substrate
exhibit the signs of self-awareness). ...I leave all the more than
nominally self-aware readers to spot the logical problem with that
argument.
It is, of course, entirely possible that real AIs will refuse to have
anything to do with their human creators (or rather, perhaps, the human
creators of their non-human creators), but assuming that they do - and
the
design of their software may be amenable to optimization in this regard
- I
would argue that it is quite possible they would agree to help further
the
aims of their source civilisation (a contention we'll return to
shortly).
At this point, regardless of whatever alterations humanity might impose
on
itself through genetic manipulation, humanity would no longer be a
one-sentience-type species. The future of our species would affect, be
affected by and coexist with the future of the AI life-forms we create.
The Culture reached this phase at around the same time as it began to
inhabit space. Its AIs cooperate with the humans of the civilisation;
at
first the struggle is simply to survive and thrive in space; later -
when
the technology required to do so has become mundane - the task becomes
less
physical, more metaphysical, and the aims of civilisation moral rather
than
material.
Briefly, nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is
essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes,
with
human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a
hobby. No machine is exploited, either; the idea here being that any
job
can be automated in such a way as to ensure that it can be done by a
machine well below the level of potential consciousness; what to us
would
be a stunningly sophisticated computer running a factory (for example)
would be looked on by the Culture's AIs as a glorified calculator, and
no
more exploited than an insect is exploited when it pollinates a fruit
tree
a human later eats a fruit from. Where intelligent supervision of a
manufacturing or maintenance operation is required, the intellectual
challenge involved (and the relative lightness of the effort required)
would make such supervision rewarding and enjoyable, whether for human
or
machine. The precise degree of supervision required can be adjusted to
a
level which satisfies the demand for it arising from the nature of the
civilisation's members. People - and, I'd argue, the sort of conscious
machines which would happily cooperate with them - hate to feel
exploited,
but they also hate to feel useless. One of the most important tasks in
setting up and running a stable and internally content civilisation is
finding an acceptable balance between the desire for freedom of choice
in
one's actions (and the freedom from mortal fear in one's life) and the
need
to feel that even in a society so self-correctingly Utopian one is still
contributing something. Philosophy matters, here, and sound education.
Education in the Culture is something that never ends; it may be at
its
most intense in the first tenth or so of an individual's life, but it
goes
on until death (another subject we'll return to). To live in the
Culture
is to live in a fundamentally rational civilisation (this may preclude
the
human species from ever achieving something similar; our history is,
arguably, not encouraging in this regard). The Culture is quite
self-consciously rational, sceptical, and materialist. Everything
matters,
and nothing does. Vast though the Culture may be - thirty trillion
people,
scattered fairly evenly through the galaxy - it is thinly spread, exists
for now solely in this one galaxy, and has only been around for an
eyeblink, compared to the life of the universe. There is life, and
enjoyment, but what of it? Most matter is not animate, most that is
animate is not sentient, and the ferocity of evolution pre-sentience
(and,
too often, post-sentience) has filled uncountable lives with pain and
suffering. And even universes die, eventually. (Though we'll come back
to
that, too.)
In the midst of this, the average Culture person - human or machine -
knows that they are lucky to be where they are when they are. Part of
their education, both initially and continually, comprises the
understanding that beings less fortunate - though no less intellectually
or
morally worthy - than themselves have suffered and, elsewhere, are still
suffering. For the Culture to continue without terminal decadence, the
point needs to be made, regularly, that its easy hedonism is not some
ground-state of nature, but something desirable, assiduously worked for
in
the past, not necessarily easily attained, and requiring appreciation
and
maintenance both in the present and the future.
An understanding of the place the Culture occupies in the history and
development of life in the galaxy is what helps drive the civilisation's
largely cooperative and - it would claim - fundamentally benign
techno-cultural diplomatic policy, but the ideas behind it go deeper.
Philosophically, the Culture accepts, generally, that questions such as
'What is the meaning of life?' are themselves meaningless. The question
implies - indeed an answer to it would demand - a moral framework beyond
the only moral framework we can comprehend without resorting to
superstition (and thus abandoning the moral framework informing - and
symbiotic with - language itself).
In summary, we make our own meanings, whether we like it or not.
The same self-generative belief-system applies to the Culture's AIs.
They are designed (by other AIs, for virtually all of the Culture's
history) within very broad parameters, but those parameters do exist;
Culture AIs are designed to want to live, to want to experience, to
desire
to understand, and to find existence and their own thought-processes in
some way rewarding, even enjoyable.
The humans of the Culture, having solved all the obvious problems of
their shared pasts to be free from hunger, want, disease and the fear of
natural disaster and attack, would find it a slightly empty existence
only
and merely enjoying themselves, and so need the good-works of the
Contact
section to let them feel vicariously useful. For the Culture's AIs,
that
need to feel useful is largely replaced by the desire to experience, but
as
a drive it is no less strong. The universe - or at least in this era,
the
galaxy - is waiting there, largely unexplored (by the Culture, anyway),
its
physical principles and laws quite comprehensively understood but the
results of fifteen billion years of the chaotically formative
application
and interaction of those laws still far from fully mapped and evaluated.
By Godel out of Chaos, the galaxy is, in other words, an
immensely, intrinsically, and inexhaustibly interesting place; an
intellectual playground for machines that know everything except fear
and
what lies hidden within the next uncharted stellar system.
This is where I think one has to ask why any AI civilisation - and
probably any sophisticated culture at all - would want to spread itself
everywhere in the galaxy (or the universe, for that matter). It would
be
perfectly possible to build a Von Neumann machine that would build
copies
of itself and eventually, unless stopped, turn the universe into nothing
but those self-copies, but the question does arise; why? What is the
point? To put it in what we might still regard as frivolous terms but
which the Culture would have the wisdom to take perfectly seriously,
where
is the fun in that?
Interest - the delight in experience, in understanding - comes from
the
unknown; understanding is a process as well as a state, denoting the
shift
from the unknown to the known, from the random to the ordered... a
universe
where everything is already understood perfectly and where uniformity
has
replaced diversity, would, I'd contend, be anathema to any
self-respecting
AI.
Probably only humans find the idea of Von Neumann machines
frightening,
because we half-understand - and even partially relate to - the
obsessiveness of the ethos such constructs embody. An AI would think
the
idea mad, ludicrous and - perhaps most damning of all - boring.
This is not to say that the odd Von-Neumann-machine event doesn't
crop
up in the galaxy every now and again (probably by accident rather than
design), but something so rampantly monomaniac is unlikely to last long
pitched against beings possessed of a more rounded wit, and which really
only want to alter the Von Neumann machine's software a bit and make
friends...
#
One idea behind the Culture as it is depicted in the stories is that it
has
gone through cyclical stages during which there has been extensive
human-machine interfacing, and other stages (sometimes coinciding with
the
human-machine eras) when extensive genetic alteration has been the norm.
The era of the stories written so far - dating from about 1300 AD to
2100
AD - is one in which the people of the Culture have returned, probably
temporarily, to something more 'classical' in terms of their relations
with
the machines and the potential of their own genes.
The Culture recognises, expects and incorporates fashions - albeit
long-term fashions - in such matters. It can look back to times when
people lived much of their lives in what we would now call cyberspace,
and
to eras when people chose to alter themselves or their children through
genetic manipulation, producing a variety of morphological sub-species.
Remnants of the various waves of such civilisational fashions can be
found
scattered throughout the Culture, and virtually everyone in the Culture
carries the results of genetic manipulation in every cell of their body;
it
is arguably the most reliable signifier of Culture status.
Thanks to that genetic manipulation, the average Culture human will
be
born whole and healthy and of significantly (though not immensely)
greater
intelligence than their basic human genetic inheritance might imply.
There
are thousands of alterations to that human-basic inheritance -
blister-free
callusing and a clot-filter protecting the brain are two of the less
important ones mentioned in the stories - but the major changes the
standard Culture person would expect to be born with would include an
optimized immune system and enhanced senses, freedom from inheritable
diseases or defects, the ability to control their autonomic processes
and
nervous system (pain can, in effect, be switched off), and to survive
and
fully recover from wounds which would either kill or permanently
mutilate
without such genetic tinkering.
The vast majority of people are also born with greatly altered glands
housed within their central nervous systems, usually referred to as
'drug
glands'. These secrete - on command - mood- and
sensory-appreciation-altering compounds into the person's bloodstream.
A
similar preponderance of Culture inhabitants have subtly altered
reproductive organs - and control over the associated nerves - to
enhance
sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to
a
certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in
its
development; again, as willed. An elaborate thought-code,
self-administered in a trance-like state (or simply a consistent desire,
even if not conscious) will lead, over the course of about a year, to
what
amounts to a viral change from one sex into the other. The convention -
tradition, even - in the Culture during the time of the stories written
so
far is that each person should give birth to one child in their lives.
In
practice, the population grows slowly. (And sporadically, in addition,
for
other reasons, as we'll come to later.)
To us, perhaps, the idea of being able to find out what sex is like
for
our complimentary gender, or being able to get drunk/stoned/tripped-out
or
whatever just by thinking about it (and of course the Culture's
drug-glands
produce no unpleasant side-effects or physiological addiction) may seem
like mere wish-fulfilment. And indeed it is partly wish-fulfilment, but
then the fulfilment of wishes is both one of civilisation's most
powerful
drives and arguably one of its highest functions; we wish to live
longer,
we wish to live more comfortably, we wish to live with less anxiety and
more enjoyment, less ignorance and more knowledge than our ancestors
did...
but the abilities to change sex and to alter one's brain-chemistry -
without resort to external technology or any form of payment - both have
more serious functions within the Culture. A society in which it is so
easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender
better than the other; within the population, over time, there will
gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding
to
be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the
individuals
- will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality
and
hence numerical parity is established. In a similar fashion, a society
in
which everybody is free to, and does, choose to spend the majority of
their
time zonked out of their brains will know that there is something
significantly wrong with reality, and (one would hope) do what it can to
make that reality more appealing and less - in the pejorative sense -
mundane.
Implicit in the stories so far is that through self-correcting
mechanisms of this nature the Culture reached a rough steady-state in
such
matters thousands of years ago, and has settled into a kind of
long-lived
civilisational main sequence which should last for the forseeable
future,
and thousands of generations.
Which brings us to the length of those generations, and the fact that
they can be said to exist at all. Humans in the Culture normally live
about three-and-a-half to four centuries. The majority of their lives
consists of a three-century plateau which they reach in what we would
compare to our mid-twenties, after a relatively normal pace of
maturation
during childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. They age very slowly
during those three hundred years, then begin to age more quickly, then
they
die.
Philosophy, again; death is regarded as part of life, and nothing,
including the universe, lasts forever. It is seen as bad manners to try
and pretend that death is somehow not natural; instead death is seen as
giving shape to life.
While burial, cremation and other - to us - conventional forms of
body
disposal are not unknown in the Culture, the most common form of funeral
involves the deceased - usually surrounded by friends - being visited by
a
Displacement Drone, which - using the technique of near-instantaneous
transmission of a remotely induced singularity via hyperspace - removes
the
corpse from its last resting place and deposits it in the core of the
relevant system's sun, from where the component particles of the cadaver
start a million-year migration to the star's surface, to shine -
possibly -
long after the Culture itself is history.
None of this, of course, is compulsory (nothing in the Culture is
compulsory). Some people choose biological immortality; others have
their
personality transcribed into AIs and die happy feeling they continue to
exist elsewhere; others again go into Storage, to be woken in more (or
less) interesting times, or only every decade, or century, or aeon, or
over
exponentially increasing intervals, or only when it looks like something
really different is happening...
#
Culture starships - that is all classes of ship above inter-planetary -
are
sentient; their Minds (sophisticated AIs working largely in hyperspace
to
take advantage of the higher lightspeed there) bear the same relation to
the fabric of the ship as a human brain does to the human body; the Mind
is
the important bit, and the rest is a life-support and transport system.
Humans and independent drones (the Culture's non-android individual AIs
of
roughly human-equivalent intelligence) are unnecessary for the running
of
the starships, and have a status somewhere between passengers, pets and
parasites.
The Culture's largest vessels - apart from certain art-works and a
few
Eccentrics - are the General Systems Vehicles of the Contact section.
(Contact is the part of the Culture concerned with discovering,
cataloguing, investigating, evaluating and - if thought prudent -
interacting with other civilisations; its rationale and activities are
covered elsewhere, in the stories.) The GSVs are fast and very large
craft, measured in kilometres and inhabited by millions of people and
machines. The idea behind them is that they represent the Culture,
fully.
All that the Culture knows, each GSV knows; anything that can be done
anywhere in the Culture can be done within or by any GSV. In terms of
both
information and technology, they represent a last resort, and act like
holographic fragments of the Culture itself, the whole contained within
each part.
In our terms, the abilities of a GSV are those of - at least - a
large
state, and arguably a whole planet (subject only to the proviso that
even
the Culture prefers to scoop up matter rather than create it from
nothing;
GSVs do require raw material).
Contact is a relatively small part of the whole Culture, however, and
the average Culture citizen will rarely encounter a GSV or other Contact
ship in person; the craft they will normally have the most to do with
are
cruise ships; interstellar passenger vessels transporting people from
habitat to habitat and visiting the more interesting systems, stars,
nebulae, holes and so on in the locality. Again, this type of tourism
is
partly long-term fashion; people travel because they can, not because
they
have to; they could stay at home and appear to travel to exotic places
through what we would now call Virtual Reality, or send an
information-construct of themselves to a ship or other entity that would
do
the experiencing for them, and incorporate the memories themselves
later.
There have been times, especially just after the relevant VR
technology
was perfected, when the amount of real 'physical' tourism shrank
drastically, whereas during the time the stories are set (apart from
during
the most intense phase of the Idiran war), anything up to a tenth of the
Culture's citizens might be travelling in space at any one time.
#
Planets figure little in the life of the average Culture person; there
are
a few handfuls of what are regarded as 'home' planets, and a few hundred
more that were colonised (sometimes after terraforming) in the early
days
before the Culture proper came into being, but only a fraction of a
percent
of the Culture's inhabitants live on them (many more live permanently on
ships). More people live in Rocks; hollowed-out asteroids and
planetoids
(almost all fitted with drives, and some - after nine millennia - having
been fitted with dozens of different, consecutively more advanced
engines).
The majority, however, live in larger artificial habitats, predominantly
Orbitals.
Perhaps the easiest way to envisage an Orbital is to compare it to
the
idea that inspired it (this sounds better than saying; Here's where I
stole
it from). If you know what a Ringworld is - invented by Larry Niven; a
segment of a Dyson Sphere - then just discard the shadow-squares, shrink
the whole thing till it's about three million kilometres across, and
place
in orbit around a suitable star, tilted just off the ecliptic; spin it
to
produce one gravity and that gives you an automatic 24-hour day-night
cycle
(roughly; the Culture's day is actually a bit longer). An elliptical
orbit
provides seasons.
Of course, the materials used in the construction of something ten
million kilometres in circumference spinning once every 24 hours are far
beyond anything we can realistically imagine now, and it is quite
possible
that the physical constraints imposed by the strength of atomic bonds
ensure that such structures will prove impossible to construct, but if
it
is possible to build on a such a scale and subject such structures to
forces of these magnitudes, then I'd submit that there is an elegance in
using the same rotation to produce both an acceptable day-night cycle
and
an apparent gravity which makes the idea intrinsically attractive.
Usually, rather than construct whole Orbitals in one operation, the
Culture starts with Plates; a pair of slabs of land and water (plus full
retaining walls, of course) of not less than a thousand kilometres to a
side, spinning in a similar orbit, attached by tensor fields to each
other,
and behaving like sections of a completed Orbital; this variation
provides
greater flexibility when responding to population increase. Further
plate-pairs can then be added until the Orbital is complete.
The attraction of Orbitals is their matter efficiency. For one
planet
the size of Earth (population 6 billion at the moment; mass 6x1024 kg),
it
would be possible, using the same amount of matter, to build 1,500 full
orbitals, each one boasting a surface area twenty times that of Earth
and
eventually holding a maximum population of perhaps 50 billion people
(the
Culture would regard Earth at present as over-crowded by a factor of
about
two, though it would consider the land-to-water ratio about right).
Not,
of course, that the Culture would do anything as delinquent as actually
deconstructing a planet to make Orbitals; simply removing the sort of
wandering debris (for example comets and asteroids) which the average
solar
system comes equipped with and which would threaten such an artificial
world's integrity through collision almost always in itself provides
sufficient material for the construction of at least one full Orbital (a
trade-off whose conservatory elegance is almost blissfully appealing to
the
average Mind), while interstellar matter in the form of dust clouds,
brown
dwarfs and the like provides more distant mining sites from which the
amount of mass required for several complete Orbitals may be removed
with
negligible effect.
Whatever the source material, Orbitals are obviously far more
mass-efficient in providing living space than planets. The Culture, as
is
made clear in Use of Weapons, regards terraforming generally as
ecologically unsound; the wilderness should be left as it is, when it is
so
easy to build paradise in space from so little.
An idea of how the day-night cycle appears on the surface of an
Orbital
can be gained by taking an ordinary belt, buckling it so that it forms a
circle, and putting your eye to the outside of one of the belt's holes;
looking through the hole at a light bulb and slowly rotating the whole
belt
will give some idea of how a star appears to move across the sky when
seen
from an Orbital, though it will also leave you looking rather silly.
As indicated, the usual minimum for the width of an Orbital is about
a
thousand kilometres (two thousand if you count the sloped, mostly
transparent retaining walls, which usually extend to five hundred
kilometres or so above the plate land-sea surface). The normal ratio of
land to sea is 1:3, so that on each Plate - assuming they are being
constructed in the balanced pairs described above - a (very) roughly
square
island rests in the middle of a sea, with approximately two hundred and
fifty kilometres from the shore of the land mass to the retaining walls.
Orbitals, though, like everything else in the Culture, vary enormously.
One thing almost every Orbital - whether just two Plates or a
completed
("closed") Orbital - does have, is a Hub. As its name implies, the Hub
sits in the centre of the Orbital, equidistant from all parts of the
main
circumferential structure (but not physically joined to it, normally).
The
Hub is where the Orbital's controlling AI (often a Mind) usually exists,
running, or helping to run, the Orbital's transport, manufacturing,
maintenance and subsidiary systems, acting as switchboard for
trans-Orbital
communications, library and general information point, traffic control
for
approaching, departing and close-passing ships, and generally working as
the Orbital's principle link with the rest of the Culture. During the
construction phase of a Plate-pair, the Hub will normally control the
process.
The design of a Plate sometimes incorporates the deep - or strategic
-
structure of the surface geography, so that the Plate medium itself
contains the corrugations that will become mountains, valleys and lakes;
more commonly, the Plate surface is left flat and the strategic
structures
on the inner surface - also constructed from Plate base material - are
added later. Under either method, the Plate's manufacturing and
maintenance systems are located within the indentations or hollows of
the
strategic structure, leaving the land surface free to assume a rural
appearance, once the tactical geomorphology has been designed and
positioned, the Plate's complement of water and air has been emplaced,
the
necessary weathering has occurred, and the relevant flora and fauna have
been introduced.
The surface of the Plate base is pierced by multitudinous shafts
allowing access to the factory and maintenance volumes, and to the
sub-surface transport systems. (Almost invariably, these include
restricted single-aperture concentrically rotating airlocks paired in
sequence.)
Existing on the outer surface of the base material, an Orbital's
rapid-transport systems operate in vacuum, with the resulting advantages
the lack of air-resistance confers; the relatively uncluttered nature of
the Orbital's outer surface (whether flat, allowing the systems to
operate
next to that surface, or corrugated, requiring sling-bridges under
unoccupied mountain indentations), means that the systems can be both
high-capacity and extremely flexible. Journey starting-points and
destinations can be highly specific for the same reason; an isolated
house
or a small village will have its own access shaft, and in larger
conurbations a shaft will usually be within a few minutes walk.
Surface transport on Orbitals tends to be used when the pleasure of
making the journey is itself part of the reason for travelling; air
travel
is common enough (if still far slower than sub-surface travel), though
individual Plates often have their own guide-lines concerning the amount
of
air travel thought appropriate. Such guide-lines are part of one's
manners, and not formalised in anything as crude as laws.
The Culture doesn't actually have laws; there are, of course,
agreed-on
forms of behaviour; manners, as mentioned above, but nothing that we
would
recognise as a legal framework. Not being spoken to, not being invited
to
parties, finding sarcastic anonymous articles and stories about yourself
in
the information network; these are the normal forms of
manner-enforcement
in the Culture. The very worst crime (to use our terminology), of
course,
is murder (defined as irretrievable brain-death, or total personality
loss
in the case of an AI). The result - punishment, if you will - is the
offer
of treatment, and what is known as a slap-drone. All a slap-drone does
is
follow the murderer around for the rest of their life to make sure they
never murder again. There are less severe variations on this theme to
deal
with people who are simply violent.
In a society where material scarcity is unknown and the only real
value
is sentimental value, there is little motive or opportunity for the sort
of
action we would class as a crime against property.
Megalomaniacs are not unknown in the Culture, but they tend to be
diverted successfully into highly complicated games; there are entire
Orbitals where some of these philosophically crude Obsessive games are
played, though most are in Virtual Reality. Something of a
status-symbol
for the determined megalomaniac is having one's own starship; this is
considered wasteful by most people, and is also futile, if the purpose
of
having it is to escape the Culture completely and - say - set up oneself
up
as God or Emperor on some backward planet; the person might be free to
pilot their (obviously non-AI controlled) ship, and even approach a
planet,
but the Contact section is equally free to follow that person wherever
they
go and do whatever it thinks appropriate to stop him or her from doing
anything injurious or unpleasant to whatever civilisations they come
into -
or attempt to come into - contact with. This tends to be frustrating,
and
Virtual Reality games - up to and including utter-involvement level, in
which the player has to make a real and sustained effort to return to
the
real world, and can even forget that it exists entirely - are far more
satisfying.
Some people, however, refuse this escape-route too, and leave the
Culture altogether for a civilisation that suits them better and where
they
can operate in a system which gives them the kind of rewards they seek.
To
renounce the Culture so is to lose access to its technology though, and,
again, Contact supervises the entry of such people into their chosen
civilisation at a level which guarantees they aren't starting with too
great an advantage compared to the original inhabitants (and retains the
option of interfering, if it sees fit).
A few such apparently anti-social people are even used by Contact
itself, especially by the Special Circumstances section.
The way the Culture creates AIs means that a small number of them
suffer
from similar personality problems; such machines are given the choice of
cooperative re-design, a more limited role in the Culture than they
might
have had otherwise, or a similarly constrained exile.
#
Politics in the Culture consists of referenda on issues whenever they
are
raised; generally, anyone may propose a ballot on any issue at any time;
all citizens have one vote. Where issues concern some sub-division or
part
of a total habitat, all those - human and machine - who may reasonably
claim to be affected by the outcome of a poll may cast a vote. Opinions
are expressed and positions on issues outlined mostly via the
information
network (freely available, naturally), and it is here that an individual
may exercise the most personal influence, given that the decisions
reached
as a result of those votes are usually implemented and monitored through
a
Hub or other supervisory machine, with humans acting (usually on a rota
basis) more as liaison officers than in any sort of decision-making
executive capacity; one of the few rules the Culture adheres to with any
exactitude at all is that a person's access to power should be in
inverse
proportion to their desire for it. The sad fact for the aspiring
politico
in the Culture is that the levers of power are extremely widely
distributed, and very short (see entry on megalomaniacs, above). The
intellectual-structural cohesion of a starship of course limits the sort
of
viable votes possible on such vessels, though as a rule even the most
arrogant craft at least pretend to listen when their guests suggest -
say -
making a detour to watch a supernova, or increasing the area of parkland
on-board.
#
Day-to-day life in the Culture varies considerably from place to place,
but
there is a general stability about it we might find either extremely
peaceful or ultimately rather disappointing, depending on our individual
temperament. We, after all, are used to living in times of great
change;
we expect major technological developments and have learned to adapt -
indeed expect to have to adapt on a more or less continual basis,
changing
(in the developed world) our cars, our entertainment systems and a whole
variety of household objects every few years. In contrast, the Culture
builds to last; it is not uncommon for an aircraft, for example, to be
handed down through several generations. Important technological
advances
still take place, but they don't tend to affect day-to-day life the way
that the invention of the internal combustion engine, heavier-than-air
flying machines and electronics have affected the lives of those who
have
lived during the past century on Earth. Even the relative homogeneity
of
the people one would meet when living on the average Orbital - with
relatively few children and physically old people - would tend, for us,
to
reinforce the feeling of sameness, though the scattering of genetically
altered, morphologically extreme people around would help compensate for
this.
In terms of personal relations and family groupings, the Culture is,
predictably, full of every possible permutation and possibility, but the
most common life-style consists of groups of people of mixed generations
linked by loose family ties living in a semi-communal dwelling or group
of
dwellings; to be a child in the Culture is to have a mother, perhaps a
father, probably not a brother or sister, but large numbers of aunts and
uncles, and various cousins. Usually, a mother will avoid changing sex
during the first few years of a child's life. (Though, of course, if
you
want to confuse your child...) In the rare event of a parent
maltreating a
child (a definition which includes depriving the child of the
opportunity
for education) it is considered acceptable for people close to them -
usually with the help of the relevant Mind, ship or Hub AI, and subject
to
the sort of small-scale democratic process outlined above - to supervise
the child's subsequent development.
#
In general the Culture doesn't actively encourage immigration; it looks
too
much like a disguised form of colonialism. Contact's preferred methods
are
intended to help other civilisations develop their own potential as a
whole, and are designed to neither leech away their best and brightest,
nor
turn such civilisations into miniature versions of the Culture.
Individuals, groups and even whole lesser civilisations do become part
of
the Culture on occasion, however, if there seems to be a particularly
good
reason (and if Contact reckons it won't upset any other interested
parties
in the locality).
Just who and what is and isn't Culture is something of a difficult
question to answer though; as has been said in one of the books, the
Culture kind of fades out at the edges. There are still fragments -
millions of ships, hundreds of Orbitals, whole systems - of the Peace
faction of the Culture, which split from the main section just before
the
start of the Idiran War, when ships and habitats voted independently on
the
need to go to war at all; the minority simply declared itself neutral in
the hostilities and the re-integration of the Peace faction after the
cessation of hostilities was never totally completed, many people in it
preferring to stay outside the majority Culture as long as it did not
renounce the future use of force.
The genofixing which established the potential for inter-species
breeding at the foundation of the Culture is the most obvious indicator
of
what we might call Culture-hood in humans, but not everybody has it;
some
people prefer to be more human-basic for aesthetic or philosophical
reasons, while some are so altered from that human-basic state that any
interbreeding is impossible. The status of some of the Rocks and a few
(mostly very old) habitats is marginal for a variety of reasons.
Contact is the most coherent and consistent part of the Culture -
certainly when considered on a galactic scale - yet it is only a very
small
part of it, is almost a civilisation within a civilisation, and no more
typifies its host than an armed service does a peaceful state. Even the
Cultures's prized language, Marain, is not spoken by every Culture
person,
and is used well outside the limits of the civilisation itself.
#
Names; Culture names act as an address if the person concerned stays
where
they were brought up. Let's take an example; Balveda, from Consider
Phlebas. Her full name is Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda
dam
T'seif. The first part tells you she was born/brought up on Rabaroan
Plate, in the Juboal stellar system (where there is only one Orbital in
a
system, the first part of a name will often be the name of the Orbital
rather than the star); Perosteck is her given name (almost invariably
the
choice of one's mother), Alseyn is her chosen name (people usually
choose
their names in their teens, and sometimes have a succession through
their
lives; an alseyn is a graceful but fierce avian raptor common to many
Orbitals in the region which includes the Juboal system); Balveda is her
family name (usually one's mother's family name) and T'seif is the
house/estate she was raised within. The 'sa' affix on the first part of
her name would translate into 'er' in English (we might all start our
names
with 'Sun-Earther', in English, if we were to adopt the same
nomenclature),
and the 'dam' part is similar to the German 'von'. Of course, not
everyone
follows this naming-system, but most do, and the Culture tries to ensure
that star and Orbital names are unique, to avoid confusion.
#
Now, in all the above, there are two untold stories implicit. One is
the
history of the Culture's formation, which was a lot less easy and more
troubled than its later demeanour might lead one to expect, and the
other
is the story which answers the question; why were there all those
so-similar humanoid species scattered around the galaxy in the first
place?
Each story is too complicated to relate here.
#
Lastly, something of the totally fake cosmology that underpins the
shakily
credible stardrives mentioned in the Culture stories. Even if you can
accept all the above, featuring a humanoid species that seems to exhibit
no
real greed, paranoia, stupidity, fanaticism or bigotry, wait till you
read
this...
We accept that the three dimensions of space we live in are curved,
that
space-time describes a hypersphere, just as the two dimensions of length
and width on the surface of a totally smooth planet curve in a third
dimension to produce a three-dimensional sphere. In the Culture
stories,
the idea is that - when you imagine the hypersphere which is our
expanding
universe - rather than thinking of a growing hollow sphere (like a
inflating beach-ball, for example), think of an onion.
An expanding onion, certainly, but an onion, nevertheless. Within
our
universe, our hypersphere, there are whole layers of younger, smaller
hyperspheres. And we are not the very outer-most skin of that expanding
onion, either; there are older, larger universes beyond ours, too.
Between
each universe there is something called the Energy Grid (I said this was
all fake); I have no idea what this is, but it's what the Culture
starships
run on. And of course, if you could get through the Energy Grid, to a
younger universe, and then repeat the process... now we really are
talking
about immortality. (This is why there are two types of hyperspace
mentioned in the stories; infraspace within our hypersphere, and
ultraspace
without.)
Now comes the difficult bit; switch to seven dimensions and even our
four dimensional universe can be described as a circle. So forget about
the onion; think of a doughnut. A doughnut with only a very tiny hole
in
the middle. That hole is the Cosmic Centre, the singularity, the great
initiating fireball, the place the universes come from; and it didn't
exist
just in the instant our universe came into being; it exists all the
time,
and it's exploding all the time, like some Cosmic car engine, producing
universes like exhaust smoke.
As each universe comes into being, detonating and spreading and
expanding, it - or rather the single circle we are using to describe it
-
goes gradually up the inner slope of our doughnut, like a widening
ripple
from a stone flung in a pond. It goes over the top of the doughnut,
reaches its furthest extent on the outside edge of the doughnut, and
then
starts the long, contracting, collapsing journey back in towards the
Cosmic
Centre again, to be reborn...
Or at least it does if it's on that doughnut; the doughnut is itself
hollow, filled with smaller ones where the universes don't live so long.
And there are larger ones outside it, where the universes live longer,
and
maybe there are universes that aren't on doughnuts at all, and never
fall
back in, and just dissipate out into... some form of meta-space? Where
fragments of them are captured eventually by the attraction of another
doughnut, and fall in towards its Cosmic Centre with the debris of lots
of
other dissipated universes, to be reborn as something quite different
again? Who knows. (I know it's all nonsense, but you've got to admit
it's
impressive nonsense. And like I said at the start, none of it exists
anyway, does it?)
#
Anyway, that's more than enough of me pontificating.
#
With best wishes for the future,
Iain M Banks
Copyright 1994 Iain M Banks
Commercial use only by permission.
Other uses, distribution, reproduction, tearing to shreds etc. are
freely encouraged provided the source is acknowledged.