The bomb lives only as it is falling.
Iain M Banks, Use of Weapons
Greetings, Dwellers, and welcome to a long-overdue review of Iain M. Banks’ Culture “series” – the novels that, in part, led to the moniker I use for all you lovely people.
Now, before I begin, I’d just like to say that reviews have never been something I was overly keen to make. Enjoyment of art is subjective, and while there are certainly objective ways of gauging skill in the craft, it’s hard for me to look at something I enjoy and tell other people they should give it a shot. One of my favorite films, The Witch, I notoriously say I can never recommend to anyone, because the Venn diagram of people who like slow, brooding, atmospheric colonial American period pieces and dark, psychological horror is pretty damn small. But, hey, if you guys have stuck with me this long, there’s a chance our tastes in art are similar, so let’s give it a go, shall we?
NOTE: Oh no, I’m making an ediiiit – this thing turned out to be really long, so I split it into a couple of sections. The first is describing the “world” of the Culture and the second is my ranking of Banks’ sci-fi stories and recommendations to pick up, if you just want that TL;DR.
Science fiction is typically split into two camps: hard and soft. Hard sci-fi is heavily concerned with basing its technology on known reality and will spend a good deal of time making sure the reader understands the how of its tech. Soft, on the other hand, leans on the human (or alien) element – how these societies function, what space travel and contact has done, etc. Culture, in short. The tech is there, of course, but it’s not gone over in painstaking detail. It very much leans on Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Banks manages to thread the line between hard and soft, deftly dancing between the two. Some books lean harder, some softer, some shifting back and forth chapter by chapter. I’ll be the first to admit I’m more a fan of soft, so his harder novels were less up my alley, but even then he’s managing to deliver something profound.
Banks is – was, actually, unfortunately – one of the most imaginative voices in the scene. His vision of the “future” was truly without bounds. I used quotes there for a couple of reasons. One, unlike a lot of sci-fi, Banks’ tales aren’t set on a time after Earth reached the stars. Earth is, outside of a single short story, not involved at all. Two, the novels take place across a span of about 1,700 years, ranging in our time from the 1200’s to the 2900’s.
Also unlike most series, the novels in Banks’ Culture saga are fully standalone. They take place so far apart, either in years or location, that the cast of characters almost never repeats – the biological cast, at least. Events that were central to one story, such as the 500-year-long Iridian War, are used as history lessons or catalysts of change in others.
The adopted series name doesn’t come from Banks’ focus on the culture of various alien societies – it comes from the primary society that weaves its way through each of his novels. The Culture, a society of mostly pan-humanoids that spans the galaxy and rests firmly in the upper echelon of technology and progress.
I tried to think of a relatable political label for the Culture, but it does its best to defy such things. It has no flag, there are no true leaders, no borders. Anyone can join, so long as they espouse its core values. Base society within it is free to do pretty much whatever it wants. The people live for several hundred years, and during that time they tend to try and experience everything life has to offer. They travel across space, involve themselves in alien societies, have various drug glands and technologies embedded in their bodies, fully change sex – hell, even totally change species. All of this is the norm. Culture citizens generally have a “neural lace” that is embedded in their brain which allows them contact with others across vast bands of space and, vitally, backs up their “soul” to the nearest Mind so the person can be reconstituted upon their death.
That’s not to say the whole of the Culture is so care-free, and while Banks’ stories often involve the Culture masses, they tend to focus on members of the more active, purposeful groups: Contact and Special Circumstances.
Contact is there for just that. They are in charge of determining whether newly found or watched planets should be contacted and brought into the galactic family. Members of Contact watch worlds and often genetically modify themselves to become part of them in order to gauge whether they’re ready.
Special Circumstances, the true elite of the Culture, are essentially the espionage group. If there’s a particularly troublesome bit of information somewhere, these are the people who get involved. SC, as it’s often referred to, keeps things very close to the chest, and while there are countless people within the Culture that would love the chance to be involved, many more hope to never be in contact with them. Naturally, a lot of the novels involve SC directly or indirectly. Sometimes with known causes, others where we learn the truth as time goes on.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the human – or biological – element of the Culture, but they are actually secondary to the real Culture. The Minds. Minds are, in essence, true AI. They are advanced so beyond the limits of biology they make us wholly unnecessary. The Minds think in the 4th dimension, travel through it in hyper/ultra/infraspace, and are natively a part of every major spacefaring thing in the Culture. To societies outside the Culture, Minds – and the ships they occupy – are seen as the real Culture. The ambassadors, diplomats, and soldiers all in one.
Minds exist in all strata of the Culture. Some are perfectly happy living as homes to other culture citizens, steadily cruising through space with billions on board or controlling the whole of a multiple-thousand-kilometer Orbital artificial world. Others are members of Contact, using their tech to watch worlds from lightmonths away or building avatars to use on the world. Some still are members – or even controllers – of SC. And others, still, have gone Eccentric and no longer listen to anything from their peers, essentially absconding from the Culture to do as they please.
Minds also happen to be some of my favorite characters across Banks’ series. They are so beyond the capacity of biologicals that their terrifying scope is only limited by their belief in the Culture’s ideals. When they distance themselves from those or when they’re forced to play their hand, the normally jovial or blasé nature vanishes. It earns them a reputation, too. Minds name themselves, but every so often earn monikers from their actions. The Gray Area, for instance, chose the name due to its… moral ambiguity around using its effector systems to read and project into biological brains. Any ship could do this, of course, but they simply don’t due to their respect of sentient autonomy. Not so much the Gray Area, and for its position it is kept at a distance by its cohorts and referred to in private channels as the Meatfucker.
Now that I’ve spent… wow, way too long just describing what the Culture even is, what sort of stories can you, as a reader expect to find if you do pick up some Banks?
Honestly? It’s hard to say. His use of the Culture to build varied stories around is part of its charm. You could pick up Use of Weapons and find a deeply character-focused story around the pain of betrayal and loss, and the general fatigue of a life lived at the hands of others. Or, you could pick up Matter and have a story about revenge that’s buried in extremely detailed, hard sci-fi world building on a planet that’s multi-layered and technologically diverse across each level. Or, again, you could pick up Excession and find a story about just what happens to tenuous societal relationships – and elements within the Culture itself – when an event completely outside the realm of understanding occurs and brings with it the promise of technology once thought impossible. Hell, it’s not even a given that the biological characters you’re following in the story are human, they might be sentient tripodal pyramids or weird cat-armadillo things.
No matter the overarching story, Banks has excellent prose and manages to approach even the most obscure subjects with grace, potency, and – where apt – humor. Remember how I mentioned people in the Culture change species? Well, there’s one story where a protagonist is going to meet his uncle about an SC matter, and we’re treated to a scene where his uncle has decided to become a walrus, sloshing around awkwardly in a tank while trying to figure out his ever-changing anatomy. It’s stupid, pointless, and way more funny of a mental image than it needed to be. It serves no actual purpose other than continuing to build on just what sort of a people the Culture fosters, and it’s little bits of world building like that which are sprinkled over everything he does, icing on the cake.
I was going to say that, while his stories are complex and varied, you can always expect a few common threads – but I realized even that isn’t true. Banks was ambitious enough to make sci-fi not set in the Culture at all (which I still tend to consider part of it regardless) and Culture stories that can barely be considered sci-fi or even reference the Culture.
Below I’ve given my personal rating to all of his sci-fi novels, Culture or not. Banks is, unfortunately, no longer with us, but if you’re in the market for some brilliance, please do consider giving his work a shot. I can’t overstate his creativity – building so many distinct worlds and concepts in each book is simply a masterclass. I can only hope to have an ounce of his talent.
- The Player of Games
- Surface Detail
- Excession
- Inversions
- Use of Weapons
- Against A Dark Background (Not Culture)
- Consider Phlebas
- Transition (Not Culture)
- The Algebraist (Not Culture, here’s where the Dwellers are from)
- Look to Windward
- The Hydrogen Sonata
- Feersum Endjinn (Not Culture)
- Matter
It was actually hard to make that list. A lot of those numbers are interchangeable – my top and bottom are for sure locked in place, but on any given day I could make changes between #3-7 and #8-11.
And, again, this was my rating upon a second read of most of these. I don’t think I’d recommend picking them up in this order. For a first-time Banks reader, I’d probably recommend any of these:
- The State of The Art
- Use of Weapons
- The Player of Games
- Consider Phlebas
I didn’t include The State of the Art on the ranking list as it’s a short story collection, but honestly it’s a pretty decent introduction to the Culture and to Banks’ style of humor and writing, as is true with the other three here.
This has been a long one, and I’m certain there’s a lot I missed, but if you’ve made it this far, congratulations! Hopefully you’re more interested in picking up this legend for a proper read, and if you have any questions on his work, please don’t hesitate to ask. If it wasn’t obvious, I’m always excited to talk about it.
Get out there and read, Dwellers.
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