The Culture

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When I read Look To Windward, my favorite parts were were Masaq' Hub describing its life:

Pg. 224-226 spoiler"Hub."

"Ziller. Good evening. Are you enjoying yourself?"

"No. How about you?"

"Of course."

"Of course? Can real happiness be so... foregone as that? How depressing."

"Ziller, I am a Hub Mind. I have an entire- and if I may say so- quite fabulous Orbital to look after, not to mention having fifty billion people to tend to."

"Certainly I wasn't going to mention them."

"Right now I'm observing a fading supernova in a galaxy two and a half billion years away. Closer to home, a thousand years off, I'm watching a dying planet orbiting inside the atmosphere of a red giant sun as it spirals slowly down toward the core. I can also watch the results of the planet's destruction on the sun, a thousand years later, via hyperspace.

"In-system, I'm tracking millions of comets and asteroids, and directing the orbits of tens of thousands of them, some to use as raw material for Plate landscaping, some just to keep them out of the way. Next year I'm going to let a big comet come right through the Orbital, between the Rim and the Hub. That should be pretty spectacular. Several hundred thousand smaller bodies are speeding toward us right now, earmarked to provide an over-the-top light show for the first night of your new orchestral work at the end of the Twin Novae period."

"It was that-"

"At the same time, of course, I'm in simultaneous communication with hundreds of other Minds; thousands, over the course of any given day; ship Minds of every type, some approaching, some just having left, some old friends, some sharing interests and fascinations very similar to my own, plus other Orbitals and university Sages, amongst others. I have eleven Roving Personality Constructs, each one flitting over time from place to place in the greater galaxy, rooming with other Minds in the processor substrates of GSV's and smaller vessels, other Orbitals, Eccentric and Ulterior craft and with Minds of various other types; what they will be like, and how these once identical siblings might change me when they return and we consider remerging, I can only imagine and look forward to."

"It all sounds-"

"While I am at the moment hosting no other Minds, I look forward to that, as well.

"Fascinating. Now-"

"Additionally, sub-systems like manufactury process-overseeing complexes keep a constant and fascinating dialogue. Within the hour, for example, in a shipyard in a cavern under the Buzuhn Bulkhead Range, a new Mind will be born, to be emplaced within a GCV before the year is out."

"No, no; keep going."

"Meanwhile, via one of my planetary remotes I'm watching a pair of cyclonic systems collide on Naratradjan Prime and composing a glyph sequence on the effects of ultra-violent atmospheric phenomena on otherwise habitable ecospheres. Here on Masaq' I'm watching a series of avalanches in the Pilthunguon Mountains on Hildri, a tornado whirling across the Shaban Savannah on Akron, a sworl-island calving in the Picha Sea, a forest fire in Molten, a seiche bore funnelling up Gardens River, a firework display above Junzra City, a wooden house frame being hoisted into place in a village in Furl, a quartet of lovers on a hilltop in-"

"You've made your-"

"-Ocutti. Then there are drones and other autonomous sentients, able to communicate directly and at speed, plus the implanted humans and other biologicals also able to converse immediately. Plus of course I have millions of avatars like this one, the majority of them talking with and listening to people right now."

"... Have you finished?"

"Yes. But even if all the other stuff seems just a bit esoteric, just think of all those other avatars at all those other gatherings, concerts, dances, ceremonies, parties and meals; think of all that talk, all those ideas, all that sparkle and wit!"

"Think of all that bullshit, all the nonsense and non-sequiturs, the self-aggrandizement and self-deception, the boring stupid nonsense, the pathetic attempts to impress or ingratiate, the slow-wittedness, the incomprehension and the incomprehensible, the gland-addled meanderings and general suffocating dullness."

"That is the chaff, Ziller. I ignore that. I can respond politely and where necessary felicitously to the most intense bore forever without flagging and it costs me nothing. It's like ignoring all the boring bits in space between the neat stuff like planets and stars and ships. And even that's not completely boring anyway."

"I cannot tell you how glad I am that you live such a full life, Hub."

"Thank you."

Pg. 290-292 spoiler"And all this makes you suitable to command a world of fifty billion souls?"

"Perfectly," the avatar said smoothly. "I have tasted death, Ziller. When my twin and I merged, we were close enough to the ship being destroyed to maintain a real-time link to the substrate of the Mind within as it was torn apart by the tidal forces produced by a line gun. It was over in a micro-second, but we felt it die bit by bit, area by distorted area, memory by disappearing memory, all kept going until the absolute bitter end by the ingenuity of Mind design, falling back, stepping down, closing off and retreating and regrouping and compressing and abandoning and abstracting and finessing, always trying by whatever means possible to keep its personality, its soul intact until there was nothing left to sacrifice, nowhere else to go and no survival strategies left to apply.

"It leaked away to nothingness in the end, pulled to pieces until it just dissolved into a mist of sub-atomic particles and the energy of chaos. The last two coherent things it held onto were its name and the need to maintain the link that communicated all that was happening to it, to us. We experienced everything it experienced; all its bewilderment and terror, each iota of anger and pride, every last nuance of grief and anguish. We died with it, it was us and we were it.

"And so you see I have already died and I can remember and replay the experience in perfect detail, any time I wish." The avatar smiled silkily as it leaned closer to him, as though imparting a confidence. "Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side.

We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too. Never forget I have had the chance to compare and contrast the ways of dying."

... "I have watched people die in exhaustive and penetrative detail," the avatar continued. "I have felt for them. Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts? Per second, a human- or a Chelgrian- might have twenty or thirty, even in the heightened state of extreme distress associated with the process of dying in pain." The avatar's eyes seemed to shine. It came forward, closer to his face by the breadth of a hand.

"Whereas I," it whispered, "have billions." It smiled, and something in its expression made Ziller clench his teeth. "I watched those poor wretches die in the slowest of slow motion and I knew even as I watched that it was I who't killed them, who was at that moment engaged in the process of killling them. For a thing like me to kill one of them or you is a very, very easy thing to do, and, as I discovered, absolutely disgusting. Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I never need wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless, and hateful thing to have to do.

"And, as you might imagine, I consider that I have an obligation to discharge. I fully intend to spend the rest of my existence at Masaq' Hub for as long as I'm needed until I'm no longer welcome, forever keeping an eye to windward for approaching storms and just generally protecting this faint circle of fragile little bodies and the vulnerable little brains they house from whatever harm a big dumb mechanical universe or any consciously malevolent force might happen or wish to visit upon them, specifically because I know how appallingly easy they are to destroy. I will give my life to save theirs, if it should ever come to that. And give it gladly, happily, too, knowing that the trade was entirely worth the debt I incurred eight hundred years ago, back in Arm One-Six."

It reminded me of this monologue in BSG, where John Cavil laments being limited to a human form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VhqsFRTTTo&t=1s

What he wants is something more like a Culture Mind's senses than a human's. Did the writers on that scene read Look to Windward?

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Note on LemmyHello again! Doesn't seem like a lot of people are interested in Lemmy, huh? You can't really keep a community alive with this few members. Oh well. Things might change after June 30th, but I doubt it.

I was worried about modding issues, but since this place is receiving basically no traffic it seems like that won't be a problem. There's always an upside, I guess.

For now, I'll just keep making posts about The Culture on occasion, because I am a major fan, and I might as well fill up this community I made myself with some content. I'd feel bad for taking the community name otherwise. Also, since almost no one's looking at this, only a few people on the Internet will know how much of a kook I am.

When I get bored I'll stop posting and this community will enter heat death until Reddit makes another awful mistake and everyone considers switching over again. But I'm getting off topic.


This post is about the landscape descriptions in Look to Windward. Banks does a great job with scene-setting in that one. He has to, since the whole book revolves around the setting. In each chapter there's at least one moment that makes you think "I love this place and want to be there". It's like a tourist brochure that also has a plot. My favorite Culture book, and a beautiful one.

The last time I read it, I picked out the most impressive landscape descriptions from each chapter. These are the ones that capture the majesty of The Culture (and occasionally other parts of the galaxy) and spark that "Damn, I wish I lived there" feeling. A wonderful feeling. Or a horrible one if you go around like a total loser thinking "if only I lived in a perfect utopia" all the time. Don't do that. Did I mention that I'm obsessed with this series? Anyway.

There are only minimal spoilers here. These excerpts are about setting and mood. But you'll understand the context of them better if you've actually read the book. If you haven't, maybe this will convince you to?


Prologue

A vast burst of blue-white light leapt across the sky, making an inverted landscape of the ragged clouds' undersurface and revealing through the rain the destruction all around us: the shell of a distant building, its interior scooped out by some earlier cataclysm, the tangled remains of rail pylons near the crater's lip, the fractured service pipes and tunnels the crater had exposed, and the massive, ruined body of the wrecked land destroyer lying half submerged in the pool of filthy water in the bottom of the hole. When the flare died it left only a memory in the eye and the dull flickering of the fire inside the destroyer's body.

The Light of Ancient Mistakes

The barges lay on the darkness of the still canal, their lines softened by the snow heaped in pillows and hummocks on their decks. The horizontal surfaces of the canal's paths, piers, bollards and lifting bridges bore the same full billowed weight of snow, and the tall buildings set back from the quaysides loomed over all, their windows, balconies and gutters each a line edged with white.

It was a quiet area of the city at almost any time, Kabe knew, but tonight it both seemed and was quieter still. He could hear his own footsteps as they sank into the untouched whiteness. Each step made a creaking noise. He stopped and lifted his head, sniffing at the air. Very still. He had never known the city so silent. The snow made it seem hushed, he supposed, muffling what little sound there was. Also tonight there was no appreciable wind at ground level, which meant that - in the absence of any traffic - the canal, though still free of ice, was perfectly still and soundless, with no slap of wave or gurgling surge.

There were no lights nearby positioned to reflect from the canal's black surface, so that it seemed like nothing, like an absolute absence on which the barges appeared to be floating unsupported. That was unusual too. The lights were out across the whole city, across almost all this side of the world.

He looked up. The snow was easing now. Spinwards, over the city centre and the still more distant mountains, the clouds were parting, revealing a few of the brighter stars as the weather system cleared. A thin, dimly glowing line directly above - coming and going as the clouds moved slowly overhead - was far-side light. No aircraft or ships that he could see. Even the birds of the air seemed to have stayed in their roosts.

Infra Dawn

The sunlight was so red it almost looked brown. It shone from the vastly distant atmospheres above the Orbital's trailing plates, over the escarpment's edge, across the dark valley with its pale islands of mist and sank onwards to the low rolling hills and the distant plains on the far side. The cries of the forest's nocturnal animals had slowly disappeared over the past twenty minutes or so, and the calls of birds were beginning to fill the night-chilled air above the low forest.

A Very Attractive System

Kabe and Ziller faced each other across a large, elegantly furnished room lit by golden sunlight that spilled through the opened balcony windows, already filtered through the gently waving branches of an everblue growing outside. A myriad of soft needle-shadows moved on the creamily tiled floor, lay across the ankle-deep, abstractly patterned carpets and fluttered silently on the sculpted surfaces of gleaming wooden sideboards, richly carved chests and plumply upholstered couches.

Peer Group

Masaq' Great River was a single loop of water stretching unbroken right round the Orbital and flowing slowly as a result of nothing more than the huge spinning world's coriolis effect.

Fed by tributary rivers and mountain streams throughout its length, it was depleted by evaporation where it ran through deserts, drained by overflow waterfalls and the run-offs into seas, swamps and irrigation networks, and absorbed into giant lakes, vast oceans and entire continent-wide river systems and networks of canals, only to reappear via great converse estuaries which eventually bundled it into a single gathered current once again.

It ran its unending course through labyrinths of caverns under raised continents, their depths lit sporadically by plunging holes and immense troughs deep as the roots of mountains. It traversed the slowly decreasing numbers of yet unformed Plate topographies within transparent tunnels which gave out onto landscapes still being moulded and inscribed by the manufactured vulcanologies of Orbital terraforming techniques.

It disappeared under Bulkhead Ranges in colossal watery mazes slung beneath those hollow ramparts and slipped -flooding sometimes for whole seasons - across entire horizon-wide plains before running through winding canyons kilometres deep and thousands long. It iced over from one end of a continent to another during the Orbital's aphelion or within the local winters produced by a Plate group's sun lenses set on disperse. Its course took in dozens of neatly circumscribed or lushly sprawling cities and - when it reached Plates like Osinorsi, whose median level was well below the stream's steady elevation - the river was carried above the plains, savannas, deserts or swamps on single or braided massifs towering hundreds or thousands of metres above the surrounding ground; hoisted ribbons of land crowned with cloud, edged with falls, strewn with hanging vegetation and vertical towns, punctured by caves and tunnels and - as here - with artfully carved and soaring arches that turned the monumental massifs into a more precise image of exactly what they were: vast aqueducts on a water course ten million kilometres long.

The parapet of the massif here, just a few kilometres from the cliffs and the plains that marked the beginning of Xarawe, was a flower-strewn grassy bank less than ten metres wide. From his vantage point here, standing on a raised forecastle of the ceremonial barge Bariatricist, Quilan could look down through wisps of cloud to rolling hills and meandering rivers unwinding through misty forests two kilometres below.

(Continued in the comments because of Lemmy's 10k character limit)

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I should put something here, right, so this community isn't a completely deserted wasteland? (Imagine a howling wind sound effect plays here.) So, for any other fans out there, how did you encounter the series? Which books are your favorite?

I'll start. I saw this series mentioned several times in different places across the Internet before I actually read it. Once when Scott Alexander mentioned it on his old blog. For those who don't know him, he's a blogger who mainly writers nonfiction but has some really interesting short stories out there. There's a lot of Internet rationalists who seem to be obsessed with this series, or with AI utopias in general, and it's a fascinating detail I could go on about for a while, but that'd be derailing the topic probably.

There were a few mentions on r/whowouldwin (hey, don't look at me like that, some of the questions are pretty fun). Everyone there seemed to agree that the Culture was some epic leet OP civ that would curbstomp almost every other scifi setting. I'd be lying if I said that didn't pique my curiosity. Between that and mentions by other rationalists and a general interest in reading about fictional AIs, it was probably inevitable that I'd check it out sooner or later. Didn't hurt that the Wikipedia entry made it sound really interesting.

The first book I read was The Player of Games, because everybody said not to start with Consider Phlebas. After that, I was instantly obsessed. I read a bunch of Culture books in the next few days, no longer remember which ones or what order. My favorites are The Player of Games and Look to Windward, with Surface Detail a little further down. I honestly have mixed feelings on the plot/pacing of the other books, but the setting has always captivated me. It's so rare for a genuine utopia to exist in science fiction. Dystopias are much more common, or "utopias" that appear to be perfect but psych! There's actually a hidden catch that means it was a horrible miserable place all along! The Giver comes to mind.

Anyway, thoughts? What about you? Also welcome to Lemmy, on the off chance anyone even cares enough to see and respond to this, lol.