So I finished the Culture series and am left wanting more. Partly because Banks died too soon and I'll never get to see where he was ultimately going with it, if anywhere. Partly because I think they were never quite what I wanted them to be. I think I kept hoping for a moment of revelation that never really came, but that may have been me expecting more than any novel is likely to deliver.
The Culture is a Pan-Human civilization set in the far future that has endured for over 10,000 years and abandoned scarcity and a lot of the cultural hang-ups that came with it, a long, long time ago. At some point they created AI Minds and gave them ships with near god-like abilities to create habitats with surface areas exceeding that of most planets, which is where most citizens tend to live, in addition to the ships themselves, the biggest of which hold many millions of people. Outside of a few major conflicts, they tend to live long, care-free lives wanting for nothing and working only as it takes their interest. For all intents and purposes the ships run everything and make all the major political decisions, although any big decisions are usually put to a vote to the population at large. Votes basically happen as they need to. The ships themselves have crew, but it's more an indulgence to keep people occupied than an actual necessity, the ships themselves are entirely self-sustaining. Banks originally thought of the Culture as some future version of Earth humans after they'd left Earth behind and spread to the stars, but got so disenchanted by human society on this planet that he eventually dropped it entirely.
The Culture itself doesn't seem to have much internal political drama, but it does have a tremendous self-regard for itself and its freedom and own perceived sense of enlightenment so stories tend to focus on the friction between the culture and more aggressive/authoritarian alien societies. The Culture views itself as the galaxy's conscience, but values the autonomy of a species to rule themselves and have their own ideas of how things should be. Many of the stories center around their Special Circumstances organization, which is more or less their version of an intelligence agency, which will use more violent/devious tactics than the Culture would normally condone to deal with situations that seem abnormally dangerous and/or are likely to result in mega-death crimes (civilian deaths in the millions or billions).
The Culture is not the only civilization in the galaxy, just one of the most powerful and influential at the time. There are many multi-system empires and many that have come and gone before. One of the most interesting aspects of this universe is the idea that there are Elder races who are basically obscenely powerful, but keep to themselves, having long since gotten tired of the day-to-day politics of the wider galaxies. And some civilizations sublime entirely, leaving the material plane en masse to higher dimensions to explore different forms of existence, once they feel like they've seen all they're going to of this one.
By far my favorite part of the series are the ship Minds, and how they talk to each other. They all have semi-silly names like "Fate Amenable to Change" or "Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall" and end up being some of the most interesting characters in the series.
I am left wanting more, but with a few questions that I wish had been addressed more. Why would people be so comfortable leaving everything to the machines? Where is the challenge/reward in the average life of a citizen? I admire them for their openness and freedom, but they seem obscenely decadent to me. Even their special circumstances agents seem to do it more out of boredom and because even though Ships have Drones (themselves fully self-aware, if less powerful Minds) and Avatars (constructed semi-independent biological expressions of themselves), they seem to need organics to interface with other organics successfully. Their trust in the Minds seems too complacent, especially the trouble groups of them tend to get into over the course of the series.
One feature of Culture life is being "backed-up" where a ship Mind take a scan of your brain and then recreates you if you die. This is basically treated like a save file in the video game. Citizens seem to view this as a form of immortality, but of course they aren't. they die, and then are replaced by someone exactly like them taken from a snapshot a few days before. From the point of view of the Culture, this is ensures a constancy of culture, but it's still death for all practical purposes. There seems to be no belief in a soul that ensures a continuance of experience here. I wish he'd gotten more into the philosophical implications of that, especially in a universe where entire civilizations leave death behind entirely and sublime to higher dimensions. How does it change a civilization to no longer grieve for death, because anyone who dies prematurely can be re-created, and how messed up is it that it's all a mirage? They DO die and a clone replaces them for the sake of everyone else. How messed up is that? Doesn't that bother anyone?
In general I find the intersection of materialism and spirituality in this series a little unsatisfying. This is best exemplified in the concept of subliming, which is here pictured as the end result of ascending the ladder of increasingly technical superiority over the material world. But subliming seems more like a spiritual achievement, it's not portrayed as a technical accomplishment even in the context of the books, they just seem to reach some enlightened state out of nowhere or are deemed ready as a people by previously sublimed races who are willing to help them cross over. The dots between "technical accomplishment" and "spiritual enlightenment" are never really connected in a way that I found satisfying. Although I think Banks might have a blind spot here that western culture seems to have in general, which is this idea that the end result of technical accomplishment will be spiritual growth and peace. Like if we just chart enough neurons it will all suddenly make sense some day. Technological progress is not necessarily the same as the search for meaning and there's no reason to believe meaning and enlightenment is where slightly faster cell phones eventually leads us!
I mean, I'm okay if Banks ultimately had a different take on that topic, I just wish he had spent more time teasing apart some of these things. The Culture sometimes seems to be a commentary on modern liberal values, but never really seems to say that much other than it is self-evidently good. I think I just wish he had spent more time somewhere on digging into whether it WAS good and why or why not.
These are relatively small complaints. I loved the series overall. This series is much like the Discworld series to me at this point. I end up thinking a lot about the questions the stories provoke, but ultimately I'm just happy to spend time there.
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