There is running through the books a very persistent theme of scale and how whatever matters to you, it only matters on the scale that you operate on, which I think was important to Banks. Matter is the best example of this by far, where the protag’s mission seems like the most important injustice to rectify possible to him, and he has all these concepts of divine right and what he deserves as a prince and etc, but it literally happens on the lowest level of a layered planet where on each layer is a different more advanced alien race that is in turn under the jurisdiction of the higher civilization up, so he has to ascend through this beaurocratic escalation of civilizations each dwarfing the next in power, each seeing the struggles of the protag’s civilization as more and more utterly quaint but each more sympathetic to him, until he finally reaches someone from the Culture who is willing to help him.
There is running through the books a very persistent theme of scale and how whatever matters to you, it only matters on the scale that you operate on, which I think was important to Banks. Matter is the best example of this by far, where the protag’s mission seems like the most important injustice to rectify possible to him, and he has all these concepts of divine right and what he deserves as a prince and etc, but it literally happens on the lowest level of a layered planet where on each layer is a different more advanced alien race that is in turn under the jurisdiction of the higher civilization up, so he has to ascend through this beaurocratic escalation of civilizations each dwarfing the next in power, each seeing the struggles of the protag’s civilization as more and more utterly quaint but each more sympathetic to him, until he finally reaches someone from the Culture who is willing to help him.
Massive, end of book spoiler
And then, when they realize that something immensely powerful was awakened and is about to destroy that world, a Mind and a Special Circumstance agent immediately launch a suicide attack because that insignificant minor world that does not concern the Culture in any way matters.
I really appreciated Banks willingness to engage with scale as a theme. It is something that is present in most sci-fi stories, but which almost always is ignored. The appendix to Consider Phlebas basically points out that the Culture/Idirian war was a fairly minor footnote in galactic history; the coda to Look to Windward has a character being revived 100,000 years after his death; Matter in many ways is about scale, but also about what matters to different people.
One implication in the universe that gets me is that the Ascended are implied to be capable of...a lot, and yet none of them intervene, really. They don't even care. Not even the newly minted ones!
So is the space the Culture is operating in just unimportant in the big scheme of things? Are they just faffing about vaingloriously?
My guess would be that 3d space just mostly isn't interesting to nth-d beings. Like what would the lives and morality of a 2d universe mean to us, even if we were part of it once?
The Culture views the sublimed as mildly irresponsible fwiw
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.
I really appreciated Banks willingness to engage with scale as a theme. It is something that is present in most sci-fi stories, but which almost always is ignored. The appendix to Consider Phlebas basically points out that the Culture/Idirian war was a fairly minor footnote in galactic history; the coda to Look to Windward has a character being revived 100,000 years after his death; Matter in many ways is about scale, but also about what matters to different people.
I loved that character in Look to Windward
His entire storyline is this bait and switch where it seems like this lone guy is going to discover the secret information that will save the entire orbital- oh wait, no, the orbital was never in danger, the Culture was in complete and total control of the situation the entire time to the point of having a turncoat inside of the terrorist’s brain, and the character is killed off and never accomplished anything. But then, of course, he gets chosen to be resurrected by this godlike being 100,000 years into the future when the Culture might not even exist anymore simply because he was there.
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.
And yet for all that, the Mind that runs Gurgeh's home orbital is genuinely and personally concerned when he thinks he's being spied on. Its sweet.
Thats kind of the sweetest thing about the Culture though that for all their power and long view everything and everyone matters to them.
If you let scale define your morality pretty soon the only logical approach is no morality.
Well fundamentally it is why the Culture always wins: they’re on everyone’s side.
It's been a while but as I remember they ultimately won the Idiran war by
unshackling all their enemy AIs and convincing them the war was dumb and to no longer pursue it
which is the most hilariously pacifist way to end a galaxy spanning war with billions of casualties
That was the final knockout blow, but I think the war was basically a foregone conclusion by then. They abused the Idiran's religious need to hold everything they captured to spread them so thin a finally ramped up Culture war fleet could pick them to pieces.
Something else that's always stuck with me is a line one of the Minds drops in one book talking about a possible conflict brewing where they mention something like "who knows how many trillions of lives could be lost until one of the Sublimated races decide to come along and pick up all the toys in the playpen," implying that there are societies out there magnitudes of power above even the Culture, and they're literally so far beyond our normal perception of reality that they don't even bother fucking with the universe unless its like, really bad.
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.
And yet for all that, the Mind that runs Gurgeh's home orbital is genuinely and personally concerned when he thinks he's being spied on. Its sweet.
Yeah, there's all these great little moments where the AIs are genuinely adorable. It's this great contrast from the standard scifi trope of AI being entirely cold and alien. By contrast, they're often straight up warm and loving.
You get the sense they think about us the same way we think about dogs.
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.
And yet for all that, the Mind that runs Gurgeh's home orbital is genuinely and personally concerned when he thinks he's being spied on. Its sweet.
Yeah, there's all these great little moments where the AIs are genuinely adorable. It's this great contrast from the standard scifi trope of AI being entirely cold and alien. By contrast, they're often straight up warm and loving.
You get the sense they think about us the same way we think about dogs.
And the big minds manage hundreds of millions or billions of humans and they personally care about each one as fully as a human could care about a beloved pet
Heck Excession has a big plot point that the mind of a Plate class GSV, a ship that had half a billion souls on it, kind of lost itself and had to do a lot of soul searching because it so profoundly fucked up playing matchmaker
like it predicted how these two humans would work out together and it worked out as badly as it possibly could have, at least one of their lives was seemingly ruined, and the Mind got stuck with the same kind of feeling you get when you accidentally step on your dog's foot for decades - probably because that's not the kind of mistake a being of such mental power makes often, they simulate different universes with different laws of physics for fun
Like, Grey Area is first and foremost a nerd. "This is a weird and disgusting thing that organics do to each others. I have a collection. Want to see it ??!"
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.
And yet for all that, the Mind that runs Gurgeh's home orbital is genuinely and personally concerned when he thinks he's being spied on. Its sweet.
Yeah, there's all these great little moments where the AIs are genuinely adorable. It's this great contrast from the standard scifi trope of AI being entirely cold and alien. By contrast, they're often straight up warm and loving.
You get the sense they think about us the same way we think about dogs.
And the big minds manage hundreds of millions or billions of humans and they personally care about each one as fully as a human could care about a beloved pet
Heck Excession has a big plot point that the mind of a Plate class GSV, a ship that had half a billion souls on it, kind of lost itself and had to do a lot of soul searching because it so profoundly fucked up playing matchmaker
like it predicted how these two humans would work out together and it worked out as badly as it possibly could have, at least one of their lives was seemingly ruined, and the Mind got stuck with the same kind of feeling you get when you accidentally step on your dog's foot for decades - probably because that's not the kind of mistake a being of such mental power makes often, they simulate different universes with different laws of physics for fun
Or Look to Windward
Where the Orbital Hub literally kills itself over what it had to do to the people who were left on that plate.
The other scale thing I find cool that Banks did is that galaxies are still big.
Like yeah they span the galaxy but the next one is still absurdly far away. Its easier to vanish into the multidimensional ether than it is to actually travel in physical.space at that point.
I like that those distances still have meaning, even a postscarcity lunatic ship can "only" hit 200,000x lightspeed.
I love when the Minds are awkward or out of their depth like in Use of Weapons
When the ship tries to throw a fancy costume party at the last second to distract Diziet from figuring out they don't know where Zakalwe is and it goes horribly.
Granted there are Minds and then there are Minds but still.
The punishment that the Culture drops on the conspirators at the end of Look to Windward is fucking nightmarish.
"If the Empire ever tries to fuck with the Culture they'll find out what mean really is".
I kinda like the realization that a few GSVs would be an outside context problem for the whole of 40K.
Like, the entire setting. At the same time. The kind of things that create a new god in 40K, the Culture calls "Tuesday". That's the day they relax a bit on the hedonism to catch on some sleep.
The punishment that the Culture drops on the conspirators at the end of Look to Windward is fucking nightmarish.
"If the Empire ever tries to fuck with the Culture they'll find out what mean really is".
I kinda like the realization that a few GSVs would be an outside context problem for the whole of 40K.
Like, the entire setting. At the same time. The kind of things that create a new god in 40K, the Culture calls "Tuesday". That's the day they relax a bit on the hedonism to catch on some sleep.
"The good guy who knows how untouchable he is if someone starts shit" is a pretty worn cliche to be honest but I fucking love it every time.
The punishment that the Culture drops on the conspirators at the end of Look to Windward is fucking nightmarish.
"If the Empire ever tries to fuck with the Culture they'll find out what mean really is".
I kinda like the realization that a few GSVs would be an outside context problem for the whole of 40K.
Like, the entire setting. At the same time. The kind of things that create a new god in 40K, the Culture calls "Tuesday". That's the day they relax a bit on the hedonism to catch on some sleep.
"The good guy who knows how untouchable he is if someone starts shit" is a pretty worn cliche to be honest but I fucking love it every time.
In this case, that's because the challenge is not to deal with the situation, it's to deal with the situation ethically, while improving the life of everyone involved (and as many bystanders as possible), and finally making it so that those two over there can at least talk to each other enough to exchange apologies.
It's not a mere life-or-death situation, or an existential threat for the Culture. It's worse than that: it's about figuring out what is right and what is wrong.
Culture: Planet Nazis? Oh, we infiltrated and killeddisplaced several key leaders into a passing GSV where they'll live out the rest of their lives in quiet but everyone on their planet believes they died horrific deaths as a result of their own choice, implicating resistance forces which led to a civil war.
Nah, Culture doesn't reward people for Genocide. They just don't torture them. If you are a Nazi and you actively helped make the Holocaust happen, you drop dead. That is if they don't need to frame your death to help the resistance, in which case your death is staged to look like a bombing, shooting or poisoning. It doesn't have the be a real Bombing,Shooting or Poisoning, but it will look like one to any autopsy personell.
Quick, Painless and Permanent, that is the Culture way with Nazis.
I mean who wants Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot bumming out everybody at the party trying to justify their crimes?
(Edit. Then moving on to more important things because Nazis are stupid, viscous people of limited imagination and bad taste and who wants to spend time talking to one of them).
Kipling217 on
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
Culture: Planet Nazis? Oh, we infiltrated and killeddisplaced several key leaders into a passing GSV where they'll live out the rest of their lives in quiet but everyone on their planet believes they died horrific deaths as a result of their own choice, implicating resistance forces which led to a civil war.
Nah, Culture doesn't reward people for Genocide. They just don't torture them. If you are a Nazi and you actively helped make the Holocaust happen, you drop dead. That is if they don't need to frame your death to help the resistance, in which case your death is staged to look like a bombing, shooting or poisoning. It doesn't have the be a real Bombing,Shooting or Poisoning, but it will look like one to any autopsy personell.
Quick, Painless and Permanent, that is the Culture way with Nazis.
I mean who wants Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot bumming out everybody at the party trying to justify their crimes?
Zakalwe straight up describes what the Culture would do with someone like the genocidal leader he was talking to and its basically exactly like what I said. They zap them up and put them somewhere where they can't hurt anyone else because the Culture only kills when its unavoidable.
So that's not to say they never kill space nazis, but they certainly don't kill who they can slap drone on an island.
He highlights this as a point of distinction between him and the Culture.
I also enjoyed how Banks managed to eliminate material want and even death from his stories and still managed to tell entertaining space operas. The end conclusion of most of the books could be summed up as "none of this matters, but it was still important." He has characters who are so unbelievably powerful and capable they pretty much automatically win any conflict they are involved in, yet he still manages to tell interesting stories about these characters. I've always viewed it as a just middle finger to the whole "superman problem" for writers.
Culture: Planet Nazis? Oh, we infiltrated and killeddisplaced several key leaders into a passing GSV where they'll live out the rest of their lives in quiet but everyone on their planet believes they died horrific deaths as a result of their own choice, implicating resistance forces which led to a civil war.
Nah, Culture doesn't reward people for Genocide. They just don't torture them. If you are a Nazi and you actively helped make the Holocaust happen, you drop dead. That is if they don't need to frame your death to help the resistance, in which case your death is staged to look like a bombing, shooting or poisoning. It doesn't have the be a real Bombing,Shooting or Poisoning, but it will look like one to any autopsy personell.
Quick, Painless and Permanent, that is the Culture way with Nazis.
I mean who wants Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot bumming out everybody at the party trying to justify their crimes?
Zakalwe straight up describes what the Culture would do with someone like the genocidal leader he was talking to and its basically exactly like what I said. They zap them up and put them somewhere where they can't hurt anyone else because the Culture only kills when its unavoidable.
So that's not to say they never kill space nazis, but they certainly don't kill who they can slap drone on an island.
He highlights this as a point of distinction between him and the Culture.
Zakalwe is not exactly aware of everything, and believes what the Culture want him to believe.
The Culture might offer space-Nazis a chance to get their personality rewritten, and then kill them when they refuse. That's how they deal with a regular murderer in Surface Details, and I can't see them be more generous to space-Nazis.
They also don't try to stop Zakalwe, or Grey Area.
For that matter, Zakalwe is the ultimate personification of Special Circumstance; given that he hates himself for it, there's probably a few Minds working constantly to make sure he never realizes that.
Culture: Planet Nazis? Oh, we infiltrated and killeddisplaced several key leaders into a passing GSV where they'll live out the rest of their lives in quiet but everyone on their planet believes they died horrific deaths as a result of their own choice, implicating resistance forces which led to a civil war.
Nah, Culture doesn't reward people for Genocide. They just don't torture them. If you are a Nazi and you actively helped make the Holocaust happen, you drop dead. That is if they don't need to frame your death to help the resistance, in which case your death is staged to look like a bombing, shooting or poisoning. It doesn't have the be a real Bombing,Shooting or Poisoning, but it will look like one to any autopsy personell.
Quick, Painless and Permanent, that is the Culture way with Nazis.
I mean who wants Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot bumming out everybody at the party trying to justify their crimes?
Zakalwe straight up describes what the Culture would do with someone like the genocidal leader he was talking to and its basically exactly like what I said. They zap them up and put them somewhere where they can't hurt anyone else because the Culture only kills when its unavoidable.
So that's not to say they never kill space nazis, but they certainly don't kill who they can slap drone on an island.
He highlights this as a point of distinction between him and the Culture.
I think consistently the thing that requires the Culture to use ultra-violence instead of just slap-droning are situations in which someone knowingly attacks or threatens a member of the Culture, and the stronger that civilization is the more force proportionally the Culture has to use in order to resolve the issue. In which case, it is about maintaining "you do not fuck with the Culture" for all the involved species.
I don't think the Culture would ever kill someone they weren't specifically sending a message to the rest of the galaxy regarding.
Culture: Planet Nazis? Oh, we infiltrated and killeddisplaced several key leaders into a passing GSV where they'll live out the rest of their lives in quiet but everyone on their planet believes they died horrific deaths as a result of their own choice, implicating resistance forces which led to a civil war.
Nah, Culture doesn't reward people for Genocide. They just don't torture them. If you are a Nazi and you actively helped make the Holocaust happen, you drop dead. That is if they don't need to frame your death to help the resistance, in which case your death is staged to look like a bombing, shooting or poisoning. It doesn't have the be a real Bombing,Shooting or Poisoning, but it will look like one to any autopsy personell.
Quick, Painless and Permanent, that is the Culture way with Nazis.
I mean who wants Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot bumming out everybody at the party trying to justify their crimes?
Zakalwe straight up describes what the Culture would do with someone like the genocidal leader he was talking to and its basically exactly like what I said. They zap them up and put them somewhere where they can't hurt anyone else because the Culture only kills when its unavoidable.
So that's not to say they never kill space nazis, but they certainly don't kill who they can slap drone on an island.
He highlights this as a point of distinction between him and the Culture.
Zakalwe is not exactly aware of everything, and believes what the Culture want him to believe.
The Culture might offer space-Nazis a chance to get their personality rewritten, and then kill them when they refuse. That's how they deal with a regular murderer in Surface Details, and I can't see them be more generous to space-Nazis.
They also don't try to stop Zakalwe, or Grey Area.
For that matter, Zakalwe is the ultimate personification of Special Circumstance; given that he hates himself for it, there's probably a few Minds working constantly to make sure he never realizes that.
He'd spent 200 years dealing with Space Nazis for the Culture so I think we can safely say his knowledge of their treatment is generally solid. Unless I remember wrong he's Contact, not SC.
They do actively try to stop Zakalwe too when he goes freelance Conctact and fucks up a planet.
Culture: Planet Nazis? Oh, we infiltrated and killeddisplaced several key leaders into a passing GSV where they'll live out the rest of their lives in quiet but everyone on their planet believes they died horrific deaths as a result of their own choice, implicating resistance forces which led to a civil war.
Nah, Culture doesn't reward people for Genocide. They just don't torture them. If you are a Nazi and you actively helped make the Holocaust happen, you drop dead. That is if they don't need to frame your death to help the resistance, in which case your death is staged to look like a bombing, shooting or poisoning. It doesn't have the be a real Bombing,Shooting or Poisoning, but it will look like one to any autopsy personell.
Quick, Painless and Permanent, that is the Culture way with Nazis.
I mean who wants Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot bumming out everybody at the party trying to justify their crimes?
Zakalwe straight up describes what the Culture would do with someone like the genocidal leader he was talking to and its basically exactly like what I said. They zap them up and put them somewhere where they can't hurt anyone else because the Culture only kills when its unavoidable.
So that's not to say they never kill space nazis, but they certainly don't kill who they can slap drone on an island.
He highlights this as a point of distinction between him and the Culture.
I think consistently the thing that requires the Culture to use ultra-violence instead of just slap-droning are situations in which someone knowingly attacks or threatens a member of the Culture, and the stronger that civilization is the more force proportionally the Culture has to use in order to resolve the issue. In which case, it is about maintaining "you do not fuck with the Culture" for all the involved species.
I don't think the Culture would ever kill someone they weren't specifically sending a message to the rest of the galaxy regarding.
Basically yeah. If killing someone will let more people live they'll probably do it but if zapping that person off to a remote corner of a ring somewhere will do it too then why not not kill someone.
Yeah I haven't found any evidence in the books that the Culture proper wouldn't just slap drone a space nazi if that was an option
Zakalwe was upset as I recall that they don't even do that to every space nazi, they try to deal with them in other, invisible ways most of the time (I believe they get quite upset with him because murdering them throws off SC's 12th dimensional chess on "making this planet liberal")
Ulver Seich: Hehe, it looks like a dildo.
Churt Lyne (a drone): That's appropriate. Armed, it can fuck solar systems.
This quote needs to be in the OP cause hot damn that sort of humor just insta-sold me on this.
There's a grim humor throughout the series. It also gets to how ridiculously absurd Culture technology is compared to the galaxy as a whole.
Gurgeh can't fly his small pod ship around because what is basically a mobile apartment is faster than any warship the local empire has and they don't want them to know that. A demilitarized warship is still capable of destroying planets etc
Ulver Seich: Hehe, it looks like a dildo.
Churt Lyne (a drone): That's appropriate. Armed, it can fuck solar systems.
This quote needs to be in the OP cause hot damn that sort of humor just insta-sold me on this.
There's a grim humor throughout the series. It also gets to how ridiculously absurd Culture technology is compared to the galaxy as a whole.
Gurgeh can't fly his small pod ship around because what is basically a mobile apartment is faster than any warship the local empire has and they don't want them to know that. A demilitarized warship is still capable of destroying planets etc
There's also how the drone gets told it has to wear a disguise...
and is outraged that in addition to being bulk and square, it has to emit static crackling as it hovers.
end spoiler...
although that drone is absolutely 100% actually Skaffen-Amitskaw from Use of Weapons.
Ulver Seich: Hehe, it looks like a dildo.
Churt Lyne (a drone): That's appropriate. Armed, it can fuck solar systems.
This quote needs to be in the OP cause hot damn that sort of humor just insta-sold me on this.
There's a grim humor throughout the series. It also gets to how ridiculously absurd Culture technology is compared to the galaxy as a whole.
Gurgeh can't fly his small pod ship around because what is basically a mobile apartment is faster than any warship the local empire has and they don't want them to know that. A demilitarized warship is still capable of destroying planets etc
There's also how the drone gets told it has to wear a disguise...
and is outraged that in addition to being bulk and square, it has to emit static crackling as it hovers.
end spoiler...
although that drone is absolutely 100% actually Skaffen-Amitskaw from Use of Weapons.
is it? I recall it being the drone that blackmails him at the start. There's over 100 years between Use of Weapons and Player of Games
Ulver Seich: Hehe, it looks like a dildo.
Churt Lyne (a drone): That's appropriate. Armed, it can fuck solar systems.
This quote needs to be in the OP cause hot damn that sort of humor just insta-sold me on this.
There's a grim humor throughout the series. It also gets to how ridiculously absurd Culture technology is compared to the galaxy as a whole.
Gurgeh can't fly his small pod ship around because what is basically a mobile apartment is faster than any warship the local empire has and they don't want them to know that. A demilitarized warship is still capable of destroying planets etc
There's also how the drone gets told it has to wear a disguise...
and is outraged that in addition to being bulk and square, it has to emit static crackling as it hovers.
end spoiler...
although that drone is absolutely 100% actually Skaffen-Amitskaw from Use of Weapons.
is it? I recall it being the drone that blackmails him at the start. There's over 100 years between Use of Weapons and Player of Games
Yep, same drone. And it's not like everyone in the Culture isn't functionally immortal anyways.
Ulver Seich: Hehe, it looks like a dildo.
Churt Lyne (a drone): That's appropriate. Armed, it can fuck solar systems.
This quote needs to be in the OP cause hot damn that sort of humor just insta-sold me on this.
There's a grim humor throughout the series. It also gets to how ridiculously absurd Culture technology is compared to the galaxy as a whole.
Gurgeh can't fly his small pod ship around because what is basically a mobile apartment is faster than any warship the local empire has and they don't want them to know that. A demilitarized warship is still capable of destroying planets etc
There's also how the drone gets told it has to wear a disguise...
and is outraged that in addition to being bulk and square, it has to emit static crackling as it hovers.
end spoiler...
although that drone is absolutely 100% actually Skaffen-Amitskaw from Use of Weapons.
is it? I recall it being the drone that blackmails him at the start. There's over 100 years between Use of Weapons and Player of Games
Yep, same drone. And it's not like everyone in the Culture isn't functionally immortal anyways.
No, I'm almost positive you're mixing up characters. Can't find anything online to this effect.
Posts
Massive, end of book spoiler
If you let scale define your morality pretty soon the only logical approach is no morality.
Read Excession.
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Well fundamentally it is why the Culture always wins: they’re on everyone’s side.
Kinda make sense when you remember what Minds are.
It's been a while but as I remember they ultimately won the Idiran war by
which is the most hilariously pacifist way to end a galaxy spanning war with billions of casualties
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I loved that character in Look to Windward
And yet for all that, the Mind that runs Gurgeh's home orbital is genuinely and personally concerned when he thinks he's being spied on. Its sweet.
That was the final knockout blow, but I think the war was basically a foregone conclusion by then. They abused the Idiran's religious need to hold everything they captured to spread them so thin a finally ramped up Culture war fleet could pick them to pieces.
"If the Empire ever tries to fuck with the Culture they'll find out what mean really is".
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Yeah, there's all these great little moments where the AIs are genuinely adorable. It's this great contrast from the standard scifi trope of AI being entirely cold and alien. By contrast, they're often straight up warm and loving.
You get the sense they think about us the same way we think about dogs.
And the big minds manage hundreds of millions or billions of humans and they personally care about each one as fully as a human could care about a beloved pet
Heck Excession has a big plot point that the mind of a Plate class GSV, a ship that had half a billion souls on it, kind of lost itself and had to do a lot of soul searching because it so profoundly fucked up playing matchmaker
like it predicted how these two humans would work out together and it worked out as badly as it possibly could have, at least one of their lives was seemingly ruined, and the Mind got stuck with the same kind of feeling you get when you accidentally step on your dog's foot for decades - probably because that's not the kind of mistake a being of such mental power makes often, they simulate different universes with different laws of physics for fun
Or Look to Windward
Like yeah they span the galaxy but the next one is still absurdly far away. Its easier to vanish into the multidimensional ether than it is to actually travel in physical.space at that point.
I like that those distances still have meaning, even a postscarcity lunatic ship can "only" hit 200,000x lightspeed.
Granted there are Minds and then there are Minds but still.
Like, the entire setting. At the same time. The kind of things that create a new god in 40K, the Culture calls "Tuesday". That's the day they relax a bit on the hedonism to catch on some sleep.
"The good guy who knows how untouchable he is if someone starts shit" is a pretty worn cliche to be honest but I fucking love it every time.
In this case, that's because the challenge is not to deal with the situation, it's to deal with the situation ethically, while improving the life of everyone involved (and as many bystanders as possible), and finally making it so that those two over there can at least talk to each other enough to exchange apologies.
It's not a mere life-or-death situation, or an existential threat for the Culture. It's worse than that: it's about figuring out what is right and what is wrong.
Nah, Culture doesn't reward people for Genocide. They just don't torture them. If you are a Nazi and you actively helped make the Holocaust happen, you drop dead. That is if they don't need to frame your death to help the resistance, in which case your death is staged to look like a bombing, shooting or poisoning. It doesn't have the be a real Bombing,Shooting or Poisoning, but it will look like one to any autopsy personell.
Quick, Painless and Permanent, that is the Culture way with Nazis.
I mean who wants Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot bumming out everybody at the party trying to justify their crimes?
(Edit. Then moving on to more important things because Nazis are stupid, viscous people of limited imagination and bad taste and who wants to spend time talking to one of them).
Zakalwe straight up describes what the Culture would do with someone like the genocidal leader he was talking to and its basically exactly like what I said. They zap them up and put them somewhere where they can't hurt anyone else because the Culture only kills when its unavoidable.
So that's not to say they never kill space nazis, but they certainly don't kill who they can slap drone on an island.
He highlights this as a point of distinction between him and the Culture.
Zakalwe is not exactly aware of everything, and believes what the Culture want him to believe.
The Culture might offer space-Nazis a chance to get their personality rewritten, and then kill them when they refuse. That's how they deal with a regular murderer in Surface Details, and I can't see them be more generous to space-Nazis.
They also don't try to stop Zakalwe, or Grey Area.
For that matter, Zakalwe is the ultimate personification of Special Circumstance; given that he hates himself for it, there's probably a few Minds working constantly to make sure he never realizes that.
I think consistently the thing that requires the Culture to use ultra-violence instead of just slap-droning are situations in which someone knowingly attacks or threatens a member of the Culture, and the stronger that civilization is the more force proportionally the Culture has to use in order to resolve the issue. In which case, it is about maintaining "you do not fuck with the Culture" for all the involved species.
I don't think the Culture would ever kill someone they weren't specifically sending a message to the rest of the galaxy regarding.
He'd spent 200 years dealing with Space Nazis for the Culture so I think we can safely say his knowledge of their treatment is generally solid. Unless I remember wrong he's Contact, not SC.
They do actively try to stop Zakalwe too when he goes freelance Conctact and fucks up a planet.
Basically yeah. If killing someone will let more people live they'll probably do it but if zapping that person off to a remote corner of a ring somewhere will do it too then why not not kill someone.
Zakalwe was upset as I recall that they don't even do that to every space nazi, they try to deal with them in other, invisible ways most of the time (I believe they get quite upset with him because murdering them throws off SC's 12th dimensional chess on "making this planet liberal")
This quote needs to be in the OP cause hot damn that sort of humor just insta-sold me on this.
There's a grim humor throughout the series. It also gets to how ridiculously absurd Culture technology is compared to the galaxy as a whole.
There's also how the drone gets told it has to wear a disguise...
end spoiler...
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No, I'm almost positive you're mixing up characters. Can't find anything online to this effect.