The Involved
The Culture is a fictional interstellar post-scarcity society created by the Scottish writer Iain Banks and features in a number of his space opera novels and works of short fiction, collectively called the Culture series.
In the series, the Culture is composed primarily of humanoid aliens, artificial intelligences (A.I.), and a number of other sentient life forms. These A.I. range from human-equivalent drones to hyper-intelligent Minds. A.I. with more limited intellectual capabilities perform a variety of tasks, e.g. controlling spacesuits. Without scarcity, the Culture has no need for money; instead, Minds voluntarily indulge citizens' pleasures, leading to a largely hedonistic society. Many of the series' protagonists are humanoids who have chosen to work for the Culture's diplomatic or espionage organs, and interact with other civilisations whose citizens act under different ideologies, morals, and technologies.
The Culture has a more advanced grasp of technology relative to most other civilisations it shares the galaxy with. Most of the Culture's citizens do not live on planets but in artificial habitats such as orbitals and ships, the largest of which are home to billions of individuals. The Culture's citizens have been genetically enhanced to live for centuries and have modified mental control over their physiology, including the ability to introduce a variety of psychoactive drugs into their systems, change biological sex, or switch off pain at will. The Culture's technology is able to transfer individuals into vastly different body forms, although the Culture's standard form remains fairly humanoid.
The Culture holds peace and individual freedom as its core values, and a central theme of the series is the ethical struggle it faces when interacting with other societies – some of which brutalise their own members, pose threats to other civilisations, or threaten the Culture itself. It tends to make major decisions based on the consensus formed by its citizens: in one instance, the entire population – a direct democratic vote of trillions – decided that The Culture would go to war with a rival civilisation. Those who objected to the subsequent militarisation broke off from the Culture, forming their own separate civilisation. Another hallmark of the Culture is its ambiguity; in contrast to the other interstellar societies and empires, it is more difficult to define both geographically and sociologically, and it "fades out at the edges".
Similar Artists