Iain M. Banks - Culture Novels

[PTY]

Nisam citala (a moracu, makar zbog Hidrogen sonate koja izgleda zesce stivo) ali znam da Melkor i Mica najverovatnije jesu, pa evo malko rasprave o tom konkretno fenomenu:




Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas was published in 1987, the first book written of what would come to be known as the Culture sequence (or cycle). Released just this year, The Hydrogen Sonata marks the tenth book in the long running, award winning Space Opera series. But what makes for a good Culture novel, what is the secret to Banks' longevity?

We asked this week's panelists...
Q: In celebration of Iain Banks' CULTURE series, what do you think sets this work apart from other space opera fiction? What specifically makes for a good CULTURE novel and why? Here's what they said...


John Scalzi:
I'm going to be honest and note that the reason that I read the Culture novels are not for the stories themselves — which are very good, mind you — but because I like wandering around the books like a tourist, gawking at all the cool shit that's in the Culture. So I suppose what I really want is an "encyclopedia of The Culture" sort of book with pretty pictures and maps and a timeline and crap like that. Which is the exact opposite of a novel. I'm not sure if this makes me a bad reader of Culture novels or just a highly specialized one. What I do know is that I'm always looking out for the next one. So for me, what makes a good Culture novel is that Iain Banks has finished it and his publisher has offered it up for me to buy.


Robert Buettner:
How is the Culture series different from other space opera?  I begin with a blasphemy: It isn't.
Is the Culture series different simply because it's well-written?  Hardly.  True, bad writing and bad storytelling characterizes far too much space opera, and, indeed, far too much science fiction.  But there's also plenty of space opera that, like the Culture series, tells stories about what characters who the reader cares about will do next, and why, in transparent, well-constructed prose.
Is the Culture series different because it postulates human co-existence with, hybridization with, or eclipse by, thinking machines?  Nope.  Boatloads of science fiction since Philip K. Dick have mined that vein.
What about vast, generation-spanning, interstellar war, cold and hot?  Nah.  That's a virtual sine qua non of the sub-genre.
Ah, but the Culture stories are connected one to another more by their universe than by through-line characters!  An example of the often-used through-line structure would be, well, the Orphanage books. Those being my five-book history of the Pseudocephalopod War. Hachette Orbit publishes both the Culture and Orphanage series, and actually calls my books the "Jason Wander series," because all five books follow that through-line character.  However, the Culture stories' structure is scarcely ground breaking.  Heinlein's numerous stories and novels about disparate characters who fit into his "future history" has been emulated countless times.
Well, don't the Culture stories carry larger messages about contemporary social issues?  Sure.  In non-writing life Iain Banks is a vocal liberal (he cut his UK passport into pieces and mailed it to Ten Downing Street to protest Britain's participation in the Iraq war).  The "Culture" of the Culture stories is often described as a kind of top-down liberal anarchy.  But authors' art reflecting their view of life is hardly different.  Heinlein's politics, often oversimplified as right-wing (sure he was a cold warrior, but he also campaigned for the socialist candidate for governor of California), permeate his fiction.  And today, the series of other Times-list authors like John Ringo's Posleen War books leave no doubt about the author's views on contemporary social and political issues.


Mike Cobley:
Well, once upon a time space opera was largely defined by the American experience, along with the unspoken doctrinal belief that the military was some kind of repository of high-minded canny super-admirals. Yet recent reports have suggested that the US is developing autonomous combat machines, which implies the deployment of lethal firepower targeted and directed by algorithmic AIs. And then we turn to look at the Culture, a galaxy-wide civilization run by ferociously intelligent AIs apparently hardwired to look after the best interests of the Culture's constituent races. The foundations of the Culture begs a million questions, of course, but it also presents a picture of multicultural tolerance which I find inspiring.
Also, the culture of the Culture is relaxed and enabling – although I sometimes wonder if, in a civilization of abundance,
the incidence of egotism and narcissism might present a significant blip in the picture. In other space operas, the narrative sometimes looks at the experience of the lower classes, the laborers, service industry workers, etc, but in the Culture there seems to be no need for them, which inevitably skews society along lines where there is no resource/commodity scarceness to foster friction.
What makes a great Culture novel for me is dangers, a plot full of urgent (and even ancient) mystery, AIs with human characteristics, humans with mechanistic characteristics, vile miscreants getting their comeuppance, possessors of towering arrogance coming unstuck, humour and wit when the chips are down, the fire is in the hole, and the pin has been pulled. Give me all that and I'll be a happy bear!


Neal Asher:
Because of that wonderful research tool called the Internet I can say without doubt that the first time I read Iain M Banks' stuff was in 1987. It was A Gift from the Culture published in Interzone. This was a story that grabbed me at once and tightened its grip when the gun the protagonist had obtained started talking to him. Obviously this grip remained in place because later, maybe months or years later, I walked into a book shop and saw a large format copy of Consider Phlebas and didn't hesitate in picking it up and buying it – bear in mind that at the time I was getting most of my SF fix from a second-hand book shop and the library. Thereafter I bought every ensuing science fiction book from him, loved The Player of Games and rate Use of Weapons as one of the top ten best books I've ever read.
But what is it about his books that do it for me? Always in SF I'm looking for sensawunda and Banks delivers it in spades. He hits a nerve in me every time when he writes about GSVs the size of worlds. There's that moment too, in The Player of Games, when it becomes evident that full knowledge of the sheer power and size of the culture is being kept from a smaller realm because such knowledge would cause that realm to implode. Then there are the drones and AIs. These have been knocking about in some form or other for decades. We've seen the former in films like Star Wars and Dark Star where they were called 'droids' and the latter have been with us since before Hal in 2001 (1968).
But Banks' drones and AIs are different. They are a breath of fresh air because they aren't at one of two opposing poles: either trying to exterminate the human race or adhering to Asimov's laws. They are sarcastic, funny, smart-talking and often a perfect foil for the sometimes far too serious human characters. In this respect Banks' books have provided, along with everything else I look for in science fiction, something quite rare in the genre, which is humour. Who did not laugh out loud when the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw brought a gift to Zakalwe? During a particular mission, the man had suffered the misfortune of losing everything below his neck. The gift was a hat.
Respect.
(Incidentally does anyone remember a book in which an AI called something like Logos was zipping about like a giant glass brick? Perhaps someone can help me out there?)


Damien G. Walter:
Compassion. The Culture novels are meditations on ideas of altruism, utopia and values of good and evil. My favourite of the series, Look To Windward, is as much a story about coming to terms with grief as it is a Space Opera. More so maybe.
From another perspective Banks is a successful writer of anti-genre. Other writers in this model are J G Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, China Mieville. It's interesting that those I can think of are British. Whether its a British 'thing' or I'm just better versed in UK writers is hard to say. Anti-genre writers set out to offend the prevailing values of a genre. They're only interested in the rules of a genre as far as breaking them provides a springboard to do something new. So the Culture novels are anti Space Operas. Whether that makes them still part of the genre is an open question.
Also, Banks has a lot of humour. People who enjoy Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman will also like Banks, by and large. We need more humour in SF. It takes itself too seriously sometimes.


David Brin:
Iain Banks is a very smart fellow.  One of his unique accomplishments is to see past what I call the "idiot plot." Yes, as an author, you must contrive ways to keep your hero and heroine in pulse-pounding jeopardy for 500 pages ... or ninety minutes of film... but most writers and producers do is bay grabbing the simpleminded cheat — assuming that society as a whole is unwise and filled with fools who cannot or will not help people who are in peril.  If you posit that civilization sucks and is incompetent, then sure, a story of lively antics and hairs-breadth escapes can ensue without the inconvenient presence of skilled professionals (exactly what you hope and expect to see, when you're in real life danger) arriving to muck up the tension!  (Sure, most adventure stories show such professionals, briefly, in order to kill or write them off, or else showing them in cahoots with the villain.)
Banks chose another route, which I also travel. He asks: "Suppose humanity as a whole makes a truly wonderful and wise civilization.  Operating under that brutal handicap, can an author still find ways to throw the protagonists into lovely peril?"  I like a challenge.  So does Iain Banks. He shows us how our descendants might be vastly better than us – the goal for which we live our lives! But that it still may be possible — even probable — to find the cracks, the chinks, the gaps, the inevitable errors that call for courage.  That call for heroes

[zakk]

Čitao samo Consider Phlebes i dobro je to, mada uz podosta škripe, ali nisam shvatio oko čega tolika fama. Možda je do 1987. i težišta na "mekim" naukama; Benks ubacuje tehnološke zevzevate lopatama, tu je i hipersvemir i antigravitacija i razni vanzemaljci i sve moguće, ali najzanimljiviji su mi bili sukobi načina mišljenja, kultura, subkultura, ideologija.

[Izitpajn]

Pročitaj "Look to Windward" i "Player of Games".

Onda i "Use of Weapons".

Možeš i "Excession" ako imaš vremena (jedna od debljih). Ima narativnih problema, ali je slatko i zabavno. Onako, više za fanove.

Ostalo možeš preskočiti, bar koliko se meni čini. Zapravo, Feersum Endjinn ti malo veže mozak u čvor dok ga čitaš i poslije ćeš kao blesav preporučivati to prijateljima, ali to baš nije Kultura. Kažu da je, ali meni je jako mutno.

I na kraju, kad si se dobro upoznao sa svemirom, shvatio kako sve funkcionira uzduž i poprijeko, kad usvojiš sve pojmove, koncepcije, definicije, kad više nema stvari koje će ti ostati nejasne, uzmi "State of the Art". Novela, 100 strana. Meni osobno apsolutno vrhunac. Pročitaš to i možeš reći, jebote, od sad čitam samo trash jer ovdje je sve rečeno, s filozofijom sam gotov.

Ali prije toga obavezno pročitati nekoliko drugih knjiga iz Kulture. Kao što rekoh, da shvatiš pozadinu, da ti šareni detalji ne odvlače pažnju od prave stvari.

[Father Jape]

Kieron Gillen je preporučivao neke od njih, pa su mi već godinu-dve na spisku, ali nije se još stiglo. 

[Melkor]

Nije Feersum Kultura. -.-

Ovako, procitao sam sve romane sem poslednjeg (evo laktam se sa njim po stolu, nemam vise gde spustati knjige) i priznajem da ih obozavam. Cak i nesto slabije - uhvatio sam sebe da uzivam u njima. I zamislim se juce zasto. I ima poneceg od svega citiranog, ali to nije to. Shvatio sam da nije nista konkretno, ni sense of wonder, ni uspesna razrada utopije, ni zapleti ni raspleti, ni sjajni likovi (svih fela), ni genijalna imena vestackih intiligencija, ni socijalni, politicki, antropoloski, tehnoloski i ini komentari. Kroz sve knjige provlaci se neka atmosfera, neko raspolozenje  koje osecam kao svoje. Izgleda da delim Banksov svetonazor i mnoge stvari koje se meni nemusto motaju po glavi on pretoci u sjajne alegorije svoji romana.

Sve ovo vise govori o meni nego o Kulturi, doduse. Ali, dodjavola, nismo ovde dosli da preobracamo nove fanove vec da nadjemo shvatanje i razumevanje kod postojecih, zar ne? Novi fanovi nek samo slede nas vsetli primer i sve ce biti u redu.

Citao sam ga, inace, hronoloski, kako je izdavano i taj redosled mi je sasvim ok. Nisam siguran koja mi je omiljena knjiga, Consider Phlebas mi je veoma drag jer me je uveo u Kulturu (u stvari prvo sam procitao pricu sa pametnim "pistoljem, to me je navuklo), mozda Palyer ili Use of Weapons.

[PTY]

Čitao samo Consider Phlebes i dobro je to, mada uz podosta škripe, ali nisam shvatio oko čega tolika fama.

Primetila sam da kad god se Culture ozbiljnije rivjuiše, uvek se napomene kako je to svetli primer optimističnog SFa. To valjda potpada pod Banksov svetonazor...  nego, odvajam ovih dana must read serijale koje sam do sada besprekorno eskivirala i ovo mi je među prvima upalo na listu, iako ne znam još da li je Hidrogen sonata tu finalni deo ili ne.

[Mica Milovanovic]

Ne. Nažalost, nisam. "Mićin strah od serijala".


Od Benksa sam pročitao samo prva dva romana koje je potpisao kao Ian Banks... Ne može se sve stići...

[Melkor]

Nije Kultura serijal, samo gomila knjiga smestenih u isti svet.

[Izitpajn]

Primetila sam da kad god se Culture ozbiljnije rivjuiše, uvek se napomene kako je to svetli primer optimističnog SFa.

Pa... Ne baš. Phlebas definitivno nije optimističan. U Player of Games na kraju "good guys win" (nije spojler, vjerujte), ali nekako ti nije drago zbog toga. Jer, na kraju, tko su "good guys"? U Look to Windward, pa, cijela atmosfera i svemir jesu optimistični, ali glavni likovi bogami nisu. Excession: ni izbliza. Mislim, ako je poanta tipa "svi ste vi retardirane amebe" optimistična, onda zbilja... O Use of Weapons bolje da ne govorim. A State of the Art je Banksova verzija J'Accuse, samo što je ovdje, kao prvo, na optuženičkoj klupi cijelo čovječanstvo, zajedno s cijelim svojim kulturnim i nekulturnim naslijeđem, a, kao drugo, (možda spoiler ->) kad na kraju dobiješ presudu, shvatiš da je to jedina moguća presuda...........

Zapravo, ovo gore sam nabrajao kako bih sebi složio popis u glavi. Dakle, ne, optiimzam jest na površini, ali ispod svega toga se valja gadna egzistencijalna gorčina. Likovi jesu veseli i zabavni, ali brzo shvatiš da je, kad su veseli, riječ o njihovom cinizmu i nezainteresiranosti sranjem za koje znaju da je svuda oko njih, a znaju da se ne može riješiti.

Meni je poanta Banksa: svemir je jedno veliko sranje i jedino što ti preostaje je da budeš veseo, čisto kao čin samoob(r/m)ane, ne zato jer si sretan što živiš u "najboljem od mogućih svjetova", nego zato jer će te sve drugo odvesti u ludilo i samouništenje.

[PTY]

Pa, mislim da se pod tim optimizmom više podrazumeva sam pristup temi, negoli sami pojedinačni zapleti. Recimo, nešto duž linije ovog Brinovog komentara, da Banks podrazumeva kako će ljudska vrsta ipak doseći taj status drevne i mudre civilizacije, i pored svih uzgrednih poteškoća. Mada, naravno, nisam čitala pa ne znam koliko je ta procena pouzdana.


Nego, evo nečeg skroz prikladnog:






An Interview With Iain M. Banks on the 25th Anniversary of the Culture








In The Hydrogen Sonata you explore the concept of 'subliming', whereby advanced civilisations achieve a higher level of existence. You've touched on this theme in previous Culture novels, as well as exploring the idea of digital hells inSurface Detail. What is it about these alternative states of being that entices you to write about them?


I guess it's all part of the process of exploring the possibilities the future might offer.  The history of technology is largely about wish-fulfilment, even dream-fulfilment:  as a species we dreamed of being able to fly, of holding conversations with people on the other side of the world, of exploring and travelling to other worlds... well, our technology has achieved these things.  Historically one of the areas we've been busiest in, coming up with usually comforting but frankly unlikely dreams, is that of existence after death, or just avoiding death in the first place; the kind of stuff, in other words, that religions tend to deal with.  Now, while religions tell us next to nothing useful or true about the universe, they do tell us an enormous amount – perhaps an embarrassing amount – about ourselves, about what we value, fear and lust after.  It is now those dreams that we might realistically think about fulfilling.  And that's fertile territory for a skiffy writer, and relevant, because we stand on the brink of creating things like gods – AIs – , we continue to significantly extend our life spans and we seem on the way to blurring the boundary between the real and the virtual to the point of irrelevance.  On matters where only religious writing and faith previously seemed qualified to comment, SF is now able to speak with some degree of authority, or – at the very least – propose alternative angles for looking at the same dreams.  Though of course there will always be those who choose to disagree, unable to accept that religions are simply part of our wacky narrative history rather than direct, if laughably contradictory, conduits to absolute truth.



The rise and fall of civilisations and empires is another recurring theme in your Culture novels, and The Hydrogen Sonata is concerned with the tumultuous last days of a race known as the Gzilt. What is it that fascinates you about the ends of civilisations?  In addition, how far is the endless cycle of civilisations in your Culture universe symptomatic of your belief that existence is just – to use your own term – 'outrageous chaos'?



I think you'd have to have the heart of a cabbage not to be interested in empires falling and civilisations meeting their ends.  We love tragedy as much as comedy, and while we might appreciate, admire and even vicariously glory in the rise to power of somebody or something great, we are certainly capable of appreciating their fall with at least equal relish.  Again, SF gives you the opportunity to talk about this kind of stuff, and to custom-build the setting it all happens within to let you better make your point (history has the unfortunate quality of being, generally, pretty much fixed.  Even the most zealous revisionism can only take you so far).
I suspect the endless-cycling thing going on in the Culture novels is largely about me trying to reconcile the age and scale of the universe – actually, just this galaxy – with the plausible life spans of both creatures even vaguely like ourselves and the likely duration of their institutions, empires and civilisations.  Throughout the Culture sequence especially I've tried to give an impression of the scale of the context beyond the immediate focus of the narrative, both physically and chronologically, and to emphasise that there are lots of different ways for civilisations to interact and develop; with the last three Culture books in particular I've been trying to make it clear that there is a lot more to the galactic meta-civilisation than just the Culture – it's actually a fairly small fraction of the whole.

Beyond that, I might query the "just" in that sentence, "existence is just ... 'outrageous chaos'":  a place within that chaos, that vast unfolding of randomness and pursuance, might be what we're ascending – hopefully and erratically – towards, and what we'll be lucky ever to achieve.  I'd argue that you don't even start to become a part of it until you get all your eggs out of the one home-planet basket.



Music is a prominent feature of The Hydrogen Sonata and seems to play a significant role in your own life – you've previously reviewed music for a radio show and have admitted that you're "a sucker for a good tune", although an interviewer noted in 2009 that your piano rendition of Chopsticks was 'faltering'. How polished are your musical skills these days, and do you listen to music while you write?
I refute that entirely unwarranted assertion robustly!  I've never been able to play "Chopsticks" and I still can't.  I can play the first four bars of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.  So well, indeed, that it remains a constant source of surprise to me that the rest of the piece continues to repel my assaults upon it.  My conventional musical skills, then, remain quite entirely miserable.  However, my skills at putting together pieces of – for want of a better term – music using a terribly clever bit of software called Logic Pro 9 running on a 27" iMac – along with an interface, a few outboard sound modules, a mixer desk and some frighteningly unforgiving speakers – have become sufficient that at least one person is genuinely impressed with the results (though that person would, admittedly, be me).

I listen to music whenever I write.  The radio, as a rule:  Radios One and Six for pop-rock-hip-hop-neo-folk-whatever usually, though, these days, Radio Three with lots of classical music, too, and occasional dips into Two (can't be doing with talk radio, or radio with adverts).  I have multiple playlists ready to go, if there's too much talk on the radio, and Glenn Gould playing Bach as a sort of ultimate resort, for when I really need to concentrate on the words being rattled off the qwerty keyboard and even people singing seems somehow overly intrusive and distracting (distant humming along with the tune is just about acceptable).



With the 25th anniversary of the Culture series now upon us (Consider Phlebaswas published in 1987), have you come to regard the series as your life's work? Do you think you'll ever 'complete' the series, or do you still have a long list of ideas that you want to explore?



I suppose the Culture series will form the largest part of my life's work; it's unlikely I'll come up with another over-arching structure on the same scale now.  I'm perfectly happy with that.  I'll keep writing about the Culture for as long as I still feel there are new things to say, new avenues to explore.  It's important that I feel able to write SF outside the Culture, but even within it the restrictions are minimal; most of the action in most of the Culture books takes place well outside the Culture itself, and it's been that way since the beginning, with Phlebas.

I don't intend ever to complete it; I decided right from the start to resist the temptation to tear it all down at any point, and this has become sort of indicative and symbolic of the nature and demeanour of the Culture itself, now:  it means to resist completion and put off Subliming, so that it can keep on going, sticking around in the Real and trying to do good (as it sees it), for as long as it can, and it's already envisaging that when it does finally fade away, it'll be when its going will hardly be noticed, because being something like the Culture – behaving like it – will be pretty much the default state for all galactic civilisations.  (Though, in this, it could, of course, be completely wrong.)

I've more than enough material and ideas for another full-on Culture novel, and that has been the case for at least the last decade or so, no matter where I've been in the Culture-novel-writing cycle, as new ideas keep on coming along at a slow but steady rate.  At the moment I'm tempted to try something a bit more oblique next time, though I'm also tempted to go with something tighter and more wildly kinetic, too...  Who can say?  We'll see.





You've been writing in the Culture universe for nearly three decades – how do you keep things fresh, and do you still approach new novels with the same sense of excitement? Do you feel you still have anything to prove?
I keep things as fresh as they are – however fresh that may be – by still finding new things to write about.  Sometimes these come from brand new ideas – like the Shellworlds in Matter – and sometimes they come from throw-away ideas – sometimes just single words – in earlier novels (like the airspheres first mentioned in Phlebas turning up again in Look To Windward).  The whole Subliming thing in Hydrogen Sonata is another example; Subliming had been mentioned in various culture novels and I'd never really thought much about it – it just gave me an out for civilisations without them having to collapse in the classical, Ozymandian sense.  Then people at signings and in interviews began to ask about it, so I started to think about it properly and decided/realised that it was an important part of the whole context of the Culture and the rest of the civilised galactic scene, and could provide an interesting setting in which to tell a story.  (This is as close as I ever get, or want to get, to audience participation.)  I still needed an idea for a plot, and so the initial idea might have sat on the shelves for years waiting for one, but then, fortuitously, a plot suggested itself and the book was ready to go almost immediately.  I can remember where and when the idea came to me:  I was lying on a sort of bubble-bed wotsit at the side of a large swimming pool, in the sunlight at a spa complex called Archena, in southern Spain, in October 2011, thinking about an edition of QI I'd seen a week or two earlier, in which Stephen Fry had mentioned something called The Great Disappointment.  Bang; the plot of The Hydrogen Sonata just unfolded in my head.

I guess a little of the excitement I used to feel starting a novel has ebbed away over the years; it's my life, my career, my living, and I've got used to writing a novel more or less every year, so to some degree it's part of a routine, not the dazzling new adventure it used to be.  But that's okay, because there are compensations, and the fact that I oscillate between mainstream and SF means that I'm always writing something different from the last book.  Plus there is, anyway, invariably a point where the book I'm writing, regardless of genre, sort of takes over and energises the whole process; I get all wrapped up in it and come close to forgetting that I've ever written anything else.

Also, if you have any sort of ambition, pride in your work or even self-respect, in a sense you always have something to prove.  I'm getting to the sort of age now when I need to prove there's life in the old dog yet, and fully intend to keep on attempting to do so until it becomes positively embarrassing for all concerned.  (In this scenario, the lunch where your publisher takes you somewhere nice but then asks pointedly what your plans are for your retirement represents the equivalent of the smelly mutt's last trip to the vet.)





The Culture is the ultimate utopia: an egalitarian, post-scarcity society, whose citizens want for nothing and do not fear illness or disease, instead being free to live lives of apparent luxury. Yet what power exists in the Culture is firmly in the hands of the Minds, which are artificial intelligences. To what extent are you suggesting that humankind could not achieve a utopia like that of the Culture without ceding control to machines? Is human nature too destructive and corruptible to ever achieve such a utopia otherwise?
In a sense I'm trying to pre-empt objections to the very idea of the Culture.  Suggesting that beings much like us can achieve a functioning utopia as though it's part of our plausible, easily-envisaged future, our expected and plausible destiny, always seemed a bit wishy-washy to me; too much like just wish-fulfilment.  Arguably we express as too inherently nasty, too prone to become violent, too prone to xenophobia and too easily en-mired in our noxious mythologies of false comfort and dubious exceptionalism for this to make sense (narrative, psychological or philosophical).  Taking away the excuse that we need to be mean and selfish to others because, heck, there just ain't enough of everything to go around... well, that's one step, but I suspect that while it might be necessary to achieve a hi-tech utopia, it's not sufficient.  The Minds – the Culture's high-level AIs – are the other part of the equation.  The humans create them and enough of these god-like entities stick around to save us from ourselves.  The children create the adults, and behave better as a result.  I submit this is no more likely to be wrong than the idea that as soon as we create an AI it'll try to exterminate us is right – that's the us in it talking, if I can put it that way; that's our guilty conscience articulating.  The final get-out is that in the end the mongrel Culture, though suspiciously human-like in so many ways, isn't us, so they might just be naturally nicer than we'd ever be in the same situation.  Cos that's evolution, that is.

Anyway, one of the side-tracks of the Culture I'm thinking about exploring at some point is one of the parts of it where Minds don't get involved, and people run everything themselves; they'd have computers, I guess, but no Minds.  Smart help without any of that concomitant but deeply annoying wisdom.  I am not yet sure how this will go.

The tricky thing about claiming we'll ever create a utopian society is that our record up to this point is so lamentable:  you can create something as close to utopia as technologically possible at any point in your development once you have a reliable surplus of food and goods; it's not about having rocket-belts, floating cities or even smart-alec drones, it's about having the shared urge, resolve and will to behave decently, altruistically and non-xenophobically towards your fellow human beings, whether your latest invention was the wheel, moveable type or an FTL drive.  And in that respect – I humbly submit – we've been heading backwards quite rapidly over the last thirty years or so.  It would be pleasant to believe that we're starting to pull up and out of our nose-dive into the morass of Greedism and Marketolatry that has characterised our civilisation for the last three decades, but frankly it's still too early to tell yet.







You've mentioned before that you created the Culture as a deliberate response to the science fiction of the time, which was largely concerned with dystopias. To what extent was your earlier science fiction deliberately aimed at challenging genre conventions, or was your subverting of certain tropes merely a by-product of your desire to tell a ripping story? And is it important for SF writers to strike out into uncharted territory, or is the story all that really matters?

I don't think I saw it as challenging genre conventions as such; I just did what any fan of a genre (who has ambitions to create within that genre) does:  look at what's on offer, think "I can do that," and then "But I want to do it differently, I want to do it this way."  Especially in SF, it seems right to try to improve on what's already been produced, to take matters forward, to climb onto the shoulders of the giants who have gone before.  What I wanted to read – and so to write – was SF with the energy, vitality and can-do attitude of so much great American SF, but which was as well written as so much of the usually more reflective, nuanced and less gung-ho British stuff.  What I wanted to avoid was what I saw as the economic – and to some degree political – naivety of the US writers and the sheer god-awful sub-Orwellian miserablism of the Brits.  Whether I've succeeded or not isn't for me to say, but either way I'm sure I've managed to introduce my own intrinsic, embedded annoyances that other writers have been, are and will be reacting against for some time.  This is entirely right and proper, by the way, and just the way the whole system works.  So there.
I think with SF yes, you do, generally, need to strike out into uncharted territory, though there will always be writers for whom the story is all that really matters.  Room in the field for both.







The serene image of the Culture hides a dark underbelly: the various agents and AIs that stay in the shadows, working to protect the Culture's existence and future by monitoring and meddling in the affairs of other civilisations. To what extent is this persistent interference a reflection of real-world events? You were a vocal critic of the Iraq war, so is it fair to assume that you are influenced by international politics and that your feelings about world events work their way into your novels, perhaps in some cases even driving them?

It's not a deliberate or thought-out policy, though, as I've always said, even space opera isn't written in a vacuum (repeat until funny ... thank you Mark and Lard).  So events in reality will seep in, I guess.  The position implied regarding the use of torture in Transition is entirely a reaction to then (and still) current events and effectively my contribution to the debate.  Shameful though it is that we should even be having it.







Despite being a pacifistic utopia that promotes tolerance, the Culture's 'Special Circumstances' division sometimes resorts to shady practices to defend its civilisation's 'moral right to exist'. Do you regard any of these practices as ethically problematic, or is any act acceptable when it's geared towards protecting the ultimate utopia?
Very ethically problematic.  The Culture itself – both en masse and in the shape of the tiny numbers of people and machines engaged in or in any relevant way connected to that sort of behaviour – is disturbed by the very idea that such actions might ever be justified.  That's why they don't do it very often and they're constantly re-calibrating the moral cost-benefit balance through the use of assiduously gathered and honestly deployed statistics (said a Culture spokesperson).  Of course, my need to tell a story of even the slightest degree of rip-roaringness means that the novels tend to concentrate on exactly the kind of life-threatening mayhem that the entire Culture is very carefully designed to obviate, both within it and – to the extent that it reasonably and ethically can project its values – around it.  The impression the books might give is that this action-adventure stuff is happening all the time all over the place, and that's just not true.  (But there we are – that's fiction.)  Technically, also, any Mind would tell you that the more often you have to resort to bad behaviour to keep yourself safe, the less plausible your claim to be part of a utopia is.  A true utopia implies an inclusivity, a comprehensiveness – limited only by consent – or it's not really a utopia at all.  Living in a gated community and employing hired muscle to keep you comfy does not mean that you live in a little utopia.  It means you live in a dystopia and happen to be one of the privileged.







A sense of humour runs through all of the Culture novels, whether it's in the form of an eccentric drone or in your famously unconventional ship names – and the humour isn't just limited to humans. If we consider humour to be something of a coping mechanism, how important is it as a pre-requisite to a civilisation's development and continued existence? And while we're on topic, where do you get those ship names from?



Very good question.  We'll never truly know until we either meet proper space aliens or create some really high-end virtual civilisations of our own, inside a computer.  I suspect – hazarding – it's all-important.  Not as a deliberate ploy or strategy you can choose to pursue but as a near-infallibly significant emergent property.  I think it's pretty much accepted there is a strong link between what you might call a broad, well-balanced intelligence, and wit.  So I'm assuming, anyway.  Sadly, being just one very limited human being, I can't make the Minds as cutting, witty and just plain smart as they really would be (did they actually exist – I have to keep reminding myself they don't.  This is very annoying).

Ah, the ship names.  Sometimes they're a result of me just keeping my ears open, but mostly they come from me trying to think myself into the mind-set of the Minds (or at least a reasonably clued-up human Culture citizen – let's not get too ambitious, given the above and how much I've banged on in book after book about the transcendently ineffable intellectual fabulousness of the Minds).  Then I just think about how the Culture would look upon a bunch of barbarians like us, and take it from there.

I am aware this is not a furiously helpful answer.  My apologies.









You've created a vast setting where theoretically almost anything is possible. While this gives you an impressively large and expansive canvas to work with, is it important to instil a sense of realism and humanity in your characters? Or is the whole notion of realism (as we understand it) a redundant concept in a world where many people live in hedonistic bliss?

Well, you have to have the feeling that the writer can't just write him or herself into a corner and then do the with-one-mighty-leap-he-was-free! thing.  There's no jeopardy, no tension and little interest if you do that.  You are allowed to feel that the writer's on the side of the protagonist, but not that they're necessarily going to make sure everything's going to work out all right no matter what (actually that's not true; there are lots of series in lots of media where that's exactly what people want and what they get.  Again; room in all the fields for all tastes).  And there has to be realism in any depiction of utopia.  There is still failure, embarrassment, thwarted ambition, unrequited love and the possibility of suffering a broken heart, even in the Culture.  Not to mention existential despair at the utter incorrigibility of one's fellow, less morally developed galaxy-users, almost no matter where or when you care to look.





Ever since Consider Phlebas, large set-pieces (often involving big explosions, which you're a self-professed fan of) have been a regular feature of the Culture novels. Is writing these epic sequences your favourite part of penning a new story, or do you take equal satisfaction from the interactions of your characters and exploring political and social ideas through their deeds?







It is one of the most enjoyable bits, I do confess.  Ultimately, the thing I enjoy most is putting together a good, well-balanced novel; the set-pieces, like any other aspect, can't be allowed to play too big a part in that or the whole thing gets out of kilter.  Still, I'd love to pack another novel with as many action sequences as Phlebas, but then that was the result of sweeping up a couple of decades-worth of such ideas (most of which had been left on the shelf because they were so preposterously over-the-top ... or under-the-bottom in the case of the fist-fight under the giant hovercraft) and cramming them into the one novel just for the hell of it, so I guess that isn't going to happen unless I stop writing for an unfeasibly long time – even supposing I keep on having that sort of idea in the first place.  Still, keeping that kinetic quality in the Culture books is important to me.  The characters just have to make their way through the stories and plots as best they can and frankly I pretty much leave them to it.  The political and social ideas I touch upon are equally subject to being bundled and tumbled along by the story, rather than ever being granted central stage.  Best is when it all comes together and the characters, the story and the ideas all coalesce within a given sequence, producing something – in its own modest way – transcendent.  That's the gold standard, that's the longed-for ideal.

Still working on that.


Maybe one day...




http://www.orbitbooks.net/interview/iain-m-banks-on-the-25th-anniversary-of-the-culture/

[Izitpajn]

Pa, mislim da se pod tim optimizmom više podrazumeva sam pristup temi, negoli sami pojedinačni zapleti. Recimo, nešto duž linije ovog Brinovog komentara, da Banks podrazumeva kako će ljudska vrsta ipak doseći taj status drevne i mudre civilizacije, i pored svih uzgrednih poteškoća. Mada, naravno, nisam čitala pa ne znam koliko je ta procena pouzdana.

Nije pouzdana jer Kultura nema veze s Homo Sapiensima. To su neki neodređeni humanoidni mješanci. A u "State of teh Art" Kultura dolazi na Zemlju 20-og stoljeća kao tajni agenti-promatrači koji bi trebali ocijeniti je li Zemlja spremna za kontakt.