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A Few Notes on the Culture by Iain M Banks

This article was posted to newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written on 10 Aug 1994 on behalf of Iain M Banks by Ken MacLeod.

At the time of the Culture stories, there are perhaps a few dozen major space-faring civilisations, hundreds of minor ones, tens of thousands of species who might develop space-travel, and an uncountable number who have been there, done that, and have either gone into locatable but insular retreats to contemplate who-knows-what, or disappeared from the normal universe altogether to cultivate lives even less comprehensible. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is — without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset — intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings. If you know what a Ringworld is — invented by Larry Niven; a segment of a Dyson Sphere — then just discard the shadow-squares, shrink the whole thing till it’s about three million kilometres across, and place in orbit around a suitable star, tilted just off the ecliptic; spin it to produce one gravity and that gives you an automatic 24-hour day-night cycle (roughly; the Culture’s day is actually a bit longer).

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