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JgPz posted:I just finished after putting it down for a couple weeks, more out of ocd than genuine interest. The ending was cool, I didn't care a lick for Zakalwe so I was just like 'hehe twisty'. Reading it as a comedy definitely helped, the part where Zakalwe fights the voiceless guy was funny. I assumed he shaved his head as a remembrance to that time, since I was pretty sure he died or became useless as a field agent at the end, which would explain why Sma was recruiting a new merc. proudfoot posted:You kind of get the idea that the Culture has been technologically stagnant for a while - and the only way forward for them would be to sublime. I don't think it's that they're technologically stagnant. It's more that they've reached the point where the type of advancements being made are so esoteric that they don't have an effect on the daily life of the Culture's population. One of the ships in Excession shrugs off the abilities of the Sleeper Service, assuming that it hadn't kept up with technological improvements during the 40 years of its Eccentricity.
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Oct 31, 2009 05:19
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I came across an interview with Banks on the adaptation of A Gift From the Culture, and Hollywood's take on his Culture books in general: http://www.empireonline.com/News/story.asp?nid=26180 There's also this little bit quote:That said, this isn’t The Culture’s first brush with our Earth cinema, as Banks reveals that the second novel The Player of Games was once on the agenda at Pathe. “About ten years ago a chap from Pathe persuaded them to buy the rights – not just the option but the rights,” he says. “It got some way along and had some serious money spent on it, even by Hollywood standards, and there were various names attached. But eventually the guy whose baby it was left, and it was then cancelled by the incoming team, for the usual reasons: if it had been a success it would’ve been his success, and if it’d been a failure it would’ve been their failure. That was the closest we’ve come before, to a proper nibble. It wasn’t even a nibble, it was a real bite, but we couldn’t reel it in! Hah! Couldn’t land the blighter!”
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Nov 10, 2009 02:17
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mllaneza posted:The ship names have a limit, which is keeping me from several names I wanted to use. I bet my Ethics Gradient was cooler than yours. 
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Feb 24, 2010 06:34
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And also aHumans are basically Uncle Toms.
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May 15, 2010 04:42
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mllaneza posted:That, and if the Minds are anything like me or some of my friends, maybe they just love hosting parties. Sometimes even the harshest-looking phallic war machine wants to dress up like a fuzzy creature and host a party. 
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May 19, 2010 20:03
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The Algebraist's cover was pretty rad, but then again it's an actual picture of Jupiter.
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Jun 24, 2010 21:41
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Mr. Peepers posted:We know so little about the characters before the Staberind incident that it just doesn't have much impact. This was kind of the same problem I had with Excession and Genar-Hofoen.
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Aug 7, 2010 08:04
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gvibes posted:I just can't handle these gibberish sections in Feersum Endjinn. Good god. Like the others said, I got into a groove with it after a while. Besides, it also helped sell the Ergates stuff.
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Sep 29, 2010 20:32
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andrew smash posted:What happens when a god gets tired of taking care of its indifferent worshippers? I know at least some of you guys played black & white too. Peer pressure from its fellow gods keeps it in check, or they give it a mean name behind its back or something.
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Nov 3, 2010 02:19
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The Greater Reviled, duh. 
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Nov 6, 2010 04:17
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I thought it was just a knife missile that would follow the person around, which Zakalwe didn't gave much problem with.
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Nov 11, 2010 01:38
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Suits can have a range of intelligence. There's a basic minimum needed which is needed to keep the thing running smoothly (and I think the Culture tends to require things past a certain point of complexity to be sentient), but the user can request something more in line with a normal person or drone. Genar-Hofoen's suit was pretty dumb, but in that short story, Descendant, the suit's inner monologue seems pretty normal, if delusional.
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Nov 11, 2010 20:59
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Reading through Look to Windward again, I came across this bit:quote:'In any case, even if heaven did not exist originally, people have created it. It does exist. In fact, lots of different heavens exist.' 
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Feb 8, 2011 06:24
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andrew smash posted:Actually I have the same opinion of Consider Phlebas, I guess I just like space romps. Any time I look at my copy, I feel bad, because it's got that  shuttle the Culture sent to ferry off those cultists right on the cover. Poor, stupid shuttle. 
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Feb 11, 2011 21:25
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The nonary is a nice touch.
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May 16, 2011 00:11
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Especially when you have Orbitals managing the lives of billions of inhabitants perfectly well with just a single Mind (and sometimes without one).
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Jun 3, 2011 06:30
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Hey, I liked the guy on Pittance.
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Jun 8, 2011 05:50
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As neat as the Culture is as a setting, I think I've enjoyed the characters in Banks' other science fiction stories more. Especially Ergates.
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Jul 25, 2011 05:16
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Lasting Damage posted:I forget which book(s?) talked about it, but I thought the reason most of the Culture (and some other independent species) were pan-human was literally just because its currently in fashion. The reasoning was that most species didn't evolve into that configuration but chose to change themselves because its a bit like learning a widely spoken language: convenient and makes travelling the galaxy simpler. In Excession, one of the character's ancestors looked like potted plants because it was the style at the time. Banks has said that the initial group of civilizations that became The Culture were roughly humanoid, though. Graviton v2 posted:No poo poo, can you quote it? Dont have book or file with me right now. Appendices: the Idiiran-Culture war posted:(The following three passages have been extracted from A Short History of the Idiran War (English language/Christian calendar version, original text 2110 AD, unaltered). edited by Parharengysa Listach Ja'andeesih Petrain dam Kotosko. The work forms part of an independent, non-commissioned but Contact-approved Earth Extro-Information Pack.) The Dark One fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Sep 29, 2011 |
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Sep 29, 2011 01:50
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syphon posted:Well he IS a British Author after all. Commonwealth's loyalty to the queen and whatnot. Yeah, my Orbit trade paperbacks even have a "NOT FOR SALE IN THE USA" warning next to the UPC.
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Sep 30, 2011 01:05
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He wrote a bunch of science fiction novels before any of them were ever published, so I don't know if he intended that one to be the introduction of the Culture when he penned it. I think Use of Weapons is the oldest story, and it sat for a long time without the narrative structure we know and love. e: according to wiki, the old verwsion of use of weapons dates back to '74 The Dark One fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Feb 28, 2012 |
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Feb 28, 2012 21:01
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Feersum Endjinn has a bunch of phonetic narration, but it stops being work after a while. It's also the Banks book with my favourite character.
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Mar 2, 2012 04:58
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Mr. Peepers posted:Your relativity doodlings made me realize that Banks has, as far as I know, completely ignored time travel as a possibility in the culture series. Under relativity performing time travel is more or less trivial once you allow FTL travel, so I wonder if he just hasn't gotten around to it yet or intends to completely ignore its possibility (not an unreasonable position, to be honest). Why bothering traveling in time when you can just use your self-aware black body object to travel to a younger universe?
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Mar 22, 2012 03:02
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Fragmented posted:For what it's worth i remember a drone thinking something was "As impossible as traveling through time." it one of the books, either Matter or Use of Weapons i think. Banks covered this in one of the more recent books, with a soldier trapped inside a slowly overheating spacecraft wondering about the backed-up version of herself that would be reborn, and how much she'd changed from being that person.
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Mar 22, 2012 19:29
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a kitten posted:awesome pictures Is that Marain functional (has anyone actually made it functional?) I remember watching a video of somebody creating a nonary typeface, but I don't remember if it covered anything about the structure of Marain itself.
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Mar 23, 2012 02:17
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If a recent copy of your mindtsate isn't a good enough match to be you, then you aren't the person who fell asleep in your bed, either.
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Mar 24, 2012 02:11
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TouretteDog posted:Does this mean that you should or should not fear death if you're backed up? I suspect it comes down to how much you subjectively value internalist vs externalist notions of identity. If you die, the 'you' that is represented by a continuous stream of consciousness doesn't get to have any more fun, but at least your family won't have to miss you. I think it's a feeling of familiarity with the technology that would make the idea easier for people. If I knew, and had always known, that I could wake up the next day after a sudden death, then I'd probably treat it as the equivalent of getting really wasted at a party and waking up without any memory of the previous evening. I can't say I'd be that carefree if the tech was plopped into my lap today, though.
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Mar 25, 2012 18:40
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If you drill down far enough, you just have particles with certain properties like spin and momentum. Any hydrogen atom is as good as the next one, so if you can map the right properties onto it, it's like having two of the original. Scale that up far enough and you'll get a perfect duplicator. perfect!~~~~
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Mar 26, 2012 19:06
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andrew smash posted:To each their own I guess. I read ringworld as a teenager and thought it was awesome, then reread it a couple years ago and thought it was garbage. In comparison I've been reading the culture books for about a decade and things i've really enjoyed about them have shifted over the years but my experiences with them have always been very positive. I always preferred his short stories. He still had fun with his high concept ideas about teleporters in your living rooms, or the tidal forces from a neutron star, but didn't have as much opportunity to bog things down. The Dark One fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Apr 4, 2012 |
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Apr 4, 2012 04:47
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Horza sees the human portion of the Culture as decadent, dependent parasites to their AI and the AI themselves as mechanical, un-life monstrosities. This doesn't mesh with reality (because as far as I can tell Banks' AIs are always goofy and chaotic and approximately human) but it's not really stupid either, just ignorant. He's the kind of person who'd vote for the fire-and-brimstone guy, even if he disagreed with all his views, because the candidate for the Democrats was a smug, big-city hotshot. The Dark One fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Apr 4, 2012 |
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Apr 4, 2012 15:59
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Was that the drone that was genuinely thousands of years old, or the hipster who just wanted a big case for the look of it?
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Apr 5, 2012 03:07
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No love for Inversions?
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Apr 7, 2012 22:52
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Seldom Posts posted:It's not a binary of Idrian vs. Culture. Horza fights for the Idrians because he is against the Culture, not because he is in favour of the Idrians. If I recall correctly (and I may be misremembering this in light of my thoughts above) he says something to the effect that he fights for the Idrians because under them you will still have the "freedom to be wrong," (although this presuambly may involve getting tortured by them) whereas under the Culture, how can you possibly be free to be wrong if an Omniscient AI is going to correct you? The Culture thinks its way of life is so self-evidently awesome that any outside visitor to a Ship or Orbital or whatever will end up being an ambassador for the Culture to their own kind, spreading the word even farther. The Idiran Empire, conversely, didn't try to capture anyone's hearts. At one point, they made Horza recite a prayer in a dead Idiran dialect he couldn't understand to a God that personally offended him. The wasn't to correct his heathen ways, but to get that symbolic gesture of obedience out of him. They didn't care what he was thinking, as long as he was willing to fall in line, because they didn't view him (or any species in the Culture) as being much more than a fleshy soulless robot.
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Jun 4, 2012 15:54
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Lasting Damage posted:He did. Fields definitely hold the atmosphere in place on Orbitals. I'm pretty sure its mentioned in Consider Phlebas when Vavatch is described. There's probably passing references in the other books too. Yeah, in Player of Games, Banks mentions the Limiting Factor going through a 'tensor field' before passing over Chiark's retaining walls. Anyway, the Culture obviously doesn't have a problem with using fields to hold in an atmosphere- look at the exterior balconies on the GSV in Use of Weapons.
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Jul 5, 2012 09:23
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Owlkill posted:Feersum Endjinn If I remember it correctly, the diaspora turned the sun itself into the fearsome engine. It would dim a bit overall as it ejected more mass in one direction until it could get out of the way of the cloud.
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Aug 11, 2012 04:46
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ConanTheLibrarian posted:Ok this is from a while back but the answer is the solar system was moving away from the dust cloud. The Sun being the fearsome engine, was pretty clear to me, but what I didn't get from the end was who the guy at the top of the tower was. Was he some transhuman just waiting around in stasis for someone to show up? Is he some a construct like Asura, but with fewer constraints on seeming normal, and therefor not concerned with regular human food?
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Sep 11, 2012 02:29
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ConanTheLibrarian posted:If an entire race/religion/other "branch" of humanity was lost for some reason, I think people would consider that a big deal. I don't think it's clear if the Changers were 'human' any more than the Azadians, or the civilization in A Gift From the Culture were. Even Culture residents are the result of a half-dozen races genetically modifying themselves to the point where they could interbreed.
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Sep 13, 2012 02:28
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Player of Games is a good, accessible novel, but it didn't grab me as much as a lot of people in this thread. You didn't mention Look to Windward, but I'd recommend it anyway. It doesn't have Consider Phlebas' crazy action set-pieces, but it touches on the repercussions of the Idiran-Culture war more than any of the other Culture books.
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Oct 10, 2012 04:51
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Hey, you've got die-hard gliding and lava flow purists who will only accept things if they've done all the work themselves. I'm sure there are some obstinate people who would only read a book if they had personally mulched its fibers and set the type themselves.
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Nov 5, 2012 16:11
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Prolonged Priapism posted:I've thought about it a lot actually, and the whole Banks cosmology, with ships skipping in and out of 4D (from which you can see a 2D representation of real space), antimatter warheads going off, and ship drives making wakes/reacting against the sparkling ocean of the energy grid(s), would probably provide some pretty awesome (and unconventional) combat visuals. If you did it right. Just imagine the Winnebago in Spaceballs making skid marks in space when breaking hard, only this time there are two sets of marks, one each level of that meta-universal onion. 
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Nov 19, 2012 07:04
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