Contact and Special Circumstances || The Culture Lore
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- In Iain M Banks’ popular science fiction series known as the Culture series, Contact is a division within the Culture that deals with the interaction of alien and foreign societies outside the Culture as well as matters of a military nature.
#theculture #iainmbanks #sciencefiction
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MY STUFF
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MY SCI-FI NOVELS
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DELPHINE DESCENDS
After her family is killed and her homeworld occupied, young Kathreen Martin is sent to the distant world of Furoris for re-education. She will live the rest of her life as a serf - to be bought and sold as a commodity of the Imperial Network.
When her only chance of escape is ruined, a chance mistaken identity offers her a new life as the orphaned daughter of a First-Citizen Senator and heiress to a vast fortune.
She vows to claw her way into power to sit among the worlds’ elite. Then, with her own hands, she will reap bloody vengeance on them all.
But to beat them, she must play their game. And she must play it better than them all.
BLACK MILK
Prometheus has the chance to bring his wife back from the dead, but doing so will mean the destruction of Earth.
Spanning time, planets and dimensions, Black Milk draws to a climactic point in a post-apocalyptic future, where humanity, stranded with no planet to call home, fights to survive against a post-human digital entity that pursues them through the depths of space.
Five lives separated by aeons are inextricably linked by Prometheus’s actions:
Ystil.3 is an AI unit sent back in time from the distant future to investigate Prometheus’s discovery...
The mysterious Lydia has devoted her life to finding a planet that the last remaining humans can call home…
Tom Jones (he’s a HUGE fan!) is an AI trapped inside a digital subspace, lost and desperate to find his way back to his beloved in real-time…
Dr Norma Stanwyck is a neuroscientist from 24th Century Earth whose personal choices ripple throughout time...
Prometheus must learn the necessity of death or the entire universe will be swallowed by his grief.
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GOODREADS
You can stalk me on Goodreads to see what I'm currently reading. bit.ly/3rrcByD
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IMAGE USE
The images in my videos are mostly licensed stock photos. However, occasionally I will use images found online. I always seek to properly credit artists and offer a link back to their amazing work but sometimes it's hard to find the original source of the work. If I've used an image you own and I haven't credited you, please feel free to get in touch as I am always more than happy to do so.
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I just finished re-reading Excession. A subplot dealt with a social influencer's wish to become a "glamorous" contact agent (be careful what you wish for) that was exploited by SC to accomplish their own goals. It speaks to Bank's foresight when you consider the book was published in 2008, before social influencers were really a thing.
Excession is one of my favourites in the series. Prescient in so many ways!
Excession was published in 1996
@@RCD434 Thanks for the correction. My 2008 date came from the Kindle edition. I should not have assumed that was relevant for first publish. The earlier date speaks even louder to Banks' foresight. Thanks again.
@@libertyauto totally agree. The fact that he wrote it all in the mid-90s is much more impressive
I've read Excession a few times, who's the social influencer? The pregnant woman (I've forgotten all the names since they're all silly throughout the books)? Her ex who likes hanging out with the digusting would-be Klingons (or else maybe the disgusting British upper-class come to think of it)? The big odd spaceship that takes dead bodies for intergalactic holidays? The young girl who grows up on an asteroid and has 18 beds? Yeah I can see you might mean her, she's unbearable, self-centred, thinks she knows everything but actually knows nothing... yeah I can see that.
But women like that existed in the '90s and long before. In the past they wanted to work in the media. Particularly in the career of "Presenter". That's where you're on TV all the time despite not being talented in anything, or even bearable.
In the past we had presenters, but they were usually comedians or singers or something, taking time off from their actual, really existing career, to do a bit of mugging at the camera, and tell the odd joke or maybe sing a song at the end. Bruce Forsythe is a British example. But nowadays they'd either win a contest with Simon fucking Cowell, or else suck off the producer at the demand of a phone call. The latter at least had a career that laster until their looks went, the Simon Cowell ones lasted 6 months til the series ran again and somebody else wins your job.
Which sounds cruel but really it's fair. The public deserve better than nobody-at-all on their TV screens. That is if they even still watch TV.
You make it very tempting to start reading the series! Thanks! 😀
You're in for a treat.
You should! That is if you haven't already in the last 7 months. "Consider Phlebas" is a great book but it's the first Culture book and mostly takes place away from The Culture, you see very little of it.
I'd recommend "Use Of Weapons". It's very good, has quite a bit of Culture in it, as well as other interstellar people living their weird lives. Just a little spoiler but there's a scene at a party where a surgeon has some very good tools. He dismembers people, has their guts hanging out of their belly, arms twiste over, really horrific injuries. The injuries are all real, but nobody feels any pain, he's switched that off, and ensured their body systems all continute working correctly. It's all just for a laugh. Partly just for fun, partly for fashion. People line up at the party to have things done to them!
That scene isn't even important to the story! It's just such a great "meanwhile..."! The story deals with an agent who is non-Culture but get hired a lot by Special Circumstances to do their dirty work, and is paid basically whatever he wants, since there's very little The Culture can't have or arrange.The work is pretty dirty!
There's also... the chapters interleave. You come to realise that half of the chapters are the story, the other half are our man's life story. But still, you read the pages in the normal order, and come to realise some amazing things til the very amazing ending. Which won't have any meaning unless you've read the entire book through to that point. Very good book.
There's also "Player Of Games" which is a bit more tame, but the beginnng illustrates what Culture citizens do with their lives. Mostly hobbies, and getting the Mind that controls their habitat to build them a nice, unique house somewhere far away, if that's what they like. Some do. And they chill out with their Culture-human friends and the many drones and robots that live around the place. Drones don't tend to have houses AFAIK, they don't need them, since the weather doesn't bother them. Then the Minds have interstellar conversations, each one being one of the cleverest things known to exist. Mostly they just gossip. But sometimes plot. A plot that achieves it's effect, sometimes a big one, using as little effort and disruption as possible, is respected most. Then they gossip about that. Once there was a Mind that let another Mind live inside it's own computer, since it had room. The guest Mind built itself a little castle and chatted to it's host now and then.
SC is, in my mind, Banks’s homage to Ian Fleming’s Double O section in the James Bond novels, doing the sexy dirty jobs with a certain old world panache… Same seedy glamour, same love of gadgets and same encounters with evil, over the top villains… so pay attention 007…
Suggestion for another Culture topic: Are Culture citizens human?
Banks uses the word human to refer to them, but humans from Earth are explicitly not Culture members. What does he mean by it?
Additionally, despite the stated respect and restraint toward its biological/organic citizens, isn't the Culture a Level Eight Involved directly because it is run by Artificial Minds?
That’s a great suggestion!
Humans in the story refers to as bipedal biological creature. Earth’s human are known as "human-basic". Think of it as how we see dogs as dogs but dogs has different breed that makes them different. Plus anything that has achieve a “personality” can join the culture should they wish to. So in a way, a knife missies with an built in Ai would be a Culture citizens and will have the same rights as a human.
There’s a bit of a cyclical multiverse thing he mentions in his page “a few notes on the culture”
I recently decided to re-read the series, it's as enjoyable as it was the first time. I have a friend who reads thrillers but didn't know that Iain Banks and Iain M Banks were the same author, I lent him my copy of Consider Phlebas, he's hooked.
Bad advice, glad that it still worked. I think Consider Phelebas is by far the worst Culture novel.
I just realised neal ashers polity is a cheap arcade friendly ripoff of Banks' Culture
I love the art you use in your vids. It always fits what's being said, and sometimes I'm thinking "Does he commision it?" 👍
Thanks! I try to find art that fits in well but no I don’t commission them. I do spend lot of time hunting through stock libraries 😁
@@Sci-FiOdyssey I appreciate that you take the time to use stock instead of just using generated images.
Thank you for these awesome videos! Beautiful images, nice voice to listen to, you bring Ian back alive 🙏 Great work! Highly apreciated 👋🫀
Love your culture reviews and breakdowns from my favourite book series
Thanks 🙏
love this youre the only one who talks about this series.
There is something very British about the Culture. I would draw a straight line from Special Circumstances to MI6 or even the SAS. Sometimes you gotta do what you have to do.
"Restoria Section" 3:24 and Warhammer 40k Tyrannids took that personally 🤣
“Hegemonizing Swarms”. sorry..
Do any of the books have actual Robots? I know there is the MIND and ai drones and such, but are there any books in the series you would say are featuring full on Robots and not just sentient computers?
Excellent. Now I would like to know how to sign up for the Culture?
Get in line!🤣
Yes, please.
maybe a mind will read the comment and consider it😋
Become the change.
Canonically they were here in 1979 and (so the GCU mind claimed) the consensus from the Minds was that we were not ready.
How do they get any plot point going?
I'm new to Sci-fi and only read Red Rising and currently reading Enders Game, do you think Culture is dense and hard to understand for someone new to sci-fi?
Good question. I think it depends which Culture books you start with (they don’t need to be read in order). For someone new to sci-fi I’d recommend starting with Player of Games and then move onto Consider Phlebas. By then you should be more than ready for the others. Hope that helps!😀
@@Sci-FiOdyssey Ok I'll try to read Player Of Games and see how i like it.
@@muttineni03and how did you like it?
@@joshuawilliams9247 Are you asking about Red Rising?
Good to see people still promoting this series. It came close to being made into an Amazon series but was canceled. Well worth reading.
*sigh* as an old git i miss the period when a new Culture novel would pop up from time to time ... Iain was a legend.
WTF are there still no films/tv-series of his work?
A lot of the Iain M Banks work was optioned but its exceedingly difficult to bring it to the screen without a high budget and of course high budgets often means a work losing some of its essence.
They'd ruin it. Plus it doesn't fit within the mentality of the studios
After finishing the Red Rising series (until the next book comes out), this sounds incredibly captivating. Great video, Darrel!
Thanks. I hope you enjoy them if you decide to give them a go.
I've read all the Culture books, as far as I know, and I think all of M's other scifi work too. One or two of the non-Culture books have a sneaky easter-egg in there too, referring back to The Culture or somebody we know.
I've never heard of the Obletionaries. What book was that? Sounds interesting, I can't recall it at all and I'm sure it's something I would have noticed! The idea of being able to re-seed not just the human-oid race, as well as the plant and animal life necessary to support it, as well as the technology... You could store so much information in some tiny little cube I'm sure, and some sort of 3D printer could print a bigger 3D printer til you were up to reconstructing anything you wanted from Santa Claus machines...
How would you raise the people? Would they start of as babies and need civilising and teaching? How would you guarantee they grow up the way you wanted them to? The Culture itself creates very nice people (usually), and that's usually just a result of having anything you want, ever. But the human mind is a funny old thing, Some people are sadists and monsters. All of that's in the genome somewhere, or perhaps results from the chaotic system that is a human brain. You can only "teach" so much.
You'd need a lot of people. Maybe a lot of frozen clones, or even frozen adults. Lots of resources, although post-scarcity makes that easy...ish. There's still the problem of whatever destroyed The Culture in the first place presumably being around. You'd need some nippy spaceships, a whole fleet, with the address of somewhere nice to live, that nobody knows about, that doesn't already have a civilisation on it. Seems to me that intelligent life is inevitable on any planet with life. Intelligence has certain evolutionary advantages, whoever climbs that tree fastest wins and gets to rule the world.
Did Iain explain how it'd work? He was a clever bloke, may the Great Atheismo bless him. If anyone could figure that one out, he probably could. Or else a few Minds could conspire, as they do behind the scenes of basically everything that happens in The Culture. It's all plots against plots!
Watching this video makes me want to reread some of these novels. Iain Banks wasn't one to write a guide to his universe, so it's up to you! Thanks!.
What a great and apt final quote from the master.
I've been watching your old videos(I find them relaxing) and I need to warn you of something: change the links to your books in the old videos descriptions. For some reason the links are leading to weird animated p0rn (maybe the link shortener server you used in the past was sold to one of those domains) instead of the Amazon pages. Keep up the great work, luv!
Firstly THANK YOU for letting me know about the links. How awful! I'm changing them asap! Secondly, thanks for liking my videos 🙏
You are a nice ad for the culure series al get it once i read gold coast.
The SC plotlines were almost always the most interesting, just because they got themselves into the most dangerous situations.
"If you want peace you must prepare for war"
"If you want war you must prepare for peace"
@@sammiller6631 Not actually true, but yeah if you don't prepare for the peace after war you'll just start one of those amazingly destructive cycles of hatred.
when the culture went to war with the idirans, and the idirans destroyed the first orbital, the culture minds could not comprehend such a senseless loss in matter, life, and energy - nothing was defending it, if they wanted it, they could just say "this is ours now", the culture had a rude wakeup call about assuming everyone advanced must have a baseline level of rationality