Banks evidently subscribes to some form of linguistic determinism...
How confusing. I thought that Whorf was a character from Star Trek?
If I do get around to writing my piece, it won't be until at least next week. I like where you're you're going with it and this is reminding me a lot about Player of Games, which faded into memory faster than I expected it to. (Maybe that was the oxycodone? 10 weeks post-surgery today!)
There's great choice in how they build their societies internally. I think part of the complexity is the more restrictive paths that lead to, for lack of a better word, greatness - galaxy-spanning-ness. The resources and organization needed to do this do not come naturally whatever society you devise, although Azad (and Idir!) certainly made it harder on themselves by equating greatness with conquering other civs and dominating their societies, while the Culture just sidesteps planets and settled systems. But the Culture also made a compromise, from an anthropocentric POV at least, because it presumably got its ridiculous level of technology and resources at least partly by unleashing its AIs and making them Minds.
I enjoyed the post and found it interesting despite not having read any of the books. This is a tantalizing point.
The point I want to emphasize is that Azad and the Culture have the societies and the ethics they do not by necessity but by choice, and those choices are embodied in the education they give their members; and in this critical respect they are not opposites, but points on a continuum. Flere-Imsaho:
On a trivial note, every time I've seen a reference in one of the culture posts to Mawhrin-Skel my brain tries to interpret it as a baby-talk parody (a la "baba wawa" ) of "Martin Shkreli". It almost works.
I re-read CP a couple of days ago. I'd forgotten what a romp it was, although I got stuck at the end, with the reveal about Yalson, who then of course comes to a sticky end - I imagine that having recently had a partner in the same situation, I found it tougher going than before (as well as being a bit of a cheap shot, in terms of storytelling).
These posts are very interesting, as they focus both on the first few books and on Banks's worldbuilding. I imagine that for most authors, writing the first novel of what might be a huge series or might end up being a standalone, worldbuilding takes a backseat to other considerations, and happens somewhat naturally.
If you're heeding the "show, don't tell" adage at the beginning of a potential series, there are plenty of shadows and foggy nebulae for plot devices to emerge from. It's only later, when you explore that territory, that you find yourself filling in the blanks - and perhaps constrained by earlier choices.
(You see this with Tolkien. The Hobbit is a fun romp for kids, with plenty of jokes and silliness and references to our own world, and it's used as a frame to build a somewhat po-faced, very detailed and largely self-contained imaginative world. However, the ring became a much more significant object in this expanded canon, and Tolkien even had to significantly rewrite the Hobbit to account for this - which he rather cleverly justified in-world.)
In CP, I see Banks's priorities being approximately: 1) fun, pulpy, grand space opera story-telling 2) gleeful, nasty, Wasp Factoryesque enfant terrible perversity [I'm thinking here of Yalson's fate in particular, the Eaters, Damage, and pretty much everything that ever happens to the crew of the CAT] 3) deeper themes, especially the folly of war [the Idirans attitude in the tunnels in the third act, once again everything that happens to the crew of the CAT] and 4) worldbuilding. The only expository part of the book, i.e. not in service of the Grand Space Opera, comes at the very end, and mostly establishes dates relative to our own timeline, gives a sense of scale to events, and shades in a little about the philosophies of the civilisations involved - so all of this was obviously on Banks's mind, but I suspect that it took a backseat to some of the other things that he was doing in CP.
(I know that "a few notes on the culture" is also under discussion, but as I understand Banks wrote the essay after The Use of Weapons.)
I find the OP's point of view on Azad very interesting, because I never got the impression that Azad as a civ was anywhere near the Culture's level. Still, you can imagine that if they were left alone by the Culture and SC they might come to totally dominate whichever Magellanic Cloud they are in.
In the end though, the Culture sends one smart gamer chock-full of "Culture Values" (which turn out to be critical) and he single-handedly brings them down (with a little help from a drone, natch). By contrast, Idir is at about the Culture's level, and the Culture has to engage in a long, expensive (in lives and time) war to prevent them from possibly dominating the Galaxy. Why was one so "easy" and one so "hard"?
10.2: Wasn't it established that SC knew how to inject Gurgeh at just the right moment in just the right way, even suggested they maybe influenced his upbringing/career so he became the right person for the job? And Contact communicated to the Emperor that they'd invade if Gurgeh won, which made him react the way he did to losing... lots of other subtle SC work going on, presumably, not just after the big game.
I hope everything is O.K. with the ROC contingent.
12: Good for now.
"The bureau had previously said that Sunday's magnitude 5.8 earthquake was the main earthquake and that it expected tectonic movement to gradually cease after multiple aftershocks.
However, it changed its evaluation yesterday, saying that Tuesday's magnitude 6.0 temblor was the main earthquake and Sunday's was one of its 94 foreshocks.
"This seismic sequence has completely changed the way we think about earthquakes in this region," Seismological Center Acting Director Chen Kuo-chang (陳國昌) said."
Super reassuring.
Did anybody ask him the odds that Tuesday's quake gets demoted for foreshock?
8: Banks first devised the Culture in the 1970s and had a manuscript of at least one other book when CP was published, so he was working within a somewhat specified frame already. It's interesting he included the Appendices at all, I think it's the only time he did anything like it. I wonder if the initiative was his or the publisher's.
Also on JRRT, I note that Eä the Azad homeworld shares its name with Eä the universe of Midle-Earth. I assume this is not coincidental.
6: The intended post title was actually Doctrine: The Player of Games. That got lost in the emails somehow.
I really love these posts. Am reading along. In UoW right now. Thank you all.
I don't know what the point is, if anything. JRRT was all chain of being and divine right of kings, not like Azad at all.
16: Another popular fantasy series popular in these parts involves the Creation of Éa.
Were all the Eas inspired by the ancient mesopotamian god/concept Ea, lord of the depths?
10: I thought along those lines and yet I'm not sure what "at the same level" really means. It was successful at doing what it was doing. Whether it could continue that level of control after meaningful contact with The Culture was the unclear part. A lot of this seems like fruit-of-the-tree-of-knowledge stuff (or maybe I've been swayed a bit by diving too deeply into Hainish Le Guin lately) where the problem is coexistence with the knowledge that there's more being very different from an ability to just go on as a general culture. I'm also starting to worry I'm getting too autobiographical. Anyway, I'm willing to believe Azad was doing fine. I share the SC concern that everything could go to hell at any moment, I suppose, but just on general principle.
15: Thanks, I didn't know the history.
I found the implication by CP's appendix that human's would make contact with the Culture at some point (likely after 2110) really interesting.
"The following three pages have been extracted from A Short History of the Idiran War (English language/Christian calendar version, original text 2110 AD, unaltered), edited by Parharengyisa Listach Ja'andeesih Petrain dam Kotosklo. The work forms part of an independent, non-commissioned but Contact-approved Earth Extro-Information Pack."
It made me think that if you were an emissary from an advanced culture, you might prepare the ground by providing blueprints for the anticipated contact, seeding key prophecies regarding the advanced civilisation in religious texts, for example, a la the Missionaria Protectiva.
Or, say, in a more secular society, a popular series of science fiction novels.
10 et seq: We don't need to imagine, it's in the text:
It is pure chance that we've met them when their civilisation looks primitive to us; one less ice age on Eä and it could conceivably have been the other way round.'
26: I don't think that means that Azad is anywhere close to the Culture in technology level. What that means to me is that Azad looks primitive to the Culture, but if Azad had had several more millennia to develop, the Culture would look primitive to Azad.
It's not a "these guys are near equiv-tech". In fact we know they're not because when some equiv-tech stuff appears, in the room for the final game between Nicosar and Gurgeh, Flere-Imsaho's reaction is "oh shit where did they get that stuff". It's more like "we're way ahead of these guys but that is largely a contingent phenomenon, it's not inevitable".
Speaking of Azad, if it hasn't been mentioned yet, may I recommend the recently published "The Science Fiction of Iain Banks" which dedicates a section to Azad the game.
30: ed. Hubble and MacCallum-Stewart? Looks good, thanks...
Martin! Thanks for the recommendation. I hope you're doing well.
28: This is precisely what I say in OP1. I never said Azad was equiv-tech: that was Dave misreading in 10.
24. "I'm willing to believe Azad was doing fine."
There were a lot of things in the Azad society that were pretty awful (the band or orchestra for example). Not a place I'd like to live, anyway. At some point you wonder where SC draws the line of "should/shouldn't intervene." I wonder if it's much different from modern Earth superpowers vis a vis "nation building" et al. There's a touch of hypocrisy there, with a sprinkling of imperialist interventionism. Every imperialist power has justified their imperialism in public by appealing to those who want to fix up a broken "sh*thole," to coin a phrase.
28. On re-reading (and your explanatory posts didn't hurt either) I see what you were getting at. After all, Earth last had an ice age around 20,000 years ago. Why the heck aren't we the rulers of the galaxy, amiright?
34: Pretty sure 24 was not saying "doing fine" in the moral sense, but in the civilizational-robustness sense, against Mawhrin-Skel's late assertion that it was on the brink of collapse.
Diacritics mean stuff, bro.
Having just copy-edited about 250 museum labels with another 200 to go where translations and transliterations from a Babel's Tower of languages abound lemme just say fuck yeah.
37 There should probably be a comma or two in there but I've used up my allotment for the day.
35. We say.
Hey, has "Why the culture wins" been discussed here yet? I enjoyed it, because it packages a few fairly banal observations about the Culture (It reproduces itself! Members believe that its values are worth defending!) with some really great unsupported assertions about actually existing reality (Unpaid hobbies are inherently useless! All societies will converge to market economies! Mandarin is a "hyperlanguage"*!).
I suppose that it's not only science fiction that reflects our current preoccuptions and unconsious biases, but also science fiction criticism.
*In fairness this might be true, but the author neglects to properly define a "hyperlanguage" beyond "a language that becomes more powerful the more it grows" - which, unless I'm misunderstanding the intended use of the term "powerful", is a fairly useless description that would surely apply to all languages?
40: Wow, that was lovely! Thank you for the pointer! Sometimes this place is like being back in grad school!
40 link is stupid in numerous ways. For starters:
Banks, by contrast, imagined a future transformed by the evolution of culture first and foremost, and by technology only secondarily.
As he lays it out in the Notes, Banks believed the opposite: social change would follow post-scarcity; political structure would follow spacefaring. The linked writer also contradicts himself repeatedly on this point, saying the Culture has technological solutions to social problems.
40 link utterly misunderstands Herbert's Dune. Herbert didn't anachronistically project feudalism into a high tech society. He designed a society in which: specific technologies had regressive effects, especially energy shields, which recreated a premodern premium on individual skill with edged weapons; and religious factors had suppressed most technological advance. (This is laid out explicitly in the first chapter of the first book.) And Herbert did all this specifically to examine a cultural phenomenon,messianic religion and ideology, which he did, with at least the same intellectual and literary skill as Banks.
And yes Star Trek did relentlessly use "classic" storylines, because it was never about the future, it was about the present. It shows us our own better selves, facing our own problems and finding better, more humane solutions than we do in reality; and this was a strength not a weakness.
And yes Star Trek did relentlessly use "classic" storylines, because it was never about the future, it was about the present. It shows us our own better selves, facing our own problems and finding better, more humane solutions than we do in reality; and this was a strength not a weakness.
44: And then he kept writing worse and worse sequels.
40 last: "Hyperlanguage" seems just to mean a widely spoken language. You're quite right that there's nothing qualitatively different about such languages, but I don't think Heath is saying there is. He does seem to be saying that languages spread in virtue of their usefulness.* This of course is true; and the usefulness tends to arise from being wedded to a successful political economy, which Heath acknowledges. What he doesn't appear to acknowledge is that the success of political economies (and their languages) can be highly arbitrary, largely independent of their characteristics. So for instance Spanish is a "hyperlanguage"; but this came about, to the extent it did, due to the massively underdetermined successes of the conquistadors. Heath takes "memes" as his frame, but the phenomena he talks about are largely political.
*The whole piece is very sloppily written so I'm not going to bother analyzing carefully. This goes for comments above too.
And then he kept writing worse and worse sequels.
History repeats itself, the first time as Dune, the second time as Heretics of Dune.
And then he kept writing worse and worse sequels.
I actually liked Dune Messiah, but it was downhill from there.
52: My thesis only requires that it be worse than Dune.
Goodness, I'd forgotten his point about how advanced technologies make regressive social relations impossible, a point that seems trivially falsifiable by reference to the world outside Canada.
Also, how did Frank Herbert manage to write such terrible sequels? I suppose that writing one really good book is more than most people manage in their lifetime, but it's always striking when the change in quality is so abrupt. I remember buying an anthology of Gorky Park and one of Martin Cruz Smith's earlier works, Nightwing, because I wanted to re-read the former and there wasn't anything else that looked interesting in the airport WH Smith. Gorky Park was and is one of my favourite thrillers. Nightwing, it turns out, is a novel about killer vampire bats summoned by a Native American shaman. It is... less good.
I thought Nightwing was grown-up Robin.
But the later Renko books were good too. Polar Star is terrific.
True. I liked some of them quite a lot, although I still don't think any are the same league as GP - however, the comparison with earlier rather than later work is unfair, given the point I was trying to make. (There's a moment in one of the later books that I still think is incredibly cool - Arkady's very young adopted son asks somebody if they'd like to play chess and when they agree, instead of producing a board, he just says "OK. Pawn to d4".)
Ah, fair enough. (And I agree: GP remains the best.)
The one point Heath makes worth thinking about is Culture-as-Borg. He says, correctly, that the good works of Contact are established to be the only reason the Culture ultimately has for its own existence. He then goes on to say that the Culture is just making copies of itself, is nothing but a pure replicator. That notion isn't directly supported in the books, but I'm not sure it's actually refuted either. Tsoldrin Beychae makes that exact claim when he's talking to Zakalwe: 'They want other people to be like them, Cheradenine.' Zakalwe doesn't deny it; though in fairness he's not in the best position to know.
Huh!
(I will maybe write my post today. Sick and grumpy, but if it keeps me occupied it might be a good thing.)
61: Just saw that and was figuring out which thread to post it in.
61: nice. Though I can't help thinking that "hey, a huge unpleasant American corporation that treats workers like shit is adapting the Culture series into a big-budget TV series" is the very definition of good news/bad news from a Banks point of view.
So which one of us is Bezos? Or is he a lurker?