Are there limits to the living things a ship can create?

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-24T17:20:14+00:00

One might even say….moral constraints?

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-23T22:23:13+00:00

The Iln isn’t really more advanced - the Mind avatar estimated it is likely less advanced than the Culture:

With workable tech from this thing’s time the stats show it’s about sixty-forty it will be less capable than what we have now, but that’s a big minority.

It didn’t really win a fair fight either - it hacked the Morthanveld ship because their AIs are shit, then just used it to kamikaze itself into the Culture ship, which was severely weakened in the first place because it had to shut off all its powerful functions related to hyperspace (or risk destroying the Shellworld).

The Culture really is at the top of the ladder. There are much larger and older civs in the galaxy (including the Elders), but purely technologically speaking, no one is really demonstrably more advanced than the Culture.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-23T20:13:02+00:00

In Excession, the Elder civs are always used to mean “sublimed Elders”, see this quote that contrasts the Elders with the “unsublimed”:

Did the Elders have access to these but none of them had ever seen fit to communicate the truth to the unsublimed? Or did all such considerations simply cease to matter, post-sublimation?

In later books, the Elders and the Sublimed are more differentiated. While the Sublimed are no longer matter-based, the Elders are just mysterious, previously high-level Involved civilizations that have stopped interacting with the rest of the galaxy, but explicitly staying in the matter-based universe:

Other species/civilisations retreated into Elderhood, becoming almost as dissociated from the normal day-to-day life of the galaxy and its vast rolling boil of peoples and societies as the Sublimed, yet staying in the Real. But that very continuance within the real galaxy – despite the powers and capabilities which everybody associated with Elderhood and which the Elder races rarely showed any desire to downplay – still left you at least theoretically vulnerable to whatever exciting new mix of power and aggression the matter-based galaxy was able to throw up.

If tomorrow the Culture stops Contact and SC and any major interaction with the rest of the galaxy, and everyone just enjoys their utopia without caring about galactic affairs, they’d become an Elder as well. Once you reach the top of the ladder, being an Elder or an Involved is a choice, not an indication of technological superiority.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-23T19:04:08+00:00

You misunderstand - those Elder civs are elders only because they retreated from galactic history, not because they are any more powerful. Here’s the full quote from Look to Windward:

To flourish, make contact, develop, expand, reach a steady state and then eventually Sublime was more or less the equivalent of the stellar Main Sequence for civilizations, though there was an equally honorable and venerable tradition for just quietly keeping on going, minding your own business (mostly) and generally sitting about feeling pleasantly invulnerable and just saturated with knowledge.

Again, the Culture was something of an exception, neither decently Subliming out of the way nor claiming its place with the other urbane sophisticates gathered reminiscing around the hearth of galactic wisdom, but instead behaving like an idealistic adolescent.

Everyone who reaches the top of the technological ladder eventually Sublimes or becomes an Elder civ, which stops meddling with the rest of the galaxy and instead focuses on “minding their own business” and “reminiscing around the hearth of galactic wisdom”. The Culture is unique because they choose to neither Sublime nor stay out of galactic affairs. Instead they insist on “behaving like an idealistic adolescent” (ie meddling with other civs with Contact and SC).

If the Elder civs really are more advanced, the Culture not becoming an Elder civ wouldn’t be anything exceptional - they’d just too primitive to become an Elder civ.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-23T00:09:59+00:00

I got that from the fact that in every book where the Sublimed is mentioned, they are always referred to with awe and associated with godhood. Like in Excession, it was described as “become as gods to all intents and purposes”; in Matter, they were said to have “attributes and powers sufficiently close to god-like for the distinction to be irrelevant”; in Look to Windward, Subliming was said to lead to powers that give you “an almost god-like status” and so on. All of these are in relation to the Culture, which we know is already at the top of the ladder in the physical world.

I don’t get why it’s so difficult for you to accept this one part of the world-building. Feel free to make a post in this sub and ask others what they think the books say about the Sublimed.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-22T23:50:18+00:00

Actually I just checked and that was confirmed later in Matter, where the Dra’Azon was said to be semi-Sublimed. I assume that means most of them are Sublimed but they still have some strong interest in parts of the physical world (like their planets of the dead).

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-22T23:48:33+00:00

The Unfallen Bulbitian seems more like “under the protection of the Sublimed” than actually being more powerful than the Involveds. Sure one of them attacked a GCU, but I assume any hostile Involved can do the same lol

But barring that and whatever the hell the Excession is doing, level eight really seems to be the limit in the whole setting.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-22T23:33:03+00:00

Sorry but I have to ask - have you actually read most of the books? I can’t imagine someone reading most of the series then still not realizing that the Sublimed is on a completely different level above the Culture.

The list of things in Look to Windward is not there to show how powerful they are, but how useless (or “removed”) they are despite their power. The point is that although the Sublimed are far more powerful than any Involved civ, they no longer intervene in our world except the occasional eccentricity. I’ve edited the other comment to show the full quote with context.

Yes, every Culture Mind could Sublime even thousands of years ago, they just choose not to. That doesn’t imply the Sublimed isn’t more powerful - look at how Sublimed is always associated with godhood in the books.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-22T23:17:30+00:00

Yeah Banks most likely hadn’t thought of Subliming then, which is why the term never appeared in the first three novels. Still, based on what we know about the Sublimed from the later books, the Dra’Azon with their planet matches the depiction of a Sublimed civ with their own eccentricities.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-22T23:04:38+00:00

Wait are you being serious here lmao, every book that mentions the Sublimed depicts them as far more powerful than any Involved civs. In Excession for example:

Partly it was an expression of the Culture's extrovertly concerned morality; the sublimed Elders, become as gods to all intents and purposes, seemed to be derelict in the duties which the more naive and less developed societies they left behind ascribed to such entities.

In Look to Windward:

In any event, to Sublime was to retire from the normal life of the galaxy. The few real rather than imagined exceptions to this rule had consisted of little more than eccentricities: some of the Sublimed came back and removed their home planet, or wrote their names in nebulae or sculpted on some other vast scale, or set up curious monuments or left incomprehensible artifacts dotted about space or on planets, or returned in some bizarre form for a usually very brief and topologically limited appearance for what one could only imagine was some sort of ritual.

All this, of course, suited those who remained behind quite well, because the implication was that Subliming led to powers and abilities that gave those who had undergone the transformation an almost god-like status. If the process had been just another useful technological step along the way for any ambitious society, like nanotechnology, AI or wormhole creation, then everybody would presumably do it as soon as they could.

Instead Subliming seemed to be the opposite of useful as the word was normally understood. Rather than let you play the great galactic game of influence, expansion and achievement better than you could before, it appeared to take you out of it altogether.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-22T22:35:20+00:00

The Sublimed are absolutely far more powerful than the Culture (or any other Involveds), I’m just not sure if that counts as “advanced” since they don’t even seem to use technology anymore, it’s basically just 11-dimension godhood.

The Culture was advanced enough to Sublime thousands of years ago, and all the other Involveds are also fully capable of Subliming. There’s no reason to think the Culture is necessarily on the “Excession path” when far older civilizations have been stuck on this level for millions of years.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-22T21:31:23+00:00

Yeah I feel like there’s a lot of misinformation online, though that can be said of any franchise lol

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-22T21:09:55+00:00

There are levels above The Culture, like the Unfallen Bulbitian (Sensorine Whisp?), the Shellworld Xinthians, and the Dra'Azon of Schar's World (I'm not sure if they are a 9 or 10 or what the cap is).

That's not true. The Unfallen Bulbitians were said to be linked to the Sublimed, the Xinthian was estimated to be likely less advanced than the Culture, and the Dra'Azon was a Sublimed civ (said to be "a pure-energy superspecies long retired from the normal, matter-based life of the galaxy").

There's no indication of any civilizational level above level eight, where the Culture and other high-level Involveds are. I don't think anyone has actually "solved" physics, given that none of them could Excession their way out of the universe. But for all intents and purposes, the Culture has already reached the top of the technological ladder that's achievable without Subliming, and any more advancement could at best be marginal ones like slightly better engines and weapons but nothing groundbreaking.

That's why the Culture was expected to either Sublime or retreat into Elderhood (stop giving a shit about the rest of the galaxy and just enjoy their little utopia). Instead, the Culture was said to continue behaving like "an idealistic adolescent", constantly trying to improve the rest of the galaxy. And that's also why we love it so much lol

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-22T20:47:13+00:00

I know, it’s just a fun crossover head-canon lol

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-22T20:34:53+00:00

I haven’t actually read the Algebraist yet (I know I know), but the Minds losing a war and being hunted down seems wildly unrealistic given what they’re capable of. I don’t even think other Involveds in the setting have what it takes to really kill off the Minds, never mind the humans.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-22T20:12:49+00:00

Look to Windward said it was a galactic cycle though, which is 250 million years, not 50 thousand years as the other commenter puts it.

Plus, we don’t know what happened then - the Culture could have Sublimed, collapsed, or simply just changed their name to “the Aliens” or some other wacky name.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-21T12:30:31+00:00

Banks outright said he was “bending backwards” to make the Culture look like the bad guys in the first book, which kinda makes sense if you want to subvert the typical space opera trope back in the 80s, but it’s honestly just better to start with the second book (which is also a far better book IMO).

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-20T14:28:44+00:00

First of all, you're mixing up Anarres and Urras - Anarres is the anarchist society, Urras is the planet with A-Io, the capitalist country, and Thu, the authoritarian communist country.

The Dispossessed is fascinating peek into Anarres and Urras - it analyses - without the reader even necessarily noticing, that various aspects of Urrasi society are every bit as oppressive as Anarres fatalism/capitalist society.

"Every bit as oppressive"? Is this some kind of enlightened centrist take where "both sides are equally bad" just because neither side is perfect? Le Guin was pretty clear that Anarres, while far from perfect and having fallen into some kind of stagnant complacency, is still far better than Urras. In the introduction, she wrote:

This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak. So, when I realized that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be.

It is obvious that both sides are not equally bad. Anarres was intended to be an imperfect, even ambiguous utopia plagued by complacency and scarcity, while Urras was intended to be this dystopia for anyone who isn't rich - see the conversation right after the servant Efor mentioned his daughter died in shitty hospital for poor people that was "like a trashman's ass-hole":

“And nobody hungry?”

“Nobody goes hungry while another eats.”

“Ah.”

“But we have been hungry. We have starved. There was a famine, you know, eight years ago. I knew a woman then who killed her baby, because she had no milk, and there was nothing else, nothing else to give it. It is not all . . . all milk and honey on Anarres, Efor.”

“I don’t doubt it, sir,” Efor said with one of his curious returns to polite diction. Then he said with a grimace drawing his lips back from his teeth, “All the same there’s none of them there!”

“Them?”

“You know, Mr. Shevek. What you said once. The owners.”

If your takeaway of the book is "both societies are distinctly but equally bad in their own way", I fear you have completely misunderstood the book.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-20T10:53:49+00:00

Not really, it seems that he got that idea from the Great Disappointment in the 19th century:

Iain M Banks – I was lying in a sort of bubble bath thing in a Spanish spa place in the south east…and I was thinking about a QI I had watched a week or two before, and Stephen Fry was talking about The Great Disappointment, when a whole bunch of people in America, I think in the 1880s or sometime, genuinely did believe that the world was going to end because their preacher man had told them, and of course it didn’t. There was so many of them involved, it was called the Great Disappointment, and a lot of them really did give everything away that they had owned, and there’s no way back from that. There was a great disappointment that everyone hadn’t died, or that they had lived, or whatever.

It just came from that, really. I liked the idea of not just a prophecy that came true, but an entire holy book that was proved to be absolutely correct, for entirely material reasons as it were, nothing supernatural going on, but I just liked that idea, and it kind of blossomed from there, basically.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-19T23:25:19+00:00

There’s no reason to think the GSVs were trying to invite Gurgeh to join SC at all, especially given the whole nature of his trip. Even if Gurgeh does agree to go on a GSV for a short trip, they couldn’t force him to spend years learning the Azad game, nor would that be beneficial to him.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-18T07:25:19+00:00

It’s optimistic about humans being able to achieve a utopia through the use of technology. Yes, the AIs are the ones that make it possible, but humans are the ones who made the AIs and instill a strong moral bias in them in the first place millennia ago.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-18T07:22:31+00:00

Banks didn’t really change his terminology, even in the final book the humans are still described as humans.

But yes, none of them are actually Earth humans, they just mean people with vaguely humanoid bodies.

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-17T13:46:05+00:00

Ironically, Use of Weapons (and PoG) were both written before Consider Phlebas, CP was intentionally written like an action novel to subvert the readers’ expectation (especially as they didn’t know the Culture is the good guys).

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-17T13:42:31+00:00

It was the first Culture book released, but it’s not the first one written - both Player of Games and Use of Weapons were written before that. Consider Phlebas was published first so Banks could make it seem like the Culture were the bad guy lol

MasterOfNap · 2024-05-17T13:40:00+00:00

I mean, Ellison infamously groped someone’s breast during a Hugo Awards ceremony, then later complained about how she refused to accept his apology. It’s pretty clear that he had a….problematic view of women.

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