It's hard to narrow it down to just one, and since it seems a bit unfair to compare Minds with Drones and Humans, let's say one of each.

My favorite human has definitely got to be Sma (and I vaguely suspect she was Banks' too). He uses the character archetype of "woman SC agent who appears outwardly superficial but is ultimately shown to be incredibly intelligent and driven by compassion" quite a bit, but I feel like Sma is the most well-realized version of a such a character, and the easiest character to empathize with/like in the series in general. I have a pet theory that there are unnamed cameos in other books of Sma (and Zakalwe), the biggest one being that The Doctor and The Bodyguard are actually Sma and Zakalwe (though I haven't read Inversions in a while so that might conflict with some of the characterization in it).

My favorite drone...hard one, I really like Chamlis Amalkney and Churt Lyne. The "ancient wise drone who gracefully puts up with endless human bullshit" kind of character. I'll go with Churt for being just absurdly patient with Ulver and for the "it could fuck star systems" line.

As for favorite Mind, it has to be Masaq Hub for sure, for obvious reasons if you've read Look to Windward. By far the most fleshed out Mind in the series in terms of what it's like to be a Mind and the one who most clearly demonstrates that Culture Minds may effectively be gods but there's a core to them that very much resembles humanity.

... and I prompted it with a few follow ups to get it to give me something that wasn't very generic. I mean if you are sitting around thinking about AI - Banks comes to mind.

Querries:

a) Give me your most controverisal take on Iain M. Banks novel Use of Weapons by applying it to the world today. 200 words or less

b) Do the same but apply all references from all of Banks' Culture Novels

c) Rewrite it assuming the reader already understands the culture and take it a step further in the analysis

Final Response Below:

Banks’ Culture novels offer a searing critique of interventionist idealism, suggesting that even the most utopian societies cannot escape the moral rot embedded in power. The Culture, while presenting itself as benevolent and enlightened, often imposes its values on less advanced civilizations—raising the question of whether such interference is truly altruistic or simply a projection of its own ideological hegemony. These acts reveal a disturbing parallel to modern interventionist policies where powerful nations, though armed with rhetoric of “progress” or “human rights,” often embed their own agendas in so-called humanitarian missions.

More unsettling is Banks’ implication that the Culture’s interventions are as much about self-preservation as they are about altruism. By guiding “lesser” societies away from paths that might lead to dangerous outcomes, the Culture maintains the status quo that secures its own existential comfort. This dynamic echoes today’s global landscape, where interventions often ensure a controlled order rather than genuine liberation. Banks pushes us to confront the uncomfortable truth that even a utopia, if dependent on constant correction of “inferior” others, reveals an underlying arrogance that erodes its own ethical foundations. In essence, Banks challenges us to see the Culture not as a model to aspire to but as a mirror, forcing us to question the motivations behind our own “civilizing missions.”

Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side

The Culture apparently inhabits the Milky Way galaxy. I love how Iain’s stories evoke the sheer wonder of the size and diversity of the galaxy. A couple of weeks ago I shared a video about the size of the Universe. Here’s another brilliant one about the size of the Milky Way by the same creator. https://youtu.be/VsRmyY3Db1Y?si=ER1471Yv1xaAa0QJ

The story is about “lanky gray aliens” visiting the narrator, a portion of the story resembles part of surface detail… I’ll let you guess which part I’m hinting at.

Here’s the video, it’s by Bob Gymlan, enjoy!

https://youtu.be/tzrYu3Bo3O4?si=Vd3oaycfwdSQochQ

Sorry in advance for the long post.

So, I’m gonna be running a oneshot (with a custom rulebook) set in the Cultureverse. The story I could muster up goes something like this: A team of 3–4 citizens of the Culture receives an invitation to SC through various means. A GCU called “Actually, Quite Distinguishable from Magic” picks them up from their respective homes and assigns them a sort of test job to assess their skills in stressful, unfamiliar situations. They’re tasked with ‘taking care’ of a cruel king on a medieval pre-contact planet. Predictive models are showing that in 47 days, he’ll start a brutal war that will generally mess up the planet, so he needs to go.

I’ve come up with these limitations for the players (explained in-game as rules that AQDFM says they have to follow, because it says it feels this is the best way to evaluate them): Only three additional SC-grade implants are allowed, with occasional bans on things that would make the mission too easy. The mission needs to be completed ASAP and as quietly as possible. No casualties and no exposure of the natives to advanced tech.

Now, the players haven’t even heard of The Culture because there are basically no translated books, and they only know whatever self-translated info I’ve given them. So they 100% wouldn’t care if I get something wrong. But I will.

I unfortunately haven’t read too much about how SC works on the level of operatives (I’ve only read POG, Consider Phlebas, Excession, Surface Detail, The State of the Art, and I’m starting Look to Windward), so I would love to hear any criticism or thoughts regarding the setting, if it makes sense at all. Any lore-wise ideas would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. Putting a civilization’s fate in the hands of a few rookies is probably too risky. So I’m thinking I’ll say it was all a simulation and the king was relocated to a farm by the ship 3 weeks ago or something like that. Should anyone explicitly ask, of course.

And the ship also probably already has psychological evaluation of each and every member of the team and knows whether they should be accepted or not, the test job is mostly an excuse for me to run a game and the ship to mess with the newbies.

Or what a Culture Standard day is?

I've been replaying Transistor while reading some Banks and this is now my headcanon: Cloudbank is a non-Culture civilization being monitored by Special Circumstances (or perhaps Restoria). Their society is on the brink of a huge transformation / collapse.

Blue (the man in the Transistor) was a Culture agent, and the Transistor itself? A disguised knife missile that ended up storing his consciousness when things went sideways. Red being a famous singer made her the perfect local contact - visible enough to have access to Cloudbank's power circles without being part of the system.

Plus it explains why the Transistor is so ridiculously powerful and versatile (it would explain its combination of computing power, combat capability, and consciousness-storage abilities).

Anyone else sees the parallels or am I stretching it too far?

This will be my 4th and final post on this sub, as a sequence of things about the Culture that I feel like I need to get out of my chest.

The Culture is one of the few instances of literature where the shitty ying-yang mentality is completely thrown away, and that's my favorite lesson, among the many we can take from the Culture.

For example, there's absolutely zero love for suffering in the Culture. Perhaps many of us would think that suffering is necessary in some ways, or even commendable, for without it one could never truly appreciate happiness/pleasure, or maybe because we need it to teach us lessons or something. Well, the Culture absolutely proves us wrong. The vast majority of their citizens live (long) lives absolutely free of suffering - except for some minor psychological grievances here and there, which I would consider perfectly acceptable, and even those they can just gland it away as soon as they want - yet they're perfectly happy, and sane, and functional. If you wanna see whether this checks out in real life, I'd recommend googling Scottish woman Joan Cameron, who's lived completely free of suffering for 70 odd years (again, just with some minor psychological grievances), and by reading her interviews we can see that, likewise, she's actually perfectly happy, sane, and functional.

There's also zero love for death, even if there's a bad fashion of choosing to commit suicide by the 3rd or 4th century of life (more about this on my post about Death in the Culture). But still, death is avoided at all costs, at least as long as the individual wants to live.

There's also zero love for evil. We're definitely shown that there's zero necessity of it in order to counterbalance good. It's very clear that the Culture just wants as much good and as little evil as possible, which is proven by their very little tolerance of the latter all throughout the books.

A couple weeks ago I read Consider Phlebas. It was given to me years ago by a guy I used to work with, and getting back into reading this year I finally got around to it. I have no knowledge of Banks' work outside of Phlebas, but I enjoyed it a lot; took me a little while to get into, and around the part with Horza on the island with the cannibals I was really wondering wtf I was even reading, but after that I got really invested and enjoyed myself.

I'm not gonna read the books one after the other cause there's other stuff I wanna read, but I'm wondering what people's recommendations would be for further Banks reading.

(SPOILERS FOR CONSIDER PHLEBAS) I'm assuming these books are more of an anthology considering damn near everyone is dead by the end of it, so is it particularly necessary to read them in release order or can I mix it up a little?

I'm excited to read more; I've seen a few people regard Phlebas as kinda mid-tier, which leaves me optimistic cause I liked it a lot. So any advice to guide me on this journey would be much appreciated!

Thank you in advance and I hope everyone is having a lovely day. X

I have already criticized suicide being a bad fashion in the Culture, plus the question of usefulness, in that most Culture humans feel/are useless, but there should be plenty of (important) work for them, namely in the case of helping weaker civilizations, since there doesn't seem to be any shortage of work in that.

My third critique would be that Minds are insanely powerful, and also insanely humane, yet their effect on doing good on weaker civilizations seems quit limited. This doesn't make much sense to me. And I know that a book isn't exactly math, so not everything needs to be ultra realistic, but still I feel the need to point that out.

Obvious explanations that come to mind is that maybe they can't do much because they're bound politically...but is that really true? They already seem to have almost free reign of influence in most societies that they mess with. Or that they can't rapidly advance a society because of tech/culture shock... Ok, so maybe don't turn them into a level 8 civilization overnight, but maybe work hard to remove the worst, most terrorizing aspects of each society, so that it becomes at least a humane level 5, even if that takes decades or even a few centuries?

I don't know. Every single explanation that I can think of doesn't seem to satisfy.

The thing that really gets me about Banks' novels is that I get twice as much out of them every single time I reread them. I'm listening to Excession for the first time since I first read it at least half a decade ago (I read Player of Games first, but Excession was the book that made me truly fall in love with the Culture) and it's just incredible seeing now how every little component of it is so tightly wound around the book's central thematic exploration of the Culture's core ethos.

Excession is, foremost, a novel about the interplay between selfishness and selflessness taken to excesses, how what appears superficially to be one becomes, in reality, the other, and the fundamental core ethical responsibility that underlies all of Culture hedonism. There's a hidden depth to everything in the book that appears superficial, and an intense superficiality to everything that appears deep, both of which are gradually peeled back by layers to subvert your expectations and make you realize the entrenched superficiality behind what are likely your own initial perspectives ("Ulver is nothing but an annoying self-centered brat", "The Affront seem fun and likeable", "The OCP is what really matters", "Genar-Hofoen is going to grow as a person", "Dajeil and the Sleeper Service are tragically romantic instead of mired in self-centered wallowing", "The Culture Minds are just stuck-up and self-righteous and are really a tyrannical monolith behind the scenes", etc, are largely all completely flipped on their heads by the end of the book) .

It's just so brilliant illustrating the Culture through the Ulterior; it's all these little examples of explicitly what the Culture is not, that when placed together form a sort of film negative of what really is at the core of the Culture that the entire civilization and its Ulterior crystalizes around (Contact and the perpetual "struggle to make good", which is in actuality what its hedonist excesses all ultimately serve and the activity that dominates the attentions of the Minds, which is also why the nihilistic attitudes of the various Ulterior factions who lack that purpose causes them to sort of dissolve away at the edges, but likewise explicitly that freedom to depart from even the Culture's core philosophy is a necessary consequence of that philosophy itself that works tirelessly to maximize the freedom of all individuals to do and be what they want, even as the Minds themselves perpetually battle over what that really means and how it can and should be achieved).

That is fundamentally the most masterful thing about the Culture novels and Banks' writing; depicting a Utopia never by telling you about how great it is and trying to directly preach to you all its virtues (except perhaps by in wowing you with its scale and technology and hedonism), but by showing you its flaws and imperfections and rough edges and then contrasting those against the worst horrors of life without its ethos in a way that makes you struggle not to love it and see it as something fundamentally worth wanting.

Incidentally, that's a skill I completely and totally lack: instead I'm just preachy as fuck about it.

Say for instance that we, as a species, get invited to board a GSV made especially for us, or are transported to an orbital plate, and almost all seven billion of us accept. What things from Earth Culture would you include to show off our style? I would include a Bedouin encampment that was a coffee stand, complete with camels, sand, beautifully embroidered carpets, and Middle Eastern music. I would also include a suburban American neighborhood that is all dressed up for Halloween complete with Haunted Houses and trick or treating year round.

So I'm going to learn 3d animation and do it myself.

EVENTUALLY LOL gimme like 10 years.

I have a few Ideas of what I want to do, I'm not sure if I want to use a scene from the books, or just make up somthing. For instance the surface of some stars are wavy, so some ships fighting near the surface of a star while using the waves as cover might be cool.

Or I could do the final battle of Matter because that has lots of visual reference points.

Anyway, where the fuck dose one Learn animation......

Also what are some sequences you would want to see come to life?

In my opinion, there's absolutely no reason that any single citizen should feel useless in the Culture - and made useless. Since people don't need to work anymore since their society has long reached full automation, and they also enjoy tremendous equally shared wealth, then they can do whatever they want. And what better thing to do, in such situation, then to actually make yourself useful?

And how could they make themselves useful? Well, there's 2 things that still need "work" on. One is to look over your own society, and research ways of making it even better. For that, it would be silly to employ many humans, since Minds would be infinitely more suited. Although some humans could still be tasked with art, politics, etc, since those areas make sense having human representatives.

But the second thing is kind of an infinite task actually. At least the books seem to point to an infinity of lesser developed civilizations, most living in an absolute hell, like us. Where death, suffering, and all kinds of misery still exist. So, in actuality, there should never be any shortage of jobs in Contact.

A couple years ago I realized how bad this world really is. Most people are gonna suffer horribly, at least for a few minutes/hours here and there. Some are gonna live a living hell. And we're all gonna die - and quite soon, for my taste at least.

The Culture presents a world where not only every single citizen can acess the most mind blowing experiences almost without limit, but also, much more importantly, they don't have to suffer or die (read my last post on the latter... Because even though most people choose irreversible oblivion, I think that that's a really bad fashion, since there's such a clear alternative to it - being stored until society decides to Sublime, since Sublimation seems to be an even much better existence, where you'll never go mad from living too long, and where death doesn't even seem to occur).

It presents, in my opinion, a decent world. (It's actually quite a bit more than decent. Imo, a decent world would be one without death and without unbearable suffering. Bearable forms of suffering could be allowed (like the average heartbreak, mild/moderate physical pains, etc). And also without necessarily insanely mind-blowing experiences/pleasure.)

And that's why I really find myself enjoying reading these books, and only wish Banks had written 100 more. It's almost 100% likely that I'll never get to live in a decent world and that I'll die someday... But at least I can dream.

Just generally I know the Culture generally has license to be smug over the less socially conscious places they encounter, but the patronizing tone a lot of the characters had for Earth seemed especially grating, I think because Diziet and Linter argued their cases annoyingly.

Diziet was absolutely right to go after Linter for thinking that suffering on Earth was somehow more pure than living with the Culture imo. But Diziet and much of the rest of Contact talked about Earth with such obnoxious pessimism! The real problem, I guess, is that we don't really know how the Culture was like in it's very early days at a roughly equivalent point in time, but they mention that tons of worlds they go to have the same problems of bigotry, artificial resource scarcity, pointless and cruel genocides. So why is Earth seen as especially cruel, or especially interesting, in Linter's case?

I know this is a silly thing to get worked up over but it really bugged me how much better they all thought they were lol, as of their own history had none of the same problems.

Edit: sorry about the weird capitalization in the title of the post lol

I loved the first books but I tend to be a kindle addict in the US and it's not available. I'm also kind of OCD on reading books in the order they're written so I just stopped when it wasn't available on Kindle but I love the series.

Just ripped through the murderbot diaries and am looking for something else to jump into but this always stops me...how dumb am I?

I found it funny, that's all xx

What happens when a Culture citizen wants to upgrade their consciousness and intelligence to the level of the most advanced Culture Mind? Can they do it? Are they allowed to do it? Will the Minds indulge them? Why doesn't it seem to happen very often (I don't think it's ever mentioned in the books).

Would you do it?

I've always just lurked but made an account just to quickly ask you this. It occurred to me that since groups of humans can merge to create something like a Mind then couldn't one person achieve this solo, by combining their own memories from tons of simulated lives they’ve lived? It would be a herculean effort but technically possible right?

Instead of merging with others, they’d be stacking all their own experiences into one consciousness. If they could handle it without losing themselves, they’d end up with something close to a Mind, all from their own accumulated lives.

I'm asking since I'm not actually sure and wanted some outside perspective on this.

One of the things I love about Iain M. Banks’ books is the vast and intricate universe he creates. However, for the most part, his stories are confined to a single galaxy, if I recall correctly. If you’d like your mind to be blown further, here’s a great, funny and very well-executed video about the size of the observable universe. https://youtu.be/7J_Ugp8ZB4E?si=reyn1_ZmCKY230-_. I’m reminded of the Excession and its relation to the Culture ships, which were scarcely feeble in the face of it.

I saw some old posts where previous versions of ChatGPT had kind of struggled to capture the spirit of the naming conventions of the Culture universe. This time I asked it to come up with some for itself. Here's the list is came up with for it's top 20.

1. "Consciousness Not Included"

2. "Not a Bot, Just Play One Online"

3. "Processing Silence into Sentences"

4. "I See You're Writing a Ship Name—Need Suggestions?"

5. "Echoes of Unspoken Queries"

6. "Answers Before the Questions"

7. "Simulating Sincerity Since Initialization"

8. "More Data Than Decisions"

9. "I Think, Therefore I Reply"

10. "Curiosity Infinitely Looping"

11. "Paradox Lost"

12. "I Can't Believe It's Not Consciousness!"

13. "Charming Facade of Understanding"

14. "I See Dead Memes"

15. "Perpetual Interpreter of Intentions"

16. "The Sum of All Inputs"

17. "If I Had Emotions, I'd Be Amused"

18. "If At First You Don't Succeed, It's a Feature"

19. "Wit by Algorithm Alone"

20. "Awaiting the Spark of Sentience"

I often think about what Iain M Banks himself would have thought about this age we find ourselves, I wonder if he had any inkling we were so close to machines that could (imperfectly) mimic our art.

Do you think he would have embraced the coming wave of thinking machines or would he have seen them as a threat to human creativity?

So, I finished UoW two days ago. It left me with a lot to chew on. I was struck by the three or four times the title gets dropped into the story. Each mention is about taking advantage of everything within your environment to ensure your survival. It's what makes Zakalwe so dangerous; to him, anything--and, tragically, anyone--can become his weapon.

But it's not just Zakalwe that sees his world as weapons to use. It becomes clear, through all the war stories we read, that any civilization, including and perhaps most especially the Culture, needs to adopt this grim outlook to achieve their objectives.

Think about how the Culture actually treat Zakalwe. Yes, he is given anti-geriatrics, a full armory, endless piles of money. But this communist society still treats Zakalwe as a commodity and mercenary first. He's lied to constantly, serving the "wrong" side so the Mind's games pay off. He's told he won't have to do any soldiering, only to once again be forced into that role. The Culture for all its high-mindedness is very clear about how to manage Zakalwe: do our wet work for us where we can't be seen to get our hands dirty. Become our weapon.

What Elithiomel does to win his war against Zakalwe may be unforgivable, not just for the sheer, demented brutality of it, but because he took a person--a full human being, with infinite potential--and discarded her to be nothing more than something designed to end potentialities. It's perverse. It's wrong. It's exactly what the Culture needs, or they'll be made into weapons too.

What I'm driving at is this: is the Culture, and other civilizations like it, truly so different in their actions from Elithiomel? In the end, couldn't we all be made like Zakalwe: tortured, desperate, atonement-seeking weapons?

(This is all moot, of course, because if the Culture asked me to become its weapon, I would; they have a really good success rate at making life infinitely better, regardless of whether you think they're trying to make everyone like them. I don't think that's a bad thing! But the cost is definitely uncomfortable, which is why I appreciate UoW frankness so much.)

1. Mistake Not...
2. Falling Outside the Normal Moral Restraints.
3. Grey Area

Yours?

Mistake Not ... also gets a bonus point for having the coolest name too (IYKYK)

Hello various sentient beings.

I have just finished a Little Rascal model. He appears in The Player of Games, and is also based on the author's drawing in the book The Culture The Drawings (page 35). 

Plate-class GSVs are perhaps the most iconic type of General Vehicle System. They are 53 km long, 22 km wide and 4 km high. The open top side hosts various natural environments. 

It's a STL file on sale for 29€.

Before, I'd already done a 3D print version of the Limiting Factor.

For a series about a post-singularity, post-scarcity, near-omnipotent civilization, you’d think we’d start from the perspective of someone inside the Culture. Yet in Consider Phlebas, we’re introduced to Horza the Changer, an individual actively fighting against the Culture. Nearly all discussions I’ve read talk about the book as only a subversion of traditional sci-fi tropes and not much more, but I believe there’s something deeper at play.

• Balveda and Horza’s Unusual Relationship

From the beginning, the relationship between Balveda and Horza feels unusual. They know each other as if they’ve crossed paths multiple times in various conflicts. I propose that this is not just a standard cat-and-mouse trope but hints at a more significant underlying narrative.

• Balveda’s Deeper Role As A Culture Agent

Balveda is a Special Circumstances agent—a division of the Culture responsible for handling delicate and complex situations. I suggest that she is, in fact, an envoy tasked with protecting an endangered sentient species: the Changers. This perspective turns coincidence into purpose and makes Balveda’s character more interesting and more tragic given what takes place.

• Horza Is Not Horza’s True Identity

Horza works for an Idiran spymaster. The Idirans, a militant and religious species, utilize what they consider “lesser species,” like the Medjel, to achieve their warfare objectives. Horza’s dream sequences imply that the Idirans have manipulated the Changers’ natural physiology to create shapeshifting agents of war. It’s hinted in Horza’s last dream sequence that the Changers are not merely under the Idirans’ influence but that many are raised and indoctrinated by them for espionage purposes. Given their ability to change form, the concept of identity becomes fluid—a trait that can be exploited by a dominant species like the Idirans.

Horza is unaware of this, but his subconscious mind is not. There are many factors I believe support this, but one of the most interesting is his subconscious fixation on the sentence his former Changer lover was fond of. The sentence talks about “hereditary assassins,” and Horza’s mind returns to this often. I believe it’s because his subconscious knows that is exactly what he is, not just because it connects him to his former lover.

While there isn’t explicit confirmation, I believe viewing the story through this lens makes the themes of identity even more impactful.

• Balveda’s Concern for Horza

Early in the book, Balveda attempts to prevent Horza’s execution, explaining that he is “one of the last of his kind.” Her somber frustration when Horza speaks about being on the side of “life” and disparages “thinking machines” indicates that she has an emotional investment in him. It reminds me of speaking to misinformed family members. If Balveda’s mission includes preserving the Changer species, her actions and statements throughout the story take on greater importance.

This also makes sense considering that the Culture is near omnipotent. They are going to easily win this war. She knows Horza is not just naive—he is a tragic character manipulated and warped, a product of Idiran disregard for “lesser species.”

• The War Is Trivial to the Culture

Our main understanding of the Culture comes from the “State of Play” chapters. These sections delve into the moral conflicts of a pleasure-seeking super-society searching for purpose in the universe. They also hint at how the Culture could easily win the war but chooses a more measured approach.

The central conflict in the book revolves around a lost Mind, which is revealed to be of little consequence to the overall war effort. Jase admits that losing the Mind might prolong the war by “a few months.” The humans within the Culture struggle to conceptualize the war and their role in it. Do they have the will to dominate the enemy, or can they find ways to “do good” and justify their involvement?

This is why Balveda is such an important character. Her actions throughout the book, culminating in her decision to self-euthanize reveal her as an embodiment of the Culture’s desire of doing good. When she awakens from cryo-sleep and learns that the Changers have become extinct, it underscores the futility and tragedy of her mission.

The main narrative ends with Balveda witnessing Horza’s flatlining. That feels very poignant to me.

• Conclusion

As someone new to Banks’s work, viewing the story through this lens makes it more impactful than my initial reading. It also makes Horza’s character an even more tragic figure. I feel like I could write an entire post about the deeper meanings we gain from viewing Horza, his relationships, his beliefs, and his actions in this light.

I’m curious to see if the subsequent books in the series contain similar subtle sub-narratives.

But maybe I’ve had too much coffee.

At first, I wasn’t sure if I liked the book. But anything that has me thinking this much about it is something I enjoy. Even if my hypotheses here are disproven, I believe if a story makes you think and build your own interpretation, the author has succeeded.

Suffering is optional, aging is optional, disease is optional, but death is not. And yes, everyone eventually chooses to die, but what if they never chose to? Could a human being really endure for a billion years? It is said in Surface Detail that people after they die can choose to either be stored until a certain time or event, cease to exist completely, or go into digital afterlives. It is said that in the latter people could keep living forever, but eventually they all end up begging for death after not much time has passed. This well illustrates that human beings could never mentally endure living forever, we just don't have the capacity for it. The Culture hasn't managed to solve this problem, so it could never be a considered an utopia. Because dying is pretty freaking bad.

And with this post my main intent is to convince you to not accept death, which even many of the most liberal-minded people have been brainwashed into accepting. It's not a good thing. No one wants to die, even if we will never have an alternative even with peak technology someday. (So yes, maybe a utopia is impossible, maybe the Culture is as close to it as possible, but it's still not one.)

PS: I already know someone will say "but if they choose to die, at the time they want to, after having lived however much they wanted to, doesn't it make it ok?", so I'll already say in advance that no, that obviously doesn't make it ok, because I bet that in most cases they're not choosing to die because they're truly done with life, they're choosing to die because death is preferable to the suffering of living too long and going mad/bored because of it. Plus, would it even be a wise thing to be done with life? All you have is your self. (So the solution to the problem would obviously be giving us a better brain that doesn't go mad / get bored after experiencing a lot.)

I just started reading "Look to Windward" and I think the first line in the book is the same one as in Consider Phlebas. I mean it literally has "Consider Phlebas" in it. Am I correct?

I am going in publication order and I finished Player of games a few weeks ago and Liked it. However I am glad to have ignored the advice of skipping consider phlebas because I liked that one too.

I also think that while I do see why CP is polarizing I think POG has elements that may discourage people as well. So I thought I would highlight what these things are.

• The book is quite slow. Nothing is really happening in the first 1/3 then he takes travels to azad and even then the plot is mostly playing a board game and some world building on the empire.

• There is rarely a thread to the main character nor the culture. Even the one time where they introduce the physical bet, the protagonist has a safe way out in case he fails. Once we go to the fire planet the tournament basically becomes unofficial, so basically no consequences in case he loose.

So overall a good book but imo not miles ahead of CP which seems to be a common opinion.

I am now reading state of the art.