Life, the Universe and Everything: The Philosophy of Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams is principally remembered as a writer of comic fiction. His science fiction series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the thing for which most people still know him today. This is partly because H2G2, as it is abbreviated by fans, appeared in many different formats. It started life as a BBC radio series, then a series of books, a play, a text based computer game, BBC TV series, and finally a film in the years immediately after Adam’s untimely death in 2001.

Yet Douglas Adams had many other strings to his bow. He was enthusiastic about technology and its potential to make the world better, presenting a number of radio and television series on the subject. He was a committed conservationist. His book, Last Chance to See, co-written with zoologist, Mark Carwardine, as they travel the world in search of endangered species, remains a classic.

Adams was also a guitarist and music aficionado. Pink Floyd’s final studio album, The Division Bell, was named at the suggestion of Adams to his friend, guitarist David Gilmour. Not to mention Adams’s early work co-writing sketches with Graham Chapman for the final series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If anyone can be considered the seventh Python, it is surely Douglas Adams.

Because of his perception as a comedy writer, the contribution of Adams to a number of disciplines of philosophy is perhaps neglected. Not that Adams ever wrote a philosophical treatise, or couched his work in purely philosophical terms. Yet many a true word is spoken in jest. While H2G2 contains any number of circular arguments presented for comic effect, there are also ideas featured in the books and radio scripts which cast a serious eye upon the human world.

Science fiction has always been about taking contemporary issues and ideas and removing them to a place sufficiently distant in space or in time to be able to explore them with greater objectivity. H2G2 is no different than any other work of science fiction in this regard. In the sections that follow, we will look at five disciplines of philosophy, including economics and politics, to examine what Douglas Adams had to say.

Political Philosophy

The president’s job – and if someone sufficiently vain or stupid is picked he won’t realize this – is not to wield power, but draw attention away from it.

As quoted above, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is referring to a Galactic President. More specifically it refers to Zaphod Beeblebrox, former galactic president, and one of the principal characters in all variations of H2G2.

However, it is hardly a great stretch of the imagination to see this as a satire on the President of the United States. The initial radio series and the first two of the five books were released during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. At the end of 1980, the USA elected Ronald Regan to become its 40^th President. The age of the stupid had begun.

There is a tradition in Russia that the leader of the country must alternative between hairy and balding men. If the previous president or king was hirsute and bearded, the next leader must be balding and beardless. They take this very seriously. Something similar might be argued for America in line with Adams’s comments on presidents. Republicans tend to elect stupid leaders; the Democrats vain leaders.

The analogy doesn’t always hold, but considering Ronald Regan and George W Bush on one side, Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama on the other side, it is good enough. The forty fifth President brought stupidity, ignorance, and basic bigotry to it apotheosis (or is it its nadir? – neither words he would understand). Obama was probably the most accomplished President since Lyndon Johnson, but had more in common with John F Kennedy, in that he was adept at giving speeches which were big on gravitas, but light on actual substance. The writer and presenter Sandi Toksvig described Obama as sounding like the pre-printed messages in Hallmark greeting cards. It’s hard to argue with this assessment.

Of course Great Britain is hardly in a position judge. Not when David Cameron and Boris Johnson have both been Prime Minster in recent years. Men who remind us that the best education money can buy cannot instil intelligence in people who didn’t have any to begin with (or, with which to begin, as their private education would argue, incorrectly).

The UK has also seen Tony Blair as Prime Minister; a man who could give Narcissus lessons in vanity. Vain leaders are arguably more dangerous than stupid ones. And when a vain leader joins forces with a stupid one, disaster is bound to follow. I’m sure the people of Iraq would have something to say on the subject.

Democracy is a good idea in principle, but was hijacked a long time ago. Increasingly politicians the world over fail to represent their constituents and instead represent only themselves and the narrow interests they serve in order to reap the financial benefits for which their treachery is rewarded. American politics is predicated on raising funds to run a campaign, which is open to corruption from the very start. Britain is different, but still guilty of prioritising rich interests over those of the most in need. Untendered government contracts worth billions of pounds can be given to Tory party donors, but the same people will let the children of the poorest members of society go hungry with apparent relish. Or watch with barely concealed glee as they drown in dinghies crossing the English Channel. All while claiming to be followers of the Christian faith.

Douglas Adams summed this all up in typically succinct fashion:

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

Hair, no hair. Which explains a lot.

Economics

Shoe shops! In every road, on every street corner, in every city shopping precinct, shoe shop after shoe shop!

Adams’s main contribution to economics is The Shoe Event Horizon. Although, I think he might have been depressed at how one of his most beloved tech companies, Apple, has become as ruthless as any conglomerate to which his imagination gave birth.

The Shoe Event Horizon appeared in episode five of the second series of the original radio incarnation. It reappears in the second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It works like this. The commercial centres of a planet are flooded with shoes shops. Hundred of them. Thousands. Then fashion is introduced into the mix. The types of shoes that are sold are upgraded each season. Moreover, the shoes sold are of such poor quality that they fall apart almost at once. Hence they need to be constantly replaced due to changing fashions and inferior manufacturing, increasing public dependence on the shoe companies (all owned by the same company), until the financial situation reaches a point of critical mass:

The shoe event horizon. The whole economy overbalances. Shoe shops outnumber every other kind of shop. It becomes economically impossible to build anything other than shoe shops.

The Shoe Event Horizon takes its name from the event horizon of a black hole. This is the point around a black hole at which gravity becomes so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. The Shoe Event Horizon is reached at the point in a target planet’s economy where it is impossible to build anything other than shoe shops. A comic idea, to be sure, but one which has real world analogues in western capitalist societies, as well as emerging economies in the developing world.

One of the things the Shoe Event Horizon foretold is something that has come to be known as Planned Obsolescence. This is the very idea that products for sale are deliberately designed to break after a specific length of time, forcing consumers to spend money on replacements at regular intervals. Anyone who has ever bought jeans or shoes from a supermarket knows they are often so badly made that they develop holes and broken stitching in a few months. The Dolmansaxlil Galactic Shoe Corporation would be proud.

The worst culprits though are the tech companies. Their products are often designed to fail after a certain time. Either that or newer operating software is not available for older products, preventing applications from updating so that they can no longer be accessed.

All this serves to drive up profits for the tech companies, depleting the world’s resources, and killing off the competition in the process. Not to mention the dubious working conditions for the people who manufacture the products in Chinese sweat shops, as well as the wars they help to perpetuate in countries where raw materials like bauxite and cobalt are mined.

Ironically it is Apple, of whom Douglas Adams was a big fan, being one of the first people in the UK to own an Apple Mackintosh computer, who have become the exemplar (if exemplar is the right word: spoilers – it isn’t) of Planned Obsolescence and, by extension, The Shoe Event Horizon. One day it might become economically impossible to build anything other than Apple stores.

The Shoe Event Horizon is ultimately a satire on capitalism itself. Those who lionise Capitalism speak in reverent tones about things like market forces and Adam Smith’s invisible hand guiding the market. Capitalism is the antidote to the evils of Communism, so we are told. In reality they are two sides of the same coin. In Communism, the state owns the means of production. With Capitalism, the means of production instead owns the state. Both moving inexorably towards one and the same destination, just one moving clockwise and the other anticlockwise. One political party or one corporation, the end is the same.

Socialism is lumped in with Communism as a great evil to be avoided, but the truth is that Capitalism is just as socialist as Communism. It’s just that with Capitalism, socialism is only extended to the very rich. Banking, farming, the arms industry, oil companies, and the tech industry all receive hand outs and bails outs and pay as little tax as possible. National infrastructure is placed under more strain by them than by the average citizen. Yet little is contributed to the general upkeep of roads and environmental protections and the like. When socialism is spoken about as being undesirable, this is equivocation, with the end of the statement left unspoken. Socialism is undesirable for individuals and the poor. There is always money available for wars and bail outs. Not so much for libraries or to pay nurses anything other than lip service. Clapping NHS workers is cheaper than bothering to fund its services properly. Or repeating slogans like Support the Troops and Help for Heroes, when ex service men and women are left to beg on the streets once their usefulness has ended.

Yet as the Shoe Event Horizon reminds us, this kind of naked profiteering is unsustainable. Capitalism treats society like a Jenga tower, pulling out more and more blocks from the bottom and placing them on top until the entire structure becomes unstable. In this it is not so different from the Soviet structure, which was not so much defeated by the west as it collapsed in on itself after years of corruption and neglect. All top heavy structures topple over eventually.

If all the people who make things and grow things and do the actual work died tomorrow, the very richest would die of neglect within a few weeks. If the owners and operators of all the world’s corporations suddenly expired, it would be some time before anyone noticed. As another famous science fiction writer, Kurt Vonnegut, famously wrote: So it goes.

 
Teleology

The Answer to Everything...

Yes...!

Life, the Universe and Everything...

Yes...!

Is...

Yes...!

IS...

Yes...!!!

Forty two.

Teleology is the study of the end of things: The purpose or point of things. And what could be more important than to work out the purpose of the universe?

Yet in a certain sense, the question is meaningless. It is also self-serving and self-deluding, given that what we really want to know when we ask about the purpose of the universe is, what is my place in the universe? Or rather, give me an answer to the question that highlights my importance within the function of the universe. Our quest for a meaningful meaning to the universe is rarely objective , but often subjective in even formulating the question.

For instance, when people say that they say, I believe in a God (see below), what they are really saying is, I believe that I am important. I believe any teleological explanation for the existence of the universe must place me at its absolute centre. That I, one small part of one ordinary planet, orbiting one ordinary star in one ordinary galaxy in what is, in all likelihood, one ordinary universe, am somehow still special. That I am the centre of a universe in which no centre exists. Or, in the inverse, but equally valid cosmological view, a universe in which every point is as central as any other. Either way, the universe is as devolved and decentralised as it is possible to be.

Yet the question, as we say, is meaningless. After all, why should the universe have any point, other than the one from which it began its existence at the big bang? What if the meaning of life is that life is meaningless? Which may be a depressing answer, but that doesn’t prevent it from being true. After all, the trans Atlantic slave trade and the holocaust are depressing, but they still took place (no matter what idiots think).

Conversely, maybe the question has an extremely simple answer. Something like, the purpose of the universe is to expand and create. That is what the universe does at face value at least. From some form of singularity, an unfathomable amount of energy was thrown out to create an expanding universe. Out of that energy, matter was created, stars and galaxies were formed, giving rise to habitable planets on which sentient beings arose to look into the night sky and ask from where all of this creation came.

From this we might derive a similar drive for human existence. The meaning of life is to expand one’s awareness and to create, either through basic biological reproduction, or by outpourings of artistic expression. Or both.

This is some lefty, liberal hippy shit, to be sure, but few other ideas sit so well in the habitable zone between finding an answer to life, the universe, and everything that speaks to the human condition, while retaining something of the reality of the universe. Rather than interpreting the wishes of an irrational, contradictory god that exists largely in our heads and tells us what we want to hear, at least the existence and actions of the universe play out above our heads in nightly repertoire. If only someone would bother to turn off the lights.

What does any of this have to do with Douglas Adams? A good question. Nothing, except that Adams appreciated the meaningless of searching for a meaning to life. Perhaps the most famous section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is that of Deep Thought. Deep Thought is a giant supercomputer built by an ancient civilisation to come up with an answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything. He mulls it over for seven and a half million years and finally announces that the answer is forty two. An even bigger computer, the Earth, then has to be built to figure out what the actual question is for the answer to make any kind of sense.

This is cyclical nonsense done for comic effect, as with much of Adams’s writing (see, below), but the answer Deep Thought gives is as meaningful and valid as any teleological explanation humans have developed for the purpose of the universe.

In many ways Deep Thought is a grand skit upon the function of religion, particularly the various Christian schisms. Speculative questions are developed to the try to fit the answer to a question (How many roads must a man walk down? Forty two.). They are no less nonsensical than the attempts to try and resolve the various contradictions and absurdities found in the Bible.

Deep Thought and Forty Two reinforce the universal truth that if one asks a stupid question, one will get a stupid answer. That absurd axioms can only lead to further absurdities. Humanity is not the be all and end of the universe and any ideology attempting to place human beings at its centre, let alone select human minorities, are doomed to failure and are right to be ridiculed. As such, forty two is as valid an answer to the absurd question of life, the universe, and everything as anything else. Other valid answers include: the square root of minus one, mauve, a slice of lemon (wrapped around a large gold brick), the dodecahedron, or a liquid which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. 

"It was a tough assignment."

Theology and Metaphysics

"I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist, and so therefore you don't. QED."

Perhaps the most famous proposition in all of philosophy is Rene Descartes’s statement: Je pense donc je suis. This is usually presented in Latin (Descartes originally wrote it in French): Cogito Ergo Sum. However, we know it from its English translation: I think, therefore I am.

Reading Descartes’s rationale in reaching this conclusion is still impressive nearly four hundred years after it was first developed. What can I really know? Descartes asks. I know that my senses do not faithfully reproduce the sensations of my surroundings. Sometimes they deceive me and make me see things that are not really there. One thinks of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, when the ghost of Marley asked him why he doubts the evidence of his eyes:

"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

Moreover, how can I know that what my senses tell me about the world around me are in any way accurate? This might all be a grand illusion. I might be a brain in a jar hooked up to some artificial reality. I might be living in the Matrix or some other form of virtual reality. This might be a simulation. Descartes of course did not quite think in these terms.

The only thing that I can say with any confidence is that as I am able to think and ask such questions as, how do I know that I exist, I must, on some level, exist. Everything that I see and experience around me may well be part of one grand delusion, but there is some part of me that is able to think, which is evidence for some form of existence, whatever form that existence might take.

Er, excuse me, who am I?

Hello?

Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life?

What do I mean by who am I?

Calm down, get a grip now … oh! this is an interesting sensation, what is it? It’s a sort of … yawning, tingling sensation in my … my … well I suppose I’d better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let’s call it my stomach.

It is a brilliant piece of reasoning, which makes what follows it all the more depressing. In my Penguin Classics copy of Discourse on the Method and the Meditations, Descartes turns his attention to the existence of God. Apropos of nothing, Descartes argues that God must exist. He has already successfully argued that the senses deceive us into believing the existence of things that are not there. We hallucinate and daydream and fully dream when we close our eyes at night and slip into unconsciousness. Yet this rationale does not translate into Descartes’s thinking for things that remain entirely invisible and unknowable to us.

Whether you believe or do not believe in God (I am very much in the later camp), is irrelevant in this matter. God is in many ways a collective hallucination for people who believe in such things, but one which is no more verifiable than whether human existence is one big computer simulation. If we are unable to confirm the evidence of our eyes, how can we say anything about the thoughts in our head? Which is what beliefs are: Desires for how we wish the universe to act and to be like, but without any empirical evidence to support those wishes. The same often applies for political beliefs or support for one particular sports team.

To be fair to Descartes, he was living at a time of great religious persecution, where to even suggest that the existence of God might be a matter for doubt could have landed him in serious trouble with the religious authority of his day. As such, he had to make an argument for the existence for God, even if he did so in such a haphazard fashion that it is difficult to take seriously. Yet it is also an example of how theology does not conform to the rigours of the scientific method found in other branches of philosophy and the sciences.

Douglas Adams references such lack of rigour in interviews he gave in his lifetime. He notes his education at Brentwood School, where scientific and philosophical concepts were taught with careful attention, using reason to elucidate the journey from first principles to a consistent and provable theory. Yet, as a Church of England school, when the focus turned to religious education, those same rigorous methods were nowhere to be found. Here reasoning seemed to rest on the simple axiom of: just because. Like Descartes justification for the existence of God, Adams’s teachers built theological arguments on castles made of sand (or Jenga blocks) and apropos of nothing.

This mindset is then parodied in the Hitchhiker’s Guide rationale for the non-existence of God. God cannot exist, because the existence of the Babel Fish proves he exists and proof denies faith, which is all that religion and the belief in God are based upon. It is a paradox (see below), but one which pokes fun at the idea that it is impossible to prove a negative. You can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but you can prove that he does exist, which for religion would be almost as bad. If God were real and the Bible was literally true, many people in religious authority would be in a lot of trouble.

We cannot prove the non-existence of God, but we can show that his existence solves nothing metaphysical. The philosopher Bertrand Russell learned this lesson early in his young life, turning him from a believer into a lifelong atheist. God is invoked as the creator of the universe; the prime mover that gave movement to the universe and set the planets and stars in motion. But then the question becomes, but who created God? Theology tells us that God just is. But if God can just be then we can equally argue that the universe just is. There is nothing special about the existence of a God’s role in the universe that cannot equally be said for a universe that arose all by itself. A godless universe doesn’t solve anything, but it also doesn’t complicate the vexed question of the origin of the universe. Indeed, it simplifies matters considerably.

Douglas Adams described himself as a radical atheist. A Dawkinsist, as he often called himself, in reference to his friend, the biologist, Richard Dawkins. Adams famously said of religion and the supernatural, “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Yet he could also write books that feature UFOs, ghosts, time travelling college rooms, séances, and electronic monks. Adams recognised that fiction operates under different rules to non-fiction. It is possible to consider the mythical and the mystical when writing escapist tales. Which is where they should remain. Such things have no place in considering real world solutions for real world phenomena.

Paradoxes

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”

Paradoxes. Many philosophers have paradoxes associated with them. Mathematical paradoxes, like Zeno’s Paradox. Logical paradoxes, like Russell’s Paradox. The Socratic paradox that all I know is that I know nothing. Or Epimenides, a Cretan philosopher, who said that all Cretans are liars. The paradox is often used by philosophers to test the limits of knowledge or logic, or to examine the general limitations of language to convey useful and internally consistent information.

Douglas Adams’s work is littered with paradoxical ideas and aphorisms. We have already seen in the previous section the idea that proof that God exists is ultimately a logical proof for his non-existence. There are many other examples.

One such example is the story of the Improbability Drive. This is a space propulsion drive that uses improbability as its powering force. The drive itself is invented by a student who recognises that such a machine is virtually impossible, so he works out just how improbable it is and inputs that number into a computer. He then creates the drive out of thin air and is killed by his contemporaries for being a smart arse.

The tale of the Improbability Drive can in part be seen as a satire on the study of cosmogony, the study of the beginning of the universe, as well as theology. In any explanation for the beginning of the universe, there is the problem of infinite regress. As we saw in the previous section (see above), for anything that creates the universe, whether it be God or the Big Bang, there is then the question of what created the creator. One solution is that our universe is one of innumerable universes sitting on a manifold called a brane. But then what created the brane?

This is an old philosophical chestnut that has been incorporated into many an apocryphal tale. The classic one is found in Stephen Hawkins’s A Brief History of Time. An old lady attends a cosmological lecture by a philosopher about the nature of the solar system and the universe at large. At the end of the lecture she objects, saying that everyone knows that the Earth in fact sits on the back of a turtle. The philosopher smugly asks her what does the turtle then rest upon. The woman replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

An improbable invention that is created by calculating how improbable is its existence is one very clever way around the idea of infinite regress. Perhaps one day science or philosophy will develop a theory quite so deft to explain the existence of the universe.

In the third Hitchhiker book, Life, the Universe and Everything, Arthur Dent learns how to fly by teaching himself to the throw himself at the ground and miss. The paradox is that one cannot do it voluntarily. The trick is to distract oneself at the crucial moment so that one is unaware the ground is looming up below. The idea that one can perform the impossible, even miraculous, by simple virtue of being unaware of what one is doing is highly paradoxical. It serves as a plot device in the third and fourth books in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.

Another paradox, that is never explained, is how Zaphod Beeblebrox is great grandfather to his own great grandfather. That is to say that he is from a long line of Zaphod Beeblebroxes, of which he is the first and his great grandfather is the fourth. All we are told is that it involved a contraceptive and a time machine.

This, of course, is a variation on the Grandfather Paradox, where a person goes back in time and kills their own grandfather before he can sire a son and so the grandson is never born to go back in time and kill their grandfather. But then the grandfather isn’t killed, the grandson is born and can go back in time to kill their grandfather. At this point we encounter our old friend, infinite regress.

Although one of the ways out of the Grandfather Paradox is to introduce the idea of parallel worlds. That as soon as one goes back in time and changes anything, one creates a different version of reality that exits in parallel with the original universe. The grandfather is killed in the new version of reality, but continues to exist in the first reality and no paradox is required. Indeed, if the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics holds true, both universes already exist and killing one’s grandfather would simply move one from one universe into the other.

Another broadly paradoxical idea that plays into this is the idea of an artificial universe. A writer for the Hitchhiker’s Guide has set up an artificial universe in his office so that he can research stories in the galaxy, but still go to parties near the guide’s offices at night. In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, this is used to protect Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Beeblebrox is be executed by being placed in the Total Perspective Vortex, a device which shows its victim the entire, infinite enormity of the universe and their place in it, frying their brain in the process. However, when Beeblebrox is subjected to the Vortex, he has entered the artificial universe and not left it.

This alternate universe, it turns out, has been set up for the sole purpose of protecting Beeblebrox from the Total Perspective Vortex. So when he is shown the sheer scale of the universe, he realises that he is the most important object in it (which in the alternative universe, he is). Not a good idea for a man of Zaphod’s already massive ego. He in all other respects continues to interact with the real universe and its inhabitants. Only when he has successfully survived his exposure to the Vortex is the universe turned off and he can get on with his real mission.

The real mission is to find the man who rules the galaxy. He is a lonely old man who doubts everything; even his own existence. The galactic government keep him out of the way and cut off from news or information of any sort to ask him hypothetical questions which are then used to govern the universe, solving the problem of people wanting to be politicians being kept away from the business of actual decision making (see above). A paradox is solved in the process.

There are many other paradoxical examples in Adams’s work. Ships that hang in the air the way that bricks don’t. The man who proclaims nothing is true, but is later found to be lying (shades of Epimenides’s Cretan). The golden age of the galaxy where everyone was rich and no one was poor; at least no one worth speaking of.

Adams’s work is filled with logical inconsistencies from which his comedy arises. But beneath the surface there is to be found much depth. For my money, he was one of the most important philosophers of the 20^th century.

Douglas Adams

We Haven’t Met But You’re a Great Fan of Mine: Iain M Banks’s Culture Series

 (spoilers and trigger warnings apply)

The eight, nine, or ten books of Iain M Banks Culture series (depending on how you count them – see below) are some of the most important science fiction novels published in the last forty years. Variously called space opera, utopian futurism or anarcho-techno-syndicalism, the Culture goes beyond the standard sci-fi typified by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke and their contemporaries. Here there are big ideas, even if some of those ideas are not explored in any great depth, but they are the backdrop to each stand-alone novel. Character, rather than science, takes centre stage in the Culture.

The Culture refers to an utopian, post-human society in which biological life and general AI (‘Minds’) exist and work together. Not that this is a human society. Although the Culture is located in the Milky Way, the novels take place as much as fifteen hundred years apart. The titular story of The State of the Art collection does take place on Earth, but humanity is otherwise not featured. That said, the majority of the main characters in the Culture books are humanoid in appearance. Banks, after all, is writing for other humans.

Post-human in this sense refers to the various genetic and technological advancements that augment the people of the Culture. They live for hundreds of years, with many using a ‘neural lace’ grown around the brain to protect them against unexpected death, uploading the consciousness to a lab-grown replacement body. Many in the Culture switch between genders and raise children as both men and women. They also employ various glands in the body to secrete drugs for sleep, alertness, time dilation or enhanced memory, to name but a few examples.

The majority of Culture inhabitants no longer live on planets. Instead, the Culture has constructed great rings (‘Orbitals’), millions of miles in diameter, on which cities are built on plates on the inner ring. Each of the billions of inhabitants are in communication with the central Mind that controls every aspect of their environment. Humanoid Avatars act as the Minds’ representatives on the surface.

The other main population density are found on the various spacecraft of the Culture that whip around the galaxy at speeds many times faster than light. The larger General Systems Vehicles (GSVs) can be home to billions of people, although the average GSV is about the size (or volume) of a large city and house millions rather than billions. These ships are also managed and operated by a central Mind and its Avatars.

The ships of the Culture are perhaps the most well known element of the series, due to the comical names the Minds choose for themselves. Just Read the Instructions, No More Mr Nice Guy, The Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival, Poke it With a Stick, Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life's Rich Tapestry, the list is extensive¹.

There are also ships named in honour to other sci-fi and cultural items. The Someone Else’s Problem seems to be named after the SEP field from Douglas Adams’s Life, the Universe and Everything²: Minority Report after the Philip K Dick short story (and the schmaltzy Hollywood adaptation): Clear Air Turbulence after the Ian Gillan Band album, which bears a resemblance to the yellow striped ship on the LP cover.

Many people know the names of Culture ships thanks to Elon Musk. In an act of typical small-mindedness, Musk named a number of Space X rocket platforms after GSV ships, including Of Course I Still Love You and A Shortfall of Gravitas. Which is a bit like naming a paddle boat after the Titanic. It’s further evidence that Musk might have read a lot of science fiction, but he doesn’t seem to have understood much of it.

The other main occupants of the Culture are Drones. Anything from the size of a fingernail to as large as a dustbin, drones are robotic life. Like R2D2 hovering in the air. The electrical field around them, which presumably allows them to hover, glows in different colours depending on mood. Although entities in their own right, Drones usually accompany a main character on their journey or mission (just like R2D2 in fact). A subset of Drones are Knife Missiles, which are a more overtly weapons-grade Drone. For the most part, Knife Missiles are to Drones what Avatars are to Minds.

The controversy over how many Culture novels there are and what constitutes a Culture novel is complicated by two entries in the series. The aforementioned The State of the Art is a collection of short stories that features two, possibly three, stories set in the Culture universe, including the title story. However, the book also includes a number of non-sci-fi, Earth based stories. Banks published science fiction as Iain M Banks and regular fiction as just Iain Banks. While The State of the Art is a hundred pages long, more than half the book’s length, five of the eight stories included are normal fiction.

Moreover, the novel Inversions is set entirely on a world equivalent to Earth’s medieval era. While there are two moments of Deus Ex Machina that seem to be caused by Culture-esque technology, possibly a Knife Missile, the narrator, Oelph, is a native of the planet, where electricity has yet to be invented, The incidents in question are not witnessed by him directly and he speaks about them as miraculous events (any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic). Alternating chapters focus on The Doctor and The Bodyguard³, who both seem to be Culture citizens in disguise, but the book is routed in medievalism. It’s more The Name of the Rose than The State of the Art.

As such, I will focus mainly on the remaining eight books that make up the Culture series. Luckily there is more than enough material to consider.

Preference is subjective and comes down to personal choice, but I think most people will agree that The Player of Games is the first great Culture novel. The first book in the series, Consider Phlebas, is good, but its follow up is on another level and is arguably the best of the first four Culture books (five, if you include The State of the Art).

All of the Culture novels feature Special Circumstances, the Culture’s equivalent to the CIA or MI6. Many main characters are officers of Special Circumstances, but in The Player of Games, Jernau Morat Gurgeh is a master board game player recruited by Special Circumstances to travel to a civilisation in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The journey takes years, during which time Gurgeh learns to play a game so complex that no one, not even Special Circumstances, expect him to last beyond the opening rounds of the tournament he is about to enter.

The Azad, to whose homeworld Gurgeh is travelling, are a species that base their entire society on this one game. The most skilled players become generals and professors. Even emperor. The Azad spend their entire lives learning the game in order to rise through the ranks of their society. Gurgeh has only a few years to learn the game during his journey out of the galaxy, but hides and underplays his understanding of the game, even from Flere-Imsaho, the Special Circumstances Drone sent to accompany him.

The Player of Games has some similarities with Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. In both books, the central game is complex and neither is described in any great detail. The Glass Bead Game requires expert knowledge of music, mathematics and philosophy. The Azad game involves mini games played using cards or dice, but the main game is played on a board large enough for players to walk around it and interact with the pieces.

Both the Azad and the fictional European country of Castalia are authoritarian in nature. The Glass Bead Game takes place at some unspecified time in the future. The Player of Games takes place a century after The State of the Art, which is set on Earth in the 1970s. Mastery of the game in both The Player of Games and The Glass Bead Game allows for social advancement in their respective societies. How much, if any, knowledge Banks had of Hesse’s novel is unclear, but the books are at least connected in spirit to one another.

Indeed, The Player of Games is the most unique of the Culture novels. There are more accomplished books later in the series, but The Player of Games is a true stand-alone novel in the sense that it has a tone and a style that Banks’s didn’t really use again. Consider Phlebas is similar in the way it follows one POV character for the majority of the narrative, but Bora Horza Gobuchul is a more self-possessed character than Gurgeh. Gobuchul is a mercenary and a survivor. Gurgeh is a civilian and a pawn in the Culture’s plan to destabilise Azad society.

Consider Phlebas is in its way also unique, in that it is the only book that focuses solely on a character from outside the Culture. In this first entry in the series, most of what we know about the Culture is gleaned from what their enemies in the Idrian War think of them. Though, to be fair, they are not exactly wrong. The Culture might be a utopian society, but its dealings with rival empires are Machiavellian in the extreme. Their treatment of the Azad, who live in a dwarf galaxy and lack the capability to cross into the Milky May, demonstrates this. It’s safe to say the Culture do not abide by any equivalent of Star Trek’s Prime Directive.

Consider Phlebas takes place about seven hundred years before the events of The Player of Games and five hundred years before any other book in the series (although there are flashbacks in Excession that take place more than a thousand years earlier). Rather like Asimov’s Foundation and its connecting series, events in The Idrian War become the subject of rumour and folklore in later Culture novels.

After The Player of Games, Banks never again concentrated entirely on one character. Each subsequent book is either a duet of dueling narratives, like Inversions and Use of Weapons, or we find a true space opera of competing stories, all focused on one event or plotline. Excession, Matter, Surface Detail, in fact most of the later novels, are all examples of this second kind of storytelling.

Again, preference is subjective, but for me the best of the Culture novels is Look to Windward. More of a dueling kind of narrative with some elements of space opera, Look to Windward swirls around its main protagonist. Major Quilan is another character from a species external to the Culture, the Chelgrian. Quilan’s wife, also a soldier, is killed during a civil war the Culture instigated (part Machiavelli, part CIA). He is offered the chance to take revenge on the Culture, although the true nature of his mission is kept from him until the end of the book.

Look to Windward is a kind of sequel to Consider Phlebas, in that they both take their titles from lines in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (although there is little else to connect them). I think what elevates Looks to Windward is its treatment of grief and PTST and survivor’s guilt. Quilan’s motivation, ultimately, isn’t about revenge but death-wish and an inability to carry on without his wife. He is vulnerable and, like Gurgeh, used as a pawn by more powerful forces manipulating his grief.

The resolution is bleak but it is honest and not muddied with high-minded rhetoric about the human condition. The best novels offer no resolution because life itself is unresolved. Every life ends in tragedy of one sort or another, if only for the people left behind. Science fiction, it is worth repeating, is about taking contemporary human concerns and placing them at some sufficient remove in time or space in order to examine them with greater objectively. In that sense, Look to Windward is the most human of all the Culture novels. It is melancholic and dark, but it is also the book to which most people should be able to relate.

Banks wrote the Culture novels as a riposte to the dystopian science fiction of the day⁴. Yet for supposedly utopian science fiction, the Culture series is shot through with all of the most extreme forms of violence, including rape, cannibalism and dismembered bodies fashioned into household furniture. True, most of this violence is committed by non Culture species, but the eponymous society has just as much blood on its hands. The Culture is a model of the western world, where opulence and comfort have been achieved at the expense of colonialism, slavery and bloodshed.

Nowhere is the violence more evident than in the penultimate Culture novel, Surface Detail. Here the two main female characters, Lededje Y'breq and Chay, are both victims of sexual violence. Lededje is killed by her abuser as she tries to stab him to death and is resurrected tens of light years away by a neural lace grown in her skull without her knowledge or consent. Chay is an operative in a digital hell, created to control the native population, who becomes trapped and is repeatedly tortured, raped and tricked with visions of escape, before being made into an angel of death, able to kill one person a day and release their souls from hell.

In the meantime, the Culture are going about their usual machinations. They seem to be trying to protect Veppers, the operator of the various digitals hells, who also happens to be Lededje’s abuser. The Culture, though,  are plotting against him. A rouge Culture Mind, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, helps Lededje return to her homeworld, but prevents her from exacting revenge on Veppers when confronted with him. It is another act of duplicity by the Culture and with the servers destroyed that maintain digital hell, Veppers is ripped to pieces by tech implanted in Lededje’s regrown body.

A fitting end perhaps, but it once again shows the darker side of utopia. In a future where we could upload and resurrect ourselves at the flick of a switch, what value would we place on life itself? Like being able to download a book or an album in an instant and then leaving it unheard or unread because it has no physical presence or intrinsic value. To a species obsessed with ownership, would life become equally worthless when it is so easy to download and retain? Another throwaway commodity, like single use plastic. And what protection would we afford peoples lacking similar means to save and download themselves? The history of colonialism and globalisation give hints of a worrying conclusion.

What most utopian science fiction writers quickly learn is that perfection is boring⁵. The original Star Trek series (TOS) from the 1960s was an optimistic, utopian vision of the future, produced against the backdrop of the Summer of Love and the civil rights movement. By the time The Next Generation aired in 1987 (coincidentally the year Consider Phlebas was published), the cynicism of the 70s and 80s Reganomics had made that vision seem as naïve as it ultimately was. The imperfect world of Deep Space 9 (1993-1999) was both a more honest view of the world and an accurate prediction for many of the issues still facing us to this day. The narrative limitations of utopia had given way to boundless imperfection and dystopia, creating one of the best science fiction shows in TV history, as well as leading to the Battlestar Gallactica reboot, which plumbed the depths of dystopian science fiction in the years following 9/11.

There was an attempt to return to utopia in later Star Trek series, but Voyager needed the introduction of Seven of Nine to create conflict and as good as Enterprise became, it’s main human characters often come off as arrogant and self-serving evangelists for the American way of life above all other ideologies. People denounce modern Trek for being a betrayal of Gene Rodenberry’s vision but that vision turned out to be kind of bunk. It was of its time and has not aged well. The idea that no-one in the future would use slang or idiom or more than the most mild of swearwords is a white, educated, middle class view of the world. Every indication is that these things will increase as society becomes more tolerant of colourful language and embraces language outside of the ‘norm’. English in particular has always appropriated words from other languages. The English of the 23rd and 24th centuries will probably sound nothing like 21st century English. If English survives at all.

Science Fiction reflects the time in which it was written. TOS is a reflection of the 60s and second generation Trek a reflection of the concerns of the 80s and 90s. Modern Trek is a reflection of today. People swear in new Trek because characters are allowed to swear on mainstream TV today in a way they couldn’t in 1966 or 1987. In the same way that same sex couples exist in modern Trek in a way TV executives were intolerant (and openly homophobic) towards in the past.

Much of this is also true for the Culture series. It might be a utopian society, but watching normal people going about their ordinary, comfortable lives isn’t very interesting. Hence the main characters of the Culture novels are soldiers and mercenaries and sex slaves and exiled war criminals. Banks argued that the Culture has lived in relative peace for thousands of years and the few episodes depicted in his novels are the exception rather than the rule. The Culture, he said, only interfere in the development of other societies when they absolutely have to, or when a threat to the Culture is identified.

This seems like a conceit. All the evidence from the Culture books indicates they interfere more frequently than either they or their creator would like to admit. Special Circumstances has a lot in common with Star Trek’s Section 31, the covert organisation introduced in Deep Space 9. As we see with their treatment of the Azad and the Chelgrian, Special Circumstances often interfere in the affairs of other planets and societies not because they must but because they can. Section 31 are prepared to commit genocide against the Changelings in order to win the Dominion War. Like all science fiction tropes, these are reflections of our own covert organisations overthrowing democratic governments (or bombing civilians in revenge for crimes of which they are not guilty and had no power to prevent) in order to maintain western global hegemony. We do it not because we have to, but because we want to. After five hundred years of colonialism and empire building, it has become a destructive habit. We just can’t help ourselves.

The Culture novels show that all the technological advancements we can imagine won’t save us from ourselves. People still suffer from boredom and depression and post traumatic trauma. People still cheat and lie, especially to themselves. People still die, despite their best efforts at preservation, and people still grieve for those they have lost. Despite the most advanced general AI working in concert with one another, the Culture is still deceived and bested by individuals and other societies alike. We can’t solve all of life’s little problems and the more we do, the more new problems will blink into existence in unpredicted ways. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t try.

Maybe this is why Banks became more and more interested in medieval societies in the later Culture novels. As well as Inversions, Matter and Surface Detail feature worlds with societal levels roughly equal to the Middle Ages. Amusingly, Banks at one time became so obsessed with the game, Civilisation, he hadn’t done any writing in three months and had to delete the game from his computer and smash the CD to avoid missing another deadline. Although Inversions predates this incident by several years, Matter appears to be the book he was working on at the time.

The main focus of Matter is a feudal society on the eighth level of the Shellworld, Sursamen. The plot centres on palace intrigue. The king is murdered by his adjunct under the cloak of a battlefield injury. His son, Prince Ferbin, witnesses his father’s slaying and flees through the various levels that make up the Shellworld, each an environment in itself, as he attempts to reach the planet’s surface and recruit mercenaries to help him defeat his father’s killer. His younger brother is declared heir to the throne until such time as the regent can arrange the boy king’s death. Meanwhile their sister, Djan Seriy Anaplian, who left the planet fifteen years earlier to became a Special Circumstances agent, hears of her father’s death and makes the journey home. 

Despite the usual elements of space opera, Matter has as much in common with Game of Thrones as it does Foundation or The Expanse. How much of the plot developed from Banks’s addiction to Civilisation and how much he played the game as ‘research’ for the book is unclear⁶. Yet it clearly affected the structure of the book, albeit containing some good science fiction world building. The denouement is as violent and incident packed as any Culture novel, relying on every iota of Culture technology. Yet the final scene of the book returns to the simple life of feudal Sursamen.

War is a common feature of the Culture novels. The Idrian War. The civil war of the Chelgrian. The medieval conflict in Matter. The War of Heaven being waged in Surface Detail. The various internal wars in which Cheradenine Zakalwe is embroiled in Use of Weapons (another non-Culture citizen recruited by Special Circumstances who conceals the true nature of his origins).

Indeed, the lion’s share of the Culture series is about military engagement and covert operations. Other than the first act of The Player of Games, it is not until we get to Look to Windward that we spend any extended period of time in the Culture itself, where much of the main narrative takes place on the Orbital, Masaq’. More time is given over to travel on one GSV or another, but these seem to be the hedonistic, pleasure cruise, party bus division of the Culture and more atypical than life on the Orbitals.

Again, utopia is boring, narratively speaking, and little focus is placed on the sedate regions of the Culture, except as a force pulling at the hero as they the resist the Call to Adventure. In Joseph Campbell’s hero cycle, the Culture might be viewed as the immature state we are destined to reject in setting out to become adults. The majority of the Culture’s unseen citizens are in a state of arrested development as a result of extreme luxury and the guiding hand of the Minds and Special Circumstances. Eden, like all utopias, is stultifyingly boring, which is why Adam and Eve couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.  Yet the Culture has not one omnipotent being watching over it, but countless numbers of them, patrolling Eden’s gates and sending angels down to issue their proclamations (and avenging angels to defeat their enemies). This perhaps explains why the Culture is involved in so much war and conflict on and beyond its borders. Sheer, unmitigated boredom.

Curiously, for a gender fluid utopia, relationships depicted within the Culture are for the most part hetero-normative. There is the relationship between Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil in Excession, in which they both pass through a number of sex changes and impregnate each other, as well as living for a time as a same sex couple. But even this ends in infidelity and infanticide. Yet in a gender fluid society, wouldn’t this be the most interesting kind of romance? One that places no limit or importance on gender or sexuality, but only the love of one sentient being for another over the centuries as they navigate the interpersonal dynamics with each change in gender that seeks to keep things fresh. There is of course the conversation about sexuality as genetics rather than a choice, but one can imagine in a future where one’s gender can be so easily switched, one’s sexuality becomes equally fluid. Life as not only post-human but post-genetic and post-gender. Sexual evolution facilitated through technology.

This is perhaps the biggest criticism of the Culture novels. That Banks built a world of interesting possibilities and then didn’t follow through with its many potential thought experiments. It is true that the Culture books are space opera and each concentrates on some crisis point within the galaxy, but these are also character studies and the sex lives of the characters are for the most part hetero-normative. Whatever the mainstream distaste for such considerations, it seems a lost opportunity to create a world of gender fluidity and then only shine a light on the most frozen regions where men love women and women love men. Other than Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil, the only other kinds of same sex coupling are in the orgiastic parties of the hedonistic GSVs. Or the affair between Gilt President Geljemyn and her underling in The Hydrogen Sonata, which is still a hetero-normative cliché.

To Banks’s credit, the Culture novels are filled with strong, self-possessed, fully realised female characters. They are often the main protagonist in a cavalcade of characters, particularly in the final three books in the series (Matter, Surface Detail and The Hydrogen Sonata). Even in the duelling, two character novels (Use of Weapons and Inversions), female POV characters take up half of the narrative. I’m not sure the Culture ever crosses the threshold for passing the Bechtel Test. The nearest two named women come to having a conversation about something other than a man is in Surface Detail, where Culture agent Yime Nsokyi is sent to prevent Lededje from killing Veppers. The closest we come is with Nsokyi being in conversation about Lededje. The two women never meet and the Nsokyi subplot is perhaps the least important of the novel.

However, it is again a curious kind of redundancy to talk of male and female characters in a gender fluid society. There are no trans characters and the only kind of androgyny is found in the Avatars that represent the Minds. I don’t think we can judge Banks too unfairly, as this is a problem inherent in all science fiction. In shining a light on the rest of the universe, we really only reflect our own personal experience and preference (and prejudice), in the same way that alien races in Star Trek are indentified as ‘other’ by slightly different nose,  forehead and neck ridges. Aliens always conform to human expectations. Klingon women still have cleavage and even reptilian women are identified with prominent bosoms, despite not being mammalian. Even lizard women must conform to an adolescent male idea of sexuality on which much of entertainment is still based.

Indeed, many of these issues come down to the simple fact that science fiction was for the longest time the sole preserve of male writers and directors. Just as progress on Earth moves slowly because white, male, hetero-normative power structures are reluctant to relinquish power and increase diversity, so do we see a mainstream view of society reflected in our science fiction.

If you want a vision of something outside of the conventional, waspish view of the universe, you have to step outside the white-male-centric world and read science fiction written by women and people of colour. Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, with its species of non-binary peoples, was considered revolutionary when it was published in 1969 (though it seems fairly tame by today’s standards, which is a testament to progress made in the last fifty years). Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (aka Lilith’s Brood) presents visitors to Earth who are so truly alien that humans become nauseous at the mere sight of them⁷. Or Afro SF (published 2012), a collection of short science fiction stores written by African writers, which reflects the issues facing the continent, from post-colonialism to political corruption, in the same tradition of all science fiction. There are myriad other examples, all of which get buried beneath the foundations of classic science fiction, which is, for the most part, entirely white and  entirely male. This is starting to change. Albeit slowly.

These criticisms are perhaps a little unfair and overly harsh, because I am a massive fan of Iain M Banks (and Iain Banks) and of the Culture in particular. They are all better than average novels, well written and well executed. What’s more, there is incredible variety in their structure. No two books are exactly alike. Consider Phlebas is a series of adventures. The Player of Games is one contiguous narrative. Use of Weapons is the first dueling narrative, one story moving forwards, the other backwards in time. Excession is the first of the space opera books. The dueling narratives of Inversions are lock-stepped in time.  Look to Windward mashes everything together. Matter and Surface Detail are perhaps the most similar, but still significantly different.

I think what Banks’s science fiction represents is a bridge between the classic 20th century science fiction that runs from Asimov to Philip K Dick and the emergent 21st century worlds of Liu Chixin, Arkady Martine and the countless modern science fiction writers I have yet to read (I have a pile I am working my through). I don’t know if or how much James S. A. Corey’s Expanse series was inspired by the Culture books, but it seems a kind of natural successor. For all its utopian pretensions, the Culture introduced a grittier, darker kind of universe to science fiction and the Expanse definitely leans into that. Both series employ a similar level of casual violence (though the TV adaptation dials it up somewhat). I like the Expanse books, but the prose seems a little terse at times. Could do with a few more run on sentences. A minor criticism.

 

 

There are features to Banks’s final Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata, that make it seem like a book written by a man who knew he was dying. The Gzilt are preparing to Sublime, an activity which had been alluded to in other Culture books, but not enlarged upon. To Sublime is to enter a higher state of reality and leave the physical world (the Real) behind. The book is written as a sequential narrative, counting down to the day on which most, if not all, of Gzilt society will Sublime. Though the reality of Subliming might not be as concrete as many believe. The search for this truth drives the book’s narrative.

All good metaphors for death and the beyond. In fact, Banks wrote the book before his final diagnosis. His final non-fiction book, The Quarry, is the one he completed as he was dying and is structured around a son and his terminally ill father. However, if Banks was going to write a final Culture novel (it was the last book released before his death), the themes addressed in  The Hydrogen Sonata are a fitting and ironic way to conclude the series. It is one of the best of the series: The conclusion feels like Banks accepting death and the uncertainty of what lies beyond. No matter the circumstances under which he wrote it, The Hydrogen Sonata always reminds me of Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, the final two TV series written by Dennis Potter in the mid-90s as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. The desolation of the final scenes of The Hydrogen Sonata play out like a metaphor for a world without Iain Banks living in it. Which is a sadder and more impoverished place to be.

Banks died ten years ago as I write and as a committed socialist and humanitarian, I can only imagine what he would make of what has happened to the UK and the world in general in the decade since he left us. Brexit, Trump, Ukraine, the cost of living, Partygate, anti-Wokeness, transphobia, the refugee crisis: Utopia rarely seemed so beyond our reach. We could do with a few Minds about now to save us from the mindless. And the heartless. And ourselves.

The Culture showed that science fiction novels can embed themselves in a common world without the need for a continuous narrative featuring recurring characters. Which is still something of a radical idea. Even the great world building books of science fiction and fantasy are concentrated on a common theme, whether it be the forging and destruction of the one true ring in the Lord of the Rings, or the formation and concealment of the various incarnations of the Foundation in Asimov’s novels. The actors might change, but the goal remains the same. Either that or authors create new worlds with each new novel⁸. Few authors other than Iain M Banks use world building as a background to a series of single arching, single use narratives.

The moving finger writes. And having writ, moves on. And we must move on. To the science fiction inspired by the Culture. And to the books that follow in its wake. Iain M Banks smoothed the way. His pioneering work should not be forgotten.

Footnotes:

¹A complete list is available at: https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft
²Similarly, the five year long party held on a floating platform in The Hydrogen Sonata appears to be based on a similar one in Life, the Universe and Everything, which, in that book, has been going on for four generations.
³The Doctor’ chapters are narrated by Oelph and ‘The Bodyguard’ by a more general narrator.
⁴I always find it funny that when Blade Runner was released in 1982, it was considered a bleak vision of the future - today it looks almost naively optimistic.
⁵It’s why Dante’s Inferno is enthralling, Purgatory interesting and Paradise dull as dishwater.
⁶Ironically, given Banks’s issues meeting his deadlines, Matter is the book I read quicker than any other. I managed to read all six hundred pages in two days, while holding down a full time job.
⁷Butler’s Patternmaster series does explore elements of the gender fluid relationship of long lived entities, but that relationship is for the most part patriarchal and domineering.
⁸Three other Iain M Banks novels, The Algebraist, Feersum Endjinn and Against a Dark Background are non-Culture books, but nonetheless just as good.