Some thoughts on Iain Banks and the Culture.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I've just finished reading "Stonemouth" and "The Hydrogen Sonata", but my original discussion of this was derailed by the announcement of Iain Banks' illness. (Iain Banks has released a statement very recently saying that he felt 'treasured' by the outpouring of sentiment on this. It's nice to know that we've had a chance to let him know how we feel before he goes. Too rare.) What follows is fairly high level but, if you are very much against any possibility of spoilers, perhaps don't read on until you've read "The Hydrogen Sonata" and, to a lesser degree, "The Algebraist" and "Excession".

One of the challenges of exploring a Universe of your own creation, as with the Culture in the Iain [M] books, is that you run the risk of not answering everyone's questions about what will happen or, in many cases worse, you will come up with an answer and it is bathetic, rather than concluding at the same level of significance. The 1812 Overture should not finish with "shave and a haircut" played on the kazoo. Given the environment of the Culture, where civilisations rise and fall, with many highly successful groups deciding to head off and Sublime after some ten thousand-ish years, it was always going to be a question of how the Culture ended. Would they fall apart into many disparate segments (although this had happened numerous times already) or would the vast majority Sublime, an act of ascension that was necessarily always shrouded in mystery due to the sheer inexplicability of the experience, leaving behind a Remnant to carry on the name of the Culture and oversee the mark-down everything-must-go disposal of their technology to favoured protege civilisations?

I am not an enormous fan of the great detail found in much of the "harder" Science Fiction as it has a tendency to get in the way of both plot and characterisation, in order to explain the detailed workings of a machine that has not and may not ever be able to be built, for a purpose that we may never achieve. (At the same time, I'm a huge fan of epic span and interesting technologies, I just don't need an author to draw out the schematic and spend ten pages in exposition to a curiously under-informed new engineering ensign.) Similarly, while I am curious about the details of civilisation in Science Fiction, I am well aware that this is a fiction, not an historical document, and expecting some sort of guaranteed consistency and resolution is really putting too much stress onto the author!

I never expected to see how the Culture turned out, because I didn't see why Banks should feel the need to stop writing about them or moving them into a semi-historical model, and I really didn't want to read an answer that didn't fit with my happily unresolved thoughts on their final state. We get hints, throughout Banks' work, that something interesting happened at the end of the Culture (one character has the opportunity to wake up after 200,000 years and look back in one work) but "The Hydrogen Sonata" gives us an idea of what would happen if the Culture did decide to take the step and Sublime. Subliming is handled delicately in Banks' work. It is incomprehensible to the denizens of this advanced civilisation, who happily work with hyperspace, and it does not appear to be a state from which one really ever returns. There could not ever be a "Adventures in Sublimation" book, any more than any book on what happens in a "Heaven" could adequately describe even a fraction of what things could be like in such a space that was unbound by our current existence.

One thing is pretty clear, and Banks states it himself; the protagonists of his Culture works are the outsiders of the Culture. Those who are happy in the post-scarcity socialist utopia of the Culture do not run off to fix problems on other planets. They do not plan for war. They do not take steps outside of the principles of the Culture. All of this is left to those who do not fit in, often external agents brought in from other civilisations, and these people would not stand in front of the transcending portals and solemnly intone the formula required to Sublime. The protagonists, at least, would all be Culture-Remnant at most and, more likely, nameless wanderers who attached themselves wherever they thought it was interesting. One of the frustrations with the Resiler-Protagonist is that their position is always at odds with the accepted mechanisms for a comfortable and happy life in their society. While this rebellion and stance can be noble, it can also be downright irritating - an affluent teen painting their room black while still living within the privilege and circle of those against whom they rebel. Ennui is  one of the perceived risks of post-scarcity cultures and, while it does appear that this can actually happen where sufficiently rich people have to occasionally find modes of behaviour that are completely transgressive in order to inspire action, it is hard to see that this will always be the case. My argument of the "Depraved Powerful" is more along the lines that it is the gradient between haves and have-nots that ultimately provides the feeling of reactive uselessness and lack of purpose to action but, hey, let's build a utopia and see what happens. The other, more sinister, interpretation is that having a relative wealth of such magnitude that it makes one untouchable has actually required a degree of disregard, psychopathy and cruelty that is then manifested in transgressive social behaviour in other spheres but maybe I've just read "American Psycho" too many times. "Hydrogen Sonata" dances pretty close to the "irritating" line with the protagonist, for my taste, while simultaneously showing us how other citizens could be unconventional and yet still integrated - if anything, this does illustrate that the representations of these far advanced and socially distinctive cultures is continually being seen through the lens of our closest analogue. The notion that rebellion, for some, is inevitable and that there will always be people that won't fit in is heart-warming for the human outsiders who read the book and can identify with an anti-social hero but assuming that it will always be so goes against all the other problems that have been solved in setting up the post-scarcity society.

Eh, it's a minor point and I'm not sure I could even truly comprehend his world if it were not through that lens so let's return to the major contribution of "Hydrogen Sonata" - how we might see the end of the advanced civilisation in this current dimension.

With "Hydrogen Sonata", Banks gives us a fairly good idea of what would happen to the vast majority of the Culture that we don't see but he has also set up a situation for a very, very strong Remnant. I have occasionally entertained the idea that the ideas explored in Excession set up a situation where the Culture (Sublimed) and the Culture-Remnant may have a more linked future than anyone in the Culture ever thought. Some of that is because I am soft and middle-aged and do not like the thought of things going away to where I can never get them back and some is my projection of Banks' authorial ego onto the true power wielded by some of the civilisations he has created. "The Algebraist" clearly shows a people who are wielding unimaginable power but in a way that imposes no burden upon them. The Culture, his first creation and the one he returns to, have always been slightly ahead of the curve in many regards so I wonder what is in his mind.

Of course, we will probably never know the real answer, not that such a concept exists and, even if we do get "the answer", will it satisfy us? History is notoriously short on real resolution and what we tend to see is re-interpretations of the artefacts we have as we try to work out when one civilisation stopped and another started - but it's rarely clean. We mark key events in the life of a civilisation but, of course, the actual civilisation must have existed before point X (in some way) and then continued after point Y, at least until the kids stopped learning Latin and started to pick up a more Germanic language, for example - but there's always a cross-over (Saxon drugs and Roman rule?) You might have ejected the magistrates but the flavour of your civilisation generally changes more slowly than acts of legal fiat.

It has been interesting to follow the Culture over the span of the books, get some insight into its beginnings and start to see some of the ways it might end. While "Hydrogen Sonata" is not the best of the Culture novels and could have been edited more tightly to cut some flab, it is a good one and well worth reading, not least because it gives enough of the shape of an ending to allow us to construct one for ourselves that will meet our expectation - if this is even important to the reader in question!