Culture
by Iain Banks · first published 2023
51% recommend45% neutral4% critical
Why HN recommends it
Space-opera series imagining a post-scarcity, AI-run utopia where benevolent Minds look after humans; prized for ethical and political ideas about war, surveillance, and what people do when AI does everything.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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Devil's advocate: Imagine a world in which theft, rape, slavery, and child abuse are impossible (more than once / for any meaningful period of time). Have you read any of Iain Banks's Culture series? I think the peace of mind that you and everyone you'll ever know will never get disappeared into someone's rape dungeon doesn't seem so bad. Or that you can go into business and actually win…
on “How a Cashless Society Could Embolden Big Brother” ↗> CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture? > Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it’s my secular heaven….Yes, I would, absolutely. Iain Banks's The Culture is my Utopia too. Of all the worlds and societies of science fiction that…
on “The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks (2009)” ↗…in his imagination but it'd be better presented in a different format than science fiction. To truly see how bad he is as a writer, compare him to the greats: Stanislaw Lem, Gene Wolfe, Iain Banks (Culture Series), Strugatsky brothers, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Heinlein, J.G. Ballard, Ursula Le Guin, William Gibson ... Since Dune was mentioned in this thread, I find the first two books to be absolutely in…
on “Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?” ↗I'm now glad Amazon decided not to do a show based on the Culture series by Iain Banks. I can only imagine how horrible that'd be, since they have even less taste than Apple or Netflix. Sci-fi is better for it, just read the books, they're excellent.
on “When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost” ↗…these things is that these people will die, and be replaced by younger generations who grew up with different ideals. I hope to be cryogenically frozen and one day awake into a world like that of the Culture in the books of Iain Banks, but I know on some level that this isn't just decades or centuries away: it's millennia.
on “A $3B bet on finding the fountain of youth” ↗…government. (I originally wrote "any organization", but any organization with such compulsory power becomes the de facto government...) A recent sci-fi with a positive view of hyper-tech civilization is "The Culture" (Iain Banks). However, the interesting stories there all occur on the borders, with the interaction of the Culture with non-Culture civilizations. "Player of Games" is a good starting point.
on “Why the yakuza are not illegal” ↗Benevolent AI maybe? More Iain Banks "Culture", that's the universe I'd choose out of all sci-fi to live in I think.
on “Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture” ↗…weapons were energy or mass, but space battles essentially boiled down to rolling your ship to always present your best charged shields and damage absorbers towards the enemy. I'm also a big fan of the Culture series by Iain Banks, it's a lot of high-high-high-tech technobabble, but he gets some physical basics right, it doesn't matter if your ships is enormously more technologically advanced than someone else's,…
on “The aesthetics of science fiction spaceship design” ↗Iain Banks would be pleased, were he still alive. To the uninitiated: Musk is quite obviously a fan of The Culture sci-fi series by Iain Banks. This right here device is called "neural lace" in the series. The series is quite possibly the finest example of the genre that I've ever read, and it's way ahead of its time.
on “Neuralink Live Stream [video]” ↗The Culture Series by Iain Banks, quite a good scifi series in my opinion.
on “Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?” ↗…Just started it, but so far it's a well-written discussion of OAuth, OpenID Connect, UMA, and JSON for API security. The State of the Art by Iain Banks I have been forcing myself to ration out the Culture books so I don't run through them too quickly. Such a great series. The Trauma of Everyday Life by Mark Epstein The fourth book I've read by him, a really good synthesis of Buddhism and psychology.…
on “Ask HN: What is HN reading?” ↗The Algebraist is my favourite Iain M. Banks book too - the breadth of imagination in it is amazing I think Surface Detail is my favourite Culture novel. Many Iain Banks books (regular fiction as well as sci-fi) are really just wish-fulfillment stories, but they're so stylish and fun to read that I love them (plus there's usually at least one very…
on “What are your favourite sci-fi books?” ↗Also Iain Banks' Culture novels have this question as an occasional theme (and the main themes are also very interesting, of course).
on “100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over” ↗Not exactly research, but reading The Culture Series by Iain Banks [1] has caused me to give a lot of personal thought on the subject. When AI is advanced enough to dominate everything and humans are left to just do whatever, what will they do,…
on “Request For Research: Basic Income” ↗Since the topic is fiction - to me the best description of human condition in a post scarcity society is found in Iain Banks' Culture series where artificial minds form the ruling political cliques and manage most practical things. And succeeds in keeping things psychologically believable for the main human characters through several…
on “Why Peter Thiel Fears Star Trek” ↗