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Well, sure. I have no doubt the finest and most morally unimpeachable Minds weigh all the costs and run all the sims to make a decision. I'm just saying Special Circumstances is not above getting their hands(fields?) dirty. You could argue that maybe meteor strikes are too inelegant a solution for them, but would it be so surprising to go with that if they knew none of their more subtle or less distasteful tricks wouldn't work? edit: A disclaimer - I haven't actually read Inversions. I'm just inferring from their behavior in other books. Lasting Damage fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Jul 19, 2013 |
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Jul 19, 2013 02:18
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Base Emitter posted:Yes, but It's also possible they just tweaked the trajectory of a rock that could have done more damage. That's what I figured. And really It seemed to me that it was just the old emperor and most of its established power structure that was wiped out. That seemed a little too convenient considering the Cultures goals and tech level. Regarding their justification remember the nutty killing spree the Azadian Emperor went on after he got beat. Im sure considering how well Minds can model situational outcomes they expected that so I wouldn't put much past SC when they can statistically justify something. edit Lasting Damage posted:edit: A disclaimer - I haven't actually read Inversions. I'm just inferring from their behavior in other books. I put it off till last since most reviews were a little cool on it and I really love reading about Minds and such but I'd highly recommend it. Na'at fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Jul 19, 2013 |
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Jul 19, 2013 04:11
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Lasting Damage posted:edit: I mean, never forget who actually started the Idiran War. How many billions died for just the Culture's peace of mind? Not just peace of mind. The simulations showed that the galaxy would be a clearly better place and more lives would be saved in the long run by engaging in war when they did, and the sims were high enough degree of probability to act on The Culture is of the stance that allowing nature to run its course when you could change it leaves you just as morally culpable for inaction as you are for action. What happens, happens, and they do their best to ensure that in the end it's the best thing that does.
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Jul 19, 2013 05:06
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MikeJF posted:Not just peace of mind. The simulations showed that the galaxy would be a clearly better place and more lives would be saved in the long run by engaging in war when they did, and the sims were high enough degree of probability to act on And even with all of that, the decision was controversial enough that a "Peace Faction" broke off from the Culture, and you hear little bits of debate throughout the books over who is or isn't the "real Culture".
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Jul 19, 2013 15:45
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I wonder gow many Minds there are in the Peace Faction. There must be some to run the ships, but are they taking care of the people or have they actually joined up themselves? Also what do AhForgetIt Minds do? All day in infinite fun space? 
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Jul 19, 2013 17:06
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Strategic Tea posted:I wonder gow many Minds there are in the Peace Faction. There must be some to run the ships, but are they taking care of the people or have they actually joined up themselves? It's been a while since I read Excession but I seem to remember the whole Zetetic Elench was a peace faction breakaway.
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Jul 19, 2013 17:10
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Strategic Tea posted:I wonder gow many Minds there are in the Peace Faction. There must be some to run the ships, but are they taking care of the people or have they actually joined up themselves? I got the impression that the Minds disagreed with other Minds about as often as the humans disagreed with each other. There was a group that tried to provoke the Affront into a war against the Culture so as to teach them a lesson, some of them may have been behind the attack on Masaq hub, and so on. Larry Niven suggested (in Protector, and elsewhere) that sufficient intelligence negates free will because you see the one and only Right Answer to any problem; Banks appears to disagree with that notion, his Minds may be hyper-intelligent but they can and do disagree on what should be done. Edit: "Monds," ffs ZekeNY fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Jul 19, 2013 |
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Jul 19, 2013 17:22
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Base Emitter posted:It's been a while since I read Excession but I seem to remember the whole Zetetic Elench was a peace faction breakaway. The Elench predate the Peace Faction by like 800 years.
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Jul 19, 2013 17:29
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ZekeNY posted:I got the impression that the Monds disagreed with other Minds about as often as the humans disagreed with each other. There was a group that tried to provoke the Affront into a war against the Culture so as to teach them a lesson, some of them may have been behind the attack on Masaq hub, and so on. Larry Niven suggested (in Protector, and elsewhere) that sufficient intelligence negates free will because you see the one and only Right Answer to any problem; Banks appears to disagree with that notion, his Minds may be hyper-intelligent but they can and do disagree on what should be done. Indeed, one of the things I took away from Excession is that the Minds are just as petty on their own scale as the humans that created them. I read Excession after CP, PofG, Uof W, Inversions and Matter, and it really changed my mind on some of the claims that the Culture makes about itself.
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Jul 19, 2013 17:48
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ZekeNY posted:I got the impression that the Minds disagreed with other Minds about as often as the humans disagreed with each other. There was a group that tried to provoke the Affront into a war against the Culture so as to teach them a lesson, some of them may have been behind the attack on Masaq hub, and so on. Larry Niven suggested (in Protector, and elsewhere) that sufficient intelligence negates free will because you see the one and only Right Answer to any problem; Banks appears to disagree with that notion, his Minds may be hyper-intelligent but they can and do disagree on what should be done. I don't think that the Pak Protectors lacked free will because of their intelligence--their crazy hard-coded instincts just forced that intellect into a small box. A better example might the personalities given to offensive drones like Mawhrin-Skel or Sisela Ytheleus 1/2.
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Jul 19, 2013 21:50
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ZekeNY posted:I got the impression that the Minds disagreed with other Minds about as often as the humans disagreed with each other. There was a group that tried to provoke the Affront into a war against the Culture so as to teach them a lesson, some of them may have been behind the attack on Masaq hub, and so on. Larry Niven suggested (in Protector, and elsewhere) that sufficient intelligence negates free will because you see the one and only Right Answer to any problem; Banks appears to disagree with that notion, his Minds may be hyper-intelligent but they can and do disagree on what should be done. Well in a way Niven is right, In Look to Windward any perfect AI, without any trace of its creators' bias, always tries to sublime immediately. Though that's the sublime so I guess it's kind of cheating.
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Jul 19, 2013 22:45
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The Dark One posted:I don't think that the Pak Protectors lacked free will because of their intelligence--their crazy hard-coded instincts just forced that intellect into a small box. A better example might the personalities given to offensive drones like Mawhrin-Skel or Sisela Ytheleus 1/2. Good point about the instincts, I haven't read Niven in a while so I'll have to look out for that if I get the chance to revisit Protector and the later Ringworld books.
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Jul 19, 2013 23:26
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Whether or not the Minds are actually all that 'moral' by our standards is one of my favorite meta-questions arising from his books. Another example: birth, death and population control. It's considered "childish" to want to live forever and weird to have more than one or two kids. Does death give life meaning and are most citizens so conscientious as to not want to overpopulate their habitats because that's the natural conclusion mortal humanoids would come to given the circumstances or do the Minds get bored when faced with the notion of taking care of a geometrically expanding population of lesser beings who become ever more set in their ways and thoughts (and therefore more boring) as they get older in a largely static environment bereft of any real survival challenge and act, subtly of course, to make death and small families popular for that reason? Oh, and is that all that immoral, anyway? Also, the best ship name is clearly the former ROU and current VFP Resistance Is Character-Forming.
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Jul 23, 2013 07:02
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Munkeymon posted:Whether or not the Minds are actually all that 'moral' by our standards is one of my favorite meta-questions arising from his books. Another example: birth, death and population control. It's considered "childish" to want to live forever and weird to have more than one or two kids. Does death give life meaning and are most citizens so conscientious as to not want to overpopulate their habitats because that's the natural conclusion mortal humanoids would come to given the circumstances or do the Minds get bored when faced with the notion of taking care of a geometrically expanding population of lesser beings who become ever more set in their ways and thoughts (and therefore more boring) as they get older in a largely static environment bereft of any real survival challenge and act, subtly of course, to make death and small families popular for that reason? Oh, and is that all that immoral, anyway? Possibly, but I'd say it's more likely just another expression of the kind of parsimony the Culture seems to value. I'm reminded of the bit in Use of Weapons where Zakalwe gets annoyed about there being no junk on the ship to shoot, or how the Culture generally far prefers Orbitals to planets because of the material-to-living space ratio. Given their resources, they probably could throw poo poo away all the time and spread out over ten times the amount of planets they'd need than when using Orbitals, but that just wouldn't be very elegant. Besides, from our own real-world statistics we can see that people who are materially better off and socially more secure tend to have fewer children anyway, and the human inhabitants of the Culture have, needless to say, immeasurably better living standards than we do.
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Jul 23, 2013 11:05
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Munkeymon posted:Also, the best ship name is clearly the former ROU and current VFP Resistance Is Character-Forming. I should know better than to even consider getting into a "best Culture ship name" debate, but I can't help it. Yours is a defensible choice, but I still prefer the Ethics Gradient, a name that sums up SC perfectly in two words. (Although I can't remember off the top of my head if that was even an SC boat. Oh we'll, any excuse for a re-read is a good thing!)
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Jul 23, 2013 15:04
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ZekeNY posted:I should know better than to even consider getting into a "best Culture ship name" debate, but I can't help it. Yours is a defensible choice, but I still prefer the Ethics Gradient, a name that sums up SC perfectly in two words. (Although I can't remember off the top of my head if that was even an SC boat. Oh we'll, any excuse for a re-read is a good thing!) Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints is less subtle, but another name that encapsulates this, although it is a GOU/Picket rather than a GSV or Contact unit. I don't even know what my favourite Culture Mind name is. They're generally all awesome.
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Jul 23, 2013 15:23
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Trauma Tank posted:I don't even know what my favourite Culture Mind name is. They're generally all awesome. Agreed about the FOTNMC; awesome name and truly awe-inspiring in action. And I think "they're generally all awesome" is probably the best possible answer to the best name issue.
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Jul 23, 2013 15:39
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I've always been partial to Meatfucker
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Jul 23, 2013 16:54
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Lasting Damage posted:I've always been partial to Meatfucker Lasting Damage was a pretty great one too, now that your name brings it up.
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Jul 23, 2013 17:54
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Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The is easily my favourite one. But as you say, they're all great.
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Jul 23, 2013 20:31
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I was always partial to "Frank Exchange of Views" If I knew it I'd just call it Frank.
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Jul 24, 2013 09:34
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Munkeymon posted:Whether or not the Minds are actually all that 'moral' by our standards is one of my favorite meta-questions arising from his books. Another example: birth, death and population control. It's considered "childish" to want to live forever and weird to have more than one or two kids. Does death give life meaning and are most citizens so conscientious as to not want to overpopulate their habitats because that's the natural conclusion mortal humanoids would come to given the circumstances or do the Minds get bored when faced with the notion of taking care of a geometrically expanding population of lesser beings who become ever more set in their ways and thoughts (and therefore more boring) as they get older in a largely static environment bereft of any real survival challenge and act, subtly of course, to make death and small families popular for that reason? Oh, and is that all that immoral, anyway? I don't think the Culture ever has to worry about overpopulation given their resources. Even if they did become strapped for space they could start building Culture versions of Nariscene Nestworlds around a few stars and have lving space for trillions more people. They could probably even build their own Shellworlds if they put their minds to it, and those wouldn't even require a natural sun. As for immortal humans becoming boring, Ngaroe QiRia in the Hydrogen Sonata seemed amusing enough, even if he did have some weird quirks. I imagine that some Minds might even enjoy having humans the same age as them around. They don't seem to worry about drones living for a very long time, either.
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Jul 24, 2013 16:28
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It's not a name but I always liked that ship in Excession from a totally different civ but with a Culture loyalty rating of 90% (NB - self assessed).
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Jul 24, 2013 16:42
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Strategic Tea posted:It's not a name but I always liked that ship in Excession from a totally different civ but with a Culture loyalty rating of 90% (NB - self assessed). Yeah, the Homomdan ship that the Wisdom Like Silence pitches a shitfit about, for being invited to the Super Secret Meeting of Only Old And Trusted Minds. That whole sequence is very funny for what amounts to an IRC chatlog. I also like the Orbital Mind that pops in just to spout poetry.
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Jul 24, 2013 18:52
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I read somewhere that Banks was actually trying to emulate the way discussions go on message boards, so I always imagine that part is like a forum invasion. ZekeNY posted:Lasting Damage was a pretty great one too, now that your name brings it up. Chosen solely because I thought it sounded cool. Also, probably because I think Look to Windward is my favorite.
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Jul 24, 2013 19:36
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Just the other day I finished Look to Windward and yeah, it's up there as a favorite. For much of the book it's like an essay on the state of mind of the Culture as a whole, if it can be treated as such. A similar thing happens in some of Hydrogen Sonata. All this ship name talk reminds me of the two party goers trading insults in ship names, from Windward.
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Jul 24, 2013 21:55
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I don't think citizens are conscientious of overpopulation. The biological modifications Culture citizens are born with mean they don't even get pregnant unless they want to. The state of their society and culture means that for most people, having children is an ends, so most people just have a kid or two just to experience it. Bam, done. A "that was neat now let's do something else" sort of thing. There's that one minor character from Player of Games that just kept having children and they're seen as kind of odd for it. Why would you deliberately subject yourself to that sort of experience again when you can go do new things?
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Jul 25, 2013 02:02
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Argas posted:I don't think citizens are conscientious of overpopulation. The biological modifications Culture citizens are born with mean they don't even get pregnant unless they want to. The state of their society and culture means that for most people, having children is an ends, so most people just have a kid or two just to experience it. Bam, done. A "that was neat now let's do something else" sort of thing. There's that one minor character from Player of Games that just kept having children and they're seen as kind of odd for it. Why would you deliberately subject yourself to that sort of experience again when you can go do new things? 'That sort of experience' being quite different for Culture members, though; no pain, no worry, the kid can even be incubated externally if you want. And after it's born they're raised in estates populated by a lot of extended family with no real other responsibilities and Hub or Ship as an ever-present watcher.
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Jul 25, 2013 03:57
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Just remember, everything in the Culture has trends. In some eras, it was fashionable to live ~500 years with backups (like the era the books are set in), but in others 99% of Culture humans may have been as immortal as you can get. Sometimes all you got was one life, with no mind-state saves. In some eras one kid is enough, but in others, a baseball team worth of kids may have been popular. There were probably eras where the sublimation rate was comparatively high, or Minds had less charitable views towards their charges, or ships had names with gravitas and grandiosity. And, of course, it could vary habitat-to-habitat pretty widely. Generalized trends when you've got a trillion citizens spread across millions of habitats are going to have to be really general indeed.
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Jul 25, 2013 06:14
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Trauma Tank posted:Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints is less subtle, but another name that encapsulates this, although it is a GOU/Picket rather than a GSV or Contact unit. I am just reading Surface Detail for the first time, and the positive glee that Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints has for being in battle is hilarious. Surface Detail posted:"So what does it think it's following?"
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Jul 29, 2013 00:14
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gender illusionist posted:Just the other day I finished Look to Windward and yeah, it's up there as a favorite. For much of the book it's like an essay on the state of mind of the Culture as a whole, if it can be treated as such. A similar thing happens in some of Hydrogen Sonata. Just read that part of look to windward, and it was great. My favorite is Falling outside the normal moral constraints, as many others in this thread. The more I read of banks the more I see how he has influenced Asher. A lot of Asher's combat drones and war ships are very similar in attitude to Fotnmc above.
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Jul 29, 2013 12:11
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Jet Jaguar posted:I am just reading Surface Detail for the first time, and the positive glee that Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints has for being in battle is hilarious. I think it's one of the best developed ship-minds. The central minds are too completely beyond human scope to be written about consistently well (though having said that there's some great bits in Surface Detail with them), but this battle-mad, pretty suave fighting ship is just written so so well. There's the great moment when the battle is supposedly raging but it's actually a recording slowed down by like 1000% or something, just shows the absolute crippling power of a fully modern Culture warship.
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Jul 29, 2013 12:46
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lenoon posted:I think it's one of the best developed ship-minds. The central minds are too completely beyond human scope to be written about consistently well (though having said that there's some great bits in Surface Detail with them), but this battle-mad, pretty suave fighting ship is just written so so well. There's the great moment when the battle is supposedly raging but it's actually a recording slowed down by like 1000% or something, just shows the absolute crippling power of a fully modern Culture warship. "Shouldn't I suit up so you can maneuver freely without worrying about my safety?" "My dear, this is just a recording. The battle lasted about 3 seconds in real time."
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Jul 29, 2013 13:02
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That exchange followed a 2 or so page description of said battle, and I seem to recall more moments like that in the Culture novels. You read pages long descriptions of an event and at the end it's revealed it only took half a second in real time. It really drives home the point that we're dealing with powers so far beyond our own comprehension. There's also this great bit around the start of Matter, where one of the main characters connects to the net and there's a beautiful description of the sheer immersion it entails, complete with colours and impressions unimaginable to our own baseline understanding and it's ended with a sort of sarcastic reminder that it's downright primitive compared to what a Mind experiences every nano-second of its existence. Banks really had a knack for impressing upon his readers the magnitude of what his stories dealt with and make it believable and somehow imaginable even though it's inherently far beyond our understanding.
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Jul 29, 2013 13:42
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Ken MacLeod has made a post about Banks's politics.Ken MacLeod posted:He was quite willing to stick his neck out when necessary: he came down to London in 1977 to join the mobilization against the fascist National Front's attempt to march through Lewisham, took his place in a small squad of comrades none of whom he knew but me, and thoroughly enjoyed the fight that ensued. On a later visit he joined me when it was my turn to guard our group's bookshop and offices, which had recently been targeted in an amateurish arson attempt by the fascists. As Iain and I checked the locks on the building's back door, two policemen loomed behind us and tapped our shoulders. It took us some minutes to convince the coppers that we really were there to protect rather than attack the shop. Iain ribbed me about it afterwards: Ken MacLeod posted:It was my later explorations of libertarian thought that most sorely tried his patience. I could never persuade him that libertarianism was anything but a shill for corporate interests: a common misconception, and one that many libertarians have worked hard to confirm.
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Jul 29, 2013 14:04
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I am so loving sad he's dead.
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Jul 31, 2013 00:37
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Banks' death has made me realise what a disservice I've been doing to the man by only reading his Culture books, so I'm endeavoring to read his complete works. I've just finished The Wasp Factory. This was actually the first book of his I ever read, found it in the college library years ago. It's a much more compelling read now that I'm not 17 and can actually appreciate the shamanistic imagery of it all. My theology is rusty, shamanism might not be quite the right term for Frank's rituals, animism might be more accurate. I like how peculiarly atheistic it is though, objects, animals and people have spirits but there's nothing divine about it, it's just some essential component that's tied up in them materially. Frank definitely seems to feel the contrived nature of his elaborate rituals, but that's sort of the whole point of them. They're not appealing to some higher power for help, they're just a way for him to exert some influence on his surroundings. Frank is even disgusted by the build up of grime he gets after not washing for weeks, but to him it's essential to produce his sacred essences. There's a nice parallel there with his Dad's obsessive labeling, trying to bring some sort of order to the world by measuring every inch of matter. Frank tries to dominate his surroundings by enveloping them in his body (Freudian imagery ho!) while his Dad prefers the intellectual approach, but in the end they're both creating talismans to try and make sense of the scary scary world. I was gutted to hear that interview whee Banks says he put it in just because it was an amusing eccentricity. In the same interview he discusses working on the oil platforms that Frank sees off the coast - like The Bridge it's very tied in to Scottish geography and the weird tone of industry and isolation mixed together is unlike anything I've read, I'm used to my dystopias being crowded. Moving into spoilers for Eric. I'm kind of tempted to say that all the character's psychoses are a result of their environment, but this is probably untrue given the stories Frank tells of the rest of his family. There's some dodgy genes going on with those people. What's interesting is that Eric isn't crazy in the way people think he is. Frank is sure he's just putting on an act because he enjoys playing the boogeyman that everyone thinks he is. His affectation of madness is just as much a ritual as the Wasp Factory. I always feel a bit uncomfortable at gender-based twists, they tend to feel a bit regressive, but I quite like how it was handled here. To me it's not really about gender at all - Frank views his killing as a replacement for his stolen masculine potency, and it is tragic to see his identity crumble away like that. The ending is relatively upbeat though, optimistic almost. It feels Nietzschean in the way it supports the challenging of the identity your parents force onto you, on top of all the anti-religious bits about empty rituals. The descriptions of all the torture I didn't find all that shocking. Like American Psycho we're so tied up in the psyche of the narrator that it's hard to really grasp the magnitude of what he's doing. I'd also compare it to the first half an hour of Upstream Color, which also spends time not just making you sympathise with this psychopath, but shows you the beauty and wonder that they see in the horror they commit.
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Jul 31, 2013 00:45
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I believe it was mentioned earlier in the thread but I'm reading all of Banks' non-M books and The Bridge, at least, contains a knife missile - was there another knife missile sighting in the literary works or is this the same one?
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Aug 3, 2013 04:31
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Saw this floating around, thought I might share it with the thread. http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4182/iain-m-banks-universe
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Aug 3, 2013 06:21
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I'm maybe a third of the way through The Algebraist and I'm having a hard time maintaining interest because half the book seems to be about what a party animal the main character used to be. I've never read any of his books before, are they all like this?
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Aug 5, 2013 00:45
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