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mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

MikeJF posted:

Eh, maybe. Phlebas came out early 87, TNG launched late 87. And Phlebas wasn't the greatest demonstration of The Culture itself.

I'm sure the writers would've been aware during the run of the show, though; you had Player of Games, State of the Art and Use of Weapons all out by 1990. Hell, it's possible they counter-influenced each other, TNG might've influenced Banks in ways too, if only in wanting to do certain things less shallowly than the show did.

For some reason I had it in my head that Phlebas was in '82 and Player of Games was in '87, so I do stand corrected. I do think it's absolutely fair to say the two properties fed back into each other as each progressed. Early TNG really is a lot of old TOS scripts dusted off, but by late Season 2 and through Season 6 you can see the writers bringing some subtle Culture influences into the worldbuilding and plotting.

Alchenar posted:

I don't think it's inconsistent to say that Bezos is making fortunes off the back of slavery, and that what Amazon is trying to build is a system where a human pushes a button and a few hours later a drone appears on their doorstep with a thing they want, which looks a lot like the tail end of the Culture's economy works.

This is a bit like saying "because Bezos' fortune is mostly in stocks, it's not fair to call him the richest person in human history." Like there's technical merit to that argument, but it's kind-of confusing the trees for the forest, y'know? Bezos could indeed have some high-concept ideas about where he'd ideally want to take Amazon (which already makes some big assumptions about him per an auteur/visionary theory), but that doesn't take away the indisputable fact that most of Amazon is still built the old fashion way through coercive capitalist wage-slavery and exploitation and Bezos empirically appears to have zero problem with that.

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Alchenar
Apr 9, 2008

mind the walrus posted:

This is a bit like saying "because Bezos' fortune is mostly in stocks, it's not fair to call him the richest person in human history." Like there's technical merit to that argument, but it's kind-of confusing the trees for the forest, y'know? Bezos could indeed have some high-concept ideas about where he'd ideally want to take Amazon (which already makes some big assumptions about him per an auteur/visionary theory), but that doesn't take away the indisputable fact that most of Amazon is still built the old fashion way through coercive capitalist wage-slavery and exploitation and Bezos empirically appears to have zero problem with that.

I'm not saying that Bezos is trying to turn Amazon into The Culture, I'm saying that on the very long road from where we are to The Culture someone needs to build all of that automation of the supply side of the economy that Amazon is currently building.

RoboChrist 9000
Dec 14, 2006

Mater Dolorosa

Alchenar posted:

I don't think it's inconsistent to say that Bezos is making fortunes off the back of slavery, and that what Amazon is trying to build is a system where a human pushes a button and a few hours later a drone appears on their doorstep with a thing they want, which looks a lot like the tail end of the Culture's economy works.

Besides the fact that his system requires human misery to function - the aforementioned slavery - even when you ignore the slaves it's not like how the Culture's 'economy' works. If I want something from Amazon, I have to pay for it. Yeah, it's at my door almost instantly in a way that to the me of even 10 years ago would seem almost like magic, but the fact is I still have to pay for it. It's still just the same thing as any other form of market exchange, just faster. If you still had the slavery angle BUT Amazon products were completely free to non-slaves, then you'd have something at least vaguely like the Culture.

Like even when you ignore the slavery angle - and I'm not sure why you would - it's not like the Culture. It's just what Humans have been doing for thousands of years, but faster.

I still say that like the whole thing is that trying to assign any economic system to the Culture is absurd because the Culture has no economy. It is post-scarcity. Economies are things that exist in scarcity societies.

Torquemada
Oct 21, 2010

Drei Gläser

mind the walrus posted:

but by late Season 2 and through Season 6 you can see the writers bringing some subtle Culture influences into the worldbuilding and plotting.

I’m going to need some citations here: I’ve watched a hell of a lot of Star Trek, and read a hell of a lot of Banks, and I’m struggling to find a single instance of even minor overlap.

Alchenar
Apr 9, 2008

RoboChrist 9000 posted:

Besides the fact that his system requires human misery to function - the aforementioned slavery - even when you ignore the slaves it's not like how the Culture's 'economy' works. If I want something from Amazon, I have to pay for it. Yeah, it's at my door almost instantly in a way that to the me of even 10 years ago would seem almost like magic, but the fact is I still have to pay for it. It's still just the same thing as any other form of market exchange, just faster. If you still had the slavery angle BUT Amazon products were completely free to non-slaves, then you'd have something at least vaguely like the Culture.

Like even when you ignore the slavery angle - and I'm not sure why you would - it's not like the Culture. It's just what Humans have been doing for thousands of years, but faster.

I still say that like the whole thing is that trying to assign any economic system to the Culture is absurd because the Culture has no economy. It is post-scarcity. Economies are things that exist in scarcity societies.

All you'd have to do is replace the slavery with robot-slaves and remove the currency and it's the culture. It would be ridiculous to expect Besos to solve those problems and Amazon has to exist as a company in a Capitalist system, but in your fully automated utopia someone has to have worked out the logistics.

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Alchenar posted:

All you'd have to do is replace the slavery with robot-slaves and remove the currency and it's the culture. It would be ridiculous to expect Besos to solve those problems and Amazon has to exist as a company in a Capitalist system, but in your fully automated utopia someone has to have worked out the logistics.

robot slaves that are carefully tooled to be just dumb enough that they don't know they're slaves :thunk:

Alchenar
Apr 9, 2008

sebmojo posted:

robot slaves that are carefully tooled to be just dumb enough that they don't know they're slaves :thunk:

That is explicitly the text of the Culture's economy

e: actually the explicit text is that it's robot slaves who are just dumb enough that the minds don't care if they have rights or not. Soooo....#


e: \/\/ no it was a very fair challenge. To rewind a bit, Banks cheats a lot and does not ever touch on how you would actually build something like the Culture to avoid ever having to get to grips with this sort of issue. It's also why I think he mellows on this point a bit - by the time he's writing the last book the Gzilt have money and private possessions but there's none of the sneering and moral condemnation from Culture POVs that previous books would have had. There's strangely not even a judgement on universal national service.

Alchenar fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Sep 29, 2020

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

Torquemada posted:

I’m going to need some citations here: I’ve watched a hell of a lot of Star Trek, and read a hell of a lot of Banks, and I’m struggling to find a single instance of even minor overlap.
It's more of a zeitgeist overlap-- Season 3 of TNG got very into things like Prime Directive stories, social politics, and cultural intervention in ways that wasn't purely indulging Roddenberry's fetishes, and things like recognizing the potential of the Ferengi as capitalist caricatures to contrast with the Federation's pseudo-utopia vibe (which was largely dissipated by the end of TNG's run). Meanwhile Banks would have surely been aware of TNG as a hot commodity in the genre, and thus things like Excession and Inversions are basically classic Star Trek premises (space anomaly, and visiting a primitive planet) through the Culture schema.

If you want a smoking gun where some TNG writer says "Oh yeah I was reading The Player of Games and though 'I can't do Azad but used it as inspiration for that one where everyone gets addicted to VR goggles'" then you're not going to find one, but I also don't think it's some implausibly far stretch to go "oh yeah both properties were aware of and influenced by each other, and you can see traces of it in which types of stories they chose to tell."

Alchenar posted:

I'm not saying that Bezos is trying to turn Amazon into The Culture, I'm saying that on the very long road from where we are to The Culture someone needs to build all of that automation of the supply side of the economy that Amazon is currently building.
Fair enough. Didn't mean to be a dick.

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Alchenar posted:

That is explicitly the text of the Culture's economy

e: actually the explicit text is that it's robot slaves who are just dumb enough that the minds don't care if they have rights or not. Soooo....

Yeah I mean I guess we don't fret about whether cars have rights, but given how ubiquitous artificial intelligence appears to be in the Culture it's interesting.

sebmojo fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Sep 29, 2020

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




Torquemada posted:

I’m going to need some citations here: I’ve watched a hell of a lot of Star Trek, and read a hell of a lot of Banks, and I’m struggling to find a single instance of even minor overlap.

I'd say there's actually more culture influence in the original version of TNG. As initially envisaged, the Federation was meant to be much more strongly post-scarcity, but that kinda waned later on for drama's sake and ease of writing.

Also, the Enterprise-D was meant to be a bit closer to the idea of a GSV, but they never really managed to pull that off, and scaled it back later. That's why the ship has children and families on it - the idea was that it was this massively powerful, supreme ship that carried an entire spacefaring slice of Federation society out into the unknown for a decade beyond the Federation's borders, a floating mini-planet that could go exploring, with parks and villages and neighborhoods on board. They could never depict it well and the ship got into enough trouble that it became more of a generic heavy cruiser thing.

Even what we got on screen was pared back in development, too - the earlier version of the Galaxy Class had 5000 people and a huge civilian population aboard, with much more GSV-like settings. They considered a bridge where they all sit around a big table just looking at what's happening with screens and all actual orders and doing things are done by computers, and the ship is almost entirely self-maintaining and running.

MikeJF fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Sep 30, 2020

Cerv
Sep 14, 2004

This is a silly post with little news value.

sebmojo posted:

It comes off as a backhanded unintentional critique of communism, since he needs to posit ultimately powerful and infinitely benevolent god machines for it to work

I don't think it's entirely unintentional.

at some point every leftist has to grapple with the questions of why every communist state to date has failed at being the workers' paradise and/or collapsed; what needed to have been different them to succeed or is it an inherent flaw to communism?
that we needed some sufficiently magical tech probably isn't the answer, but to a sci-fi nerd it's an interesting idea to base some of your world building around.

Alchenar
Apr 9, 2008

I think Banks is also very unconvincing when he tries to explain why people in the Culture might choose to do work. Zakalwe meets a guy who's waiting tables 'for the satisfaction', but it's clear the guy just likes meeting people and isn't keeping regular shifts and probably isn't unclogging the toilets or doing any of the things the restaurant would need in order to reliably function. There's a woman who likes building spaceships but she fully acknowledges that what she's doing is a veneer of being useful and the machines could all just do it. 'Contact' is the main avenue of work for Culture citizens but even that looks suspiciously like people going on holiday around the galaxy while the ships do all the work, where the real barrier to entry is proving they you understand you can't just do whatever you want while you are on these jollies.

I can't tell whether it's intentional or not that the two main characters in the series who feel a compulsion to do actual meaningful work (Zakalwe and Gurgeh) are driven by being broken - Zakalwe by the trauma of his past and Gurgeh basically suffering a mental breakdown over how pointless his life is - and the only form of meaningful work the Culture can produce for them is incredibly traumatic in nature.

e: but I don't think it's necessarily a criticism of Communism because as previously stated, Banks is deliberately skipping past that conversation to have a go at 'once we've achieved a post-economics society, what happens to the people who's brains can't handle the fact that they're not really needed for anything'.

Alchenar fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Oct 4, 2020

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Alchenar posted:

e: but I don't think it's necessarily a criticism of Communism because as previously stated, Banks is deliberately skipping past that conversation to have a go at 'once we've achieved a post-economics society, what happens to the people who's brains can't handle the fact that they're not really needed for anything'.

I mean, sure, that's a pretty useful sincere question from a leftwing perspective. Marx and Kropotkin both were pretty overt about their belief that people simply shouldn't be compelled to work, though a big difference is that Marx didn't think it was worth speculating on and Kropotkin thought it was very possible to do so. Part of this is a belief that it's just not that hard to sustain a good quality of life as long as there aren't any 'utility' monsters sluicing off or wasting everybody's time. e: To a certain extent the stories don't really "exist" if they're about the non-broken people. Gurgeh's friend just parties and gets into terraforming and has a wonderful time, and Banks was not writing in an era where out and out utopian fiction with minimal conflict was in vogue, so her story isn't a book.

Maybe I'm just missing something about your perspective on human nature or something. Most people I know put a lot of work into unpaid labor, I put in more time and seriousness into volunteering than I do into my day job. I'm not currently volunteering at any animal shelters but I did when I lived in a less urban area, and I was doing stuff far more unpleasant than unclogging toilets. People tend to put in the work when they believe it's needed.

Anyway, another thing about Minds is that they can in a way be seen as nega-capitalists. Instead of being otherwise unremarkable people who maliciously direct resources to wasteful ends through the means of harming the vast majority of society, the Minds are extremely remarkable people who ethically direct resources to the best ends through the means of loving magic.

Tulip fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Oct 4, 2020

Gravitas Shortfall
Jul 17, 2007

Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.


Alchenar posted:

I can't tell whether it's intentional or not that the two main characters in the series who feel a compulsion to do actual meaningful work (Zakalwe and Gurgeh) are driven by being broken - Zakalwe by the trauma of his past and Gurgeh basically suffering a mental breakdown over how pointless his life is - and the only form of meaningful work the Culture can produce for them is incredibly traumatic in nature.

Gurgeh is an atypical Culture citizen not necessarily because of his desire to "work", but his desire for dominance via victory in games, something that drives him to cheat and allows Special Circumstances to blackmail him. He's also never changed sex, which is subtext for the the reader living in a patriarchal society (but not necessarily for anyone within the universe of the Culture) of this atavistic need for the "dominant" position.

He's then shown the extreme outcome of this kind of dominance, and in doing so, moulded into a more suitable Culture citizen while at the same time neatly achieving SC's goals. Gurgeh is a pawn, successful pawns get promoted.

ptkfvk
Apr 30, 2013

Killing Time is one of my favorite characters in any book. I love a well designed warrior.

I want to reread Surface detail but the parts on hell always made me uneasy. I remember really like the rest of the story bits.

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Banks does have a Thing for horrific torture

indigi
Jul 20, 2004

how can we not talk about family
when family's all that we got?

ptkfvk posted:

Killing Time is one of my favorite characters in any book. I love a well designed warrior.

I want to reread Surface detail but the parts on hell always made me uneasy. I remember really like the rest of the story bits.

same, when I reread it a while ago I just skimmed or outright skipped the hell parts until Prin got to the monastery

Quaint Quail Quilt
Jun 19, 2006


Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

Cerv posted:

I don't think it's entirely unintentional.

at some point every leftist has to grapple with the questions of why every communist state to date has failed at being the workers' paradise and/or collapsed; what needed to have been different them to succeed or is it an inherent flaw to communism?
that we needed some sufficiently magical tech probably isn't the answer, but to a sci-fi nerd it's an interesting idea to base some of your world building around.
Isn't it because every time someone tries socialism or communism they are sabotaged or declared war on?
There are a few threads I've been getting educated on about communism, mutual aid and activism and unionizing. I joined a union about 6 years ago and like the taste, a workers owned coop of some sort would be even better maybe.
From what I've read it doesn't really seem to work unless you get at least your neighbors on board with it. It's baby steps until you reach a critical mass.

E: Whatever brought me to this thread got me to buy all the culture books, I think I've only read 4 so far though.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


I'm part of a worker coop for my second job and it does own yes. And absolutely solidarity takes at least two to tango, just like as a matter of logic.

TBH I think the Culture books, compared to like The Dispossessed , are not really about building solidarity nearly so much as the weird limits of it.

Kassad
Nov 12, 2005

It's about time.

Quaint Quail Quilt posted:

Isn't it because every time someone tries socialism or communism they are sabotaged or declared war on?

In some cases, like the PRC, they were also an extremely poor country as the result of roughly a century of imperial collapse, civil wars, actual wars, colonization, famines and revolutions. It's only been truly politically stable since the late 1970s. Even with how insane the economic development has been in the decades since, there's only so much that can be unfucked in 50 years.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



Experimenting a little with midjourney AI image creation to get ideas for what the top of a GSV might look like. Nothing perfect but these are pretty suggestive, and close to what I was imagining, at least for some bits near the edges. Wild riots of detail and intermeshing shapes are one thing these AIs do pretty well, since they have no underlying understanding of 3D form or perspective.



Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Prolonged Panorama posted:

Experimenting a little with midjourney AI image creation to get ideas for what the top of a GSV might look like. Nothing perfect but these are pretty suggestive, and close to what I was imagining, at least for some bits near the edges. Wild riots of detail and intermeshing shapes are one thing these AIs do pretty well, since they have no underlying understanding of 3D form or perspective.





v cool thank you for this

Gravitas Shortfall
Jul 17, 2007

Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.


Prolonged Panorama posted:

Experimenting a little with midjourney AI image creation to get ideas for what the top of a GSV might look like. Nothing perfect but these are pretty suggestive, and close to what I was imagining, at least for some bits near the edges. Wild riots of detail and intermeshing shapes are one thing these AIs do pretty well, since they have no underlying understanding of 3D form or perspective.





Owns.

Also:
(GSV) Nothing Perfect But Pretty Suggestive
(GOU) Wild Riots Of Detail

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Gravitas Shortfall posted:

Owns.

Also:
(GSV) Nothing Perfect But Pretty Suggestive
(GOU) Wild Riots Of Detail

GCU No Underlying Understanding

SixFigureSandwich
Oct 30, 2004
Exciting Lemon
Very cool images, they remind me of 70s scifi books.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



No accident! "book cover style" as well as "John Berkey" and or "John Harris," both prominent scifi cover painters, were part of the prompts that led to those images.

If I ever get to a somewhat finished GSV design some of the images will be in that painterly style, it fits the subject too well.

SixFigureSandwich
Oct 30, 2004
Exciting Lemon
One thing I enjoyed about Excession was that you can easily transplant the whole plot into a cold war spy novel and the book would hardly be any different

Kazzah
Jul 15, 2011

Formerly known as
Krazyface
Hair Elf
There's this description in one of the books - maybe Surface Detail, or Excession - of a Culture apartment building, which uses holograms and stuff to give every resident the views and experience of living in the penthouse. The actual top floor contains all the building's essential machinery, because if someone had the real penthouse the other residents might feel cheated. The whole setup bothers me in a way that's hard to put into words - there could be a real penthouse, but they don't allow it to exist. It's a great little anecdote.

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




Huh, I don't remember that, anyone have a quote?

Seems weird to me, feels like a more culture way would be for the top floor+roof to be community space.

HAmbONE
May 11, 2004

I know where the XBox is!!
Smellrose

Scope posted:


Also I want a small flying suitcase to be simultaneously protective of me and also the most sarcastic and abrasive friend I have.


There was a comic in Heavy Metal, must have been 90’s, where a guy had a future-tastic briefcase. I remember it being good.

Alas heavy metal website is terrible

Quantum Toast
Feb 13, 2012

MikeJF posted:

Huh, I don't remember that, anyone have a quote?

Seems weird to me, feels like a more culture way would be for the top floor+roof to be community space.

Excession, chapter 6-V, page 219 (at least in my paperback) posted:

In the View Hotel, every suite was a penthouse corner suite; there were four per floor, and the only floor which didn't have four penthouse suites was the very top one, which, so that nobody in the lower floors would feel that they were missing out on the real thing when it was available, was restricted to housing some of the hotel's machinery and equipment.

Gravitas Shortfall
Jul 17, 2007

Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.


The View Hotel isn't actually in the Culture, it's in (a) Night City;

"Excession by Iain M Banks posted:

There were Night Cities throughout the developed galaxy; it was a kind of condominium franchise, though nobody seemed to know to whom the franchise belonged. Night Cities varied a lot from place to place. The only certain things about them was that it would always be night when you got there, and you'd have no excuse for not having fun.

Night City Tier was situated on the middle level of the world, on a small island in a shallow sea. The island was entirely covered by a shallow dome ten kilometres across and two in height. Internally, the City tended to take its cue from each year's Festival. The last time Genar-Hofoen had been here the place had taken on the appearance of a magnified oceanscape, all its buildings turned into waves between one and two hundred metres tall. The theme that year had been the Sea; Street Six had existed in the long trough between two exponentially swept surges. Ripples on the towering curves of the waves' surfaces had been balconies, burning with lights. Luminous foam at each wave's looming, overhanging crest had cast a pallid, sepulchral light over the winding street beneath. At either end of the Street the broadway had risen to meet crisscrossing wave fronts and connect - through oceanically inauthentic tunnels - with other highways.

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




Ahhh. (Also it feels different having that setup in a hotel than in an apartment building)

SolTerrasa
Sep 2, 2011


I really like that. It’s great that this slightly better experience COULD be available - but it isn’t, because there’s no way to provide it fairly, and people will be more mad about not being the one to get it than it would be worth. It’s a cute little dig at the post-scarcity nature of most societies in the culture novels. Never truly post scarcity as long as you’ve got people around to fabricate scarcity out of nothing!

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

Reminds me very much of the old speech in Reservoir Dogs where no one is allowed to pick their colors. Humans are always going to find a way to whip 'em out and be assholes to each other just for the chance to feel superior.

quote:

- Mr. Pink: Why can't we pick our own colors?
- Joe Cabot: No way, no way. Tried it once, it doesn't work. You get four guys all fighting over who's gonna be Mr. Black, but they don't know each other, so nobody wants to back down. No way. I pick. You're Mr. Pink.

Also did not remember the slur in the lines preceding that :kstare:

Gravitas Shortfall
Jul 17, 2007

Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.


SolTerrasa posted:

Never truly post scarcity as long as you’ve got people around to fabricate scarcity out of nothing!

Look To Windward by Iain M Banks posted:

The avatar gave a snort. 'They're really doing it.' It laughed with surprising heartiness, Kabe thought. It was not the sort of thing you expected a machine, or even the human-form representative of a machine, to do at all.
'Doing what?' he asked.
'Reinventing money,' the avatar said, grinning and shaking its head.
Kabe frowned. 'Would that be entirely possible?'
'No, but it's partially possible.' The avatar glanced at Kabe. 'It's an old saying.'
'Yes, I know. "They'd reinvent money for this",' Kabe quoted. 'Or something similar.'
'Quite.' The avatar nodded. 'Well, for tickets to Ziller's concert, they practically are. People who can't stand other people are inviting them to dinner, booking deep-space cruises together - good grief - even agreeing to go camping with them. Camping!' The avatar giggled. 'People have traded sexual favours, they've agreed to pregnancies, they've altered their appearance to accommodate a partner's desires, they've begun to change gender to please lovers; all just to get tickets.' It spread its arms. 'How wonderfully, bizarrely, romantically barbaric of them! Don't you think?'
'Absolutely,' Kabe said. 'Are you sure about "romantically"?'
'And they have indeed,' the avatar continued, 'come to agreements that go beyond barter to a form of liquidity regarding future considerations that sounds remarkably like money, at least as I understand it.'
'How extraordinary.'

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



I'm still on a GSV visualization kick. For context here are some older things I've come across and been inspired by:

https://vimeo.com/184041325

Ambitious concept, middling execution, great music. Spot all your favorite ships! Plus those Mind chat logs you love. This is the most book accurate depiction of a GSV I've seen - A Plate class like the Sleeper Service (or Little Rascal in Player of Games) is pretty exactly described. The main thing this version gets right (beyond the bottom km engine, 2km bays and engineering space, 1km habitation layer cake) is that there's a clear "front" and "rear" to the topside park (both 400 sq km, roughly 20km x 20km), with regular canyons stepping down in between. That central athwartship canyon makes a lot of sense after you position the two parks in the outline of the ship and see the gap big between them.

The things I don't like are the overall lack of detail (forgivable! they've got the whole thing in a single scene!), especially when it comes to the residential bits. Yes, there should be more open bays, but "the middle looks more like swiss cheese" is pretty easy to imagine. I find the mega-apartments too big, dull, and repetitive. In general I don't think the Culture would build such structures - they're too depersonalized and inhuman in scale. I like the idea of the central canyon being the most obviously populated, but people would want to live on the sides too, around the edges of the parks. And the massive population would essentially require it anyway.

Some Alex Brady (she's a professional concept artist) GSV noodling, the Plate-class Toward Infinite Freshness launching the Range-class Availability May Vary.






Full gallery here

The scale is strong, and the straight-sided engineering layer is more book-accurate. But I find the mechanical cutoff of the top park bits to be too extreme and regular, as others have said it makes the whole thing look like a tablet or phone. And there's not much indication of where people live.

Lastly there's this version of the Sleeper Service, probably the first GSV image I saw online:



Not really adhering to the book description, but what I really love about this one is the height variation in the topside park. It looks cool, gives a sense of direction and motion, but it also just seems obvious - of course (some) GSVs would have a little mountain range in their park, for people to hike and camp out in. Why not?

Given all that, here's my rough draft.



First, a schematic view. Fore is left, aft is right. Got to have a mountain range in the rear park. And why not have a big body of water in the front park? People like beaches, and islands. We have a central, heavily populated athwartship canyon, with fore and aft populated canyons connecting it up to the level of the park smoothly. On all sides of the ship there are regular-ish populated canyons, dropping from level with the park at their inboard borders, down to the top of the engineering layer, about 1 km below. The park extends to the edge of the ship where there is no residential canyon, meaning people in the side canyons generally have park on three sides, all within a km or two. Because of the fore and aft orientation of the sunline, the bow and stern of the ship get the most constant light, and so I'd expect them to be relatively more populated than the port and starboard side canyons, with generally less interpenetration of the park and a gentler slope.

The drawing isn't the easiest to interpret, so I carved some little physical models to help me wrap my head around this. Meet the (smaller) Basin class GSV Not Quite To Scale, and the Plate class Proof Of Concept.










Made from a yardstick and a toy wooden building block (plus some colored pencil for the water). I'm not much of a woodworker, but hopefully this gets the idea across. If I had the skill I'd have done a more complex coastline (like in the drawing), plus lots of little islands. And a more realistic mountain range. The side canyons were against the grain and too small to be chiseled out, so they're sloppily filed out instead, and I wish they were a little wider, making the park/valley rhythms more even. But I'm happy with the overall form, I think the organic and the straight-lined artificial come together nicely. It doesn't break with the books in any major way, aside from the parks being more varied and vertical. But the lower-lying and partially submerged front park makes up some of the "excess" volume in the rear mountains, if we're keeping mass budgets. And the idea of that sea just stopping at the ship's edge, via crystal retaining walls or force-fields, strikes me as vulgar/elegant in the best Culture way. An infinity pool indeed! So what if nothing quite like that got mentioned in the novels. Too common to even remark upon, maybe. And imagine the tiered waterfall city you could build in to that forward edge, and the corresponding underwater half of the city extending behind/beneath the terraced falls...

The piece of this I don't have nailed down mentally is the inhabited portions - how dense are they, how do they look, and how exactly they interface with the organic landscape and bare ship material. Most people will want to live on top of the ship. Some will live inside it, because that's closer to their work or leisure or visiting home craft, or they just prefer it, but if there's an "outside" I think the majority will want ready walking access to it. So in general no high-rises that aren't heavily terraced. In Use of Weapons we are told most people on a GSV live in ziggurat-looking constructions (possibly inside the ship, but I'm ignoring that), which create little valleys between them. That sounds right to me, although given the population density they have to be pretty numerous and pretty tall. We get some "free/natural" verticality from the way we've cut those big regular canyons in to the landscape, and we'll need all of it.

I did some more AI generated art to help visualize those more heavily populated areas. I think the vibe of these is close, and the density/greenery looks right. You'll have to imagine slotting these in to the various canyons around the ship - fading out to uninhabited park in one direction, hitting the edge of the ship and empty air in another, maybe looking out across a big gulf of air to more inhabited bits, and usually bounded by high cliffsides, sometimes starkly artificial and containing bays and large passages in to the interior.










I also tried to add some water, to get ideas for parts on the coast of the sea.






Not quite the sea views I wanted, but who doesn't love a little non-Euclidian lake country?

"Megacity" was part of the prompts that generated these, so a lot of very vertical skyscraper or spire shapes show up, especially in the distance. In general I ignore them or mentally edit most of them to be shorter and/or fatter at the base, with terraces and connections to the surrounding structures. There's probably at least one "generic" looking future megacity on a GSV, because some people will want to live in and around those kinds of buildings, but I don't believe it would be the norm, or a common structure type. If skyscrapers exist they should be mostly isolated, instead of comprising a "skyline."



Limit one (1) vaguely-dystopian megalopolis per self-respecting GSV!

From here I'll start to do some 3D, probably starting with the park landscapes.

Prolonged Panorama fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Aug 18, 2022

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

Man I wish Banks were alive to play around with those

josh04
Oct 19, 2008


"THE FLASH IS THE REASON
TO RACE TO THE THEATRES"

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Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good



lol accurate

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