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[quote="Lex Talionis"] I don't think there's enough information in the book to definitively answer #1. I don't think it's a safe assumption that the ruling authority that he was fighting against was an evil one. It's been a while since I read it, but I don't recall any clear indication that his father was fighting for anything in particular, so it could have simply been one noble trying to replace another. Further, if they were really that evil, why would they have welcomed the child into their house? But it has been a while, so maybe I'm forgetting something.
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Feb 6, 2011 02:44
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Inversions: Mortar/pestle; dagger; bottle of perfume; crown; all of them laying on a blanket with ragged edges
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Feb 23, 2011 04:17
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Pope Guilty posted:I remember reading about the Culture and about Consider Phlebas, going "wait, why would you fight against the Culture?", and sure enough Horza's reasons are silly as hell. It's been awhile since I read the book, what did you find silly about his reasons?
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Apr 4, 2012 14:09
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Pope Guilty posted:If anything, Horza's views reflect a sentiment that advanced technology and easy living makes people weak and soft that I used to see in classic SF (which is a big part of why I decided I didn't like SF for awhile when I was a teenager). Is Heinleinian the word I want? I cheerfully admit that this is a kind of half-formed idea. quote:IIRC horza thinks the idirans are preferable because they "believe in something" rather than nothing even if what they believe in is religious holy war. I want to say I'm partly remembering wrong because the culture clearly has its own ideology but maybe that's part of the stupidity of horza's reasoning. These are the reasons I remember now, and I don't think of them as being particularly silly. To me, one of the big themes of Bank's Culture books is the post-scarcity society. One his Big Questions is: why go on living if everything is provided for you? Or what do you do with your life if you don't have to do anything? So Horza's position is that he thinks this kind of life is not worth living, and he wants to fight against it. I think that makes CP less interesting, but it works as a great intro to PofG, where the question is more explicit. The protagonist in PofG decides to devote his life to meaningless games, is thrust into a society where games are everything, and then deposited back into a society where no one cares about games again. In a further smash to the reader's face, it turns out that he got "gamed" by the SC minds that run his society, and that his actions essentially destroyed a society that accepted his own value system in the name of one that didn't. That's more than I meant to write, but I think those two books are a great one-two punch on the meaning of life in a post-scarcity society, and you can't help but think that Banks is commenting to some extent on the difference between the developed and developing worlds, or the rich and the poor generally.
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Apr 5, 2012 16:08
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Barry Foster posted:Not to get too political because this isn't D&D, but the idea that the only way to find meaning in life is through a daily struggle for existence is by no means a true one. If you're suggesting that I'm arguing that, then you've misread my post. I think that Banks raises that question and leaves the answer ambiguous. quote:... but it'd also leave a lot of other people free to pursue whatever they want to pursue. You're assuming this is a good thing, and I'm saying that Banks is asking you to question that assumption. As an example, what do you think of the way Gurgeh chose to live his life and what happened to him? The Culture allowed him to choose the life he wanted, and then manipulated him into destroying another culture that reflected the values he had chosen. Was the Culture right to do that? quote:We're inevitably culturally conditioned to think that certain things make life meaningful. I am saying that the question of 'meaning' for most people depends on the extent to which the scarcity problem is solved for them. So when Banks raises it, he's really talking about the rich and the poor.
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Apr 5, 2012 17:34
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Barry Foster posted:This is where it gets very tricky, and it really stems from the wider interventionist issues of the Culture. In any normal, real world (or more realistic) situation, the intervening party would have no right to do that - when the decision comes from supposedly near omniscient Minds, it becomes more ambiguous. I suppose the problem with liberalism, like many other things, is that it tends to fall apart in anything less than perfect circumstances. SC doing whatever the gently caress it wants throughout the books is an illustration of that, because, good as the Culture is, it certainly isn't perfect. But I'd still say that a post-scarcity society doesn't necessarily entail interventionism. Interesting point re: omnipotence--does the ability of the Mind's obligate them to intervene? The other interesting thing is that when I asked "was the Cultre right to do that?" I was thinking more about the effect on Gurgeh then the intervention effect on the other society (shows my own bias)--I was thinking it was pretty drat ruthless of the Minds to use Gurgeh like that, which to me suggests an even darker answer to the intervention question.
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Apr 5, 2012 19:13
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Prolonged Priapism posted:Yeah Contact/SC is specifically stated to be an avenue for finding meaning (provably helping other beings) in an otherwise possibly meaningless life. Which book says this? quote:The Culture exists to enjoy itself, which is agreed to be a pretty good reason for the most part. You mean agreed by the Culture right? I don't think this is a clear message in the books I read--it's pretty explicitly challenged in CP, PofG and Use of Weapons.
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Apr 7, 2012 01:24
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Prolonged Priapism posted:Great post, I'll look that stuff up and also re-read CP, I had forgotten about that stuff at the end.
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Apr 7, 2012 04:11
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The Dark One posted:No love for Inversions? I love inversions.
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Apr 8, 2012 00:41
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Red Crown posted:There's a massive roster of lists why AI should not be based on the human brain: For one, it is a very flawed creation. In the same way that programs can skew into odd places and are imperfect and buggy; the human brain has it's own software failings. I think you're assuming that the "flaws" are actually flaws. Given what we actually know about the brain, that "delusional" optimism could be entirely necessary to its operation. I don't know much about AI, but I do recall reading a number of years ago an article where an AI expert posited something like "a brain doesn't have to eat or go to the bathroom to be intelligent" and the response was "well, we don't actually know that, given that the only example of advanced intelligence we have does actually require eating and making GBS threads."
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Apr 16, 2012 15:54
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Coriolis posted:Well, it isn't explicitly shown that he's been rid of these traits, but one can assume. The whole first section of the book (with Gurgeh on the orbital) is there to show you how out of place he is in the Culture. In the Culture games are just played for fun, but Gurgeh wants to win which by extension means he wants to dominate the other player. There's a bit where he wishes the Culture had money so there could be real stakes attached to a game. It's also why that friend-chick doesn't want to sleep with him, she says he's too possessive. Azad is a literal embodiment of winning=domination: the more you win, the more people you get to rule. So the whole idea of playing to win is completely antithetical to the Culture's egalitarian, anarchistic values. You actually see the values of the Culture playing out against the values of Azad in the final game between Gurgeh and the Emperor (hierarchy vs networks, domination vs cooperation, etc). By the end Gurgeh has been glutted on games with real stakes, and his final match against the Emperor proves the superiority of the Culture's way of life. This, exactly is why I like that book so much. I was trying to say as much a few pages back. The Culture, which is supposed to be about individual freedom, also has no problem "re-educating" somebody--but the delicious irony in the way they do it really makes the question of whether it was a good thing or a bad thing unsolveable.
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Jun 1, 2012 16:28
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andrew smash posted:That may be true but the moral distinction lies in the fact that gurgeh wasn't sat in a chair and reformed but was led inevitably to reach his own conclusions vis-a-vis the culture and reform himself. That's sort of the point of the culture in a nutshell anyway. He wasn't "sat in a chair" but he was manipulated by beings much more powerful than himself. The question is whether you think they put in him a situation where he really had a choice . Some people think they just gave him the tools to change his mind. I tend to think it was just a more "civilized" way of putting him in a chair. drat, the more I think about the culture, the more I understand Horza. Banks is a friggin' genius.
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Jun 4, 2012 00:48
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andrew smash posted:There's still a distinction between those two things and that distinction is what the culture prides itself on. And it doesn't have anything to do with one way being more 'civilized' - just more honest I guess. You might be right, but I don't think you're answering the question that I think is being posed. Given the omnipotence of the Minds, is there really a distinction? How? It seems to me that the answer is 'yes' only if you think there was a point in PofG where Gurgeh could have done something different and choose otherwise. Only then does his 're-education' become an exercise of free will in favour of the Culture. It's very similar to the argument as to why the Christian God would grant free will, because otherwise belief would be meaningless. Maybe there is a point like that for Gurgeh--I have to re-read to see, because it has been awhile. quote:And do you think that the Culture is any more engaged in this than the cultures Horza fought for? The Idiran equivalent probably involves hot metal things and explorations of pain tolerance. It's not a binary of Idrian vs. Culture. Horza fights for the Idrians because he is against the Culture, not because he is in favour of the Idrians. If I recall correctly (and I may be misremembering this in light of my thoughts above) he says something to the effect that he fights for the Idrians because under them you will still have the "freedom to be wrong," (although this presuambly may involve getting tortured by them) whereas under the Culture, how can you possibly be free to be wrong if an Omniscient AI is going to correct you?
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Jun 4, 2012 14:31
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andrew smash posted:It's interesting you bring up christianity because there are distinct (and I would guess intentional on Banks' part) parallels between Gurgeh and the parable of the prodigal son! hah, good point, I hadn't thought of that. So is the point of the Culture that "Any sufficiently advanced quote:The Culture thinks its way of life is so self-evidently awesome that any outside visitor to a Ship or Orbital or whatever will end up being an ambassador for the Culture to their own kind, spreading the word even farther. I don't understand what you are trying to get at. I'm not saying the Idrians are great people. What I am saying is that their methods of persuasion are not infalliable like the Culture's--and that is where the difference lies. Would you rather be a martyr for your beliefs or have your mind changed for you?
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Jun 4, 2012 17:10
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andrew smash posted:None of that matters, the choice as such happens in the climactic game against the emperor. Gurgeh chose to play as the culture essentially. He could have resisted and lost the game, but there's no way he would have done that because at that point he became cognizant of the fact that the culture's way was simply better. It was spelled out for him on the game board, which was really the only way he would ever really grasp it. I don't want to belabour this, but I am enjoying the discussion. If Gurgeh were to resist at that point though, he would be essentially throwing the game, and thus not being true to himself--this is what makes it seem sort of like coercion to me--it's like once the Minds got him to that point, it was checkmate.
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Jun 5, 2012 02:29
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Pope Guilty posted:"Stop being dicks to each other or we'll make you stop being dicks to each other." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_internationalism IMO, the only reason the books are interesting is beause the existence of the Minds suggests that this could actually work. I am wondering if you and Mr. Smash think this is key for Banks as well, or if the books advocate for it regardless?
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Jun 11, 2012 15:35
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Pope Guilty posted:The Culture isn't a liberal state, though. I think you missed the point. It's an analogy.
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Jun 12, 2012 02:45
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Lex Talionis posted:epilogue: Zakalwe is still trying to fight his way to redemption, just without the Culture's help I didn't think it was that uplifing, because Zakalwe's redemption will probably never happen, as "the bomb only lives while it is falling."
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Jun 21, 2012 14:40
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Barry Foster posted:I'd agree with this. Matter basically strikes me as Banks doing a sci-fi version of Don Quixote, and just as Sancho Panza is the best of that book, Choubris Holse is the best part of Matter. That's a really good reading of it, and I like the way the 'tilting at windmills' idea matches General Battuta's idea about why the book is subversive.
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Jun 26, 2012 17:20
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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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Entropic posted:I read The Player of Games after reading a few of the other Culture books first, so I knew about The Culture and what its deal was already, so when I read TPOG it seemed really needlessly trying to hard to make The Culture be unambiguously the Good Guys. I much prefer the more morally complicated stories like Look to Windward or Use of Weapons. We've had this conversation in the thread before, but I don't see how POG presents the Culture as good guys. They completely manipulate and tear down Gurgeh, using him as an agent to essentially genocide the Azad. They may not be as bad as the Azad, but they're not good guys.
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Aug 15, 2013 03:13
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Except the whole point of Look to Windward is that, as hyper-intelligent as they are, they still gently caress up. This to me is also the point of Excession which I read much later. I don't think you can justify much on the basis of infallible Minds--they seem to still suffer from the same flaws as their creators.
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Aug 18, 2013 01:50
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MikeJF posted:They know they gently caress up, but they know that their success rate is high enough that if they didn't do what they do, the galaxy and the lives of people would be, on the whole, a much worse place. The occasional gently caress up is to them more than counterbalaced out. Where is this assertion from? If it's the minds themselves making it, that would obviously be suspect.
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Aug 18, 2013 14:27
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Strategic Tea posted:Pretty much nothing turns me against one of Banks' characters faster than that. When people start moralising about how life has no soul without suffering and injustice, from the comfort of their GSV or the ruling class of some horrible tyranny. Even Horza, who suffers plenty, is still a long shot from some civilian refugee on the receiving end of an Idiran occupation. Is that what Horza's reasoning was though? It's been awhile since I read it, but I thought it had more to do with turning your life over to the Minds.
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Sep 7, 2013 17:35
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:It's mentioned that the small number of "immortals" are borderline crazy (look at QiRia from The Hydrogen Sonata) and at the very least obsessed with keeping themselves alive. It's quite possible the average Culture citizen looks at those examples and goes "Yeaahhhh... probably not a good idea." Put the book title outside the spoiler tag so people know not to mouse over it please. What I meant to post: Use of Weapons is thematically summed up by the line "The bomb lives only as it is falling." Keep that in mind while you read and you'll appreciate the 'literary' approach of some of the duller chapters.
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Dec 3, 2013 15:20
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WeAreTheRomans posted:Consider Phlebas is an awesome book, but you do get a sense that some aspects of the Culture universe are not fully fleshed out yet. I would definitely agree with the general consensus that UoW/PoG are the best intros to the Culture as a whole. As for dealing with the Sublimed, that's mostly the last book The Hydrogen Sonata, and I guess somewhat in Excession. I usually agree that PoG and UoW are the best intro books, but thinking about it from a different perspective, I think they are the best intro books from the perspective of learning about The Culture. With regard to Bank's literary/scifi mashup skills, I think now that Consider Pheblas is actually a better introduction, since while it also deals with some weighty themes, but they're placed around awesome action set pieces in traditional scifi settings.
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Jan 13, 2014 15:19
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GenVec posted:I feel like we were reading completely different series. I read the series the same way Gravitas Shortfall does. A big theme is liberal interventionism, and whether it's ok even if you have near omnipotence.
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Sep 22, 2014 17:21
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GenVec posted:Probably because Banks rarely writes in a straightforward way and there's clues all over the place that something is amiss in that scene, as we've already pointed out. I think you have the opposite read of most people in this thread, so can you tell me what you think "the deep moral questions" of the series are?
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Sep 24, 2014 20:29
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apophenium posted:Can someone speak some words to me about Excession? I just finished it this afternoon and ended up feeling a little underwhelmed. The first half of it felt almost completely pointless, even though a lot of the little vignettes were cool and interesting. There was a I guess acknowledgement to this about halfway through by a couple of the Minds in one of their little Instant Messaging chapters "I wish something would happen! I remember being like "Yeah! Come on!" Phone posting so this won't be as much as I might normally write. The thing about excession for me was that how it showed how the minds were not as great as they think they are. Despite being ahead of the meat people, they are still as petty at heart as their creators which is why they aren't deemed worthy by the OCP.
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Dec 3, 2014 02:33
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ZekeNY posted:That's how I read it. You get the local population's view of both the sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of Contact intervention. I read it the same way. Also my recollection is that Vasill's king was behind the plot against Dewar's, but I can't remember if Vasill played a role in it.
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Dec 19, 2014 17:06
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xian posted:Hannu Rajaniemi perhaps? I just finished his trilogy and it blew me away. This is correct.
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Jun 23, 2015 17:17
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The Culture are "the good guys" in the same way that the Liberal West in our world are the "good guys." It's the best place to live, but its not perfect, and its certainly not always in the right, particularly when it chooses to interfere in other civilizations/nations. I still haven't read the last two books, but the whole series is just a really fascinating take on the liberal interventionism problem, IMO.
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May 6, 2016 14:27
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Max posted:I actually did like the one plot point in Excession where the minds realized that being a utopian post-scarcity society only lasts as long as there isn't something material to fight over. The speed at which all the different groups mobilized to try and seize control of the OCP scared some of them. This is why Excession is such an important book in the series, IMO--it shows that the Minds are not infallible and that the implied claims about the justness of their interventions need to be viewed with skepticism.
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May 12, 2016 17:50
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