|
Yeah, all of the other books take place a fair bit of time after the Idiran War.
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2015 13:45
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 12, 2024 15:02 |
|
|
bewilderment posted:I feel a little embarrassed that while I mostly liked Excession as a story, having to memorise the ship names and who was involved with who got a little tedious to the point where I stopped caring about their conversations at some points, especially when it was a two-ship conversation and I forgot which was supposed to be which. It didn't affect my overall understanding of the story, though... maybe? The Attitude Adjuster was brain hacked, but maybe you were thinking of Not Invented Here? NIH committed suicide at the end of the book. The Interesting Times Gang was just a bunch of high level ships that tended to get together during times of crisis, legends with huge amounts of experience that took over and had made contingency plans for things. The conspiracy was being done by a subset of ITG ships led by Not Invented Here and Steely Glint, who'd set things up so that the Affront would be in a position to do something that'd force the Culture to declare war on them - like steal the Pittance ships - and the Culture would be in a position to crush them via the Sleeper Service fleet. All they were waiting for was an event they could use to instigate it and shove the Affront towards taking that action. The Excession turned up and they used that. Some other members of the ITG, including Serious Callers Only and Shoot Them Later, had figured out that something was up and were trying to get a grasp on what was going on and stop it, and some other ships had no idea what was going on and were trapped in between, and the whole thing was a clusterfuck. In the end, the Sleeper Service had enough information - a lot of it had been transmitted to it by other members of the ITG who'd been trying to get ahold of it - that it could ferret out the conspiracy and expose it, so the conspiracy failed. NIH committed suicide, Steely Glint surrendered. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Apr 28, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 09:53
|
|
|
Hedrigall posted:I'm actually stuck on Excession. I'm almost exactly halfway through and I cannot for the life of me keep track of all the ships. Is there a reliable who's-who sort of guide that doesn't spoil too much? gently caress The thing that might help as you go is to keep in mind that Serious Callers Only and Shoot Them Later are the core of the anti-conspiracy-conspiracy trying to get to the bottom of everything.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 10:05
|
|
|
I agree, that never really meshed well. There's meant to be some context given by the conversation between the drone and the excession, and keep in mind that nobody actually died, they were all scanned and stored for later revival, and it's clear the excession doesn't consider that death... but still.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 17:43
|
|
|
The Clowning posted:Alastair Reynolds, maybe? Especially the Revelation Space books. They're slower-paced than the Culture books and don't involve as much AI, but they're decent hard sci-fi. The Culture was as soft as they come, though. Science through the floor. They were just really good soft sci-fi.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 26, 2015 13:24
|
|
|
Some of those things in A Few Notes From The Culture are clearly things that changed later since he wrote it in 1994. Like the idea that GSVs are exclusively Contact vehicles and average Culture civilians would rarely see one. Later on it's clear many GSVs are just full-blown mobile civilian habitats.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2015 06:25
|
|
|
Gravitas Shortfall posted:What part of the plot was it necessary to know that a main character was male or female? This is an honest question, I haven't read the first two books in a while (and I haven't read the third yet so no spoilers please). I seem to remember sex not being a massive deal in the setting and found it just as easy to imagine everyone as female. Not so much the plot as some people like the good ol' brain-TV while they read and it's annoying to keep getting it wrong and knowing it the whole time.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2015 16:57
|
|
|
andrew smash posted:Was i the only person who didn't like the big 'mistake not' reveal? I honestly thought the idea was cooler before that happened, it's not like it wasn't abundantly clear what 'mistake not...' was implying anyway. I didn't like it. I'm kinda sick of Culture ships being braggarts, to be honest. It probably doesn't help that I wasn't too fond of Mistake Not... as a character.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2015 07:06
|
|
|
Gravitas Shortfall posted:GSVs seem to range from "sympathetic and nice" to "stuffy and a bit boring" for the most part. Pretty sure these are one and the same, it just depends on who's describing them.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2015 00:59
|
|
|
Shockeh posted:And the ITG could by definition be described as 'falling outside the norm' by virtue of what they get up to. The majority of basic GSV are happy to just wander the galaxy, pursuing their own interests and not warranting having a story written about them at all. Basically, we only see the weirdos, because the regular Joes in Ship terms rarely get screen time. Basically the same reason we tend to see Special Circumstance agents.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2015 13:11
|
|
|
Consider Phlebas doesn't get into the Culture itself much. As a result, Player of Games is the first 'real' inside-the-Culture Culture novel, so he's feeling very introductory and universe-exploring during it. And then there's a second stylistic leap that happens during his 2000-2008 break. Make sure you read the ones from before that first, I think. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Nov 1, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2015 23:30
|
|
|
Yeah. I mean, the Culture mentions they have contacts - some, small contact - among the sublime, I think we can take the idea that the Chelgrien-Puen sublimed at face value.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2016 13:56
|
|
|
Taeke posted:
Just if you read Against a Dark Background, don't forget that he released epilogue online after it was published. Director's cut ending.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2016 10:20
|
|
|
I just couldn't do Feersum Endjinn. It was just too hard to read those chapters. Maybe I'll cheat. I wonder if there's an audiobook?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2016 01:13
|
|
|
Toast Museum posted:The impression I got was that the whole concept doesn't exactly make sense in the Culture. They have the sort of virtual environments that would constitute another society's heaven, but as far as I can tell they have no interest in restricting people from passing in and out of them, so it ends up being more of a change of address or body mod than an afterlife. Didn't they say in Look to Windwards that the majority of causalities of the plan would actually be virtualised culture citizens running inside Hub? Or is that my imagination. So it seems the virtualised population is fairly substantial and it wouldn't surprise me if there was a large set specifically designed to operate as kind of heavenly retirement communities in some way for citizens tired of regular existence. You're right that they'd be able to pop out at any time, though. Not enforced retirement from life like heavens. What I recall of post-life options for Culture citizens tended to be: oblivion (often with your memories being donated to some database or Mind), merging into a groupmind, or storage, either physical or virtual, until the Culture's sublimation. Also, choosing to live more than 400 years is considered kinda gauche. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 14:15 on May 1, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 1, 2016 14:07
|
|
|
Combed Thunderclap posted:To be fair it's kind of difficult to politically or economically categorize a society with 50 trillion entities, no laws, and no scarcity, run by god-like machines with a thing for helping people be happy and enabling instantaneous, ad hoc local referenda. Talk about an out-of-context situation by the standards of anything on Earth. The culture is a benevolent oligarchal authoritarian regime which was designed and operates by deliberately creating dictators who are benevolent and good and permissive of personal liberty and passing the authority to them. And where the rest of the designed oligarchs would reign in any who failed to live up to those principles. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 14:25 on May 2, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 2, 2016 14:19
|
|
|
Is that a quote from Hydrogen Sonata? I know they went into the Simming Problem there and why Minds thus can't perfectly predict.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2016 12:48
|
|
|
The good droneship Of Course I Still Love You just caught her second intact rocket, which is nice. Triple deceleration burn this time due to a high orbit launch, too. Last time that punched a hole in her. The poor Just Read The Instructions must be feeling left out. All she's had is a rocket that fell over after it landed.  It's hilarious to watch the cast and there's a big complex graphic with the earth and trajectories and burns and stage one and stage two marked and then a dot just reading "Of Course I Still Love You"  Also, someone in the space thread posted an amazing gag from Hot Fuzz I never knew about : Alaan posted:To briefly go back to Banks, I was watching Hot Fuzz again the other day and noticed the guy at the police station desk that is always reading has all Banks books. Every scene he has a different one. Antti posted:It goes deeper than that, actually. It's two identical twins, and the other twin reads Iain M. Banks and the other twin reads Iain Banks without the M (which is how Banks kept his SF and his other books separated). MikeJF fucked around with this message at 14:26 on May 6, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 6, 2016 14:13
|
|
|
Seldom Posts posted: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. Except the Culture gets around the entire issue with liberal interventionism by being able to simulate with high degree of accuracy the results - orders of magnitude of success more than enough to offset the very few failures of prediction.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2016 14:38
|
|
|
shallowj posted:Last question: do we know what happens to machines that do, uh, "bad things"? We know humans get slap-droned, for example, if they murder people. Machines certainly aren't infallible. I forget what happens to the conspirator ships in Excession. Do they just get "slap-droned" on a massive scale, like the ship that has to follow around Sleeper Service? Or do they simply get "re-programmed" ? I doubt they'd be allowed to stay in a large ship. If they're even still allowed their mobility, I bet it'd a tiny slow unnamed unit with a built-in slap-drone.
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2016 23:27
|
|
|
Gravitas Shortfall posted:Whether or not it deserved to die is up for debate, but weapons designed to cause maximum pain have no place in a utopian society, or any society for that matter. It was basically just hacked with effectors, no dedicated weapon. It was no e-dust assassin OH YEAH LET'S GO THERE.
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2016 11:08
|
|
|
Shockeh posted:Ive always assumed it was 100% the Culture, it's us as readers gettIng the motive wrong. The reason they used the e-dust, the reason it was so gratuitously violent, was all to reinforce 'do not gently caress with the Culture'. They're not taking any pleasure in it - they're reinforcing a message in a visible, obvious way to a society that has clearly forgotten. Minds are 'past' vengeance, they don't need it, this was about a narrative. Oh that was absolutely what I assumed was the reason. It is, after all, not just a weapon, but a terror weapon. And the book makes a point of telling you several times how it deliberately leaves enough surveillance intact to make it clear to the Chelgrians exactly what happened. It was a deliberate, thought-out reminder to everyone not to mess with The Culture. And because of the Chelgrian-puen, they couldn't just fake it. The thing is... even if they could have, I don't think they would have. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 14:53 on May 8, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 8, 2016 14:48
|
|
|
Snapchat A Titty posted:They've probably run some math and possibly a basic simulation but you can't ever know if you took the right choice. No, but they've been doing this for ten thousand years and they know for a fact they're good enough that orders of magnitude more lives are saved and improved than if they were non-interventionist. Which outweighs the times they take the wrong choice. Keep in mind they do actually have control groups, just to make sure that they simulate right and it is actually their actions. Earth is a control planet. (And even then they've probably run math showing that the increased accuracy of having x control groups will offset the increased deaths on them due to inaction) MikeJF fucked around with this message at 04:34 on May 9, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 9, 2016 04:31
|
|
|
Gravitas Shortfall posted:What's amusing is that Hub did everything in its power to make sure that if anyone and everyone could see the show. It was simultaneously broadcast at multiple stadia, could be experienced remotely via VR, etc etc. Some did, anyway. There were 40 billion people on Masaq'. Dunno how much of the general population was doing it.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2016 08:19
|
|
|
Maybe. It was Gary Donnelly and Louise Banks in the story.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 04:19
|
|
|
The Iln weren't more advanced or powerful than the Culture, they just had a fully weaponised system in-place against a single partially demilitarised agent. Its biggest advantage was that it had managed to compromise the Morthanveld ship. He does also say that it's possible to be advanced in different ways and different styles, but the main thing was that the Iln destroyer was... well, there.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2016 05:26
|
|
|
Yeah, the Oct were hoping that the 'Inheritor' they found would grant them dominance over the Shellworld and power of a higher tier.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2017 04:13
|
|
|
divabot posted:The Hydrogen Sonata is really pretty darn good. Consider Phlebas is sorta ehh okay, but its sequelish Look to Windward is awesome. Haven't actually read Matter. Inversions is dessert afterwards. Hydrogen Sonata should come last. You should read the culture books he wrote before 2000 as the first generation, then the ones he wrote after 2008 as the second generation (there's a very noticeable change in style after he took that long break), and finish with Hydrogen Sonata. Oh and Windward should probably be read after Phlebas, yeah. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 15:10 on May 23, 2017 |
|
#
¿
May 23, 2017 15:07
|
|
|
Also be aware that Banks eventually wrote an epilogue to Against a Dark Background and posted it online.Ugly In The Morning posted:Thought about doing that, but my understanding is that there are some books that flesh out the setting more than others. It's not a direct series of sequels, so I figured I'd go with some recommendations. Eh, honestly, publication order's probably best and safest. They're mostly not direct sequels, but Banks builds the world more with each book and it feels easiest reading in publication order. And there are callbacks - Matter mentions Excession, Surface Detail references back to Use of Weapons, Look to Windward is a big reflection on the events of Consider Phlebas, The State of the Art continues a character from Use of Weapons, and there's a few others I can't recall right now. You really don't have to at all, but it's probably the best experience in the end. And so as not to build expectations, be aware that Inversions isn't usually published with 'A Culture Novel' on the front for a reason. It's not a Culture novel. But sometimes it does have that written there. Because. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 11:13 on May 24, 2017 |
|
#
¿
May 24, 2017 10:42
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 12, 2024 15:02 |
|
|
Yes inversions is clearly a culture novel. Spoilsports.
|
|
#
¿
May 26, 2017 05:34
|
|