Just what is The Culture?

[2000AD]

I keep on hearing things like:

"The culture would kill anyoine"
and
"The culture vs (someone) is more on sided than Feds vs Imps"

Just what is the culture?
In which books/films/comics/etc does it appear?
Why is it so powerful / what makes it so powerful?

[Vendetta]

The Culture appear in Iain M Banks' science fiction books (to a greater or lesser degree).

Most of their ships can blow planets up without thinking about it too hard.

[Shinova]

I keep on hearing things like:

"The culture would kill anyoine"
and
"The culture vs (someone) is more on sided than Feds vs Imps"

Just what is the culture?
In which books/films/comics/etc does it appear?
Why is it so powerful / what makes it so powerful?

They're from a book series by Iain M. Banks.


Their combat capabilities include:

Reaction times at picoseconds.

Weapon ranges at thousands of lightyears.

Ships can move so fast, battles can extend over lightyears of space, and take miliseconds to finish (One battle was spread over lightyears and took 11 milliseconds, and involved thousands of ships).

Effectors: Ultimate hacking and controlling device.

Gridfire: Blanket a volume of space with infinite energy.

AI: God-like intelligence and thinking capability.



Summary: Think about everything associated with space combat: power, speed, range, reaction times, etc. Now max all of them to their highest potential and beyond. That's the Culture.

[Shinova]

To put it lightly, one Culture GCU (a scout ship) can take on EVERYTHING in Star Wars, Star Trek, and Babylon 5 (Excluding god-like people like Q) and win in less than five seconds.


And that's possibly an understatement, I guess.

[Shinova]

And do you know what's another startling thought? The Culture universe is more "realistic" and possible than Star Trek!

[paladin]

What kind of lifestyle do the people that live in "the Culture" have?

[Slartibartfast]

What kind of lifestyle do the people that live in "the Culture" have?

Probably very stressful, always running and blowing up things, never a moment to enjoy yourself

[Enlightenment]

Culture FAQ here:
http://www.mattstan.pwp.blueyonder.co.u ... refaq.html


This post requires proxy authentication (407).

[Peregrin Toker]

And do you know what's another startling thought? The Culture universe is more "realistic" and possible than Star Trek!

At least Iain Banks doesn't fill his books with pseudoscientific babble....

[Shinova]

What kind of lifestyle do the people that live in "the Culture" have?

Probably very stressful, always running and blowing up things, never a moment to enjoy yourself

LOL

Far from it. The Culture people enjoy themselves TOO much in my opinion. You can gland on various non-harmful drugs, everything's more or less free, and many of the people have sex all day. It's one long party.

It's a social utopia. That's the Culture.

<Note: Why don't you read the source (the books) before making a statement like that, hmm?">

[Slartibartfast]

What kind of lifestyle do the people that live in "the Culture" have?

Probably very stressful, always running and blowing up things, never a moment to enjoy yourself

LOL

Far from it. The Culture people enjoy themselves TOO much in my opinion. You can gland on various non-harmful drugs, everything's more or less free, and many of the people have sex all day. It's one long party.

It's a social utopia. That's the Culture.

<Note: Why don't you read the source (the books) before making a statement like that, hmm?">

Because if I did, I wouldn't have posted what I did.

[GSV Use Psychology]

This essay has good basic information. It doesn't have much on their tech though.

Some quotes from the books:

"He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself to not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometres away. That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off . . . and still have no good idea why you were fighting."
Consider Phlebas, page 33

"The Mind had an image to illustrate its information capacity. It liked to imagine the contents of its memory store written out on cards; little slips of paper with tiny writing on them, big enough for a human to read. If the characters were a couple of millimetres tall and the paper about ten centimetres square and written on both sides, then ten thousand characters could be squeezed onto each card. In a metre-long drawer of such cards maybe one thousand of them - then million pieces of information - could be stored. In a small room a few metres square, with a corridor in the middle just wide enough to pull a tray out into, you could keep perhaps a thousand trays arranges in close-packed cabinets: ten billion characters in all. A square kilometre of these cramped cells might contain as many as one hundred thousand rooms; a thousand such floors would produce a building two thousand metres tall with a hundred million rooms. If you kept building those squat towers, squeezed hard up against each other until they entirely covered the surface of a largish standard-G world - maybe a billion square kilometres - you would have a planet with one trillion square kilometres of floor space, one hundred quadrillion paper-stuffed rooms, thirty light-years of corridors and a number of potential stored characters sufficiently large to boggle just about anybody's mind. In base 10 that number would be a 1 followed by twenty-seven zeroes, and even that vast figure was only a fraction of the capacity of the Mind. To match it you would need a thousand such worlds; systems of them, a clusterful of information-packed globes . . . and that vast capacity was physically contained within a space smaller than a single of those tiny rooms, inside the Mind . . ."
Consider Phlebas, page 177

"General Systems Vehicles were like encapsulated worlds. They were more than just very big spaceships; they were habitats, universities, factories, museums, dockyards, libraries, even mobile exhibition centres. They represented the Culture - they were the Culture. Almost anything that could be done anywhere in the Culture could be done on a GSV. They could make anything the Culture was capable of making, contained all the knowledge the Culture had ever accumulated, carried or could construct specialised equipment of every imaginable type for every conceivable eventuality, and continually manufactured smaller ships: General Contact Units usually, warcraft now. Their complements were measured in millions at least. They crewed their offspring ships out of the gradual increase in their own population."
Consider Phlebas, page 220

"Statistics Length of war: forty-eight years, one month. Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (+- .3%). Losses ships (all classes above interplanetary) - 91,215,660 (+- 200); Orbitals - 14,334; planets and major moons - 53; Rings - 1; Spheres - 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration) - 6. Historical perspective A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population. Rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space. . . . Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy's elder civilisations rate the Idiran-Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days."
Consider Phlebas, page 462

"Sharp Blue was a game-player's secretion, a product of standard genofixed Culture glands sitting in Gurgeh's lower skull, beneath the ancient animal-evolved lower reaches of his brain. The panoply of internally manufactured drugs the vast majority of Culture individuals were capable of choosing from comprised up to three hundred different compounds of varying degrees of popularity and sophistication"
Player of Games, page 9

[GSV Use Psychology]

Doh! Forgot the link:
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~stefan/culture.html

[Moonshadow]

are their any pics of a Culture ship? Seems like a ship with such firepower would be pretty damn cool looking.

[XaLEv]

are their any pics of a Culture ship? Seems like a ship with such firepower would be pretty damn cool looking.

There is only one place I have ever seen with pictures of Culture vessels, and it's been down for a while.

http://www.excession.swinternet.co.uk/


It is archived here. You might be able to find some of the pictures in there.

[XaLEv]

Dammit. The link to the archive there is bad. Use this one instead.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www ... ameset.htm

[GSV Use Psychology]

Lynas' new site is located at www.fastness.co.uk
Sadly it's missing most of the Culture ship images that were on the old site, not that there were many to begin with.

I think best descriptions is still "It looks like a dildo!"
which is resoponded by "How appropriate, armed it can fuck solar systems."

[XaLEv]

Damn, that sucks. The pic of Limiting Factor was pretty good.

[2000AD]

Holy f*ck!

Well these posts certainly answered my question.