Culture Series

The Culture series, Culture sequence or Culture cycle refers to a series of novels and short fiction of Scottish author Iain M. Banks. The stories center around the Culture, a post-scarcity semi-anarchist utopia consisting of various humanoid races and managed by very advanced artificial intelligences. The main theme of the novels is the dilemmas that an idealistic hyperpower faces in dealing with civilisations that do not share its ideals, and whose behaviour it sometimes finds repulsive. In some of the stories, action takes place mainly in non-Culture environments, and the leading characters are often on the fringes of, or non-members of, the Culture, sometimes acting as agents of Culture plans to civilise the galaxy.

Read more about Culture Series:  The Culture, The Stories, Main Themes, Place Within Science Fiction, Literary Techniques, Genesis of The Series, Reception

Famous quotes containing the words culture and/or series:

    The anorexic prefigures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says, I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination.
    Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)

    History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
    E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)