Culture Series - Main Themes

Main Themes

Since the Culture's biological population commonly lives as long as 400 years and have no need to work, they face the difficulty of giving meaning to their lives when the Minds and other intelligent machines can do almost anything better than the biological population can. Many try, a few successfully, to join Contact, the Culture's diplomatic service, or Special Circumstances, Contact's secret service division. Banks described the Culture as "some incredibly rich lady of leisure who does good, charitable works... Contact does that on a large scale." The same need to find a purpose for existence led the Culture as a whole to embark voluntarily on its only full-scale war, to stop the expansion of the theocratic and militaristic Idirans – otherwise the Culture's economic and technological advancement would have been a pointless exercise in hedonism.

All of the stories feature the tension between the Culture's humane, anarchist ideals and its need to intervene in the affairs of less enlightened and often less advanced civilisations. The first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas (1987), describes an episode in the Idiran War, which the Culture's Minds foresaw would cause billions of deaths on both sides, but which their utilitarian calculations predicted would be the best course in the long term. In The Player of Games (1988), a Culture citizen is blackmailed into being the agent of a Culture plan to destabilise a repressive empire. Use of Weapons explores the thoughts and dark secret of a mercenary whom the Culture employs for various regime change operations. The main thread in Excession (1996) is about some Minds' attempts to foil a plot by other Minds to provoke a war with a rapidly-expanding and revoltingly sadistic race. In Look to Windward (2000), the Culture has to avert an atrocity planned by the Chelgrians in retaliation for the Culture's attempt to democratise the Chelgrian's rigid caste system, which led to a devastating civil war between the new regime and the old elite; after preventing disaster, the Culture takes a sadistic revenge on the chief plotters – Banks commented that in order to prevent such atrocities "even the Culture throws away its usual moral rule-book." Andrew M. Butler noted that, "Having established the peaceful, utopian, game-playing tendencies of the Culture, ... in later volumes the Culture’s dirty tricks are more exposed."

The Culture stories have been described as "eerily prescient". Consider Phlebas (1987) explicitly presents a clash of civilizations, although this phrase was coined by Samuel P. Huntington in 1992. This is highlighted by the novel's description of the Idirans' expansion as a "jihad" and by its epigraphic verse from the Koran, "Idolatry is worse than carnage". However it was as much a "holy war" from the Culture's point of view.

Much of Look to Windward is a commentary on the Idiran-Culture war, from a viewpoint 800 years later, mainly reflecting grief over both personal and large-scale losses, and guilt over mistakes made in the war, including the rejection of peace offers from the Idirans. It combines these with similar reflections on the attempt to reform the Chelgrians' rigid caste system; although the book describes the casual murder of an unresisting low-caste Chelgrian, preventing such injustices does not compensate for the disastrous consequences of the intervention. The book illustrates the limitations of power, and also points out that Minds and other AIs are as vulnerable as biological persons to grief, guilt and regrets.