Charlie said:
But yes, that's the idea of the books, I think. Let's face it, the vast vast majority of the Culture's citizens (both flesh and machine) live happy hedonistic lives - it's the edges where the Culture meets other civs and the underbelly where people conduct nefarious schemes where the interesting stories are going to happen.
One puzzling thing is that Banks advances arguments, most notably in "A Few Notes on the Culture", that something like the Culture is a very strong attractor for space-based civilisations in the limit of increasing technology. Given this, why are there other societies with generally equivalent technology that differ markedly from the Culture in terms of social organisation? The Homomdans, for example, have ships and I'm pretty sure also Minds, and yet are an old-fashioned Empire so far as I recall. Indeed, except for Culture offshoots like the Zetetic Elench there's no mention of any other civilisations that even approximate to the Culture's social model.
Could it be that all such cultures are assimilated into the Culture itself?
Rich GCU Hedonism Gradient _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
