The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was … the urge not to feel useless. (Consider Phlebas)
To provide an outlet for those who cannot be satisfied with the multifarious pleasures the Culture has to offer, and in order to provide itself with a certain moral justification for its existence, the Culture has what we could call a missionary bureau, otherwise known as the Contact Section. Contact’s mission is to contact, study, and analyze other civilizations. More than a pure research body, it also sometimes intervenes in (or interferes with, depending on one’s perspective) the development of less technologically advanced civilizations in an attempt to steer these civilizations onto more benign lines of development.
…oh the self-satisfied Culture: its imperialism of smugness. (“A Gift from the Culture”)
Although the Culture does on occasion refrain from Contacting civilizations that haven’t achieved spaceflight, it has little compunction about interfering in the development of societies when its (i.e., the Minds’) analysis suggests that this interference will be beneficial (beneficial according to the Culture’s set of values). Contact has a subdepartment known as Special Circumstances (SC), a euphemism for its intelligence and espionage section. SC does Contact’s dirty work; for all its general demeanor of benevolence and tolerance, the Culture frequently uses devious or violent means to achieve its ends. Not surprisingly, the Culture’s oft-patronizing intervention is not entirely appreciated by the affected civilizations.
Culture Clash and The Ambivalent Hero
“…just who is Culture? Where exactly does it begin and end? Who is and who isn’t?…No clear boundaries to the Culture, then; it just fades away at the edges, both fraying and spreading. So who are we?” (Consider Phlebas)
Didn’t the Culture forbid anything? (The Player of Games)
As mentioned, Banks’ Culture stories take place at points of conflict between the values of the Culture and of other civilizations. Banks’ protagonists are, for the most part, either opposed to the Culture or deeply ambivalent towards its wonders. By showing us characters and situations outside the soft, placid center of the Culture, Banks suggests that at least some portion of humanity cannot be satisfied with the “mere” satisfaction of material and biological needs. Contact and SC are the repositories of the Culture’s spiritual values, the embodiment of the Culture’s self-congratulatory benevolent rationalism. We’ll take a look at a few of the Culture novels in more detail to see how this plays out in specific cases.
Consider Phlebas was Banks’ first published Culture novel and is set earliest in Culture history. In this story the Culture is at war with the Idirans, a powerful, technologically advanced warrior species with an aggressively expansionist, theocratic government. The novel’s main character, Bora Horza Gobuchul, is a member of a dwindling shapeshifting species allied with the Idirans; Horza, although he has no great love for the Idirans, is their willing collaborator, because, as he says to Perosteck Balveda, an SC agent he’s captured, they are:
“…on the side of life—boring, old-fashioned, biological life: smelly, fallible, and short-tempered, God knows, but real life. You’re ruled by your machines. You’re an evolutionary dead end.”
The irony of Horza’s hostility to the Culture is that in many ways he actually has more in common with the Culture than with the Idirans—his shapeshifting abilities, for example, are a rough analogue of the Culture’s bioengineering capabilities (in fact, his species was “constructed” in the distant past as a weapon of war). A growing sympathy between himself and Balveda underlines this similarity:
With something of a shock, Horza realized that his own obsessive drive never to make a mistake, always to think of everything, was not so unlike the fetishistic urge which he so despised in the Culture: that need to make everything fair and equal, to take the chance out of life.
Although Horza tries to carry out his mission for the Idirans with implacable determination, overcoming a number of obstacles and life-threatening situations, he remains, in many ways, suspended between Idiran and Culture values. Having captured Balveda, Horza refrains from the logical course of summarily executing an enemy agent, and instead brings her along on the final stages of his mission despite the threat she poses to the fragile group of mercenaries under his command. Only at the very end of his (failed) mission does he reconsider his loyalties, and by then it’s too late.
The Player of Games, my personal favorite, approaches the Culture/other conflict from the opposite direction as Consider Phlebas. The novel’s protagonist, Jernau Gurgeh, is a Culture citizen, a renowned gameplayer who seems satisfied with the challenges provided by various games he’s mastered. However, this satisfaction turns out not to run very deep—Gurgeh is afflicted by the fundamental existential dilemma of the restless Culture citizen:
“Everything seems … gray at the moment….nothing’s worth playing for anyway.”
The absence of real meaning, the lack of real stakes other than social prestige in his gameplaying is a reflection of the question of relevance for any member of the Culture:
“You want something you can’t have, Gurgeh. You enjoy your life in the Culture, but it can’t provide you with sufficient threats….”
Or, as Gurgeh says:
“This is not a heroic age. The individual is obsolete.”
Thus, when Contact approaches Gurgeh with a proposition for a five-year mission to a distant alien civilization, this previously well-integrated Culture citizen is willing to abandon his friends and status for the stimulation of the unknown.
His mission is to the far-off Empire of Azad, located outside the galaxy in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Azad is an multiworld empire supported by a game, an incredibly intricate and complex game, the playing of which determines social status; the winner of the game’s tournament becomes Emperor. The game (also called Azad) is in essence a “map” of its society; the skills necessary to succeed at the game are the same skills that the rigidly hierarchical empire requires to maintain its structure. Indeed, Contact’s analysis suggests that it is the game itself that perpetuates the Empire’s existence. The introduction of an alien player with extremely different values into the game brings the conflict between Culture and non-Culture values into bold relief.
Gurgeh’s mission to Azad is an example of Contact/SC’s long-range planning and working methods. Although Azad is quite far away from the Culture, the future potential threat it could pose to the Culture is significant enough for SC to want to undermine the Empire and its hierarchical structure. Gurgeh is deliberately kept ignorant of SC’s plan in its entirety; he is used “like [a] game-piece,” a pawn on the Minds’ galactic chessboard. Gurgeh, unaware of the ultimate purpose of SC’s manipulations, begins by seeing the game as just another challenge to be mastered, a new means of self-definition that the Culture could not provide:
He wanted to find the measure of himself through this infinitely exploitable, infinitely demanding game,…
But as the game is both the basis of and a reflection of Azad society, Gurgeh’s participation in the game creates a conflict between Azadian values and Culture values that Gurgeh cannot ignore; every time Gurgeh wins a round, he is in effect scoring points in a broader competition between the hierarchical values of Azad and the egalitarian values of the Culture. However, like Horza, Gurgeh comes to sympathize and identify with his opponent. He stops speaking in Marain, the Culture’s language, and beings to speak and dream in the local tongue, which threatens to erode his identification with the Culture:
…when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language … for, in virtually every case, something much cruder.
However, Gurgeh’s fundamental Culture mindset never entirely disappears. He finds new capacities within himself that he didn’t know he had, as he hadn’t needed them in the safe and secure existence he had enjoyed while living in the Culture:
“…just because you’ve settled down in idealized, tailor-made conditions doesn’t mean you’ve lost the capacity for rapid adaptation.”
Gurgeh’s playing style, which cannot but be a reflection of his and the Culture’s values, combines with his natural gameplaying abilities to advance him much farther in the game than anyone had expected (or was willing to admit having expected). Upsetting all predictions, he reaches the final match against the Emperor-Regent Nicosar, and the stunning climax to their match becomes the final test between Culture and Azadian values:
The board became both Culture and Empire again. The setting was made by them both; a glorious, beautiful, deadly killing field, unsurpassably fine and sweet and predatory and carved from Nicosar’s beliefs and his together.
Gurgeh succeeds in carrying out SC’s mission and finally learns the extent to which he had been manipulated by SC; his reaction is not so much one of anger as it is of exhaustion. On his return to his home Orbital he begins to pick up the pieces of his life that he’d abandoned five years ago, but he seems to have taken a little piece of Azad with him on his return; it seems unlikely he will be the same complacent Culture citizen that he was before.