Talk:The Culture

message: What's the matter with butchering the whole topic of Bank's Culture on Wikipedia?!? Cannot "editors" who are not interested in something leave it well alone? Wikipedia is becomming irrelevant in all topics except STEM and perhaps geography. --bonzi (talk) 12:59, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

message: Just to explain my revert.  I can't remember where it's said now, but I'm certain that the aesthetic value of Marain is discussed in one of his novels (along the lines in the article).  I did think it was in his "A Few Notes On The Culture", but it's not.  Can anyone recall where this comes up?  --Plumbago 11:05, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Might this be The Player of Games:
"Another change, [Flere-Imsaho] thought. [Gurgeh] had altered. ... One reason was that Gurgeh was speaking Eächic all the time. ... when Culture people didn't speak Marain for some time they ... lost the carefully balanced structure of the Culture language, its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm behind for, in virtually every case, something much cruder." 86.129.83.14 Tonywalton  | Talk 09:58, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Aesthetics of Marain 

message: I have produced a free font based on the description of the Marain langauge at , font is TrueType and posted at . I'd like to add this link to the article, any comments?
Tomcully 15:58, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Marain Font 

message: The Morthanveld are mentioned in the section on Spheres and it is not made clear that the Morthanveld are not part of the Culture but a separate civilisation.
194.78.217.240 (talk) 21:37, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That section clearly states at the beginning that these aren't Culture-only habitats - rather it explains habitats in the Culture's setting. Cheers, Ingolfson (talk) 05:21, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Morthanveld not Culture

message: Moving the minds/ships listing talk to Talk:Mind (The Culture) where I think it belongs... --Blueshade 00:11, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sections spunoff 

message: Re: the remark about the Culture's position on the Kardashev scale - as far as I am aware, the Culture have not ventured far outside their home galaxy (the Milky Way, which they share with us).  So it's possibly not the case that they qualify for a level 4 placing.  However, (among other sources) they also access energy from the "grid" which essentially allows unlimited energy use.  Is this what was meant by placing them at level 4?  If so, an even higher rating (at least by the article on the scale) might be more appropriate.  Care to comment?  --Plumbago 08:49, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: My understanding of the levels was utilization of energy in a given spatial area. Given that the Culture (even with its many megaengineering projects) appears not to have exhausted even the energy accesible from the grid in even the area of a globe, my guess is that Kardaschev levels is irrelevant. We might want to say something along the lines of "If the Culture were to be measured on a Kardaschev scale (disregarding the practically infinite energy available from the grid) they would be a level ...". --Maru (talk) 18:12, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: every time I've looked at this page for over a year that line's bugged me. Your sentiments (and mine) have gone uncontested for long enough that I think we can happily go ahead and dispose of it. -Zepheriah 00:35, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kardaschev analysis 

message: I suggest we build a section entitled "Culture Technology" perhaps listed as Section 4 underneath habitats shifting the other sections down one number.
Suggestions please for subsections, i have a nice piece on "Culture Weaponry" I intend to expand it referring to specific weapons mentioned in the books used by key characters.  Tactics of Drones and Culture (Contact) Hand-to-Hand combat.
Basically i have descriptions of the following to add under "Culture Weaponry"
I intend to merge ship and personal weaponry together as there are both large-scale and handheld/drone versions of many of the general categories here.
I am debating whether to add my description of "Knife Missiles" here or under a section on Drones.
Gridfire, Nanohole Bombs, CAMs, Lineguns, Plasma Charges, CREWS, Effectors, Pancakers
Can we have some volunteers to build other sections underneath "Culture Technology" (Personally i think we should leave Ships still under "Habitats"
--Darkpowder
Late in the discussion, but I'd suggest adding knife missiles to Drones if it hasn't been done already.  In Use of Weapons, there is a reference to Zakalwe slagging a knife missile with a ".9" rating, and I seem to recall something in that book suggesting that the .9 was a reference to human intelligence (90% as intelligent as a human?)  I don't have a copy now, just a suggestion.
BaikinMan 14:27, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That does not necessarily need to imply that Knife Missiles have sentience. MadMaxDog 07:32, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

text: I don't necessarily disagree with you. However, one or two lines do not make a subsection in an otherwise very balanced and well-fleshed out article. For the moment, I have moved your addition to another section (and even expanded it a little). Also see my edit summary. Cheers, and no offense intended. MadMaxDog 09:02, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Culture Technology 

message: There should also be a subsection of culture tech on culture weapons, gridfire, and the others. The snare 19:57, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't necessarily disagree with you. However, one or two lines do not make a subsection in an otherwise very balanced and well-fleshed out article. For the moment, I have moved your addition to another section (and even expanded it a little). Also see my edit summary. Cheers, and no offense intended. MadMaxDog 09:02, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Culture Weapons 

message: the idea that Culture exists at the same time as us was new to me. Reference? --Alvestrand 19:26, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The novella The State of the Art is explicitly set near-present day (the 1970s if I remember correctly).  It also dates Use of Weapons to near this time because of overlapping characters (e.g. Diziet Sma).  Also, Consider Phlebas includes a time-line in its appendix that relates the events in that novel to our timeframe (though it's several hundred years ago by our standards).  Incidentally, the Culture's always explicitly been set within the Milky Way.  --Plumbago 19:42, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: thanks - The State of the Art added to shopping list! --Alvestrand 19:44, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hope you enjoy it.  I'm more a fan of the novels myself, but it's still good.  Cheers, --Plumbago 19:47, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

text: There is a possible discrepency though, as PoG also says that the Idiran War ended a minimum of 716 years earlier, putting PoG in the late 21st Century, clashing with the date in Excession.--Werthead (talk) 23:05, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

text: "The time frame for the published Culture stories is from roughly AD 1300 to AD 2100, with Earth being contacted during the end of the time frame, though the Culture had covertly visited the planet in the 1970s in The State of the Art." - Can anyone tell me what the source for the bolded part is? Thanks.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.155.147.183 (talk) 08:28, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reference for claim that Culture contemporaneous with Earth? (Timeline)

message: I've been thinking about whether images might be a good idea for this article. But how to get some? Obvious idea would be to get some of the books, but that fair use is only allowed on the book articles - would it be acceptable to photograph a set of books similar to this: :Image:Gibson sprawl.jpg What do people think? MadMaxDog 07:26, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If you were the one who added the picture All_The_Culture_Novels.jpg, you missed out Inversions. Still, nice picture though. Fits into the article well. 82.69.37.32 16:26, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Dang, I did. Thats good and bad news - I need to redo the image, and I have another book to read that I didn't really realise existed! MadMaxDog 00:18, 7 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Whoopee - a new novel is coming: Matter (novel)! Ingolfson 11:39, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I read Matter. It's back to the hardcore Space Opera of Consider Phlebas! Yay! :D Anyway, what I came in here to say was: great picture indeed! Stassa (talk) 21:55, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Images for this article

message: The article says:
Seen from Earth, the time frame for the published Culture stories is from roughly AD 1300 to AD 2100, with Earth being Contacted during the end of the time frame, though the Culture had previously visited the planet.
In State of the Art, Earth is visited by the Culture (around 1970), but at the end of the story, the culture decides not to interfere or make its presence known.
Is there some other work which involves Earth in which Contact is involved?  —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Krazdon (talk • contribs). 
::For a related discussion, please see my comments on the Algebraist above, or in the talk page for that book...82.211.95.178 10:46, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The note at the beginning of the appendix to Consider Phlebas implies that Earth will be Contacted in the mid-1980s. It's anyone's guess as to what might have changed Contact's mind about Earth. -Father Inire 06:56, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Oops, I was wrong: the year given is actually 2110 AD. -Father Inire 06:21, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Ah, then it's obvious. They took one look at Judge Dredd and decided there was nothing worth salvaging.  -Jenny 10:15, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: No, the deal-killer was Wikipedia:Articles for deletion. --Philcha (talk) 08:15, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I really don't think that the note in CP provides evidence to say that Earth was contacted. It's a good 'tease', but it could mean any number of things. I think the reference should be changed to reflect the note's ambiguity.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.146.132.8 (talk) 20:07, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

text: Concur.  Sma was living somewhere a bit like, but not given as Earth.  Midgley (talk) 13:00, 13 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Earth Contacted? 

message: I'm going to start a separate article The "Culture" stories of Ian M. Banks to handle history of the series (e.g. the published version of some are re-writes), themes, literary style, place in science fiction (incl the "British Boom"), critical appraisal - because The Culture is large enough already and there's more that could be written about it as a fictional civilisation. --Philcha (talk) 15:52, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Might I suggest going the other way around? Make this article about real-world issues, and spin-off articles ("Technology of The Culture", "Civilizations of The Culture", etc) can handle the fictional elements of the Culture universe. As it stands, this article has a very high degree of "fancruft" and in-universe material, which would be nice to avoid, since it is the main article on the topic. Don't be afraid to do major overhauls, but make sure any such moves are well planned. AKA, write your material on a subpage of your user space, and move into the article space all at once. — Huntster (t • @ • c) 16:20, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I've already done some research, see "Sources" below, which is not an exhaustive list. I agree that at present The Culture "has a very high degree of "fancruft" and in-universe material", but I already have enough sources to remedy that. While researching I concluded that there was enough to support both an improved version of The Culture as background to the series and a more "lit crit" artcile on the series, and that a combined article would be too long. I decided to tackle the "lit crit" article The "Culture" stories of Ian M. Banks first because it can link to The Culture for details and any "in-universe" info I think would be excessive in The "Culture" stories of Ian M. Banks can be added to The Culture or one of the related articles, with refs of course. --Philcha (talk) 18:38, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Separate article on [[The "Culture" stories of Ian M. Banks]]

message: Hopefully useful: --Philcha (talk) 15:52, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Sources & notes

message: The article IS full of material of doubtable notability - I love it, and have in fact created much of it, but I am worried about someone coming along and reducing it to (in effect) the lede, a three para summary and the "real world" section. What can we do to improve notability of the material? Any scholarly work about The Culture out there?
I made a stab at cutting the cruft down, then reverted myself, because I got unsure. In any case,  even my significant deletions would have only halved the cruft, rather than removing it. Ingolfson (talk) 08:28, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cruft, and avoiding tags and content removals 

message: -S- or –Z- words.  Words such as “civilisation / civilization” the Oxford English Dictionary favours the -z- form, but sometimes tolerates the –s- version. The British English leans towards the -s- forms, American English to -z- forms.
can we please have one but not both thru out this article? I have yet to read the books was looking over this site and found this page so what ever version the author uses i would think would be the best but can we at least use one but not both...  Avarince (talk) 09:26, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Given that the author was from UK (well, Scotland), I think I would have gone with the -s- form. But you know what? So long as they are all uniform is style, it doesn't really matter. Good edit. — Huntster (t @ c) 09:35, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd've gone with the S, but what does Ian use in the books? We should give him the last word. 188.28.201.82 (talk) 07:09, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  IMB goes with "s" and "iour" as would most British authors... the OED is (by British standards) starting to sound rather more American these days and the Cambridge, (Readers Digest) Universal or Roggets (sp?) are preferred. 2019/11/05 14:57 (JST) *<:@)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 42.125.41.18 (talk) 05:57, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  civilization or civilisation 

message: I'm requesting a partial protect of the page due to the endemic "within tubes" sophomoric humor discussing the nestworld.  Although the vandalism is identical - appending "within tubes" redundantly - the socks rotate so it could be more than one person.  Timmccloud (talk) 00:42, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  "within tubes" 

message: The Culture (a wiki page based on Ian M. banks novels) lists all the books related to the series. It omits a book called "Against a Dark Background" published in 1993. Please add a ref to this book. Thanks
97.121.95.151 (talk) 03:37, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edit request from 97.121.95.151, 25 January 2011 

message: 
In the section: Banks on the Culture.
Paragraph currently reads:
Banks informed listeners on BBC Radio 4 programme "Open Book" on 27 August 2009 that he would start writing a new Culture novel, Surface Detail, in January 2010, and announced he had finished it just before Easter 2010.http://io9.com/5510972/iain-m-banks-has-finished-his-new-culture-novel-surface-detail
Suggested Update:
Banks informed listeners on BBC Radio 4 programme "Open Book" on 27 August 2009 that he would start writing a new Culture novel, Surface Detail, in January 2010, and announced he had finished it just before Easter 2010.http://io9.com/5510972/iain-m-banks-has-finished-his-new-culture-novel-surface-detail. The novel was released on the 7th October 2010.
Reason for update:
Paragraph talks about a future event which has now taken place. The event (the publication of the novel "Surface Detail") has now happened, and a wikipedia page about it now exists. The paragraph should, therefore, conclude with a note that the novel announced has been published. The publication date is the earliest date from the Wikipedia page on the novel (which happens to be the UK publication) - the novel page lists publication dates in multiple jurisdictions.
MarkHarrisonUK (talk) 20:28, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edit request from MarkHarrisonUK, 23 February 2011 

message: From article - "make backup copies of their personalities, allowing them to be resurrected in case of death, although as these are merely copies, consciousness is not continued, and the original individual is not truly reborn, just replaced"
I don't think that's true. Surely when you're replaced from a backup, your consciousness continues from just before the backup was taken. You're genuinely reborn, and if the backup's recent enough (like they try when things look a bit bad in Excession), you're going to come back from just a few seconds before you died. While there's philosophical questions of provenance, and if a perfect copy is the same as the original, from the view of the books, a restored backed-up person is completely their old self. Does the above need removing? 188.28.201.82 (talk) 07:04, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Backed-up dead people 

message: Is it correct that the novels "Feersum Endjinn" and "Against a dark Background" appear in the Novels section of the The Culture page? My understanding was that neither of these novels occur in the culture "universe". This is explicitly mentioned in the introduction on the Feersum Endjinn page. Mike talk 22:46, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inclusion of "[[Feersum Endjinn]]" and "Against a dark Background" in the [[The Culture#Novels|Novels]] section. 

message: It seems to me that the Overview section of this article is (a) inadequate as a summary of the topic and, (b) inappropriately argumentative as an introduction to the subject.  I think the article would be improved by adding more summary material to the section and moving the quote to another place in the article.174.91.141.19 (talk) 14:26, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Overview Section 

message: I have updated some of the references and corrected a couple of problems as a result. Just to explain some of the changes in more detail:
* presentation was inconsistent in various ways: making the refs more consistent, including author first, using Citation Style 1 templates for updates, they were already used a bit and generate the presentation already used in many of the references
* generally, web reference titles are enclosed in double quotes, printed reference titles and containing works are in italics
* I used  for a journal article with doi number: the PDF is behind a paywall and that template provides a nice standardised citation matching the others
Comments welcome. --Mirokado (talk) 16:57, 19 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  References etc 

message: A link to "The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks", an article by Alan Jacobs, was added as an external ref, later deleted. I put it here as a possible source. Barsoomian (talk) 18:39, 30 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks 

message: I does not seem to be anarchist since the Minds are de facto rulers. I'd opt for communist instead. What is the difference between a Mind planning everything and Stalin doing the same? Stilgar27 (talk) 15:04, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Anarchist?

message: I propose the Culture series be merged into The Culture. The rationale is a strong overlap: any content from Culture series whether is a copy of The Culture content (including the section Novels), whether is a literary analysis of the cycle, which would be appropriated to have in The Culture. As Wikipedia isn't a dictionary, we don't need to get a copy of the information in both pages. The content of the Culture series to move in The Culture would so be both the sections Literary techniques, Genesis of the series. Dereckson (talk) 13:35, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger proposal 

message: Does the series explain anywhere how (or if) the population control is achieved? If all members are basically immortals and each decides to reproduce once per century this already leads to exponential population growth. It can't be explained by simple social responsibility, not to mention people actually do seem to still be born regularly. Errarel (talk) 15:18, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a line in the player of games about how it's considered poor taste to have more than 2 offspring; furthermore, given that The Culture has over 30 trillion individuals, I don't think there is any evidence that there isn't explosive population growth.  Orbitals and new ships are constantly under construction. ACB Smith (talk) 15:23, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

text: It is also mentioned a number of times that the amount of space for people ia really not a problem given how much matter there is to create living space; also of note is that the Culture moved _billions_ of citizens and other non-Culture civilians out of the way of the Idirans running into the start of their war... clearly the Culture has a lot of space it isn't using already, especially since after that war a good number of the living spaces those moved bliions lived in/on had been destroyed - orbitals, spheres, worlds etc. - it is also worth noting that E=mc2 and so mass is creatable from the energy grid both "above" and "below" the Culture's universe. On top of this the assumption that immortality causes exponential growth is heavily countered by the leading life expectancy nations (excluding oddball micronations and other oddities like the Vatican city) which all have seriously dropping birth rates, so much so that those nations are mostly experiencing population decline(!) and the others of whom are only maintaining their population through immigration. 2019/11/05 14:20 *<:@)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 42.125.41.18 (talk) 05:20, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reproduction of immortals means population explosion 

message: There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:The Culture (series) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you.  —RMCD bot 11:16, 2 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move discussion in progress 

message: The orbital description makes sense except for one aspect:
Like a ringworld, the orbital rotates to provide an analog of gravity on the inner surface. A Culture orbital rotates about once every 24 hours and has gravity-like effect about the same as the gravity of Earth, making the diameter of the ring about 3,000,000 kilometres (1,900,000 mi), and ensuring that the inhabitants experience night and day.
Ok, so it is a ring surrounding a star which rotates to generate pseudo-gravity, so the inhabitants live on the inner surface. So far so good. (We will assume technology exists to prevent atmosphere flowing off the outer edges and so on.) But how does that give night and day? The inner surface is always facing the star so wouldn't it always be day? Or is the description unclear or omitting something? 2601:140:C000:2700:DCA9:C57A:1AED:4946 (talk) 06:04, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: The point is that the sun is not a the center - the center is empty (or rather occupied by the Hub, where the orbital's Mind is located) and the whole orbital is set to the side and at an angle to the sun. Does that clarify the picture? (Also check the diameter - a paltry 3 Mkm, whereas the diameter of the orbit of Earth, and thus the approx. diameter of a true ringworld, is about 300 Mkm). --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 14:24, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Orbital Description 

message: "The Sublime" or "Sublimation" is used multiple times in the article without defining it anywhere. It is a relatively well known — if not well defined — concept by culture fans, but external readers might find this quite confusing... For what it's worth, Sublimation is actually a disambiguation page and doesn't refer to anything regarding the culture phenomemon, from what i understand. TheAnarcat (talk) 14:47, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  define sublimation? 

message: This whole article is WAY too detailed and looks straight out of a fan wiki. I don't have time right now to go through it all, but if someone else could, it would be greatly appreciated. Veilure (talk) 05:47, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article Issues 

message: I can't even read this. It's a lost cause. get rid of it.
Finnboi6 (talk) 01:44, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  How do I nominate an article for deletion?