All of the stories feature the tension between the Culture's  anarcho-communist ideals and its need to intervene in the affairs of less enlightened and often less advanced civilisations. The first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, 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. The Idiran War serves as a recurring reference point in most of the subsequent novels, influencing the Culture's development for centuries and dividing its residents—both humanoids and AI Minds—along the pacifist and interventionist ideals. When the first Culture stories appeared, science fiction was dominated by cyberpunk, a pessimistic subgenre that worried about, but offered no solutions for, the offshoring of jobs to countries with lower costs or less strict regulations, the increasing power of corporations and the threats to privacy posed by computer networks. The Culture stories are space opera, with certain elements that are free from scientific realism, and Banks uses this freedom extravagantly in order to focus on the human and political aspects of his universe; he rejects what he perceives the dystopian direction of present-day capitalism, which both cyberpunk and earlier space operas assume, in creating a post-scarcity society as the primary civilization of focus. Space opera had peaked in the 1930s, but started to decline as magazine editors such as John W. Campbell demanded more realistic approaches. By the 1960s many space operas were satires on earlier styles, such as Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and Bill, the Galactic Hero stories, while televised and film space operas such as Star Trek and Star Wars were thought to have dumbed down the URL The Culture stories did much to revive space opera.
All of the stories feature the tension between the Culture's humane, anarcho-communist ideals and its need to intervene in the affairs of less enlightened and often less advanced civilisations. The first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, 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. The Idiran War serves as a recurring reference point in most of the subsequent novels, influencing the Culture's development for centuries and dividing its residents—both humanoids and AI Minds—along the pacifist and interventionist ideals. When the first Culture stories appeared, science fiction was dominated by cyberpunk, a pessimistic subgenre that worried about, but offered no solutions for, the offshoring of jobs to countries with lower costs or less strict regulations, the increasing power of corporations and the threats to privacy posed by computer networks. The Culture stories are space opera, with certain elements that are free from scientific realism, and Banks uses this freedom extravagantly in order to focus on the human and political aspects of his universe; he rejects the dystopian direction of present-day capitalism, which both cyberpunk and earlier space operas assume, in creating a post-scarcity society as the primary civilization of focus. Space opera had peaked in the 1930s, but started to decline as magazine editors such as John W. Campbell demanded more realistic approaches. By the 1960s many space operas were satires on earlier styles, such as Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and Bill, the Galactic Hero stories, while televised and film space operas such as Star Trek and Star Wars were thought to have dumbed down the URL The Culture stories did much to revive space opera.
A
humane,
D
what he perceives