By the time the next novel in the series—Excession—appeared in 1996, six years had elapsed. It was a considerable amount of time, especially for a writer as prolific as Banks.
He hadn’t exactly been slacking off, though. Between Use of Weapons and Excession, a total of five novels saw print: three no-M novels—The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993), and Whit (1995)—and two non–Culture space operas: Against a Dark Background (1993) and Feersum Endjinn (1994). So it wasn’t writer’s block, ennui, or burnout that put the Culture series on hiatus, but rather, conceivably, a sense Banks felt that it was time to sum up the work he’d done thus far. To this writer’s knowledge, Banks never openly indicated a conscious decision on his part to put the Culture in the back burner while he figured out the next step, but there is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that, consciously or otherwise, he may in fact have done so.
By 1990, Banks had completed the first great step in his development of the Culture universe: he’d rewritten and published all the previously rejected stories he’d composed between 1974 and 1982. In 1991, the short-story collection The State of the Art appeared, containing the only two Culture short stories Banks had written along with the eponymous novella,1 and in 1993 the one previously rejected non–Culture space opera, Against a Dark Background, saw print. Having closed the chapter on the early stages of his career, Banks now found himself looking, for the first time in twenty years, at the composition of a wholly original Culture story. That may have given him pause, and it may also have provided him with the impulse to sum up the history of the Culture until that point—a way of taking stock, of looking at his brainchild as a determinedly shaped, growing argument. The result was an essay entitled “A Few Notes on the Culture,” which Banks asked Ken MacLeod to post to the online newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written (Butler 2003, vii). The essay, which appeared on August 10, 1994, is best described as Banks’ manifesto for the writing of space opera, although Banks himself would have rejected the gravitas of such a description. Witness for instance the unassuming title and the beginning, which reads:
FIRSTLY, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: THE CULTURE DOESN’T REALLY EXIST. IT ONLY EXISTS IN MY MIND AND THE MINDS OF THE PEOPLE WHO’VE READ ABOUT IT. That having been made clear: The Culture is a group-civilisation formed from seven or eight humanoid species, space-living elements of which established a loose federation approximately nine thousand years ago. The ships and habitats which formed the original alliance required each others’ support to pursue and maintain their independence from the political power structures … they had evolved from [167].2
Together with a relatively precise time of origin and the mention that the Culture is a mostly humanoid civilization, we also have the indication that its birth was indeed the result of a conflicted breakaway stance. The Culture was born as a movement toward and an argument for freedom from all forms of bondage, a freedom that the technological and scientific reality of life in space guaranteed well beyond the successful resolution of the breakaway moment. Banks’ argument is structured around a series of contentions that he openly flags at the appropriate points in the text, so that the essay ends up being more than a simple rundown of the shape and behavior of the Culture’s core society—rather, it becomes a reflection on utopia and on the viewpoint of those who argue for it.
The first contention has direct bearing on the origin of the culture as described in the quote above. Basically, Banks argues, “our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.” This state of things would arise and remain because the nature of life in space, which requires of its inhabitants a substantial degree of technological development and a level of self-sufficiency hitherto considered unachievable, would make the ships and habitats nearly impossible to control on the part of any kind of static, planet-bound power system (168). Connected to this idea is the notion that the people onboard those spacefaring nation-states would be prompted by the constant awareness of their mutual interdependence to share goods, services, and resources to a point where their societies would become, by necessity, reliant on a cooperative form of economics rather than a competitive system in which the distribution of wealth is left to the vagaries of a non-sentient, internally self-devouring conglomerate of greed-based impulses:
Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without…. Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive—and more morally desirable—than one left to market forces. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is … intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings [169–170].
On the other hand, Banks writes, a planned economy “can set up long-term aims and work toward them … reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals” (170). The problem with this notion, as he well knew, is that the twentieth century was host to a number of long-term social experiments in this vein that failed comprehensively, with the concomitant suffering of plenty of conscious beings in the former Soviet Union, in China, or in Cambodia, to name a few. That’s why he also postulates two fundamental innovations for the Culture: first, a level of individual education, participation to public life, and involvement in the planning of economic goals without precedent in human history (170–171). Essentially, all flesh sentients in the Culture are comprehensively educated throughout their entire life and everyone shares a fundamental desire to contribute to the argument of utopia (172–173), because utopia is either self-sustaining through a dialectic process or it ceases to exist. “Philosophy matters here, and sound education,” Banks concludes (172).
The second innovation consists in the presence of benevolent posthuman AIs dedicated to cooperating with humans to make utopia work. This is one of Banks’ key contentions—that the birth of AI and the subsequent onset of a benign version of the Vingean Singularity are not just possible, but actually probable. The advent of such life-forms would immediately turn humanity into a twin-species race, a collective made up of flesh sentients and artificial intelligences all working in concert to fulfill the dream of building a better society for everyone concerned. The result in the Culture novels is a world in which nobody is exploited; in essence, the Culture is a fully automated society, its day-to-day requirements in terms of logistics, production, and large-system management administered by the Minds that have arisen out of the early years of the singularity, when humans created the first AIs and the AIs in turn created their own offspring (172). Machines perform the tasks that here on Earth we would call work, while human labor is “restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby”—hence the examples of those people in Use of Weapons who, without pressure or coercion, clean tables and build ships because it gives them pleasure.
But if we flesh sentients enjoy our leisure, don’t we do so at the expense of machines? Have we simply outsourced exploitation to another life form?
No machine is exploited, either; the idea here being that any job can be automated in such a way as to ensure that it can be done by a machine well below the level of potential consciousness … no more exploited than an insect is exploited when it pollinates a fruit tree a human later eats a fruit from…. People—and, I’d argue, the sort of conscious machines which would happily cooperate with them—hate to feel exploited, but they also hate to feel useless. One of the most important tasks in setting up and running a stable and internally content civilisation is finding an acceptable balance between the desire for freedom of choice in one’s actions … and the need to feel that even in a society so self-correctingly Utopian one is still contributing something [172].
This is the crux of Banks’ argument, and the dramatic engine that propels every Culture novel: in Consider Phlebas, the Short History of the Idiran War appendix had indicated this desire to be useful as the overarching impulse that had pushed the culture to enter and win a titanic conflict despite being, like Gurgeh’s model of his society in the Azad games, “quite profoundly peaceful.” To Banks, this relationship between hating to feel exploited and hating to be useless represents the twin-faced force that shaped the Culture’s utopia into what it is—a place where things happen and services are provided because everyone living there chooses to make things happen and provide services when and where they want to, without coercion or threat. Only the promptings of one’s conscience are required, and because conscience in the culture is nurtured, educated, and trained to the highest degree, it constitutes a powerful engine for carefully considered and comprehensively modeled action.
As the quote in the introduction to this book anticipated, to be alive in the Culture is to experience a system of ethics for which everything has only circumstantial, temporary value: everything matters and nothing does because things and people in the universe are here when we are rather than because we are. Meaning is constructed within a dialectic relationship into which all parties concerned enter willingly and without expectation of owing or being owed anything for their being there in the first place. In a universe without gods, devoid of divinely inspired mission statements, the people of the Culture have not just accepted, but also come to value the reality that “we make our own meanings, whether we like it or not” (173), and the meaning of the Culture, which has been embraced at every level in the society, is to help, to reduce or eliminate suffering, to devote its functionally infinite resources and near-godlike technological and productive capabilities to assisting less fortunate civilizations. The Culture makes sure no technologically advanced predator society happens upon them, no self-destructive impulse triggers genocidal wars, ecological holocausts, or any other extinction-level event, and it contacts them when the time is right for the people living there to accept the worldview-altering reality of a far bigger universe than they’d been used to until that moment.
Together with the fundamentals of the Culture’s ethos, “A Few Notes” presents us with an overview of the benefits accruing from living in it. For example, we find out about the enhanced genes of Culture citizens that allow them a pervasive level of control over their bodies’ functions—including voluntary sex change, which Banks considers paramount for the creation of a society without chauvinism. Essentially, the contention is that once the people living in a given society have been both sexes, they will quickly come to find out whether there is disparity between them and, if there is, proceed to fix that disparity (175–177). We also find out about the construction and functioning of Orbitals (179–182) and of General Systems Vehicles (178). We discover the “totally fake cosmology that underpins the shakily credible stardrives mentioned in the Culture stories” (186–188), a cosmology that, papier-mâché as it may be, makes the stories great fun and provides some sort of off-the-wall rationale for the existence of FTL propulsion systems, without which it would be impossible to retain a cohesive collective over the vast stretches of space-time involved in the narratives.
Other features of Culture life we discover: it doesn’t have laws, or at least not any legal framework that we would recognize as such. Post-scarcity levels of abundance and extremely advanced technology take care of most impulses that, within a scarcity-based economy, would lead to crimes against property, and pathologies of the mind are virtually unknown thanks first to Culture gene-fixing and second to Culture education and nurturing. The worst crime, murder, is also a unique event, but if it does happen it leads to the employment of a so-called slap-drone, a machine that accompanies the culprit around for the rest of their life to make sure they never again engage in any kind of sociopathic or psychopathic behavior (182–183).3 Also, the appointment of public posts is based on the simple criterion that the more power one craves, the less they should be allowed to wield (174). Family life in the Culture, on the other hand, is probably one of the clearest derivations from Banks’ personal life:
The most common life-style consists of groups of people of mixed generations linked by loose family ties living in a semi-communal dwelling or group of dwellings; to be a child in the Culture is to have a mother, perhaps a father, probably not a brother or sister, but large numbers of aunts and uncles, and various cousins [184].
There are plenty of echoes here of the great big noisy family Banks grew up in, and although he never specifically addresses this point, it’s fair to argue that the connection is relevant. And speaking of family, we also find out the reason for and meaning behind those infernally long names, which is that each culture name acts as moniker, indicator of provenance, and descriptor of familial ties for the individual to whom it is attached (186).4
Banks’ assessment of his utopia’s basic identity—i.e., the answer to the question “What is the Culture?”—is that it is difficult to identify with any degree of certainty because, by the very nature of its loosely arranged social structure and by virtue of the freedom of thought and action it grants its citizens, “the Culture fades out at the edges” (185). There are, for example, all the orbitals, ships, drones, and flesh sentients who, at the beginning of the Idiran war, split from the rest of the Culture because they rejected the use of force under any circumstances (Banks 2004b, 185; Banks 1991, 459); also, there are those few individuals who, like Linter in The State of the Art, have decided to live somewhere else for whatever reason.5 Thus, the Culture can be described as an attitude and a worldview before it is a society in the sense of the term we employ here on Earth; relatively stable from a technological and logistical perspective, it is constantly changing and reassessing itself in the light of the new. This characteristic, married to (1) the narrative strategies typical of Banks’ writing style and (2) the localized, personally dystopian lives within which many of the protagonists in the stories exist, makes the Culture a good example of what Tom Moylan calls a “critical utopia.”
The argument isn’t new. In a 1999 article written for Foundation, Simon Guerrier made the case for the Culture’s belonging to this category. Starting from Moylan’s identification of the shared characteristic of all critical utopias as “a rejection of hierarchy and domination and the celebration of emancipatory ways of being as well as the very possibility of utopian longing itself” (1986, 12), Guerrier discusses the various dynamics operating within the Culture that provide those shared qualities. The first is the rejection of hierarchy, which Guerrier sees most in evidence in The Player of Games: while the Empire of Azad is defined by its claim to discipline and respect of the chain of command in all aspects of life (that this claim is largely meaningless does not alter the point), the Culture finds as one of its own defining moments the absence of any such chain, with the concomitant loss of importance of maintaining discipline (1999, 28–29).
As for celebrating Moylan’s “emancipatory ways of being,” the Culture as described in the novels and in “A Few Notes” is indeed built around the idea that an individual’s freedom of expression is as sacred as it can get in a pointedly godless society, and that not only including, but especially embracing the wishes of those who end up finding themselves on the far end of the spectrum from whatever registers as the norm within the Culture. Thus, Gurgeh’s contrarian primitivism, Li’ndane’s earnest, willful playacting, Yalson’s decision to live outside the Culture even though her mother was a citizen, and even Linter’s desire to live on Earth are guaranteed, protected, and validated by the social interface that operates within the Culture’s collective life. The assessment of other Culture citizens living around these characters may be that they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing, but in no case is there any attempt at physically or psychologically restraining them from making the choices they have decided they want to make—“in a post-scarcity society such as this,” Guerrier writes, “it is always possible to accommodate choice” (30), even when the choice is to leave the Culture. Indeed, in Linter’s case Sma and the Arbitrary argue the wisdom of his actions with him, but in the face of his determination to do as he said he would, both withdraw and allow him his wish.
The last element in Moylan’s definition of a critical utopia is the moment of “utopian longing,” which Guerrier correctly sees as guaranteed by the Culture’s reliance on the Minds:
The Minds are what make the Culture work as a utopia. The Minds are the super-machines of the society, with incredible powers and abilities…. When dealing with such technology—as Moylan says—‘the choice comes down to the use of that new set of structures and mechanisms for human need and fulfillment or for the profit and power of a dominant elite.’ In what they apparently see as the rational use of their talents, the Minds have opted to benefit human need and fulfillment. What the minds essentially seem to operate is [sic] the bureaucratic systems of the Culture [31].
In this sense, Banks’ comment in “A Few Notes” that “where intelligent supervision of a manufacturing or maintenance operation is required, the intellectual challenge involved … would make such supervision rewarding and enjoyable” (172) indicates a fundamental element of play in the life of every sentient in the Culture. For a Mind, managing the bureaucratic and logistical challenges attending the administration of an orbital would be no more taxing or overwhelming than a game of, say, Civilization would be for a human. And there’s more: in a recent article, Ken MacLeod remembered a conversation he’d had with Banks about the origins of the Culture. Since neither Banks nor MacLeod believed in a utopia realized from above through the actions of benevolent rulers, and since in Banks’ telling the Culture didn’t come about through any form of revolution or class struggle, MacLeod was somewhat at a loss to foresee other dynamics that could ensure its advent:
By way of answer, Iain pointed to his pocket calculator. He said that on his last vacation job, on a construction site, one of the full-time workers had borrowed it and worked his way through a stack of wage slips, to discover that he and his mates weren’t getting all the pay they were due. The site workers had taken the result to the management, who duly if perhaps reluctantly shelled out the back pay that was owed. That, Iain said, was how he’d envisaged the Culture coming about … the sheer availability of information and computing power would arm the majority with facts and arguments that would enable them to prove, as well as enforce, their claims. The consequent advance in consciousness would allow the opportunities offered by automation and abundance to be grasped, first in imagination then in reality, and make opposition to their realisation irrational, futile, and weak [2013b, n.p.].
Banks’ position was something of an oddity in the post–New Wave years, mostly because the SF grand narrative of betterment through technology that had animated the age of First SF of the 1940s and ’50s had been roundly rejected by the writers of the following generation. But, as we have seen, he was not a technocratic simpleton; education, careful reflection, compassion, and a benevolent worldview were as crucial for his utopia’s success as that of advanced technology and inexhaustible resources.6 The pocket-calculator moment, however, does sum up Banks’ brand of SF thinking rather well: as a writer, he positioned himself midway between American SF, whose optimism for the future he loved but whose simplistic politics he disliked, and British SF, of which he enjoyed the seriousness of approach to the material but disliked the general pessimism. He loved technological artifacts, action scenes, and big events, but he also wanted them surrounded by a thick shell of ethical and moral thinking to, as it were, debrief the kinetics. That’s why any illustration of the anecdote above must be accompanied by those last four lines, the ones that clearly state the necessary corollary of an “advance in consciousness” attending the technological development, said advance becoming the spark of an imaginative revolution that projects the argument of utopia against the status quo of the world before that argument begins changing anything.
In 2009, ten years after Guerrier’s piece, Michael Kulbicki wrote another article arguing for the Culture’s belonging to the critical utopia category. Kulbicki, who conducted a reading of the Culture stories “using notions about utopian hope drawn from the work of the German philosopher, Ernst Bloch” (34), sees the presence of this utopian hope in the Culture’s interventionist stance, within which it functions as a focus “on the role of unpredictability and consequence, emphasising the degree to which the Culture’s interventions are driven by an optimistic desire that cannot be completely quantified, given the uncertain nature of each act … by definition not a program, but an openness to the as yet not manifested but desired possibilities inherent in the future, something Bloch refers to as the Not-Yet-Being” (38). The most interesting aspect of Kulbicki’s argument comes when he acknowledges the need to factor in an aspect of Bloch’s definition of utopia that seems to exclude the Culture from the category. In Bloch’s view, utopian hope implies the absence of utopia itself because “utopian plenitude … can be truly apprehended only in a fragmentary form” (qtd. in Kulbicki 2009, 38). In response to this definitional difficulty, Kulbicki argues that the impossibility of sharply defining the Culture as a political and historical body, as Banks also pointed out in “Notes,” is the element that virtually disappears it from our sight—that is, despite the pervasive presence of the effects the Culture has on other civilizations and on its own citizens, the society itself is “literally a utopia in the sense of ‘no place,’ a grouping of restless like–Minded cells, unfixed and in continuous, nomadic motion” (39). To further illustrate the fragmentary nature of the Culture, Kulbicki makes reference to the so-called Culture Ulterior (some of whose members play fundamental roles in Excession; see chapter 6), that fringe grouping of breakaway subsets of the Culture that, for one reason or another, have decided to detach themselves from the main sequence of Culture life (39).
There is a lot of merit to this argument. The Culture truly is nomadic in nature—its GSVs constantly travel throughout the galaxy, stopping at planets and Orbitals and space stations only for a while before resuming their peripatetic existence, and each GSV is home to thousands of smaller ships, including General Contact Units like the Arbitrary, which are themselves nomads. Orbitals, although static, can be quickly dismantled and relocated, evacuated, or destroyed (see for example Vavatch in Consider Phlebas), and the technologies of energy and matter collection available within the society make the creation of static constructs completely unnecessary—and in this respect, Banks designed the wacky physics of the Culture stories to help: the energy grid is everywhere besides/above/below normal space-time, which is itself riddled with planetoids, asteroids, cometary bodies, and stars from which it is possible to gather limitless amounts of resources. Therefore, to say that the Culture exists somewhere is incorrect; it exists everywhere and nowhere at once in the galaxy, always in transition from one location to another, so that the happy lives of its widespread citizenry and its politics of intervention automatically become the only fixed points of reference. This setup would have been impossible in mimetic fiction, where any such thing as a spacefaring utopia with FTL and close-to-omnipotent AIs can only exist as a metaphor, a wish, or a delusion of the mind. Within the non-mimetic register of space opera, however, it is possible to literalize the foundational play of words of More’s eu-topia by positing the existence of just such a collective.
Kulbicki also expresses a certain surprise that, despite its considerable public success both at home and abroad, leading figures in utopian studies—Tom Moylan in particular—have mostly ignored the Culture series: “Banks does not rate a mention in Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future or in Tom Moylan’s Scraps of the Untainted Sky. This seems particularly odd, given Banks’s focus on utopia and Jameson’s and Moylan’s own sustained engagement with it” (34).7
Thereby hangs a tale. Demand the Impossible, the original text in which Moylan defined, described, and provided examples of the critical utopia, was published in 1986, one year before Consider Phlebas saw print. The book was an elaboration of Moylan’s 1981 dissertation, “Figures of Hope: The Critical Utopia of the 1970s. The Revival, Destruction, and Transformation of Utopian Writing in the United States: A Study of the Ideology, Structure, and Historical Context of Representative Texts” (Sargent 2014, 242). In this long title are embedded the guiding principles that informed not just the dissertation, but the later book as well. Moylan, who had been an active participant in the oppositional cultural and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s,8 had worked on his dissertation first and his book later from within a deep personal connection to the intense struggles of those times, when it must have seemed possible—indeed, probable—that old power systems and patriarchies might give way to new, better social arrangements, inclusive of greater racial, sexual, and gender diversity. “I was writing out of my own personal and intellectual engagement,” Moylan remembers. “I began the entire project as a fan and an active citizen, continued it as a teacher, and only later brought in the methods and skills of a scholar” (2014b, xx). Out of this intense dialogue with the forms of utopian thinking that he saw shaping the consciousness of left-wing political projects of the time, Moylan condensed his argument—as the title of his dissertation indicates—by circumscribing it to the United States and choosing four specific works by four specific writers: Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1968), Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Samuel Delany’s Triton, and Marge Piercy’s Woman at the Edge of Time (both 1976). As the dates of publication indicate, those were works Moylan saw published during those flashpoint years, coming hot into an already fraught debate whose dynamics had previously influenced their writing to begin with. Thus, as Moylan himself pointed out, his choice of argument, texts, and methodology partook of a set of motivations that existed beside and beyond the purely academic:
I did not set out to canonize or valorize this set of texts from a position of high academic culture (or indeed the market)…. Rather, I was reading these books as they were being published, and I wanted to make sense of what they meant to me and to share that with others so that they would go on to read them…. Naïvely unaware of the cultural power of academia, I simply, and unabashedly politically, wanted to tell others (as a reader and as a teacher) about these works, which I came to see as part of one tendency among so many others [2014b, xx–xxi].
The cultural power of academia was the driving force behind what a number of critics indeed saw as the canonization of a cross-cultural pattern of utopian fiction when Demand the Impossible saw print. The book’s lack of specificity in terms of the physical location of the study (see Moylan 2014, xx) gave the impression that the four American novels he discussed in depth in Demand were expected to function as shorthand for the utopian venture in other countries as well, especially in Great Britain, and a debate on this score rose as the book became increasingly more influential with the passing of the years.9 Moylan crucially contributed to this debate with Scraps of the Untainted Sky (2000), a study of dystopia in which he takes stock of the reality of post–1970s capitalism and of the progressive diminishing of utopian hope in the 1980s and 1990s. Moylan argues in Scraps that the post–Vietnam War reconfiguration of capitalism into a pervasively commodity-based system, further assisted by the gradual growth of multi-national corporate behemoths and by the encroachment of neoconservative governments in the U.S., Great Britain, and Germany, “sought to revive its generation of surplus by reducing costs and expanding operations through a series of moves that included … eliminating social costs by refusing obligations to social entitlements, labor contracts, and ecological health; and moving into all corners of the globe and all aspects of everyday life to produce commodities and markets that could bring renewed financial gains (gains that would no longer be subject to even token redistribution to the very people who produced them)” (2000, xiv). Within this new system of reconfigured capitalism, the utopian impulse in SF began to die out—with the notable exception of some of Kim Stanley Robinson’s works (see Moylan 2000, 103–105)10 –replaced by dystopian visions through whose lens politically inclined writers of SF could retain the impulse toward constructive social critique typical of the critical utopia by applying it to reconfigurations of a world gone out of control:
Again, the analytic strategy of totality enables a critique that recognizes capitalism’s reproduction of a “utopia” in which the authentically radical call of Utopia is both co-opted and silenced, leaving in its place tropes of dystopia to represent and inform what critique and opposition remain…. The contemporary moment, therefore, is one in which a critical position is necessarily dystopian [Moylan 2000, 187].
Thus Moylan reprised Lyman Tower Sargent’s definition of a critical dystopia11 to indicate a restructuring of dystopian fiction designed to “manage the tension between utopia and anti-utopia, by creating a ‘space’ of utopian hope precisely by first positing a dystopia, and then offering a depiction of resistance to it from within” (Kulbicki 2009, 37). Thus the critical utopias of the 1960s and 1970s bequeathed their narrative strategies and political positions to a body of work produced under the aegis of their dark twin, and by doing so ensured the continuation of the utopian impulse in the midst of a dystopian turn in public life as well as in literature.
But if Moylan was able to acknowledge Kim Stanley Robinson’s work during the 1990s as the one major holdout of relatively unreconstructed critical utopia, why didn’t he see Banks as well? “Banks is a problem for this [Moylan’s] chronology,” Michael Kulbicki writes, “since he writes critically utopian texts from the mid–80s, the time when the ‘neo-conservative restoration’ took hold, through to the present day. For Moylan, however, there was a proviso to this enclosure, in the form of Kim Stanley Robinson, another ‘lucid variant’ at the margin. While Robinson has received a great deal of scholarly attention, Banks has not” (2009, 37). If we look at the key characteristics of the critical utopia as originally set down in Demand the Impossible, we will see that the Culture series fits the definition of this category very well12:
Aware of the historical tendency of the utopian genre to limit the imagination to one particular ideal and also aware of the restriction of the utopian impulse to marketing mechanisms, the authors of the critical utopia assumed the risky task of reviving the emancipatory utopian imagination while simultaneously destroying the traditional utopia and yet preserving it in a transformed and liberated form that was critical both of utopian writing itself and of the prevailing social formation [Moylan 1986, 42].
Here, Moylan more precisely re-states the argument made in chapter 3 concerning the agent(s) of the utopian imagination. By countering the fixed socio-economic status quo of the world as it was with the fixed socio-economic status quo of the world as they thought it should be, the writers of historical utopias ended up with yet more monolithic societies, brittle and static where they should have been flexible and open, a series of loci within whose laws their authors’ dreams of a better world died the moment they turned into actuality. The contention that utopia is a discourse first and foremost has appeared a number of times in this work already; now we can carry the argument further and say that, for Iain M. Banks as well as for Delany, Piercy, Le Guin, and Russ, utopia remains a discourse first and foremost, even after the novels are done building their respective societies in the reader’s mind. One person’s dream can easily become most other people’s nightmare, and the critical utopia is structured around this awareness. As Moylan argues, there are “two major changes that occur in the critical utopia that mark a break with the general pattern of the traditional utopia”: the first is an external deviation, i.e., the presentation of the two societies under scrutiny—the utopia and the original society against which the utopia is meant to react—in equal levels of detail and objectivity. The second is an internal deviation in the form of a critical attitude toward the utopian society itself: “in each of the new utopias the society is shown with its faults, inconsistencies, problems, and even denials of the utopian impulse in the form of persistence of exploitation and domination in the better place. Here, of course is echoed the historic failure to achieve perfection, a false goal in the first place” (44). This critical attitude generates within the work of fiction foregrounding the critical utopia a constantly self-assessing, self-regenerating discourse concerning the nature and behavior of a utopian society, and it is this constant argument that prevents the society thus designed from developing the same sclerosis as those in previous literary works.
There is little need to return to the many instances in the four stories analyzed thus far when the Culture subjected itself to scrutiny through one or more of its citizens (Balveda, Fal, Gurgeh, Sma, the Arbitrary, Li’ndane, Linter) as well as through the non–Culture people that interacted with it (Zakalwe, Chori, Horza, Nicosar). That aspect of the Culture as a critical utopia is a known quantity, and it will remain so throughout its entire published history. It’s Banks himself that represents the other crucial constituent: time and again in “A Few Notes on the Culture,” Banks flags the underpinnings of his argument—that is, his utopia—so that we can become aware of their existence and potential flaws, and more to the point, he regularly halts the flow of his narration with an open indicator that what he is saying is, once again, nothing more nor less than an argument. At the very beginning of the essay, for example, he reminds us that all this is “just” a set of stories, and a few pages further in, after discussing the Culture’s socio-economic setup, he declares: “Whatever; in the end, practice (as ever) will outshine theory” (171). He also takes pains to tell us that, since he set up the universe of the Culture as a god-less place he doesn’t believe in the existence of souls—“although,” he then qualifies, “I do write as an atheist” (171). And on he goes, always making sure his intellectual position exists clearly and transparently within a community of discourse he himself built when he created the argument—because every Culture story is an invitation to a debate, the highlighting of a dilemma for further discussion, and the presentation of a status quo that exists problematically with itself so as to make sure that, despite the reality that perfection will always remain unattainable, the striving for it will yield its own results. In the practice of his intellectual ecumenism, Banks is also well served by his characteristic writing style. Moylan again:
The apparently unified, illusionary, and representational text of the more traditional utopia is broken open and presented in a manner which is, first of all, much more fragmented—narratives intertwining present and future or past and present, single protagonists being divided into multiples, or into male and female versions of the same character. Secondly, the critical utopian text includes much more commentary on the operations of the text itself [46].
We have seen how Banks imported into his space opera all the narrative tricks that had made his non-genre work what it was: the doppelganger hauntings of Horza in Consider Phlebas and Zakalwe/Elethiomel in Use of Weapons; the playful untrustworthiness of the narrator drone(s) in The Player of Games; the opposing timelines of Weapons; the metafictional resonances of Phlebas and the borrowings from famous works in State. In Banks’ non-genre stories, all those characteristics were there to estrange the mundane and cast doubt on the solidity of the given, to propel the narrative into a fringe territory of negotiation between mimesis and its Dionysian twin. In the space operas, on the other hand, those same features function as a dialectic, as a resonance chamber for a discourse on the things that matter to Banks—how to create a meaningfully functioning better world, how to make it survive, how to make it interact with other civilizations without having it turn dystopian, and how to engage us readers in the debate honestly. If utopia is an argument before and beyond being anything else, then there is such a thing as a utopian textual experience—some books that are meant to make us dream fail because of the assumption buried deep in the fabric of the narrative that, once its underpinnings are explained, the author’s utopia will be everyone else’s as well. On the other hand, and in the vein of the critical utopias described in Moylan’s book, the Culture presents a constantly self-assessing society through the agency of a constantly self-assessing text, a heteroglossia of voices whose endlessly refracting viewpoints enables the reader to see the debate as it progresses through words and deeds.13 The ultimate goal, within and without the story, is to make the core argument of utopia survive unscathed through all the pressures and critiques, its integrity validated by the society’s very willingness to reassess and reevaluate itself without ever stopping. And this is the fundamental achievement of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series: the fact that the society he designed does remain utopian through all the difficult negotiations in which it has to engage “in its struggle to do good.” The Good Place remains intact and whole, even through the haze of blood through which the characters in the Culture stories, who are not people of the center but people of the fringe, look back at their often distant home.
In the event, Moylan did address Banks’ work. Five years after Kulbicki had made his argument, in the 2014 introduction to the new Ralahine Classics edition of Demand the Impossible, Moylan writes:
Both Simon Guerrier and Michael Kulbicki effectively argue that Iain M. Banks’s series of ‘Culture’ novels can be read as critical utopias—adding to my own conclusion that the work of Kim Stanley Robinson has continued in a critical utopian vein. Such extension or stretching of the periodizing range of the critical utopia have therefore methodologically helped to expand the category of the critical utopia into that of an interpretive, rather than a periodizing, protocol [2014b, xxiii].14
In other words, the reality of the publication of critical utopian works during the years of the neo-conservative ascendancy helps unmoor the critical utopia from its focus on 1960s and ’70s North America, so that now it can be used as a more generalized praxis for examining utopian yearnings across greater expanses of territory and longer spans of time.15 In this sense, Banks becomes an important figure in the history of critical utopianism, and even more so for his personal embracement of its real-life connections: activism and political commitment.
In the introduction, Moylan laments an oversight that he believes distorts the original formulation of the critical utopia. While many scholars have, over the years, effectively focused on the critical utopia’s built-in capacity for formal analysis and self-assessment, “I have often found myself wishing that more would have gone on to tease out the way in which that process figured a new level of engaged activism in the service of a totalizing socio-political transformation (i.e., revolution)” (2014b, xv). For Moylan, as we have seen, the critical utopia was never simply a literary phenomenon, and neither should it have been. Delany, Russ, Piercy, and Le Guin were working under the pressures of the times to create texts whose utopian projects reached beyond the page and into the same society from which they had drawn their subject matter. In those years, Moylan and his contemporaries existed in a context where to read one such book was to understand it both aesthetically and programmatically—that is, both as a story in and of itself and as a primer for utopian action in the present. These days, when it may feel that utopia has moved forever beyond our grasp (but see Ken MacLeod’s work, and again Kim Stanley Robinson’s), we have a tougher time understanding this reality—hence the tendency to overlook that dimension of Moylan’s discourse, arguably.
But Banks, as the introduction to this book makes clear, reacted to the stresses of those times in much the same way Moylan did. In 1974, two years before the publication of Triton and Woman on the Edge of Time, Banks was already a student at the university of Stirling, and he was already working on the political and ideological underpinnings of the Culture in the form of Use of Weapons’ first draft. Between 1973 and 1981, while Moylan was working on his dissertation, first creating and then refining the definitional foundations of the critical utopia, Banks was writing his early batch of stories, thinking about the shape of his own utopia and arguing with Ken MacLeod over—as he put it to David Garnett—“saving the universe.” He was also going to London with MacLeod to demonstrate against—and physically fight—the National Front, reading Chomsky, and worrying about the encroachment of conservatism in England. Banks was, in short, as engaged with left-wing activities as Moylan had hoped readers of his work would become once Demand was published, and throughout his life he remained engaged—again, witness his reaction to Blair’s assent to the invasion of Iraq or to Israel’s Gaza flotilla raid. For Banks and Moylan both, the same connection obtains between literary production and life outside the page, with the difference that Moylan channels his intellectual energies into literary criticism while Banks channeled his into writing fiction.
The Culture is a critical utopia.16 In hindsight, it’s difficult to imagine how, given what Banks needed it to say, it could have been anything else. Banks created the Culture as a salve for the many wrongnesses he saw in the world that surrounded him, and made it critical utopian because he knew that to build a utopia is to argue it into existence and maintain it through constant self-assessment—hence the series’ pervasive presence on the fringe of Culture life, where the boundary between utopia and dystopia, subjected to the greatest pressures, frays and unravels. That the model held through twenty-five years and ten books despite the critiques, both from within and from without the texts, is perhaps the best indicator of the pliant sturdiness of its build.
The one thing Banks doesn’t discuss in “A Few Notes on the Culture” is the function of Special Circumstances. SC only gets a quick, largely context-free mention in the essay (183), and even Contact receives comparatively short shrift, the reason being that “its rationale and activities are covered elsewhere, in the stories” (178). The essay is thus devoted mainly to explicating the origins, nature, and reason for being of the mainstream of the Culture, while the novels busy themselves with the dangerous and morally suspect side of things, the often trouble-fraught interfaces with other civilizations that Contact and SC have claimed as their territory—hence Banks’ description of Contact (and, by implication, SC) as “the most coherent and consistent part of the Culture—certainly when considered on a galactic scale—yet … only a very small part of it … almost a civilisation within a civilisation, and no more typify[ying] its host than an armed service does a peaceful state” (186). As Banks himself acknowledged, there were sound dramatic reasons for this choice: “The external threats were his answer to the problem that no matter how exciting a utopia might be to live in, it would be very dull to write about (unless you basically wrote a novel about people’s normal relationships within it, about love and heartbreak or whatever, in which case as Iain often pointed out, why not just write a mainstream novel?)” (Winter 2014, n.p.). This doesn’t mean, however, that Contact and SC do not participate in the processes of reassessment and critique that are the fundamental indicator of their parent civilization’s belonging to the category of critical utopias. In fact, as we have seen, the majority of the questioning comes from them precisely because they are the organizations they are and because they do what they do, which is why the two most pointed questions encountered thus far—“how do we know we are doing the right thing?” and “who elected us God?”—come respectively from the Arbitrary and from Sma, each the representative of one of the two life-forms that comprise the vast majority of the Culture’s population, and each a Contact operative.
By the end of 1994, Banks was done with taking stock. He had delved into a part of the Culture’s history that the novels had only hinted at, and answered to his satisfaction a number of questions that he himself, not to mention the many fans who approached him at SF conventions, had been harboring. Soon, he would return to writing Culture stories at a steady clip of one every two years—a slowing down since the times when “all” he’d had to do had been revising an already composed text, but the added wait would be more than worth it, as had been the six-year hiatus. When Banks returned to the Culture, he did so in grand style and with the intention of re-doing Consider Phlebas.