Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

by Iain M. Banks

He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometers away. That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off… and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.

The Culture was every single individual human and machine in it, not one thing. Just as it could not imprison itself with laws, impoverish itself with money or misguide itself with leaders, so it would not misrepresent itself with signs.

Horza recalled that the Culture’s attitude to somebody who believed in an omnipotent God was to pity them, and to take no more notice of the substance of their faith than one would take of the ramblings of somebody claiming to be Emperor of the Universe. The nature of the belief wasn’t totally irrelevant—along with the person’s background and upbringing, it might tell you something about what had gone wrong with them—but you didn’t take their views seriously.

The Aoish were a banker species, and the credits were their greatest invention. They were just about the only universally acceptable medium of exchange in existence, and each one entitled the holder to convert a coin into either a given weight of any stable element, an area on a free Orbital, or a computer of a given speed and capacity. The Aoish guaranteed the conversion and never defaulted, and although the rate of exchange could sometimes vary to a greater extent than was officially allowed for—as it had during the Idiran-Culture war—on the whole the real and theoretical value of the currency remained predictable enough for it to be a safe, secure hedge against uncertain times, rather than a speculator’s dream. Rumor—as ever, contrary enough to be suspiciously believable—had it that the group in the galaxy which possessed the greatest hoard of the coins was the Culture; the most militantly unmoneyed society on the civilized scene. Horza didn’t really believe that rumor either, though; in fact he thought that it was just the sort of rumor the Culture would spread about itself.

And if we tamper with our inheritance, so what? What is more ours to tamper with? What makes nature more right than us? If we get it wrong that’s because we are stupid, not because the idea was bad. And if we are no longer on the breaking edge of the wave, well, too bad. Hand on the baton; best wishes; have fun.

Action appealed to him most; it was the warriors’ creed. When in doubt, do.

It was the Culture’s fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The idea was fine as long as you didn’t get too close, but once you had spent some time with your opponents, such empathy could turn against you.