Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

by Iain M. Banks

I don’t care how self-righteous the Culture feels, or how many people the Idirans kill. They’re on the side of life—boring, old-fashioned, biological life; smelly, fallible and short-sighted, God knows, but real life. You’re ruled by your machines. You’re an evolutionary dead end. The trouble is that to take your mind off it you try to drag everybody else down there with you.

“Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot,”

SC really did try to think of everything, though, and its Minds were reputedly even more cynical, amoral and downright sneaky than those which made up Contact; machines without illusions which prided themselves on thinking the thinkable to its ultimate extremities.

Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.

Fal laughed, gazing up at the red and white flowers curled round the trelliswork overhead. Jase, which deep down was a hopeless romantic, thought her laughter sounded like the tinkling of mountain streams, and always recorded her laughs for itself, even when they were snorts or guffaws, even when she was being rude and it was a dirty laugh. Jase knew a machine, even a sentient one, could not die of shame, but it also knew that it would do just that if Fal ever guessed any of this.

Horza had disagreed, genuinely annoyed that the woman could use even something so obviously a testament to the power of intelligence and hard work as an argument for her own system of irrational belief.

take on yet another identity, another shape to add to the many he had assumed already during his life…. Maybe there was no point, maybe he was only taking this new shape on to die in. But, he thought, what have I got to lose?

As in all too many matters, the consensus of opinion was starting to resemble what the Culture had to say on the subject. The Culture would lay down the law (except, of course, that the Culture didn’t have any real laws) about what being human was, or how intelligent a particular species was (while at the same time making clear that pure intelligence didn’t really mean much on its own), or on how long people should live (though only as a rough guide, naturally), and people would accept these things without question, because everybody believed the Culture’s own propaganda, that it was fair, unbiased, disinterested, concerned only with absolute truth… and so on.

Whether the vast cone of human flesh belonged to a male or a female Horza couldn’t tell; great mammarylike folds of naked flesh spilled from the creature’s upper and middle chest, but they drooped over even more enormous waves of nude, hairless torso-fat, which lay partly cradled in the vast beefs of the giant’s akimboed legs and partly overflowing those to droop into the canvas surface of the litter. Horza could see no stitch of clothing on the monster, but no trace of genitals either; whatever they were, they were quite buried under rolls of golden-brown flesh.

The voice sounded like congealing fat being poured into a jug;

Get yourself out of this. Still got your teeth and your nails… and your brain. Just bide your time.…

“Fate is our gardener, and our wolf. It weeds out the weak to honor the strong.

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.

That was the way Horza felt about Fwi-Song. He had to treat him as the maniac he obviously was. The fact that his insanity was dressed in religious trappings meant nothing. No doubt the Culture would disagree, claiming that there was ample common ground between insanity and religious belief, but then what else could you expect from the Culture? The Idirans knew better, and Horza, while not agreeing with everything the Idirans stood for, respected their beliefs. Their whole way of life, almost their every thought, was illuminated, guided and governed by their single religion/philosophy: a belief in order, place and a kind of holy rationality. They believed in order because they had seen so much of its opposite,

The more mature species could look to their own salvation; they had to make their own rules and find their own peace with God (and it was a sign of His generosity that He was happy with their achievements even when they denied Him).

In these arguably insane times, any lessening or attenuation of madness is maybe something to be grateful for.

“Well, that’s silly. I mean, how do you know what to do if they don’t tell you what they want? How can you prepare? I think it’s all really unfair.”