The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks Quotes

“If space is cold and dead, technology can make it warm and alive. If the universe doesn’t care, we can do so ourselves through an essentially altruistic system of ethics. If flesh-sentients are intrinsically less capable of developing this system of ethics than machine intelligence, then the distant descendants of the first self-aware AIs to which we gave birth will take over the running of our society and leave us free to enjoy ourselves without doing harm to others. If the only godlike beings are self-upgraded sentients originally born out of the same muck as everyone else, the implication is that it is indeed possible for us to be better than we once were. And”
― Simone Caroti, The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction

“More relevantly, the revelation that Frank is Frances and that she became he because of a homegrown science experiment connects us to the practice, widespread in the Culture, of voluntary sex change. The difference in circumstances—in the Culture, the change is always completely successful, entirely reversible, and bioengineered inside the individual from birth—lies at the heart of Banks’ conviction that the ability to switch between genders at will is essential to the creation of a more just society—once one has lived as both man and woman, misogyny becomes substantially more difficult to embrace.”
― Simone Caroti, The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction

“You can’t be too prescriptive about what a writer does, but it’s important to me to get these ideas into the books, just for my own peace of mind, so that I feel I’m not just doing this to make money, I’m not just writing pageturners for people to skim through, put aside and forget. Like anybody else, I want to make the world a little more like the world I’d like to live in, sad though that is. So I put forward these ideas however subtly or cack-handedly to the extent that I can get away with it. The good thing about writing is that you can do this in a non-invasive, non-penetrative way, you’re not telling people this is what they should do, you’re just presenting ideas [Mitchell”
― Simone Caroti, The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction

“A lifelong friend of left-wing political causes and supporter of Scotland’s full independence from the UK, he found England in the Thatcher years a hard place to like, an impossible place to live in, and a dark place to observe from next door, having to witness its influence on Scottish life. In”
― Simone Caroti, The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction