The Interesting Times Gang vs. Outside Context Problems || The Culture Lore

With a society like the Culture -- one that’s advanced, post scarcity, and largely self-indulgent -- there aren’t many real threats to its continued existence. Occasionally, however, it will come across what is commonly referred to as an Outside Context Problem.
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MY STUFF
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MY SCI-FI NOVELS
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DELPHINE DESCENDS
After her family is killed and her homeworld occupied, young Kathreen Martin is sent to the distant world of Furoris for re-education. She will live the rest of her life as a serf - to be bought and sold as a commodity of the Imperial Network.
When her only chance of escape is ruined, a chance mistaken identity offers her a new life as the orphaned daughter of a First-Citizen Senator and heiress to a vast fortune.
She vows to claw her way into power to sit among the worlds’ elite. Then, with her own hands, she will reap bloody vengeance on them all.
But to beat them, she must play their game. And she must play it better than them all.
BLACK MILK
Prometheus has the chance to bring his wife back from the dead, but doing so will mean the destruction of Earth.
Spanning time, planets and dimensions, Black Milk draws to a climactic point in a post-apocalyptic future, where humanity, stranded with no planet to call home, fights to survive against a post-human digital entity that pursues them through the depths of space.
Five lives separated by aeons are inextricably linked by Prometheus’s actions:
Ystil.3 is an AI unit sent back in time from the distant future to investigate Prometheus’s discovery...
The mysterious Lydia has devoted her life to finding a planet that the last remaining humans can call home…
Tom Jones (he’s a HUGE fan!) is an AI trapped inside a digital subspace, lost and desperate to find his way back to his beloved in real-time…
Dr Norma Stanwyck is a neuroscientist from 24th Century Earth whose personal choices ripple throughout time...
Prometheus must learn the necessity of death or the entire universe will be swallowed by his grief.
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GOODREADS
You can stalk me on Goodreads to see what I'm currently reading. bit.ly/3rrcByD
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IMAGE USE
The images in my videos are mostly licensed stock photos. However, occasionally I will use images found online. I always seek to properly credit artists and offer a link back to their amazing work but sometimes it's hard to find the original source of the work. If I've used an image you own and I haven't credited you, please feel free to get in touch as I am always more than happy to do so.

[@8020Alive]

Iain M Banks, Excession blew me away when it was released and I have devoured it half a dozen times since. The communication between the great ship-minds and into the minds of Eccentric ships and Pseudo-Eccentric ships and Traitor ships and Warships is worth the cover price alone. It gets mixed reviews because it is so dense and people tend to ignore the "journey" to the BDO and perhaps were looking for a different payoff. 5 stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Excellent video! Happy holidays!

[@sirrathersplendid4825]

Halfway thru “Excession”, and it really is a thrill. Read a few of the Culture novels already but this the first that gets under the skin of the AI society, something missing in the earlier books.

[@justagigilo1]

reading Bank's Culture could lead to aspirations of greater thought on the part of this human population, it should be encouraged!

[@tulliusexmisc2191]

Ah, my favourite Banks book. I love the way he takes us tho the next level, inviting the reader inside the thoughts of beings of godlike intelligence. And in one case, experiencing its death.

[@sycodeathman]

Several cases in fact!

[@sanjoychanda2824]

Ah, The Excession. Among the very best of the best of the sci-fi novels I have read, and I have read a few. It is on another level altogether (pun intended)

[@bazoo513]

0:18 - To be precise, "pan-human" or humanoid. _Homo seapiens_ is _not_ a member species (and will not be in at least next 10-15 centuries) - General Contact Unit _Arbitrary_ with young Diziet Sma among the crew visited us around 1970. Sma advocated that Contact, or even Special Circumstances if necessary, shepard us towards a state where we would be ready to join the Culture. Some others considered us so depraved that the destruction is the only recourse. In the end, _Arbitrary_ and other Contact Minds decided to leave us uncontacted, overtly or covertly, in a "control group" of primitive societies likely to destroy themselves before they can do some greater damage. ("The State of the Art", the only novella set in the Culture universe)

[@berilsevvalbekret772]

Didn't at the end it was implied we in some form DID joined them??

[@bazoo513]

@berilsevvalbekret772 Umm... I don't think so. Where - in the novella itself, or elsewhere? Sma did refer to her visit in her poem _Slight Machanical Destruction_ dedicated to Zakalwe ( _Use of Weapons_ ), but only by mentioning "Year Zero", a reference to Khmer Rouge terror. Have I missed some other hint?

[@techauthor324]

@bazoo513. l believe you are correct. As l understand it, Earth was isolated for a significant distance to prevent contamination of the experiment. Hence the reason we have not encountered other life forms, significant or otherwise.

[@martincurrie6243]

In consider phelbas I think. The dates about the war were converted to earth dates with a little bit about contact in the footnotes

[@shingshongshamalama]

The Culture had mastered magnificent advanced technologies, including faster-than-light travel involving the manipulation of higher energy dimensions. Their scientific knowledge was immense. They understood the fabric of reality to extreme detail. The Excession was a perfect black body sphere older than the universe. It simply existed in a way that was, as far as the Culture knew, utterly impossible. Its very existence almost started a war.

[@sycodeathman]

To paraphrase the thoughts of one of the Minds dealing with it, the Excession was to the Culture Minds' power as the Culture Minds would be to a primitive biological race that had barely discovered electricity. Indistinguishable from magic, essentially. My favorite Culture book so far, I only have a few left :')

[@berilsevvalbekret772]

​@@sycodeathmanbest part was at the end Excession implied Culture will become something like them. Not yet ready but will be. God I miss Banks

[@krisbarr5663]

Love the way the ITG usurp the SC signal conference and kick the GSV that was leading before they arrived.

[@Commandelicious]

Oh god, Excession is my favourite book.

[@mistakenot1706]

One of my favorites from the Culture series. Thanks for the video 👍

[@_DarkEmperor]

It is a shame that Jacek Dukaj "Perfekcyjna Niedoskonałość" ("Perfect Imperfection" or "Ideal Imperfection") is not translated to English, You would love it (judging by content of this episode).

[@I_dont_want_an_at]

use AI to translate it, and then give it a quick once over yourself

[@_DarkEmperor]

@@I_dont_want_an_at I was translating documents with DeepL translator, even short article requires quite a lat of hand fixing by a native speaker. Beside machine learning translators are inconsistent when it comes to terminology, technical term should be translated to a specific world every single time, but it is not happening. Machine learning translation of a novel with a lot of technical vocabulary from physics, IT and cybernetics would be a nightmare to read.

[@jhwheuer]

OCP is a Banks invention.

[@channingparker9431]

This exactly what I needed to see.

[@UCwlamXmPue-X67f6AYlgL3Q]

There are so many wild ideas in fiction (both sci-fi and fantasy), so every OCP is probably already explored. We just don't know which one comes next and when.

[@fuffoon]

Was it a sublimed species?

[@sirrathersplendid4825]

One that has advanced so far it no longer requires a physical form (imho).

[@scottrackley4457]

Killing Time

[@yw1971]

5:14 - It seems that 'fucking' would still be used in the far future... I always wondered how Asimov & A C Clarke could spend their entire careers without ever printing this word... I think modern SF is too close to current culture & therefore often inferior.

[@Commandelicious]

SciFI is always an expression of the present after all.

[@razorednight]

If you want to use "realistic" language, the reader isn't going to understand a word of it! For context, see what "English" language looked like several thousand years ago.

[@yw1971]

@@razorednight But the reader should get at least a FEELING of the future. See how Frank Herbert does it in his Dune saga (no 'Fuck' there). I'm afraid modern SF writers are just too lazy (or stupid) to accomplish it. As for English - you can read Late medieval English (such as Malory's Arthurian legends) of 550 years ago and understand it well enough.

[@yw1971]

@@The_BeezerEven the more recent from the 60's rarely used it. They were just classier... Something that is lost to the new generation.

[@NaatClark]

@@yw1971 People spoke the words plenty in their day to day but the media of the time was more censored. Something that is lost to the old generation