Muscular imagination

When I peer into the far reaches of sci­ence fic­tional imag­i­na­tion, way out beyond the easy extrap­o­la­tions and con­sensus futures, beyond the Blade Run­ners and the Star Treks, the name that looms largest is Iain M. Banks.

For those unfa­miliar with his work in this genre, I’ll tell you a little bit about the Cul­ture novels and rec­om­mend a reading approach. Then, for Banks begin­ners and devoted Cul­turephiles alike, I’ll explain why his future means so much to me.

What is the Cul­ture? A civilization. An agreement. The sub­ject of a col­lec­tion of books, written across decades, which offer clues and suggestions, glances and reflections. A big part of the fun of reading those books is assem­bling your own mosaic. Here’s mine:

The Cul­ture is a spacefaring, free­wheeling admix­ture of anar­chism and socialism. In most ways, it promises its cit­i­zens radical, breath­taking freedom … but in a few other ways, it requires their submission — to super­human sys­tems of plan­ning and manufacture, the Cul­ture’s inef­fable Minds.

The Cul­ture is a utopia: a future you might actu­ally want to live in. It offers a coherent polit­ical vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, cit­i­zens of the Cul­ture very fre­quently artic­u­late and defend their values. (Their enthu­siasm for their own pol­i­tics is con­sid­ered annoying by most other civilizations.)

Coherent polit­ical vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of this is what we ought to do, yet it is absent from plenty of sci­ence fic­tion that dwells only in the realm of the cau­tionary tale.

I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.

Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.

How to read the Culture

The Cul­ture novels aren’t con­nected by an over­ar­ching plot, and there is no canon­ical reading order. For all my appreciation: I have not even read them all! If you search online, you’ll find plenty of pro­posed approaches.

Here is mine, which is unorthodox; call it a recipe for enjoying the Cul­ture. It pro­ceeds in three stages:

• I very strongly believe new readers ought to start with Player of Games. It is a cap­ti­vating novel in its own right, and its intro­duc­tion to the Cul­ture is smooth, almost stealthy. It’s also the book I started with, and obvi­ously It Worked for Me, so I can’t help but rec­om­mend the same on-ramp.

• For your second foray, you can choose basi­cally at random. I like Matter and Sur­face Detail. I do not like Con­sider Phlebas.

• Here is the unorthodox part: I don’t think it’s necessary, or even desirable, to have read more than a couple of Cul­ture novels before turning to A Few Notes on the Cul­ture, the post from Iain M. Banks that just … lays it all out there.

A Few Notes on the Cul­ture is, for me, THE thrilling Cul­ture doc­u­ment. It helps that it’s this odd sort of web samizdat — you are always reading a mir­rored copy on some random website. The orig­inal was posted to a Usenet news­group in 1994!

I should say, I don’t gen­er­ally love “raw worldbuilding” of this kind — RPG source­book material. This doc­u­ment is a bril­liant exception, because the ideas are so big, so fresh, and so con­fi­dently artic­u­lated; and of course because it’s Iain M. Banks behind them, his voice inimitable — wry and winning.

Why not simply begin with A Few Notes on the Cul­ture, if it’s so great? Well, it IS raw worldbuilding, and even the best exem­plar of that genre ben­e­fits from nar­ra­tive context. Read it on its own, and it’s a wonky thought experiment. Read it after a couple of novels, and it’s a back­stage pass.

You ought to meet a char­acter or two — hear from a few of the rol­licking Minds, learn their won­derful names — before you go behind the curtain.

Why to read the Culture

There are, in sci­ence fic­tion, sev­eral close peers to Iain M. Banks, at least in terms of the scale of their storytelling. I think in par­tic­ular of Olaf Stapledon, his Last and First Men, which gal­lops across mil­lions of years; and of Cixin Liu, his series starting with The Three-Body Problem, which bumps up against the death of the universe. I like both of these authors, but/and their futures are cold and grim. You wouldn’t call either one utopia.

So, I suppose it’s not just the scale of Iain M. Banks’s sto­ries that I want to praise, but their warmth. His megas­truc­tures over­flow with appealing char­acters pur­suing inter­esting projects. Their voices are self-aware and funny.

There’s no utopia without irony and humor; this fact really nar­rows the field.

In my novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, the ambi­tious and bril­liant Kat Potente asks:

“Have you ever played Max­imum Happy Imag­i­na­tion?”

“Sounds like a Japanese game show,” I replied.

Kat straightens her shoulders. “Okay, we’re going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pre­tend you’re a sci­ence fic­tion writer.”

Okay: “World government … no cancer … hover-boards.”

“Go fur­ther. What’s the good future after that?”

“Spaceships. Party on Mars.”

“Further.”

“Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere.”

“Further.”

I pause a moment, then realize: “I can’t.”

Kat shakes her head. “It’s really hard. And that’s, what, a thou­sand years? What comes after that? What could pos­sibly come after that? Imag­i­na­tion runs out. But it makes sense, right? We prob­ably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analo­gies in the thirty-first century.”

I’m trying hard to imagine an average day in the year 3012. I can’t even come up with a half-decent scene. Will people live in buildings? Will they wear clothes? My imag­i­na­tion is almost phys­i­cally straining.

Fin­gers of thought are raking the space behind the cushions, looking for loose ideas, finding nothing.

I have often described imag­i­na­tion as a muscle — one that, like any other muscle, can be developed.

Steady expo­sure to Star Trek gives you a minor workout, for sure; the bump of an imag­i­na­tive bicep. But there’s much fur­ther to go. You can read your way into some of it, and some of it, you have to dream up for yourself.

Even among elite athletes, there must be titans: Schwarzeneg­gers striding across the stage. (I con­jure body­builders because I like the idea of these imag­i­na­tive mus­cles BULGING.) Iain M. Banks, who died in 2013, way too young, was Mr. Universe. Here was a great writer, sure; but here was an imag­i­na­tion unmatched.

He simply pushed fur­ther and thought bigger.

For me, the Cul­ture is the standard, so, for a long time, the chal­lenge has been implicit: can you, Sloan, imagine on that scale? And not just technically, but humanely — with warmth and irony and humor?

I don’t get to Cul­ture scale in Moon­bound, but the plan — and there is a plan — is to ratchet up, book by book, so my notional series can cul­mi­nate in a feat that takes seri­ously the scale of the universe, as we now under­stand it.

It’s easier to write the defeat than the victory, isn’t it? Easier to write the failure than the suc­cess. For some reason, the suc­cess seems like it might be … boring.

Iain M. Banks shows us the Cul­ture har­nessing matter and energy on incred­ible scales. He tells us that cit­i­zens of the Cul­ture live for hun­dreds of years; that death is gen­er­ally a choice. In these books, the Cul­ture basi­cally always wins!

At first glance, this seems fatal to plot. End­less energy, immortality … aren’t these the GOALS of the story? Are we just talking about heaven here? Heaven: which ought to be occluded, unknowable, unsayable. Heaven: because it’s boring.

Turns out, no, it’s not boring at all. Plot gal­lops on, even at the outer limits of matter and energy. Even at the far reaches of freedom, the sto­ries are only just beginning.

In the writerly ret­i­cence to dra­ma­tize abundance, I detect humility — it requires serious imag­i­na­tive muscle, beyond what most folks are working with — and I detect also cowardice. What if my utopia isn’t good enough? What if I say, “this is gonna be so great”, and readers reply, “eh, doesn’t sound that great”?

Easier to con­jure some tyrant machines, some fast-spreading plagues. Every­body can agree on those.

Plenty of readers might indeed read the Cul­ture novels and say, “eh, doesn’t sound that great”. The point is, there is some­thing here to inspect, and consider, and, sure, even reject. In these novels, Iain M. Banks hoists the imag­i­na­tive burden. He twirls it in the air. His mus­cles bulge. It’s amazing to behold.

P.S. Cul­turephiles will note I’ve men­tioned only obiquely the Cul­ture’s greatest aes­thetic bounty, the names of its ships. That’s because they are actu­ally not funny or inter­esting until you step inside the magic circle of the books, and begin to intuit the rules of the game. Of course, after you’ve read one or two Cul­ture novels, learning new names becomes a large and growing frac­tion of the fun!

First published: March 2024
Last updated: April 2026