Culture of "The Culture"

In a career that spanned over thirty years, Iain M. Banks becameone of the best-loved and most prolific writers in Britain, with his spaceopera series concerned with the pan-galactic utopian civilisation known as "theCulture" widely regarded as his most significant contribution to sciencefiction. The Culture of "The Culture" focuses solely on this series, providing a comprehensive, thematic analysis ofBanks’s Culture stories from Consider Phlebas to The Hydrogen Sonata. It explores the development of Banks’s political, philosophical and literarythought, arguing that the Culture offers both an image of a harmoniouscivilisation modelled on an alternative socialist form of globalisation and acritique of our neo-liberal present. As Joseph Norman explains, the Culture isthe result of an ongoing utopian process, attempting through the application of technoscience to move beyond obstacles to progress such as imperialism, capitalism, the human condition, religious dogma, patriarchy and crises in artistic representation. The Culture of "The Culture" defines Banks’s creation as culture: autopian way of doing, of being, of seeing: an approach, an attitude and alifestyle that has enabled, and is evolving alongside, utopia, rather than animage of a static end-state.