The attraction of Orbitals is their matter efficiency. For one planet the size of Earth (population 6 billion at the moment; mass 6x1024 kg), it would be possible, using the same amount of matter, to build 1,500 full orbitals, each one boasting a surface area twenty times that of Earth and eventually holding a maximum population of perhaps 50 billion people (the Culture would regard Earth at present as over-crowded by a factor of about two, though it would consider the land-to-water ratio about right). Not, of course, that the Culture would do anything as delinquent as actually deconstructing a planet to make Orbitals; simply removing the sort of wandering debris (for example comets and asteroids) which the average solar system comes equipped with and which would threaten such an artificial world's integrity through collision almost always in itself provides sufficient material for the construction of at least one full Orbital (a trade-off whose conservatory elegance is almost blissfully appealing to the average Mind), while interstellar matter in the form of dust clouds, brown dwarfs and the like provides more distant mining sites from which the amount of mass required for several complete Orbitals may be removed with negligible effect.

Whatever the source material, Orbitals are obviously far more mass-efficient in providing living space than planets. The Culture, as is made clear in Use of Weapons, regards terraforming generally as ecologically unsound; the wilderness should be left as it is, when it is so easy to build paradise in space from so little.

An idea of how the day-night cycle appears on the surface of an Orbital can be gained by taking an ordinary belt, buckling it so that it forms a circle, and putting your eye to the outside of one of the belt's holes; looking through the hole at a light bulb and slowly rotating the whole belt will give some idea of how a star appears to move across the sky when seen from an Orbital, though it will also leave you looking rather silly.

As indicated, the usual minimum for the width of an Orbital is about a thousand kilometres (two thousand if you count the sloped, mostly transparent retaining walls, which usually extend to five hundred kilometres or so above the plate land-sea surface). The normal ratio of land to sea is 1:3, so that on each Plate - assuming they are being constructed in the balanced pairs described above - a (very) roughly square island rests in the middle of a sea, with approximately two hundred and fifty kilometres from the shore of the land mass to the retaining walls. Orbitals, though, like everything else in the Culture, vary enormously.

One thing almost every Orbital - whether just two Plates or a completed ("closed") Orbital - does have, is a Hub. As its name implies, the Hub sits in the centre of the Orbital, equidistant from all parts of the main circumferential structure (but not physically joined to it, normally). The Hub is where the Orbital's controlling AI (often a Mind) usually exists, running, or helping to run, the Orbital's transport, manufacturing, maintenance and subsidiary systems, acting as switchboard for trans-Orbital communications, library and general information point, traffic control for approaching, departing and close-passing ships, and generally working as the Orbital's principle link with the rest of the Culture. During the construction phase of a Plate-pair, the Hub will normally control the process.

The design of a Plate sometimes incorporates the deep - or strategic - structure of the surface geography, so that the Plate medium itself contains the corrugations that will become mountains, valleys and lakes; more commonly, the Plate surface is left flat and the strategic structures on the inner surface - also constructed from Plate base material - are added later. Under either method, the Plate's manufacturing and maintenance systems are located within the indentations or hollows of the strategic structure, leaving the land surface free to assume a rural appearance, once the tactical geomorphology has been designed and positioned, the Plate's complement of water and air has been emplaced, the necessary weathering has occurred, and the relevant flora and fauna have been introduced.

The surface of the Plate base is pierced by multitudinous shafts allowing access to the factory and maintenance volumes, and to the sub-surface transport systems. (Almost invariably, these include restricted single-aperture concentrically rotating airlocks paired in sequence.)

Existing on the outer surface of the base material, an Orbital's rapid-transport systems operate in vacuum, with the resulting advantages the lack of air-resistance confers; the relatively uncluttered nature of the Orbital's outer surface (whether flat, allowing the systems to operate next to that surface, or corrugated, requiring sling-bridges under unoccupied mountain indentations), means that the systems can be both high-capacity and extremely flexible. Journey starting-points and destinations can be highly specific for the same reason; an isolated house or a small village will have its own access shaft, and in larger conurbations a shaft will usually be within a few minutes walk.

Surface transport on Orbitals tends to be used when the pleasure of making the journey is itself part of the reason for travelling; air travel is common enough (if still far slower than sub-surface travel), though individual Plates often have their own guide-lines concerning the amount of air travel thought appropriate. Such guide-lines are part of one's manners, and not formalised in anything as crude as laws.

The Culture doesn't actually have laws; there are, of course, agreed-on forms of behaviour; manners, as mentioned above, but nothing that we would recognise as a legal framework. Not being spoken to, not being invited to parties, finding sarcastic anonymous articles and stories about yourself in the information network; these are the normal forms of manner-enforcement in the Culture. The very worst crime (to use our terminology), of course, is murder (defined as irretrievable brain-death, or total personality loss in the case of an AI). The result - punishment, if you will - is the offer of treatment, and what is known as a slap-drone. All a slap-drone does is follow the murderer around for the rest of their life to make sure they never murder again. There are less severe variations on this theme to deal with people who are simply violent.

In a society where material scarcity is unknown and the only real value is sentimental value, there is little motive or opportunity for the sort of action we would class as a crime against property.

Megalomaniacs are not unknown in the Culture, but they tend to be diverted successfully into highly complicated games; there are entire Orbitals where some of these philosophically crude Obsessive games are played, though most are in Virtual Reality. Something of a status-symbol for the determined megalomaniac is having one's own starship; this is considered wasteful by most people, and is also futile, if the purpose of having it is to escape the Culture completely and - say - set up oneself up as God or Emperor on some backward planet; the person might be free to pilot their (obviously non-AI controlled) ship, and even approach a planet, but the Contact section is equally free to follow that person wherever they go and do whatever it thinks appropriate to stop him or her from doing anything injurious or unpleasant to whatever civilisations they come into - or attempt to come into - contact with. This tends to be frustrating, and Virtual Reality games - up to and including utter-involvement level, in which the player has to make a real and sustained effort to return to the real world, and can even forget that it exists entirely - are far more satisfying.

Some people, however, refuse this escape-route too, and leave the Culture altogether for a civilisation that suits them better and where they can operate in a system which gives them the kind of rewards they seek. To renounce the Culture so is to lose access to its technology though, and, again, Contact supervises the entry of such people into their chosen civilisation at a level which guarantees they aren't starting with too great an advantage compared to the original inhabitants (and retains the option of interfering, if it sees fit).

A few such apparently anti-social people are even used by Contact itself, especially by the Special Circumstances section.

The way the Culture creates AIs means that a small number of them suffer from similar personality problems; such machines are given the choice of cooperative re-design, a more limited role in the Culture than they might have had otherwise, or a similarly constrained exile.

Politics in the Culture consists of referenda on issues whenever they are raised; generally, anyone may propose a ballot on any issue at any time; all citizens have one vote. Where issues concern some sub-division or part of a total habitat, all those - human and machine - who may reasonably claim to be affected by the outcome of a poll may cast a vote. Opinions are expressed and positions on issues outlined mostly via the information network (freely available, naturally), and it is here that an individual may exercise the most personal influence, given that the decisions reached as a result of those votes are usually implemented and monitored through a Hub or other supervisory machine, with humans acting (usually on a rota basis) more as liaison officers than in any sort of decision-making executive capacity; one of the few rules the Culture adheres to with any exactitude at all is that a person's access to power should be in inverse proportion to their desire for it. The sad fact for the aspiring politico in the Culture is that the levers of power are extremely widely distributed, and very short (see entry on megalomaniacs, above). The intellectual-structural cohesion of a starship of course limits the sort of viable votes possible on such vessels, though as a rule even the most arrogant craft at least pretend to listen when their guests suggest - say - making a detour to watch a supernova, or increasing the area of parkland on-board.

Day-to-day life in the Culture varies considerably from place to place, but there is a general stability about it we might find either extremely peaceful or ultimately rather disappointing, depending on our individual temperament. We, after all, are used to living in times of great change; we expect major technological developments and have learned to adapt - indeed expect to have to adapt on a more or less continual basis, changing (in the developed world) our cars, our entertainment systems and a whole variety of household objects every few years. In contrast, the Culture builds to last; it is not uncommon for an aircraft, for example, to be handed down through several generations. Important technological advances still take place, but they don't tend to affect day-to-day life the way that the invention of the internal combustion engine, heavier-than-air flying machines and electronics have affected the lives of those who have lived during the past century on Earth. Even the relative homogeneity of the people one would meet when living on the average Orbital - with relatively few children and physically old people - would tend, for us, to reinforce the feeling of sameness, though the scattering of genetically altered, morphologically extreme people around would help compensate for this.

In terms of personal relations and family groupings, the Culture is, predictably, full of every possible permutation and possibility, but the most common life-style consists of groups of people of mixed generations linked by loose family ties living in a semi-communal dwelling or group of dwellings; to be a child in the Culture is to have a mother, perhaps a father, probably not a brother or sister, but large numbers of aunts and uncles, and various cousins. Usually, a mother will avoid changing sex during the first few years of a child's life. (Though, of course, if you want to confuse your child...) In the rare event of a parent maltreating a child (a definition which includes depriving the child of the opportunity for education) it is considered acceptable for people close to them - usually with the help of the relevant Mind, ship or Hub AI, and subject to the sort of small-scale democratic process outlined above - to supervise the child's subsequent development.

In general the Culture doesn't actively encourage immigration; it looks too much like a disguised form of colonialism. Contact's preferred methods are intended to help other civilisations develop their own potential as a whole, and are designed to neither leech away their best and brightest, nor turn such civilisations into miniature versions of the Culture. Individuals, groups and even whole lesser civilisations do become part of the Culture on occasion, however, if there seems to be a particularly good reason (and if Contact reckons it won't upset any other interested parties in the locality).

Just who and what is and isn't Culture is something of a difficult question to answer though; as has been said in one of the books, the Culture kind of fades out at the edges. There are still fragments - millions of ships, hundreds of Orbitals, whole systems - of the Peace faction of the Culture, which split from the main section just before the start of the Idiran War, when ships and habitats voted independently on the need to go to war at all; the minority simply declared itself neutral in the hostilities and the re-integration of the Peace faction after the cessation of hostilities was never totally completed, many people in it preferring to stay outside the majority Culture as long as it did not renounce the future use of force.

The genofixing which established the potential for inter-species breeding at the foundation of the Culture is the most obvious indicator of what we might call Culture-hood in humans, but not everybody has it; some people prefer to be more human-basic for aesthetic or philosophical reasons, while some are so altered from that human-basic state that any interbreeding is impossible. The status of some of the Rocks and a few (mostly very old) habitats is marginal for a variety of reasons.

Contact is the most coherent and consistent part of the Culture - certainly when considered on a galactic scale - yet it is only a very small part of it, is almost a civilisation within a civilisation, and no more typifies its host than an armed service does a peaceful state. Even the Cultures's prized language, Marain, is not spoken by every Culture person, and is used well outside the limits of the civilisation itself.

Names; Culture names act as an address if the person concerned stays where they were brought up. Let's take an example; Balveda, from Consider Phlebas. Her full name is Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda dam T'seif. The first part tells you she was born/brought up on Rabaroan Plate, in the Juboal stellar system (where there is only one Orbital in a system, the first part of a name will often be the name of the Orbital rather than the star); Perosteck is her given name (almost invariably the choice of one's mother), Alseyn is her chosen name (people usually choose their names in their teens, and sometimes have a succession through their lives; an alseyn is a graceful but fierce avian raptor common to many Orbitals in the region which includes the Juboal system); Balveda is her family name (usually one's mother's family name) and T'seif is the house/estate she was raised within. The 'sa' affix on the first part of her name would translate into 'er' in English (we might all start our names with 'Sun-Earther', in English, if we were to adopt the same nomenclature), and the 'dam' part is similar to the German 'von'. Of course, not everyone follows this naming-system, but most do, and the Culture tries to ensure that star and Orbital names are unique, to avoid confusion.

Now, in all the above, there are two untold stories implicit. One is the history of the Culture's formation, which was a lot less easy and more troubled than its later demeanour might lead one to expect, and the other is the story which answers the question; why were there all those so-similar humanoid species scattered around the galaxy in the first place?

Each story is too complicated to relate here.

Lastly, something of the totally fake cosmology that underpins the shakily credible stardrives mentioned in the Culture stories. Even if you can accept all the above, featuring a humanoid species that seems to exhibit no real greed, paranoia, stupidity, fanaticism or bigotry, wait till you read this...

We accept that the three dimensions of space we live in are curved, that space-time describes a hypersphere, just as the two dimensions of length and width on the surface of a totally smooth planet curve in a third dimension to produce a three-dimensional sphere. In the Culture stories, the idea is that - when you imagine the hypersphere which is our expanding universe - rather than thinking of a growing hollow sphere (like a inflating beach-ball, for example), think of an onion.

An expanding onion, certainly, but an onion, nevertheless. Within our universe, our hypersphere, there are whole layers of younger, smaller hyperspheres. And we are not the very outer-most skin of that expanding onion, either; there are older, larger universes beyond ours, too. Between each universe there is something called the Energy Grid (I said this was all fake); I have no idea what this is, but it's what the Culture starships run on. And of course, if you could get through the Energy Grid, to a younger universe, and then repeat the process... now we really are talking about immortality. (This is why there are two types of hyperspace mentioned in the stories; infraspace within our hypersphere, and ultraspace without.)

Now comes the difficult bit; switch to seven dimensions and even our four dimensional universe can be described as a circle. So forget about the onion; think of a doughnut. A doughnut with only a very tiny hole in the middle. That hole is the Cosmic Centre, the singularity, the great initiating fireball, the place the universes come from; and it didn't exist just in the instant our universe came into being; it exists all the time, and it's exploding all the time, like some Cosmic car engine, producing universes like exhaust smoke.

As each universe comes into being, detonating and spreading and expanding, it - or rather the single circle we are using to describe it - goes gradually up the inner slope of our doughnut, like a widening ripple from a stone flung in a pond. It goes over the top of the doughnut, reaches its furthest extent on the outside edge of the doughnut, and then starts the long, contracting, collapsing journey back in towards the Cosmic Centre again, to be reborn...

Or at least it does if it's on that doughnut; the doughnut is itself hollow, filled with smaller ones where the universes don't live so long. And there are larger ones outside it, where the universes live longer, and maybe there are universes that aren't on doughnuts at all, and never fall back in, and just dissipate out into... some form of meta-space? Where fragments of them are captured eventually by the attraction of another doughnut, and fall in towards its Cosmic Centre with the debris of lots of other dissipated universes, to be reborn as something quite different again? Who knows. (I know it's all nonsense, but you've got to admit it's impressive nonsense. And like I said at the start, none of it exists anyway, does it?)

Anyway, that's more than enough of me pontificating.

With best wishes for the future,

Iain M Banks
(Sun-Earther Iain El-Bonko Banks of North Queensferry)

This article was posted to newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written on 10 August 1994 on behalf of Iain M Banks by Ken MacLeod.

Copyright ©1994 Iain M Banks. Commercial use only by permission. Other uses, distribution, reproduction, tearing to shreds etc are freely encouraged provided the source is acknowledged.