[1] Its members live mainly in spaceships and other off-planet constructs, because its founders wished to avoid the centralised political and corporate power-structures that planet-based economies foster.
[9] The Culture series comprises nine novels and one short story collection ordered by publication date: Since the Culture's biological population commonly live as long as 400 years[3] and have no need to work, they face the difficulty of giving meaning to their lives when the Minds and other intelligent machines can do almost anything better than the biological population can.
[b] All of the stories feature the tension between the Culture's humane, anarcho-communist ideals and its need to intervene in the affairs of less enlightened and often less advanced civilisations.
[b] The Idiran War serves as a recurring reference point in most of the subsequent novels, influencing the Culture's development for centuries and dividing its residents—both humanoids and AI Minds—along the pacifist and interventionist ideals.
In subsequent novels, the Culture—particularly SC and, to a lesser degree, Contact—continue to employ subterfuge, espionage, and even direct action (collectively called "dirty tricks") in order to protect itself and spread the Culture's "good works" and ideals.
These dirty tricks include blackmailing persons, employing mercenaries, recruiting double agents, attempting to effect regime change, and even engaging in false flag operations against the Culture itself (potentially resulting in the death of billions).
The book illustrates the limitations of power, and also points out that Minds and other AIs are as vulnerable as biological persons to grief, guilt and regrets.
[24] According to critic Farah Mendelson, the Culture stories are space opera, with certain elements that are free from scientific realism, and Banks uses this freedom extravagantly in order to focus on the human and political aspects of his universe; he rejects the dystopian direction of present-day capitalism, which both cyberpunk and earlier space operas assume, in creating a post-scarcity society as the primary civilization of focus.
[30] Sometimes the styles used in Excession relate to the function and focal character of the scene: slow-paced and detailed for Dajeil, who is still mourning over traumatic events that happened decades earlier; a parody of huntin', shootin', and fishin' country gentlemen, sometimes reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse, when describing the viewpoint of the Affront; the ship Serious Callers Only, afraid of becoming involved in the conflict between factions of Minds, speaks in cryptic verse, while the Sleeper Service, acting as a freelance detective, adopts a hardboiled style.
On the other hand, Banks often wrong-foots readers by using prosaic descriptions for the grandest scenery, self-deprecation and humour for the most heroic actions, and a poetic style in describing one of the Affront's killings.
[citation needed] Even in The Player of Games, which has the simplest style and structure of the series, the last line of the epilogue reveals who was really pulling the strings all along.
[26] The darkly comic double-act of Ferbin and Holse in Matter is not something most writers would place in "the normally po-faced context of space opera".
[citation needed] However, this character realises that his attempts to plan for anything that might conceivably happen on a mission are very similar to the way in which the Culture makes all its decisions, and by the end suspects he has chosen the wrong side.
[35] In an interview, Banks said he would like Consider Phlebas to be filmed "with a very, very, very big budget indeed" and would not mind if the story were given a happy ending, provided the biggest action scenes were kept.
[o] Banks says he conceived the Culture in the 1960s, and that it is a combination of wish fulfilment and a reaction against the predominantly right-wing science fiction produced in the United States.
[39] In Banks's first draft of Use of Weapons in 1974, his third attempt at a novel, the Culture was just a backdrop intended to show that the mercenary agent was working for the "good guys" and was responsible for his own misdeeds.
[46] On an episode of Lex Fridman's podcast released on April 29, 2022, the artist Grimes said that Surface Detail of the Culture series is the greatest science fiction book ever written.