Although many SF writers and futurists would consider a civilization like the Culture to be a human Utopia, or at least a bastion of post-singularity niftiness, you've repeatedly written novels whose characters are disenchanted with it. They are outright defectors (siding with the Idirans, say), or (in the case of Anaplian) they view the Culture with a great deal of scepticism. Why do you choose to show your readers the Culture from these perspectives?

To make it interesting and stop the whole enterprise getting too preachy. The basic idea is the Culture is just completely spiffing, super and brill, but if the books said that and nothing else they'd induce nothing but yawns. Taking the point of view of somebody who's skeptical about or even opposed to the Culture introduces a rather more interesting tension.

The Culture novels take place across a timespan of thousands of years, and yet one thing remains constant: war. Do you think war is a symptom of civilization?

Not necessarily. Again, it's about the authorial need for tension and conflict. Well, about my need for tension and conflict in my novels.

The vast, vast majority of the Culture's day to day and indeed century to century business is totally, boringly peaceful; I concentrate on the violent, grisly bits because that's where the most vivid stories are.

If I was adept at and interested in writing novels about a set of intense, poetically-drawn characters having anguished, convoluted relationships with each other I could write a kind of Hamstead or campus novel in space, or at least on a Culture Orbital or something, but it'd be boring - for me and the people who've liked the novels I've written so far. More like soap opera than space opera. Actually, I blame Gerry Anderson; Thunderbirds gave me a love of big explosions I've yet to shake off. It's kind of ingrained by now. Almost the first thing I think of when I've come up with an idea for a Really Big Artifact is how you could blow the living bijeesus out of it...

The Shellworld in Matter seems like the perfect location to tell a story about the layers of civilizational bureaucracy and diplomacy that affect the central characters. Were you thinking of the Shellworld in symbolic terms or did you just want to create an aesthetically interesting environment?

The physical idea came first - I'd wanted some sort of big, non-traditional super-planetary setting in the book from early in the planning stage - but was almost instantly seized upon by whatever bit of my brain is always looking for symbolic bits and pieces; it kind of ran off with it and started twisting a perfectly decent and thoroughly neat idea for its own perverted purposes.

One of the tragedies (or perhaps mistakes) at the heart of Matter involves two civilizations — the Sarl and the Oct — dealing with other groups whose technological sophistication far outstrips their own. Is this in some sense a story about uneven development — a clash between developed and developing worlds — on a galactic scale?

Yes. But it's no big deal, in a sense. Even the people at the bottom of the developmental heap, such as the Sarl, know what their position is - there's no big reveal regarding the fact they're surrounded by hyper-teched aliens, they know that from the start - but they know, or at least believe, that it's not about what toys you possess, it's about what you do with what you've got; how well and cunningly you use the abilities and advantages you have and minimise the effects of your weaknesses. It is all relative and there's even a sense in which the whole civilizational game is more rewarding for the less developed because they've still got important stuff they can accomplish; those the Sarl call the Optimae - the Culture and its fellow Galactic top dogs - have nowhere to go, nothing more of true substance to win.

They've achieved a lofty plateau from which all they can do is watch over and sometimes in the affairs of those beneath them. So being a god is boring.

Nearly all your most ancient and intelligent creatures (like the Dwellers and the Ships) possess a somewhat demented sense of humor. Do you suspect that a little weirdness is a necessary component of longevity for a species or civilization?

Absolutely. When you're that smart and wise, humour is practically compulsory. The universe is vast, uncaring and composed almost entirely of colossal quantities of nothing, and yet it is constantly throwing up examples of the bizarre and grotesque. Humour is a way of coping with this and also a kind of rejoinder to it; a reply in the same coin and tongue.

The novel centers on three siblings, Anaplian, Ferbin, and Oramen, the children of a king who rules one of the levels in a Shellworld — an ancient alien artifact that is essentially a set of nested spheres where various creatures have set up shop by pumping in the atmospheres, hanging artificial "stars" on runners in the ceilings of each level, and going about their business. The siblings are part of a group called the Sarl, whose technological sophistication has reached that of ninteenth century Europe. While Ferbin and Oramen, the boys, are groomed for positions of political power among the Sarl, Anaplian has nothing to look forward to but marriage. So she's not entirely unhappy when her father gives her away to a group of aliens from the Culture, who take her far from home, educate her, give her cool bio-upgrades, and train her as a member of Special Circumstances, the Culture's equivalent of the secret service.

But when the king is assassinated by a former trusted adviser, and both Ferbin and Oramen's lives are threatened, Anaplian decides to return to her backwater Shellworld home and set things to rights. She's accompanied only by a super-intelligent weapon and an A.I. spaceship with mysterious loyalties, and her mission is an off-the-record assignment from Special Circumstances to figure out why a minor space-faring civilization known as the Oct has become so deeply interested in an artifact buried deep within on of the Sarlian levels of the Shellworld.

The novel is as complicated and perfectly-structured as a Shellworld itself. There are wars within wars, and intrigues among the low-tech Sarl have reverberations that could be felt halfway across the galaxy among so-called Optimae civilizations who control vast volumes of space. Matter is ultimately about what happens when developing civilizations clash with developed ones over possessions neither one understands. Told with Banks' usual nihilistic humor and flair for outlandish description, this is a novel that will grab you by the shorthairs, scream at you about realpolitik, and then smack you on the head with a laser blast. And of course, you'll love every minute of it.

Matter is already available in the UK, and though its official release date in the US is February 27, it's already out in most US bookstores. Or you can order now.

The Culture Novels:

Consider Phlebas Set during the war between The Culture and the Idirans, this is one of Banks' most widely-praised science fiction novels. Its events also shape the Culture for hundreds of years afterward. The Idirans are a lizard-like, hierarchical people who want to colonize as many worlds as possible in order to convert as many creatures as possible to their religion. The Culture, on the other hand, wants to spread its more democratic-anarchic beliefs to as many worlds as possible. Essentially, the two empires are fighting to control the ideologies of colony worlds. Our protagonist, Horza, has grown disgusted with the Culture way of life and has become a spy for the Idirans. As the war reaches a howling crescendo, we follow Horza from a dying ring world full of cannibalistic cultists, to a ship full of criminals, and at last to final showdown deep within the catacombs of a dead world. This is action-packed world-building at its most alluring: full of cool fights and interesting philosophical debates. Plus, Banks pulls a typical counter-intuitive move by introducing us to The Culture through the eyes of an outsider who has grown disgusted with it.

The Player of Games Though the subject of this novel is gaming rather than war, we never stray far from one of Banks' central preoccupations: the psychology of combat. Gurgeh is a master gamer from the Culture, where the complete intermeshing of human and machine creatures has made computer games into some of the most complicated and beautiful of sports. Unsatisfied with what the Culture has to offer, Gurgeh ventures outside its volume of space to try his hand at a game beloved by the Azad. In the Empire of Azad, games are taken so seriously that if you win, you can become Emperor.

Use of Weapons This novel, a character study of a man coming to terms with a troubled past, is a version of the first novel Banks ever wrote (the early version remains unpublished, and Banks claims you could only understand it in "six dimensions"). It's the story of Zakalwe, recruited from his podunk non-Culture society to serve in the Culture's version of a secret intelligence agency, Special Circumstances (SC). Among other duties, SC Agents are often dispatched to infiltrate non-Culture or "primitive" societies and learn about them. We follow Zakalwe's mission into many such primitive cultures, while also following him back through his own memories of growing up on a planet whose culture echoes those he's spying on. SC Agents are souped up with a lot of cool powers, and this novel offers a generous helping of superpowered spy stuff, while also ravaging your soul with the story of a man trapped in his own memories.

Excession One of the most fascinating elements of the Culture is its ruling group (or the closest thing to that) — the Minds. The Minds are AIs who live for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of years, and plunk themselves into many different bodies: ships, halo worlds called Orbitals, and cyborgs called Avatars. (Well, the Avatars are really just extensions of a Mind, but if you want to get really detailed, just read this book.) Much of Excession is told from the point of view of a Mind in a former SC ship called the Sleeper Service, who journeys to an encounter with a giant, mysterious something that exists partly in subspace known only as the "excession." (I believe "excession" is supposed to be a cool noun form of "excessive.") The joy in reading this book comes from finally getting inside the computer brains of the ships, who communicate via data packets complete with internet-like headers. But there's plenty of excitement, too. Sleeper Service is also a weapon, and the Mind is racing to reach the excession before a warlike group called The Affront (who do some incredibly horrifying things to the creatures they conquer). There's even a weird romantic subplot involving the Sleeper Service's one human passenger, a depressed human female who once tried to kill her straying lover. Banks manages to juggle all these plots beautifully, and with his characteristic dark humor.

Inversions We've sung the praises of this book on io9 already. Read about it here.

Look to Windward This novel combines Banks' interest in Minds from Excession with his interest the trauma of memory from Use of Weapons. In large part, the novel is about a Mind called Lasting Damage who was inside a ship during the Culture-Idiran War. Hundreds of years later, Lasting Damage is still traumatized by memories of the war, and has placed itself in the control center of an Orbital full of civilians. So essentially, the Mind has gone from being a ship of war to an artificial world devoted to peace. But other war-damaged survivors have been unable to find peace. Such is the case with Quilan, whose wife was murdered when they were both soldiers in a civil war masterminded by the Culture. To get revenge, he's journeying to Lasting Damage on an assassin's mission that even he doesn't fully understand — it's a mission conceived by a dead Colonel's mind that's been uploaded into Quilan's, and that will culminate during the anniversary of the Culture-Idiran war. This is one of Banks' most mournful Culture novels, a strange meditation on post-tramatic stress as suffered by both machines and men.

Matter If you're in the UK, you should go out and grab this latest Culture book now. If you're in the US, you'll have to wait until Feb. 27.

Banks introduces the Culture in this essay. This is a long and rich world-building exercise, originally posted by Banks' friend Ken MacLeod on a newsgroup. I suggest you read the whole thing, but here are few interesting tidbits.

On the galactic setting where the Culture exists:

The galaxy (our galaxy) in the Culture stories is a place long lived-in, and scattered with a variety of life-forms. In its vast and complicated history it has seen waves of empires, federations, colonisations, die-backs, wars, species-specific dark ages, renaissances, periods of mega-structure building and destruction, and whole ages of benign indifference and malign neglect. At the time of the Culture stories, there are perhaps a few dozen major space-faring civilisations, hundreds of minor ones, tens of thousands of species who might develop space-travel, and an uncountable number who have been there, done that, and have either gone into locatable but insular retreats to contemplate who-knows-what, or disappeared from the normal universe altogether to cultivate lives even less comprehensible.

On the ships and their Minds:

Culture starships - that is all classes of ship above inter-planetary - are sentient; their Minds (sophisticated AIs working largely in hyperspace to take advantage of the higher lightspeed there) bear the same relation to the fabric of the ship as a human brain does to the human body . . . The Culture's largest vessels - apart from certain art-works and a few Eccentrics - are the General Systems Vehicles of the Contact section. (Contact is the part of the Culture concerned with discovering, cataloguing, investigating, evaluating and - if thought prudent - interacting with other civilisations; its rationale and activities are covered elsewhere, in the stories.) The GSVs are fast and very large craft, measured in kilometres and inhabited by millions of people and machines. The idea behind them is that they represent the Culture, fully. All that the Culture knows, each GSV knows; anything that can be done anywhere in the Culture can be done within or by any GSV. In terms of both information and technology, they represent a last resort, and act like holographic fragments of the Culture itself, the whole contained within each part.

On law:

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.

On politics:

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.

On why most people in the Culture live in Orbitals:

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.

Also, Banks has given himself a Culture-style name. It's Sun-Earther Iain El-Bonko Banks of North Queensferry.

Image from the cover of Excession by Mark Salwowski.