Quotes from work
Culture series

Iain Banks

The Culture series is a science fiction series written by Scottish author Iain M. Banks. The stories centre on the Culture, a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoids, aliens, and very advanced artificial intelligences living in socialist habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy. The main theme of the novels is the dilemmas that an idealistic hyperpower faces in dealing with civilizations that do not share its ideals, and whose behaviour it sometimes finds repulsive. In some of the stories action takes place mainly in non-Culture environments, and the leading characters are often on the fringes of the Culture, sometimes acting as agents of Culture in its plans to civilize the galaxy.

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“Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Matter (2008), Chapter 18 “The Current Emergency” (p. 333)

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“Fear lasted a week, anger a year and resentment a lifetime.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Matter (2008), Chapter 17 “Departures” (p. 305)
Context: On this purely practical issue he judged massacre wasteful and even contrary as a method of control.

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“Ultimately the galaxy, indeed the sum of the universe in its entirety, was mostly nothing; average it all out and it made a pretty good vacuum. But within the foci of matter there were the systems, the stars and planets and habitats—what a cornucopia of life was there!”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Matter (2008), Chapter 10 “A Certain Lack” (p. 167)

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“A good death. Well, he thought, given that you had to die, why want a bad one?”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Matter (2008), Chapter 27 “The Core” (p. 551)