From a Galactic War to a Hydrogen Sonata: Warfare and

Ethics in the Culture Novels of Iain M. Banks

Ivaylo R. Shmilev (Goethe University, Frankfurt)

Beyond its easily recognizable brutality and destructiveness, war is also

disturbingly quantifiable: deaths are countable and damage is always measurable
in one way or another. Given this calculable and frightening immediacy, can war
ever be considered ethical? This article approaches the indivisible issues of war
and its ethical justifiability in the well-known Culture series of Iain M. Banks and
analyzes the seeming paradox between the Culture’s peaceful sociopolitical
existence and the wars it chooses to wage.
The Culture novels are often labelled ‘space opera’. Perhaps the most
famous series in this category is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Its central novum
is the science of psychohistory, developed by Hari Seldon, which facilitates
probabilistic predictions of social developments on a large spatio-temporal
scale. Seldon creates the eponymous Foundation as well as a secretive Second
Foundation to return the galaxy to unity and democracy after the Galactic
Empire falls as predicted. Any wars or armed conflicts along the way are justified
as either an inextricable part of the Seldon Plan or unfortunate artefacts of its
small-scale imprecisions: ethics seem to play only the role of a generalized,
overarching justification of the Plan. Similarly, the drug ‘melange’, a central
novum in Frank Herbert’s Dune series, enables prescient visions of varying
scopes and intensities (depending on the users’ compatibility) and is therefore
constantly exploited in pursuits of power and wealth. Inspired by melange-
fuelled visions, Paul Atreides and his son Leto seek a way to preserve humanity
from extinction. The Golden Path they establish proves to be a meandering,
millennia-long process whose chief side-effects are brutal imperial tyranny
and insanely devastating wars across the galaxy. The Dune series could be
considered a depiction of human societies as predatory organisms in a galactic
ecosystem: wars are the inevitable violent encounters between them and thus
have very little to do with ethics.
Compared to these well-known series, Banks’ Culture novels demonstrate
the slow socio-cultural evolution of the Culture’s ethics of (armed) intervention
over centuries. Banks frequently attacked real-world wars and the politics
behind them. For instance, he admitted his deep frustration with ‘how stupid and
barbaric politicians can be and the idea that war and imperialistic aggression
will never go out of fashion’ (Ward 2008). His expression of strong disagreement
with UK participation in the War on Terror was idiosyncratic: ‘He ripped up his
passport in protest at the Iraq war and sent it to Tony Blair’ (Jeffries 2007).
The contrast between the writer’s public stances and his fictional constructions
is both intriguing and productive because the Culture wages both overt and
covert wars. To begin with, Banks sees the Culture as a quasi-utopia with a

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twist: ‘They occasionally resort to dirty tricks, but they can always prove it was
the right thing to do because they use statistics’ (Ward 2008). For instance,
the Idiran-Culture war’s justifiability is demonstrated several centuries later
when statistical modelling proves that fewer people have died in the war than
those who would have died, theoretically, in an unchecked Idiran expansion
in the same period (Banks 1988: 465). The Culture’s scientific dependability
can be observed throughout the series: for example, its strikingly powerful
military technology is based on extremely advanced physics and is invariably
used for non-military purposes in everyday civilian life as well. Banks rarely fails
to mention that the devices for remote matter and energy manipulation called
‘effectors’ are both the most powerful quotidian tools and most devastating
weapons a Culture Mind has at its disposal. In effect, these unimaginably
advanced manipulators are basically hyper-developed work tools which can,
should the need arise, be used as weapons in war. This already hints at the
idea that the Culture is no chaotic and overly simplistic space-faring anarchy,
but is guided by identifiable principles – particularly when it comes to warfare.
And although Banks frequently reports the ethical reasoning of machine and
human Culture citizens alike, most of these direct deliberations will be ignored
in the following analysis so that what is shown about the Culture’s wars can be
weighed on its own terms, without resorting to that which is told.
In the sphere of ethics, both the method for achieving a result (the behaviour
I adopt towards a goal) and the final result itself (the ethical goals I set myself)
matter equally. That is a direct consequence of the fact that ethics is, to simplify
here, a social and/or sociological discipline within philosophy. Peter Singer
postulates: ‘an ethical principle cannot be justified in relation to any partial
or sectional group. Ethics takes a universal point of view’ (Singer 1993: 11).
Since every planned action starts within the individual, if I am to be an ethical
person, I must plan my actions so that they do not negatively influence anyone
or anything, or so that any unavoidable negative influence is fully minimized: ‘at
some level in my moral reasoning I must choose the course of action that has
the best consequences, on balance, for all affected’ (Singer 1993: 13). That
results from the given and irrepressible circumstance of social existence; in
the ethical work of Emmanuel Levinas, the self emerges through the actions
upon it by already existing others (see Butler 2005: 85–90), or in grammatical
terms, the accusative impingement of others upon the yet unformed self. That
is also why Levinas sees the interaction between the self and the other as so
irreducibly central to human identity and existence, a profound interaction not
simply characterized as responsibility but an essential responsiveness towards
others. Extreme individualism is thus incompatible with the inerasable human
social existence: ‘For me, the freedom of the subject is not the highest or primary
value. […] As soon as I acknowledge that it is “I” who am responsible, I accept
that my freedom is anteceded by an obligation to the other’ (Levinas 1995: 438).
Rights and freedoms co-exist in a dynamic balance with obligations and duties

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for the individual who pursues an ethical course.
One must then ask: could the human mind be capable of discovering
fundamentally universal ethical principles which will hold no matter where, no
matter when, no matter between what species of intelligent beings we attempt to
apply them? Perhaps; but even if there is no eternal universality to ethics, then
its conclusions can definitely be translated and adapted to new environments
and circumstances. Ethics should thus not be understood as inescapably
universal and absolutely transitive, but as translatable, applicable only after
adjustment to the new localities we have copied its output to. Both the initial
considerations of an ethical subject as well as any subsequent adaptations of
ethical principles must be carefully planned, even calculated, in order to achieve
the best results for everyone affected by the intended action in practice. Singer
calls this calculative approach ‘utilitarian’ and notes that it is only one of many
available theoretical premises in ethics. Despite that, utilitarian ethical thinking
exhibits several fitting characteristics which make it applicable to sf narratives,
especially when the protagonists of such narratives, as in Banks’ case, are
intelligent robots and machines: first, it is a pragmatically oriented approach,
one that scrutinizes the effects of actions in almost the manner of an engineer;
second, the very nature of intelligent machines presupposes characters who
are designed for calculation and practical evaluations; and third, since utilitarian
thinking is interested in outcomes, it can suitably engage in an analysis of
warfare.
The current dominant concept about the confluence of war and ethics is
called ‘just war theory’. Numerous theorists have written about the idea of just
wars and many agree that its beginnings lie in the classical works of philosophers
such as Plato, Aristotle and Augustine of Hippo; Paul Christopher lists additional
figures with notable contributions to just war theory such as Thomas Aquinas,
Francisco de Vitoria, Hugo Grotius and H.L.A. Hart. Anthony Coates and David
Rodin, contemporary theorists in the field, discuss several central tenets to just
war theory. First, and above all, is the principle of legitimate authority: it posits
that a nation-state, and only a nation-state, has the right, in international law,
to officially declare war. Second, the tenet jus ad bellum insists that there must
be a just cause for a war, since the commencing of hostilities with no rightful
cause is considered equal to a crime in this theory. Next, the principle jus in
bello dictates the proper conduct of parties to a conflict during wartime and
pertains to the treatment of war prisoners and of the wounded, to negotiations
and acceptable political actions on the international arena, to combatant versus
non-combatant status in conflict, and so on. Many familiar principles in public
discourse derive from these tenets such as the right intentions for warfare
(correcting proved or provable wrongs and not pursuing, for example, economic
gains); proportionality between the expected destruction and the expected
redress of wrongs, as well as the proportionate use of deadly force in military
action; non-combatant immunity; good treatment for prisoners of war; duration

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of the armed conflict until full redress of the proved damage but no further; and
so forth. It is essential to highlight that these central principles relate to nation-
states engaging each other in armed conflicts, and that war can only ever be
considered just if it is fought in self-defence to redress obvious, well-evidenced
wrongs perpetrated by the offending party/parties. Christopher, for instance,
describes this principle as military realism: ‘the side that initiates [unjust] war
commits a criminal act and, in so doing, the members of that side thereby forfeit
any right they might have had to protection under the law’ (Christopher 2004:
3). The law which governs such relations is then international law, that is, legal
constructions which have been in development and evolution ever since the
times of their initiators, de Vitoria and Grotius – and this is precisely why just
war theory becomes hugely destabilized both on the planet we inhabit and in
the science fiction stories we write and read.
Coates produces the following grim statement in The Ethics of War (1997):
‘However “just”, no war is ever so pure or ever so untainted as to be entered
into without grave moral misgivings, or to be conducted without continual moral
scrutiny and anxiety, or to be concluded without a sense of moral failure and
remorse’ (Coates 1997: 2). If, however, we imagine our increasingly globalized
planet to be a piece of complex latticework with multiple strands interconnecting,
intersecting, weaving through, around, between each other, then warfare is
more than moral misgivings, scrutiny, anxiety, failure and/or remorse: it is the
pulling of a thread which unravels large swathes of the latticework built over
centuries. Not only are concepts of nationhood and even statehood constantly
being challenged and remade in a globalized world, it is also equally hard to
pinpoint the culprit in most armed conflicts. This leads to yet another ethical
dilemma, as described by Rodin: ‘fighting a war of national defense is deeply
problematic, while at the same time leaving open the possibility that failing
to resist aggression may have unacceptable moral costs’ (Rodin 2002: 199).
These issues pose very difficult challenges to the principles of legitimate
authority and jus ad bellum briefly outlined earlier. Immediate questions would
be: do these principles establish statutes of limitations? Can a crime on a
national scale perpetrated a century ago be re-mediated by military action
today? Can that same crime still be re-mediated by warfare now if the political
entity that perpetrated it a century ago is already part of another polity, say
a federation? Pursuing a war today could mean the undoing of historical ties
built over decades and the involvement of totally unrelated parties. Violently
pulling on any threads of Earth’s globalized weave threatens to unravel Earth
globally. And if Earth has its own enormous and barely imaginable complexity,
then pulling on the threads of the Culture’s fictional galaxy with its billions of
inhabited worlds, millions of intelligent species and uncountable conflicts may
amount to unbelievable catastrophes across the vast stellar expanses.
The Culture is a quasi-utopian society in which no one experiences any great
deprivations or needs, where peace and safety are guaranteed for everyone

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to a maximum extent possible. Why would then such a civilization wage war,
especially when any act of war risks destroying so much of the intricately
interwoven coexistence in the galaxy? It is highly unlikely that anything other
than moral imperatives might move a post-scarcity society to armed violence.
Critics, however, suggest otherwise. Patrick Jackson and James Heilman
consider the Culture and its meddling as a metaphor for the Western liberal-
democracy nation-states and their interventionist policies (Jackson and Heilman
2008: 235–8). Patricia Kerslake compares the war in Consider Phlebas (1987)
to the Cold War: ‘the warlike Idirans violently oppose the Culture, a position
highly reminiscent of the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold
War, where the aggressive technology of both sides was frighteningly similar
and equally adept at the task of destruction’ (Kerslake 2007: 176). Similarly,
William Stephenson opines that the Culture ‘can be read as the analogue of
the contemporary West, with its refined expertise in violence and its rapacious
desire to hold onto global dominance and material prosperity’ (Stephenson 2013:
166). Alternatively, Farah Mendlesohn considers the Culture to be a decadent
society because of ‘its expansionism, imperialism and attempts to “civilise”
the barbarians on its borders’ (Mendlesohn 2005: 116). For Mendlesohn, the
Culture expands economically via appropriation of memory and knowledge,
i.e. information, since these are building blocks of identity; she finds support in
Horza, one of the most unreliable narrators in the Culture series, who thinks the
Culture is an ever-expanding, cancerous civilization quite unlike his employers
the Idirans (who wage a religious war for total hegemony and betray him by
murdering his lovers (Banks 1988: 304–5; 426–30). Mendlesohn concludes
that the Culture strongly resembles the post-Stalinist Soviet Union (Mendlesohn
2005: 122).
Such statements fail to take into consideration several vital characteristics
of the Culture as a political entity. Banks highlights numerous complexities in his
fictional universe such as:

(1) the almost completely peaceful long-term history of the Culture and
the extensive negotiations around its founding;
(2) the multiple space-faring civilizations at diverse levels of techno-
scientific development (the Sublimed Dra’Azon in Consider Phlebas;
the Affront and the Excession in Excession [1996]; the Morthanveld
and the Nariscene in Matter [2008]; the Nauptre and the Pavuleans
in Surface Detail [2010]; the Gzilt in The Hydrogen Sonata [2012])
with whom the Culture manages to establish peaceful contact and/or
maintain peaceful relationships;
(3) the extensive transformation of warships into civilian ones during
times of peace;
(4) the Culture’s ethical framework of self-determination and its highly
modular and mobile political structure which allow it to effortlessly part

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 ways with ethically compatible internal groupings such as the Peace
Faction and the Zetetic Elench; and
(5) the Culture’s post-scarcity disdain for any social, economical,
political, ethical or other ideologies based on scarcity, summarized in
the oft-repeated phrase ‘money is a sign of poverty’ (Banks 1993: 11).

The most important among these points is perhaps the last one: as an actual
post-scarcity society, the Culture possesses the scientific understanding and the
technological prowess to both access practically inexhaustible resources, such
as asteroids, gas giants, gas clouds, stars and the hyperspace energy grid, and
automate its labour to the extent that intelligent beings spend near-zero time
working in any type of production. In this hyper-advanced society, production and
distribution no longer obey any familiar Earth-bound economic theories of value,
labour, consumption, capital or market. The objects of the non-living universe,
including information, are free to copy and own since the cost is infinitesimal,
every copy is absolutely identical with the original and multiplication preserves
a thing much better than any other process ever could. Living beings are a
vital exception because they ceaselessly change with time, the only thing that
cannot be controlled or multiplied: clones cannot be identical with the cloned
(but will have rights nonetheless). Hence also the Culture’s strict line of privacy
around the mind of each and every individual: the uniqueness and inviolability of
the person must be guaranteed for everyone. The only people who can lose this
guarantee are criminals such as murderers. The reputation of individuals (and
of the Culture as a whole) is the only value which is measurable, namely by their
deeds: as artists, entertainers, inventors and scientists, as thinkers, creators,
ambassadors of their society, even as Special Circumstances (SC) agents and
brilliant strategists like Fal ’Ngeestra in Consider Phlebas. The Culture is a true
socio-political novum of post-scarcity which turns its attention not only to art
endeavours and diverse pleasures but also to the challenges its ultra-developed
status poses, such as the Subliming enigma, the Excession encounter and the
interactions with other civilizations. It is towards this highly advanced techno-
scientific and socio-political state that the interventions of the Culture aim to
nudge other societies. Unsurprisingly, representatives from allegedly more
advanced cultures, for example the Homomdan Ambassador Kabe Ishloear in
Look to Windward (2000), sometimes acknowledge the Culture’s socio-political
value and become citizens. These deliberations indicate that the Culture’s
complexities are not explained or analyzed by the rather simplistic equations
critics provide. The narrow approach of equating a fictional entity with an existing
historical entity amounts to seeing a metaphor in each and every element of
a sf story and, thus, to an excessively one-dimensional equivalence between
observable reality and fiction.
In contrast with this allegorical reading of sf, Kerslake makes the following
observation: ‘While it is possible to see a genre which writes about empire as

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serving a form of social absolution, it is far more productive to see SF novels as
“what if” experiments, as they engage with incidents of empire and the results
of such cultural forays’ (Kerslake 2007: 174). The Culture novels (as well as
sf narratives in general) can be more productively considered as large-scale
scenarios or complex world simulations which pursue not only entertainment and
aesthetic achievements but also political, social, economic and philosophical
hypotheses. Comparing the fictional scenario of a sf story to historical reality
can yield more insights than simply equating elements of the first with those of
the second.
Unlike Earth-bound polities, Banks’ fictional civilization follows three unique
rules which define its relationship to warfare: (1) war may be waged when, and
only when, it is done with the utmost of extreme precision; (2) war may be waged
if, and only if, it targets destructive and tyrannical socio-political ideologies and
systems which directly assault the Culture’s anarchist, syndicalist, socialist
and hedonist ideals; and (3) despite strictly adhering to the two previous
requirements, the Culture must deal with the certainty that it will occasionally
fail. These are the reasons why, first, SC’s work is kept secret, never openly
displayed, let alone appreciated, and second the Culture very rarely engages
in open interventions, even if, or especially if, they are entirely non-military and
completely benign. Playing teacher, parent and/or deity to another species is
a very dangerous business and can end up causing much more damage than
good, as the Gzilt revelations in The Hydrogen Sonata confirm. Following this
line of thought, Use of Weapons (1990) can be said to depict an epitome of
Culture strategy: deploying a highly skilled agent (Zakalwe) again and again,
the Minds adjust and calibrate not only their pre-planned computations for
minimizing casualties, but also their finely tuned calculations of their own
agent’s behaviour. Singer would probably agree that the Culture strategists
are supremely utilitarian in terms of their interventionist ethics: although they
know they often cannot prevent a conflict, or are simply arriving too late to an
ongoing clash, their sole task is the reduction of damage. Consequently, Banks
tends to characterize Contact and SC (as well as Culture people generally)
as smug and self-satisfied, although the actual outcomes of covert and overt
interventions vary in unexpectedly emotional ways. For example, when Diziet
Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw finally discover Zakalwe’s true identity, Sma is
utterly shocked while Skaffen-Amtiskaw seems oblivious to the fact that the
Culture has used an insanely brutal and perverse murderer as their weapon of
choice in numerous interventionist missions (Banks 1992: 390–4). The drone
does not find this revolting since Zakalwe acts only as a highly useful instrument
in SC’s political games. The Culture machines recognize such dark irony but
consider emotions unnecessary under these special circumstances. The
obverse of this situation can be observed at the end of Surface Detail: Lededje
Y’breq’s revenge on her killer is a profoundly intense episode (understandably),
but to the Mind-Ship the covert operation counts simply as a job well done: most

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virtual-reality Hells are deactivated, the person who enabled the monstrous
torture of the millions upon millions trapped in the Hells is eliminated and the
final analysis shows measurable benefits for all involved; an ethical victory in
utilitarian terms (Banks 2011: 604–18).
Similar clean-cut victories have yet to be achieved on Earth. The recent
attacks on countries who have been deemed to support terrorism, such as
Libya and Iraq, have resulted in the deaths of many thousands of innocents
and long-term destabilization and ruination. Although the dictators of Libya and
Iraq have been deposed, the price in both cases has been enormous. In stark
contrast to this, the Culture’s agents infiltrate tyrannies and assassinate only
their figureheads. Before Surface Detail, Banks depicted similar interventions in
The Player of Games (1988) and Matter: in the former, the eponymous player
Jernau Gurgeh manages to literally beat a tyrannical emperor at his own game
and so cause the downfall of the oppressive empire; in the latter, the SC agent
Djan Seriy Anaplian sacrifices her life to save a Shellworld of incredible diversity,
beauty and technological sophistication from a recently reawakened murderous
machine. More often than not, civilizations which have experienced Culture
interventions emerge from the transitional chaos better off than comparable
Earth counterparts (see, for example, the finales to The Player of Games,
Matter, Surface Detail and Inversions [1998]).
A surgical strike of extreme, undreamed-of precision also occurs at the end
of Look to Windward: we observe the nameless E-Dust Assassin mercilessly,
brutally, monstrously and incredibly efficiently slay the Estodien Visquile and his
enforcer Eweirl. This killing constitutes, above all, retaliatory action for the murder
of a Culture citizen (scholar Uagen Zlepe, killed by Eweirl while departing the
Oskendari airsphere) and the obliteration of unique creatures within a unique
ecosystem (the murder of the dirigible behemothaur and its entire retinue). The
surgical strikes which real-world militaries boast about remain such only in name
when compared to the utmost precision of the Culture’s enemy identification
and execution. In addition, the retaliation only becomes necessary due to the
preceding socio-ethical miscalculation and interventionist failure: individuals
like Visquile and Eweirl constitute the unchangeable, ultra-sadistic, trigger-
happy core of socio-economic oppression in the Chelgrian civilization, and
that is exactly what the Culture underestimates in its earlier intervention. The
Chelgrian ruling caste upholds the philosophies of persisting social division, of
oppression and exploitation in the Chelgrian caste system, and of slavery on the
Chel worlds, especially with regard to the servant caste. It is then no wonder
that the brutal slaying of Eweirl at the hands of the E-Dust Assassin resembles
so much Eweirl’s earlier murder of a blind servant (Banks 2001: 256–60);
what readers witness here is a perfect example of a military campaign against
ideological principles: the Culture is at war with the philosophical, ideological
and religious tenets such people embody and daily apply. Since it is impossible,
say, to imprison these oppressors due to the impossibility of presenting an SC

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agent (Huyler) as witness, and since they continue to do as much harm as
before, the Culture responds by reversing the roles and killing them. This is still
killing and nothing can change that fact; but it is part of a war, however unjust,
waged by ethical principles of equality, liberty and democracy against unethical
philosophies of inequality, oppression and slavery.
Gradually, it becomes clear that there cannot be such a thing as a just
war. All wars are always unjust because they undo the intricate networks and
organizations of intelligent life, no matter if we choose to call these interconnected
civilizations, global latticework, multidimensional socio-economic, politico-
ecological systems, or anything else. The prime example of an unjust war in
Banks’ novels is the Idiran-Culture war. Quoting the death toll alone – over 850
billion sentient creatures – is quite enough to categorize this war as unjust. The
reasons for engaging in it, then, would have to be extremely serious. Banks
writes that the ‘Culture went to war to safeguard its own peace of mind: no more.
But that peace was the Culture’s most precious quality, perhaps its only true and
treasured possession’ (Banks 1988: 451). That ‘peace of mind’ is the central
ethical principle behind the Culture’s existence: the idea that any political entity
which has achieved a stable post-scarcity state of peace, equality, freedom and
security must necessarily make itself useful to those who have not reached such
a state. Banks describes this as ‘the urge not to feel useless’ (451); it produces
a philosophical justification for the continual existence of the Culture. Moreover,
this imperative to be useful is something the Idirans have completely inverted in
their religious ideology: they consider themselves superior to all other intelligent
life and so proceed to enslave everyone they encounter. The vast majority in
the Culture can see no way to co-exist with this conquer-and-enslave strategy.
Only those groups in the giant society of the Culture who place the principle of
non-violence above all else decide that it is generally better to be enslaved than
to kill others in a war, and split off before or during the conflict. It is essential to
emphasize that the Culture engages in this unjust war to stop another galactic
force which possesses the actual weapon and logistics capabilities not only to
destroy the Culture, but to obliterate any other political entity which supports the
philosophical principles of democracy, equality, liberty, and mutually enriching
galactic coexistence. This constitutes the first and foremost ethical consideration
for engaging in an unjust war.
Nevertheless, Culture Minds sometimes do lose all touch with the
philosophical principles of their civilization. A typical example would be the way
certain Minds attempt to lure the Affront into a war in Excession. This attempt is
foiled due to the actions of the GSV Sleeper Service and the encounter with the
Excession itself; the situation presented by an Outside Context Problem gives
rise, however, to interesting thoughts about the actions the Minds undertake.
Central here are the considerations of the GSV Sleeper Service about the ethical
dimensions and repercussions of its actions, as well as, quite importantly, the
connections between interactions in the familiar four-dimensional reality and

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the process of Subliming. The Mind asks itself: ‘how long [does] it take before
you really [know] the full moral context of your actions?’ (Banks 1997: 421). The
answer seems to lie within the mysteries of Subliming:

Perhaps, indeed, that was the real attraction of Subliming. Real

Subliming; the sort of strategic, civilization-wide transcendence that
genuinely did seem to draw a line under a society’s works, deeds and
thoughts[...]maybe it was just … accounting.
What a rather saddening thought, thought the Sleeper Service. All
we’re looking for when we Sublime is our score. (421)

If entire civilizations aim only at the calculation of a final ethical score, then
Subliming itself becomes a mere mathematical trick for psychological relief,
a clownish accounting balance act. Subliming thus cannot be counted as a
utilitarian ethical action because it simply produces a score and attaches it to
the Subliming entity exclusively; this is only a selfish action whose sole result
is the foreclosure of possible ethical trajectories and, simultaneously, vain
bragging. Although Subliming is everyone’s right and might be seen as both a
reward at the top of the techno-scientific ladder and an escape from a tiresome
reality, it is also an entirely unethical betrayal of that very same reality, and more
properly, a complete, irreversible detachment, a final separation from that reality
still echoing with the suffering of too many innocent souls. This detachment
would be an ultimate act of selfishness and as such goes against the ethical
core of the Culture. A curious parallel with Inversions emerges here. If one
considers it (very much in line with its title) an inverted Culture story in which
the narrative presents viewpoints of people whose societies are infiltrated by
gently intervening Culture agents, one can observe that the two agents in the
novel are thoroughly attached to those societies and contribute everything they
can to their slow improvement. They resort to violence only in moments of self-
defence and extreme need, although they could easily usurp the power in the
technologically less advanced civilizations they inhabit. Their (and the Culture’s)
core ethical philosophy is succinctly summarized in the opening sentence of the
novel: ‘The only sin is selfishness’ (Banks 1999: 1).
Sometimes, precisely to help those who are suffering, we have to remain
unselfish and refrain from intervention. This is exactly the predicament in which
the Culture finds itself with the Gzilt in Banks’ last Culture novel, The Hydrogen
Sonata. Culture ships discover a brewing inner conflict in the Gzilt society, an
incoming civil war in a civilization on the brink of Subliming. This time, however,
the Minds are wary of straightforward interference. The memories of Chel are too
fresh, and the knowledge about the Sublimed too limited (for instance, a Mind
returned from the Sublime proves impossible to reason with) to allow precise
simulations and calculations of possible intervention scenarios. When the
friendly Gzilt begin chasing and killing each other, Culture Minds are compelled
to act: in Levinas’ ethical framework, they are the ones who turn towards the

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face of the Other, who listen to their misery and respond accordingly. Refusing
to undertake such action is equal to dismantling the unspoken social contract:
‘The other haunts our ontological existence and keeps the psyche awake, in
a state of vigilant insomnia. Even though we are ontologically free to refuse
the other, we remain forever accused, with a bad conscience’ (Levinas 1995:
438; cf. Morgan 2011: 82–4). Not acting constitutes a general, profound sin of
omission while acting risks other errors and failures. The Culture chooses the
second path and so its urge for usefulness finds itself transformed from mere
potential into surprising action. In a stunning twist, the warrior ship Mistake
Not... chooses not to engage its Gzilt counterpart in combat, but to perform
a near-impossible rescue operation at the site of a fresh attack by that same
counterpart (Banks 2013: 478–94). This action symbolizes the Culture’s policy
in this case: the Minds choose not to reveal the secret information they have
acquired about the Gzilt so as not to disrupt their society catastrophically at the
time of Subliming. It is imperative to highlight this decision to stay attached,
connected to the habitual reality, not to abandon its troubled denizens, despite
the fact that one’s actions will sometimes result in failures, injustice and even
more troubles than before. At this juncture, the Culture proves it has evolved
beyond knee-jerk urges to interfere at all costs: in the Gzilt case, its intervention
is reined in and limited to administrative and rescue operations because armed
action and full disclosure of the ancient Gzilt secret would cause unpredictable
harm. The Gzilt protagonist, Vyr Cossont, symbolizes the same self-control,
attachment to reality and ethical evolution through her choice not to Sublime.
The titular Hydrogen Sonata she slowly and painstakingly learns to play is a
symbol of attachment to a limiting, painful, sometimes even torturing reality
which nevertheless brings rewards. These rewards, however, do not emerge
from some sort of ‘mastering’ the sonata or the instrument it is played on – on
the contrary, one must first be physically altered and then become familiar with
both the instrument and the musical piece in order to perform it. In a parallel to
this, the old four-dimensional non-Sublimed reality is not something to conquer
and master, but something to grow used to, learn its limitations in order to better
appreciate the sweet rewards it supplies. One needs to fully attach oneself
to this kind of limited existence because detachment in the form of Subliming
would mean a complete severing of long-term connections, the irreversible
introduction of an existential and ethical distance that cannot be turned back.
This choice, in the end, is what matters most: does one choose an escape,
a reward, a transcendence resulting in total disconnection, or does one prefer
attachment, continual involvement, the rejection of an overly simplistic final
score? The Culture knows the answers and has already made its choice. Here,
it wages the only possible just war: a war on the principles of detachment,
isolation, disengagement, separation and disconnection. The Hydrogen Sonata
is then – just like every one of Banks’ sf novels – not a tragedy, but a tribute to
the unbroken engagement with the limitations of reality and to the triumphs of

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those who, under the direst of circumstances, persevere in this engagement.

Works Cited

Banks, Iain M. 1988. Consider Phlebas. London: Orbit.

----- 1992. Use of Weapons. London: Orbit.
----- 1993. The State of the Art. London: Orbit.
----- 1997. Excession. London: Orbit.
----- 1999. Inversions. London: Orbit.
----- 2001. Look to Windward. London: Orbit.
----- 2011. Surface Detail. London: Orbit.
----- 2013. The Hydrogen Sonata. London: Orbit.
Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Christopher, Paul. 2004. The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction to Legal
and Moral Issues. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Coates, Anthony J. 1997. The Ethics of War. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Jeffries, Stuart. 2007. ‘A man of culture.’ The Guardian, 25 May. http://www.
theguardian.com/books/2007/may/25/hayfestival2007.hayfestival
(accessed 2 December 2015).
Jackson, Patrick T. and James Heilman. 2008. ‘Outside Context Problems:
Liberalism and the Other in the Work of Iain M. Banks.’ In New
Boundaries in Political Science Fiction. Eds. Donald M. Hassler and
Clyde Wilcox. Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press, 235–
58.
Kerslake, Patricia. 2007. Science Fiction and Empire. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1995. ‘Ethics of the Infinite.’ In Critical Theory: A Reader.
Ed. Douglas Tallack. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 434–
41.
Mendlesohn, Farah. 2005. ‘The Dialectic of Decadence and Utopia in Iain M.
Banks’ Culture Novels’. Foundation 93: 116–24.
Morgan, Michael. 2011. The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rodin, David. 2002. War and Self-Defense. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Singer, Peter. 1993. Practical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stephenson, William. 2013. ‘“Hippies with mega nukes”: The Culture, Terror
and the War Machine in Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games’.
In The Transgressive Iain Banks: Essays on a Writer Beyond Borders.
Eds. Martyn Colebrook and Katharine Cox. Jefferson NC: McFarland,
165–78.
Ward, Patrick. 2008. ‘Interview with Iain Banks: Changing society, imagining

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 the future’. Socialist Review 322. http://socialistreview.org.uk/322/
interview-changing-society-imagining-future (accessed 2 December
2015).

JGB DAY 2016

J. G. Ballard and the Natural World’
School of English, Birmingham City University,
Curzon Building, Saturday 29th October

‘Is there such a thing as authentic “Nature” these days? Or is it now merely an adjunct
to the electronic media, almost a TV gimmick? Is it rapidly turning into a theme park?’

J. G. Ballard’s fictions famously explore the meeting point between the inner world
of the psyche and the outer realm of ‘reality’. Ballard called this convergence ‘inner
space’, a dimension which, in a Romantic echo, is half perceived and half created. This
one-day, interdisciplinary symposium seeks to understand the importance of Ballard’s
works as we enter into (or continue on in) the age of the Anthropocene. What do
Ballard’s vivid depictions of flora and fauna, or their disturbing absence, have to say
to a world that is obsessed with images of plant and animal life, but is destroying the
same at an unprecedented rate? How do Ballard’s landscapes, transformed by human
mismanagement and/or the imagination, speak to concerns about our rapidly changing
climate? What hope does the power of the imagination, central to so much of Ballard’s
writing, offer in terms of anthropogenesis – and what dangers might it disguise?

250-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations are invited, and both creative and critical
responses are welcomed. Themes might include, but are not limited to:

l Ballard and ecology

l War and the environment
l Animals/plant-life/the natural world in Ballard’s fiction
l Ecology and the city
l Ballard and the weather
l The mind/world dyad
l Sight and sound in a changing world
l Nature and mediation

Please send proposals and any questions to [email protected].

The deadline for abstracts is the 4th of September 2016.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.