h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The Culture is explicitly *not* a future, relative to us here and now.

"Consider Phlebas" is set in, IIRC, about 1370. "The State of the Art" is set on and around Earth in 1977. The Culture is supposed to exist in THIS galaxy, NOW, is supposed to have existed in more or less its current form for some thousands of years already.

Other than that -

Oh, I didn't know that. Thank you.

Now I'm near my library again - from the appendix to "Consider Phlebas":

"The first Idiran-Culture dispute occurred in 1267 AD; the second in 1288; in 1289 the Culture built its first genuine warship for five centuries..."

The Idiran-Culture war "officially" began in 1327. It was a small, short war (i.e. it lasted only 48 years and killed a little over 851 billion 'people' (humans, Idirans, medjel and sentient machines).

It was only when I read State of the Art I realised that these dates referred to the Earth calendar. Earth is never mentioned in "Consider Phlebas", and indeed it's possible the Culture is, at that point, unaware of life on Earth.

How can they be humans, then, if the Culture has not yet encountered the Earth?

"...how can they be humans... ...?"

It takes but a little displacement in time. Taking a 'hyperspatial' jump as a macroscopic quantum jump, displacement in time comes inevitably with a quantum transition in space.

Interesting question.

Banks has acknowledged it, but dodged it, to date. Fundamentally, the Culture is made up of two broad classes of "person", or perhaps three if you're not being so organism-centric:

1. AIs, who I'm sure would insist that they in fact represent TWO classes: drones and similar, which are of comparable sentience to humans, and Minds, which are considerably more powerful.

2. "pan-humans".

Most of the *biological* Culture citizens are pan-human. In the Culture 'verse, things with human body-plan and similar biology are pretty ubiquitous. It never seems to come as a surprise to Contact that they've found yet another planet where everyone looks a lot like them and they can breathe the air and eat the food. There are of course also many, many other inhabited planets where they need MAJOR modification or tech to even move around ("home" planets of the Affront, for example), and many people who can tolerate the same atmosphere who look a LOT different (Chelgrians, Homomda, Idirans, medjel, etc.).

In 'Player of Games', there's a pan-human civilisation in one of the Magellanic Clouds, not even part of this galaxy, and there are hints that Thrial, the human-inhabited planet on which "Against A Dark Background" is set, is in the Culture 'verse, albeit entirely isolated millions of ly from any galaxy.

The real world reason for always using humans is obvious - we're humans, we wanna read about ourselves, and we'll let things like how realistic that is in a galactic context go.

Banks has hinted that there is an *in-universe* reason for the ubiquity of humans in his 'verse, but to my knowledge has never even hinted what the reason is.

http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

Banks wrote "A Few Notes on the Culture".

A quote from it:

"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. "

Tantalising...