updated 4mo ago
The Transgressive Iain Banks: Essays on a Writer Beyond Borders
In the Culture universe, all forms of sentient life, including AIs and non-humanoid life forms, have what Banks calls a soul.
from The Transgressive Iain Banks: Essays on a Writer Beyond Borders by Katharine Cox
The Culture itself, a post-scarcity anarchist/socialist techno-utopia, incorporates elements of utopian fiction into a traditionally conservative, rightwing sub-genre, and helped to “reclaim space opera for the left”
from The Transgressive Iain Banks: Essays on a Writer Beyond Borders by Katharine Cox
Lededje’s resurrection back into the Real (used in Banks’ novel to describe a real-life physical environment as opposed to a virtual one)
from The Transgressive Iain Banks: Essays on a Writer Beyond Borders by Katharine Cox
In Surface Detail, souls are described as “mind-states [...] dynamic full-brain inventories”
from The Transgressive Iain Banks: Essays on a Writer Beyond Borders by Katharine Cox
“the proliferation of the technologies dedicated to information and communication comprise an extension, outside the body, of the central nervous system: that elaborate, electrical message-processing system”
from The Transgressive Iain Banks: Essays on a Writer Beyond Borders by Katharine Cox
most species in the Culture novels chose to “die” eventually: “It was quite a rare species that naturally generated individuals capable of being able, or wanting, to live indefinitely” (Banks 2010, 128).
from The Transgressive Iain Banks: Essays on a Writer Beyond Borders by Katharine Cox