Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 44. Chapters: Consider Phlebas, Excession, Idiran-Culture War, Orbital, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, The State of the Art, Look to Windward, Diziet Sma, Inversions, Culture series, List of species, List of ships, Ship types, Mind, Special Circumstances, Matter, Surface Detail, GSV Sleeper Service, The Sublimed, Bora Horza Gobuchul, GCU Grey Area, Contact, GSV Bora Horza Gobuchul, Perosteck Balveda. Excerpt: The Culture is a fictional interstellar anarchic, socialist, and utopian society created by the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks which features in a number of science fiction novels and works of short fiction by him, collectively called the Culture series. The Culture is characterized by being a post-scarcity society (meaning that its advanced technologies provide practically limitless material wealth and comforts for everyone for free, having all but abolished the concept of possessions), by having overcome almost all physical constraints on life (including disease and death) and by being an almost totally egalitarian, stable society without the use of any form of force or compulsion, except where necessary to protect others. Minds, powerful artificial intelligences, have an important role to play in this society. They administer this affluence for the benefit of all. As one commentator has said, The novels of the Culture cycle, therefore, mostly deal with people at the fringes of the Culture: diplomats, spies, or mercenaries; those who interact with other civilizations, and who do the Cultures dirty work in moving those societies closer to the Culture ideal, sometimes by force. In this fictional universe, the Culture exists concurrently with human society on Earth. The time frame for the published Culture stories is from roughly AD 1300 to AD 2800, with Earth being contacted around AD 2100, though the Culture had...