Themes
- Lasers - Vavatch orbital destruction.
- Reflections on tech and AI - The Culture background and State of Play interludes.
- GSV & CAT - piloting and design.
Thoughts
Love the Fal ‘Ngeestra “state of play” interludes. A secondary reader reflecting on what we see in a different light and adding more context. A wise one, aided by technology, delving deep into philosophy and psychology, ultimately valued for inspiration, creativity and wisdom.
Technique
The Command Systems: Engines is a fantastic chapter with the ratcheting tension of many different perspectives. Having begun by bringing most of the perspectives together in a shared dialogue, it then divides them into interesting groups and accelerates the transitions between them as the tension ratchets. Who is betraying whom? When will disaster strike? The near misses of the loose restraints, the faulty camera, the Mind’s location. By contrast to the early chapters of dense sections and paragraphs describing endless detail, this chapter was all action. The detail had been given early… the picture of the tunnels and trains and the characters’ exhaustion was clear. It was all set up to build a crescendo of action.
Quotes
[172-173 - Idiran vs Culture] Horza didn't believe in the Idirans' religion any more than Balveda had, and indeed he could see in its over-deliberate, too-planned ideals exactly the sort of life-constricting forces he so despised in the Culture's initially more benign ethos. But the Idirans relied on themselves, not on their machines, and so they were still part of life. To him, that made all the difference.
Horza knew the Idirans would never subdue all the less-developed civilizations in the galaxy; their dreamed-of day of judgment would never come. But the very certainty of that ultimate defeat made the Idirans safe, made them normal, made them part of the general life of the galaxy; just one more species, which would grow and expand and then, finding the plateau phase all non-suicidal species eventually arrved at, settle down. In ten thousand years the Idirans would be just another civilization, getting on with their own lives. The current era of conquests might be fondly remembered, but it would be irelevant by then, explained away by some creative theology. They had been quiet and introspective before; so they would be again.
In the end, they were rational. They listened to common sense before their own emotions. The only thing they believed without proof was that there was a purpose to life, that there was something which was translated in most languages as "God," and that that God wanted a better existence for His creations. At the moment they pursued this goal themselves, believed themselves to be the arms and hands and fingers of God. But when the time came they would be able to assimilate the realization that they'd got it wrong, that it was not up to them to bring about the final order. They would themselves become calm; they would find their own place. The galaxy and its many and varied civilizations would assimilate them.
The Culture was different. Horza could see no end to its policy of continual and escalating interference. It could easily grow forever, because it was not governed by natural limitations. Like a rogue cell, a cancer with no "off" switch in its genetic composition, the Culture would go on expanding for as long as it was allowed to. It would not stop of its own accord, so it had to be stopped.
[282-283 - Orbital Destruction] Gridfire struck the Orbital. Horza paused and watched the screen as it lit up suddenly, fashing once over its whole surface until the sensors coped with the sudden increase in brilliance and compensated. For some reason Horza had thought the Culture would just splash the gridfire all over the massive Orbital and then spatter the remains with CAM, but they didn't do that; instead a single narrow line of blinding white light appeared right across the breadeh of the day side of the Orbital, a thin fiery blade of silent destruction which was instantly surrounded by the duller but still perfectly white cover of clouds. That line of light was part of the grid itsef, the fabric of pure energy which lay underneath the entire universe, separating this one from the slightly younger, slightly smaller antimatter universe beneath. The Culture, like the Idirans, could now partially control that awesome power, at least sufficiently to use it for the purposes of destruction. A line of that energy, plucked from nowhere and sliced across the face of the three-dimensional universe, was down there: on and inside the Orbital, boiling the Circlesea, melting the two thousand kilometers of transparent wall, annihilating the base material itself, straight across its thirty-five-thousand-kilometer breadth. Vavatch, that fourteen-million-kilometer hoop, was starting to uncoil. A chain, it had been cut.
There was nothing left now to hold it together; its own spin, the sure of both its day-night cycle and its artificial gravity, was now Ade very force tearing it all apart. At about one hundred and thirty kilometers per second, Vavatch was throwing itself into outer space, unwinding like a released spring.
The livid line of fire appeared again, and again, and again, working is way methodically round the Orbital from where the original burst had struck, neatly parceling the entire Orbital into squares, thirty-fve thousand kilometers to a side, each containing a sandwich of trillions upon trillions of tons of ultradense base material, water, land and air.
Vaatch was turning white. First the gridfire seared the water into a border of clouds; then the outrushing air, spilling from each immense flat square like heavy fumes off a table, turned its load of water vapor to ice. The ocean itself, no longer held by the spin force, was shifting, spilling with infinite slowness over one edge of every plate of ruptured base material, becoming ice and swirling away into space.
The precise, brilliant line of fire marched on, going back in reverse-spin direction, neatly dissecting the still curved, still spinning sections of the Orbital with its sudden, lethal flashes of light -- light from outside the normal fabric of reality.
[295 - Orbital Lessons] The Culture had not wasted its lesson to the Idirans and the rest of the galatic community. It had turned even that ghastly waste of effort and skil into a thing of beauty.... But it was a message it would regret, Horzath ought, as the hyper-light sped and the ordinary light crawled through the galaxy.
This was what the Culture offered, this was its signal, its adver-tisement, its legacy: chaos from order, destruction from construction, death from life. Vavatch would be more than its own monument; it would com-memorate, too, the final, grisly manifestation of the Culture's lethal idealism, the overdue acknowledgment that not only was it no better than any other society, it was much, much worse.
They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement...
[308-309 - Hyperspace] Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above. the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of the inky overcast like glinting eyes: singly, in pairs, or in larger groups, each positioned far, far away from any other set.
That is the view a ship has in hyperspace as it flies like a microscopic insect, free between the energy grid and real space.
The small, sharp lights on the undersurface of the cloud cover are stars; the waves on the sea are the irregularities of the Grid on which a ship traveling in hyperspace finds traction with its engine fields, while that sparkle is its source of energy. The Grid and the plain of real space are curved, rather like the ocean and the cloud would be round a planet, but less so. Black holes show as thin and twisting waterspouts from clouds to sea; supernovae as long lightning flashes in the overcast. Rocks, moons, planets, Orbitals, even Rings and Spheres, hardly show at all.
[464 - Too Civilised To Hate] It was the Culture’s fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The idea was fine as long as you didn’t get too close, but once you had spent some time with your opponents, such empathy could turn against you. There was a sort of detached, non-human aggression required to go along with such mobilized compassion, and Balveda could feel it slipping away from her.