*disclaimer* The following is not my work it is just information form wikipedia.
The Culture is characterized as 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, extremely 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,
In vesting all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, AI Minds, Banks knew what he was doing; this is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved, by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control. The danger involved in this imaginative step, though, is clear; one of the problems with the Culture novels as novels is that the central characters, the Minds, are too powerful and, to put it bluntly, too good.[2]
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 Culture's dirty work in moving those societies closer to the Culture ideal, sometimes by force.
Fictional history[edit]
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 2970, with Earth being contacted around AD 2100, though the Culture had covertly visited the planet in the 1970s in The State of the Art. In Use of Weapons, it is also clear from her reference to gas chambers, the electric chair, and the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment", that agent Diziet Sma had visited the U.S. during her visits to Earth between AD 1976 to AD 1978.
The Culture itself is described as having been created when several humanoid species and machine sentiences reached a certain social level, and took not only their physical, but also their civilizational evolution into their own hands. In The Player of Games, the Culture is described as having existed as a space-faring society for eleven thousand years. In The Hydrogen Sonata, one of these founding civilisations was named as the Buhdren Federality.
Society and culture[edit]
Capability[edit]
The Culture is a symbiotic society of artificial intelligences (AIs) (Minds and drones), humanoids and other alien species who all share equal status. As mentioned above, all essential work is performed (as far as possible) by non-sentient devices, freeing sentients to do only things that they enjoy (administrative work requiring sentience is undertaken by the AIs using a bare fraction of their mental power, or by people who take on the work out of free choice). As such, the Culture is also a post-scarcity society, where technological advances ensure that no one lacks any material goods or services. As a consequence, the Culture has no need of economic constructs such as money (as is apparent when it deals with civilizations in which money is still important). The Culture rejects all forms of economics based on anything other than voluntary activity. "Money is a sign of poverty" is a common saying in the Culture.
Language[edit]
Marain is the Culture's shared constructed language. The Culture believes (or perhaps has proved, or else actively made true) the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language influences thought, and Marain was designed by early Minds to
