Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding
The citizens of the Culture are generally enhanced, or are AIs.
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Fair enough. I haven't read the Culture novels (well, except for the first chapter of a couple I started and bounced off of), but I think from general cultural osmosis I have a picture of what they involve. It seems to me that they still involve humans (or at least people we can relate to, even if they aren't biologically human) having adventures, and problems are addressed by human capability, not merely by having better technology. And as I understand it, while its possible to modify humans with Culture tech, most characters don't radically do so - Transhuman Space-style cybershells and radical biological engineering aren't the norm. Is that correct?
I guess I should correct my earlier statement anyway - I don't so much mean that "technology can't improve the individual human" as "Technology shouldn't
overshadow the individual human". That is, when a problem is solved, it should feel like it
mattered that the character who solved it was there, and not that anyone with access to the same tools could have done as well. Similarly, you can have things like strong AI, as long as they either perform about as well as humans do, or are limited by circumstances or design so they can't solve all humans' problems (which I understand is sort of the situation with the Minds from the Culture - they're vastly powerful, but not so omnipotent that they can just make human effort unnecessary - they can do stuff from light-years away, but require the human on the spot to ask them to do that, usually. Again, correct me if I'm wrong.).