I should really read some of The Culture series.
About it:
The attraction of Orbitals is their matter efficiency. For one planet the size of Earth (population 6 billion at the moment; mass 6x1024 kg), it would be possible, using the same amount of matter, to build 1,500 full orbitals, each one boasting a surface area twenty times that of Earth and eventually holding a maximum population of perhaps 50 billion people (the Culture would regard Earth at present as over-crowded by a factor of about two, though it would consider the land-to-water ratio about right). Not, of course, that the Culture would do anything as delinquent as actually deconstructing a planet to make Orbitals; simply removing the sort of wandering debris (for example comets and asteroids) which the average solar system comes equipped with and which would threaten such an artificial world's integrity through collision almost always in itself provides sufficient material for the construction of at least one full Orbital (a trade-off whose conservatory elegance is almost blissfully appealing to the average Mind), while interstellar matter in the form of dust clouds, brown dwarfs and the like provides more distant mining sites from which the amount of mass required for several complete Orbitals may be removed with negligible effect.
Source: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
This is so much more elegant than a ringworld.
http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
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They are a blast, but the story-structures are all over the place, so they're not all a blast in anything like the same way. I, for instance, adore Player of Games but was largely indifferent to Consider Phlebas, as a matter of taste.
ReplyDeleteI do love the way Banks expresses hope, though: "while the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once."
yeah, the Culture books are pretty boss. Agree with Tony Lower-Basch that they're kinda all over the place tho and I don't think there's any kind of fannish consensus over which one is the best.
ReplyDeleteExcession was the one that didn't work for me super good but I loved the first three and enjoyed every other one.
Brilliant stuff. I mooched ship names from the Culture for my Earthdawn campaign, when they went to Cathay.
ReplyDeleteThey are all over the place. If you want to get into them, I strongly recommend commiting to reading at least two if not three before deciding if they're "for you."
ReplyDelete