Matter

Author: Iain M. Banks

Strictly speaking, Banksâ€™s Culture novels have nothing to do with posthumanity, since the humans of Earth are no part of the Culture, and many of the novels are actually theoretically set in our past. Nevertheless, the dominant biological race within the Culture is human, and many of the themes and ideas of posthumanity that we have laid out in this list emerge seamlessly in these novels. Thus machine intelligence, the AIs or Minds that control the ships and orbitals of the Culture, is fully part of Culture society. The body is no longer a restriction: as in Triton, people can and do change gender at will. Body modifications, as in Man Plus, are commonplace, and can be very imaginative: in Matter one character has taken on the appearance of a bush. As in Diaspora or Accelerando humans interface with machines constantly, personalities can be downloaded readily, and digital storage is one way that Culture citizens have developed to avoid death. And, as in Natural History, at the end of the day there is the prospect of Subliming, of being translated into an 11-dimensional state of existence and leaving the Real behind. Why itâ€™s on the list: Without it ever being the focus of any of the novels, every volume in the Culture sequence is filled with images that are familiar from posthuman science fiction. In other words, the Culture makes the posthuman normal.