The Culture (novel series)
Banks, Iain M. In Wikipedia's list of the series:
Consider Phlebas (1987) The Player of Games (1988) Use of Weapons (1990) The State of the Art (1991) Excession (1996) Inversions (1998) Look to Windward (2000) Matter (2008) Surface Detail (2010) The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)[1]
Available in numerous forms, but for initial publication London: Orbit. For these and other print editions, and additional publishers (and a couple additional novels), see the Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase at link.[2]
Significant here primarily for AI as characters: "As well as humans and other biological species, sentient artificial intelligences are also members of the Culture. These can be broadly categorised into drones and Minds. Also, by custom, as described in Excession, any artefact [...] above a certain capability level has to be given sentience." The Drones, in the reading of the Wikipedia author(s) "are roughly comparable in intelligence and social status to that of the Culture's biological members,"[3] while Minds "are orders of magnitude more powerful and intelligent than the Culture's other biological and artificial citizens." Note that a main type of Minds is Ship Minds: "A culture spaceship is the Mind and vice versa [...], and a spaceship without a Mind would be considered damaged or incomplete to the Culture," and we may see the ship as a body for the Mind.[4] For such entities, cf. and contrast such works as Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, J. McElroy's Plus, and K. O'Donnell's Mayflies. Minds may also be other than ships, e.g., maintaining and supervising Orbital Hubs (like as a ringworld, only smaller), or running a university.[5]
The Culture is emphatically high-tech, with antigravity, nanotechnology,[6] and other advances over our world, as necessary for a post-scarcity society, a eutopian aspect of the Culture.[7]
The Culture has been of interest to critics, for a brief example of which see the review of Matter by Paul Kincaid, SFRA Review #286 (Fall 2008): p18.[8]
Discussed in Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, and James Heilman's "Outside Context Problems: Liberalism and the Other in the Works of Ian M. Banks" in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction, Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, editors (Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina Press, 2008: [235]-258).
Look to Windward is succinctly handled by Karen Hellekson in SFRA Review #248 (Sept./Oct. 2000): 26, as of April 2023 possibly available here (which Google Chrome blocks as an unsecure address despite the "https").[9]
RDE, finishing, 18Jan21, 28Dec21; 30Ap23