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iain m banks - In which galaxy (or galaxies) are The Culture present?


They have ships that can travel really fast and really far, but galaxies are big. Have they spread to more than one galaxy?


Is the name of the galaxy known? And how far is it from the Milky Way (if it is a different galaxy)?



Answer




The Culture novels are set in the Milky Way galaxy.


Iain M Banks wrote the following in an essay called "A Few Notes on The Culture" that was posted to a newsgroup by his friend Ken Mcleod



The galaxy (our galaxy) in the Culture stories is a place long lived-in, and scattered with a variety of life-forms. In its vast and complicated history it has seen waves of empires, federations, colonisations, die-backs, wars, species-specific dark ages, renaissances, periods of mega-structure building and destruction, and whole ages of benign indifference and malign neglect. At the time of the Culture stories, there are perhaps a few dozen major space-faring civilisations, hundreds of minor ones, tens of thousands of species who might develop space-travel, and an uncountable number who have been there, done that, and have either gone into locatable but insular retreats to contemplate who-knows-what, or disappeared from the normal universe altogether to cultivate lives even less comprehensible.




No mention in any of the books is made of The Culture having a permanent presence in another galaxy, but they have been shown to visit other galaxies. For example Jernau Morat Gurgeh in Player of Games travels from The Culture to the Empire of Azad in the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 200,000 light years away, it takes Gurgeh about 2 years to make the trip.


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