Our hope is transcendent or it is mundane: at one extreme we see the possibility of existence getting better involving only a reality beyond this universe that is greater than it and somehow makes everything better; at the other we see the possibility of things getting better involving only us. It is a profound distinction, and where a person stands between these poles is a facet of their essence. The interaction between these views forms one of the great modern dialectics and may have been with us since the beginning - perhaps thirteen thousand years ago there were those who spoke of the need to sacrifice to the gods and of their vengeance if the band moved away from the sacred sites, and those who spoke of better food to be found on the horizon where the rain clouds gathered. These forms of hope are naturally tied to attitudes about causing change: where hope is transcendent there is likely to be faith in the order of things and caution at interfering, where hope is mundane there is faith in our ability to change things and there may be a willingness to start the process. Perhaps both forces are necessary to keep us at the speed for progression - too fast and we would fly apart, too slow and we would stagnate. Perhaps thirteen thousand years ago there were those who kept the hungry band alive by evoking tradition against those who argued for eating the new yellow fruit which had started growing in the third year of warmth.

From the Enlightenment until the sixties more and more of our stories of our future have had less and less of the transcendent in them. In these stories, we build a better world and we do it without help. As with our stories, so with our politics: if emperor gods and the divine right of kings were the thesis, then communism was the antithesis; today, in our stories and our politics, we seek the synthesis. In doing so our dreams of a golden future come not from utopian preachers, but science fiction. Here, again and again, we are given histories which span anything from a local now and its near future to the entirety of spacetime. These give the primary means by which we consider different settings for our world. There are a countless number of possible worlds, and science fiction is making a strong attempt to catalogue every interesting type discernible by us. Most suggests a Godless universe, in the sense of there not being an omnipotent creator, but many talk of some kind of spiritual element which hints at a bigger reality. The essential paradigm in much science fiction is evolutionary: the universe is treated as a single biosphere (Greg Bear talks of life at the end of universe using the energy of certain galaxies which had 'failed to seed' just as we might burn coal as matter which had failed to achieve sentience); it is assumed that life will come together and grow and that above us there are (or will be) intellects and spirits beyond our comprehension; the end result is often portrayed as the possibility of all life in our universe coming together into something with godlike powers.

Unlike important works of literature, important works of science fiction seldom last throu' time - this is not because science fiction is inferior but because it improves on itself over time in a way that literature does not. The former builds on itself, leaving behind its earlier versions; the latter has long been after the same elusive and profound truths. (Even so, there is some sort of progress in literature: Homer and Shakespeare still speak greatly to us, but much that is in Homer has been left behind.) I think it unlikely a book could ever be great by succeeding as science fiction alone. To do so it would require a visionary who would surely put their talents to more practical use. (One of the most brilliant originators of ideas today is Greg Bear; but he is not a genius, his ideas will not change history.) It is notable that perhaps the only science fiction novels which have lasted from the first half of the last century, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-four, were written by writers primarily known for their other writing.

Iain M. Banks is one of the finest contemporary science fiction writers, he is also a writer who came to fame (as Iain Banks) as a writer of ordinary fiction. He specialises in visions of our far future and paints grand pictures of cosmic proportion. His greatest creation is the Culture, a galaxy spanning society, which is explored so far in six novels and a book of short stories. The Culture is the Enlightenment project brought to fruition. It is made up of trillions of humans and sentient machines, the machines have equal rights to people and range from having the character of a simpleton to being incomprehensibly intelligent. These super brains are called Minds and run things in the interests of everybody concerned; they are as efficient as any good technocrat could expect, and they genuinely seek the greatest good for the greatest number while almost always, if not always, respecting the individual rights of Culture citizens. In the Culture the greatest good is interpreted in a simplistically utilitarian way: pleasure rules - simple yes-saying (they are not philistines, tho', the arts and learning and building bring them pleasure).

Banks ensures the answer he wants, because the Culture has taken complete control of itself: it should be every green's worst nightmare - total genetic engineering, but it's not, it's a wonderful dream. Culture bodies are to ours as a new Bentley is to an original Model-T Ford: it's not so much that they are super fast and strong (tho' they are faster and stronger), rather that they are more luxurious and efficient. At puberty Culture bodies grow glands in the brain which with the right mental command will reproduce virtually any drug effect known in the galaxy, this is not just hedonistically pleasurable - calm removes anger, remembrance holds a memory, sharp blue is an abstraction-modifier which makes the complex simple; from an enormous pallet, they colour their sentience at will. A manual for someone newly given a Culture body would include the details that should they now wish to change sex (which most Culture citizens do on a regular basis) they have simply to introspect until they find a particular internal picture they have of themselves and click the mental button next to it that changes its sex - over the following couple of months the alteration will gradually happen; the manual would mention that they have been 'replumbed' so that orgasms can last for as long as desired; and that from now on if they are hurt in an accident, they can easily stop the pain; they would read that they can feel energetic or tired at will (tho' the books must be balanced in the end - but only by rest, not suffering); and that their senses now are as much better than before as an expensive modern camera is to the cheapest disposable. And of course one does not have to stick with an ordinary body: the Culture provides its citizens with virtually anything the imagination can come up with from the simple attachment of golden wings (tho' you'll have to live in a low gravity environment if you want them to work), to transforming one into a sentient cloud. Banks' enumeration of such built in gadgets is enough to send shivers down the spine of the most demanding technophiles. Genetic engineers, who at the dawn of their profession have already successfully taken the ability to make antifreeze from certain fish and have given it to new breeds of tomato, read this sort of science fiction; these ideas are starting a line which may lead to the inheritors of those engineers embarking on the path Banks has laid out.

The Culture is an exception to the galactic norm - most life forms that evolve as far as the Culture, do something called subliming. This is a kind of secular apotheosis whereby whoever does it, be they individual or society, becomes immune to harm and in some way immensely knowing and powerful; however, there is a price to pay - one loses the interest, or possibly the ability, to interfere in the workings of the galaxy one still in some way inhabits. Like the Buddhist conception of enlightenment, it can seem quite a selfish state; unlike it, no one comes back to help, beyond the odd cryptic message. (This was the case until the most recent book in which the leaders of one species claims its sublimed 'elders' had made certain, as it turned out calamitous, requests of them - i suspect the leaders of lying, but Banks may be introducing new elements to the idea.) It is certainly the case that the sublimed do nothing useful, they stand by while innocents are destroyed by either the wicked, the misguided, or blind nature - the Culture considers this immoral and so refuses to sublime, insisting on staying around to help the less fortunate. Having fulfilled this duty, to do all they can to alleviate suffering, they seek to fulfil the adjacent duty, to do all they can to generate pleasure - their own.

Banks uses the Culture novels to test modern liberal values against the forces that challenge them today. The Culture novels are: Consider Phlebas (1987) which examines religious fundamentalism; The Player of Games (1988) where the enemy is traditional evil - a fascist empire (ruling over two thousand stars) with a formalised sadistic (sexual and non-sexual) power structure; The Use of Weapons (1990) which is the study of a mercenary who works for the Culture fighting the wars and doing the dirty work it cannot be seen to be involved in - unlike the other novels, it is primarily a human story and is not greatly concerned with the Culture as an idea; Excession (1996) where the Culture is up against both traditional brutality - an empire not quite as nasty as the evil one, they enjoy the suffering they cause but not sexually, they are more like a bunch of boisterous well-bred thugs, and it is up against itself in that even in the Culture there is the need for a sort of secret service, Special Circumstances, and even in the Culture this can sometimes produce nastiness (all with the best intentions, of course); finally, in Look to Windward (2000), the enemy are rather like the American religious right as you would expect them to be if they had ruled without challenge for a millennium or so, that is much the same values with the addition of a rigid caste system.

Works of science fiction are much more open to emendation after they have been finished than literature other than poetry. One might ask of the hero of A la recherche du temps perdu 'can a person really have such a relationship with jealousy' (yes), and 'are his claims to be virtually the only heterosexual in an inverted world credible' (no, as the hero himself tells us). One can easily imagine that Proust, if his death had been pushed back allowing him greater time to spend on his book, might have rewritten it until it was something almost unrecognisable from the work we have today - the process of remembering might have brought forth new material which made him see the rest in a different light, and he might have changed his mind about how he wished to present his ideas; but it is harder to imagine him going back in later novels to change the facts of A la recherche -Charlus was a misunderstood sweety all along- and how could we believe him anyway after the path he has led us? The important facts of literature are personal ones, and if the writer's view of people changes, new books are written with new characters inhabiting them. The important facts of science fiction are worldly: the writer is trying to model a world, not the people in it; but a world is less easy to replace than a person. Similar human types exist in different people, but when two worlds are sufficiently similar they are the same - fictional differences of name and location are irrelevant (an academic philosopher would say that a person is a token, a world is a type). Thus science fiction writers, like Banks, who build up a world over a series of books are either imprisoned by their original vision or they have to bite the bullet and accept the discontinuities that come from making changes. Some change can be accommodated by time (the Culture novels span thousands of years, for example), but time cannot accommodate all of it. For Banks the Culture is an evolving concept - the problems of how we will deal with a technology that can deny death and how more advanced societies can help less advanced ones, for example, are hard ones; and it would be unreasonable not to allow him to change his mind (the same applies to us: we are entitled to challenge what we are told, to doubt that Banks has got all his facts right). The books, therefore, should be seen as sketches of a world which is steadily being presented more and more accurately, not as pieces to be joined together to make a bigger picture. The titles of the first and the most recent Culture novels are taken from The Waste Land (" Gentile or Jew/ O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,/ Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you."). This may mean that Banks has had enough of the Culture for the moment and intends to move on, if so others will move into the territory - he has created something too big and too seductive to be left alone for long.

His other two novels are Against a Dark Background and Feersum Endjinn. The first is a study of a human world that has grown into technological sophistication around a lone star between galaxies that is so far from anywhere else that, super-fast space flight or no, its people are on their own. It is a story of growing up without being to grow out (growing out, expanding into space and finding (or building) and filling other worlds, is considered by most science fiction writers to be an essential part of our future should we survive - such a course will not appeal to all but it is undeniable that expanding outwards is what we have always done, and that as i write the biggest-ever space station is being built and manned trips to Mars planned). Feersum Endjinn is one of Banks' most subtle books and one of his most complexly structured - more than any other it needs to be read twice unless the reader can remember the large amount that will make no sense to them until they near the end of the book. It is the story of Earth's future in which it is populated by those of our descendants who did not leave for the stars. At sometime in history (our future) those who aspired to something greater left the Earth to fulfil their higher destiny, this is the story of the world left behind. If the Culture is the Enlightenment project brought to completion, this is the story of the forces of reaction given all the time and money and freedom they need. In Feersum Endjinn Banks describes a feudal society in sick symbiosis with the computer (in contrast with the Culture where there is a healthy symbiosis). It is a society that lives much of its time in computer reality (one up from virtual reality: one's mind actually enters it). The physical world is considered superior, it is the one people aspire to, but it is tied together by computers, and the computers are tied together by a system which rests upon an ocean of computer based sentience known as the crypt (or cryptosphere or data corpus). People spend much of their recreational time in computer reality, they send copies of themselves into it to protect their interests, it is where they are taken between the time they die and when they are given a new body, and it is the place they spend eighty subjective years in the three days between their seventh and final death and their delivery to the crypt and its judgement. This judgement is not moral but practical: what is original survives - those parts of one's persona which are taken from outside dissolve, they already exist in the crypt and their duplication is unnecessary, only that which comes from within a person, which is original, survives. It is this knowledge that keeps people striving to improve themselves and ensures that they keep in line.

Each of the two cultures tend to look down upon the other. I say that we need each as much as we need both progressives and reactionaries. The profound depths of human feeling and memory matter; and the speculations, practical and phantastic, about where we are going and how things could work matter. It is time for the two sides to come together, and while such things cannot be legislated for, it would be a start if there was a physical coming together. A series of joint conferences might do more to stimulate creativity than all the seminars of like-minded experts have ever done. If friendships were made across the divide there might emerge some fascinating collaborations - one party could provide the world for the novel, the other the people and story that are in it, even better would be both sides motivating and inspiring each other. Further, many works of science fiction are ripe for rewriting. Musicians are happy enough to give their interpretations of other people's music, but novelists rarely want to tell another's story or use someone else's world. I would love, for example, to see Ian McEwen's style and concision applied to David Brin's fascinating but overlong Uplift series. (After all, this is the way stories were originally told - verbally, with each teller adding and reshaping as they thought fit.)