Build and host other ships, including smaller Systems Vehicles. Mobile habitats and factory ships, largest and most capable Culture ship type. For example, the Sleeper Service is a sleeper agent whose cover is storing people in suspended animation 'sleeper service', and the Grey Area indulges in the (from the Culture's perspective) moral grey-area of reading the brains (' grey matter') of organic entities to root out historical genocidal acts.Ĭommon ship types in the Culture series include: Some ships' names hint at their purpose, but in a way that is not clear until near the end of the book.

A few of the ship names, like variations on 'gravitas', are also installments in running gags. 'General Systems Vehicles' as a designation does not highlight the true potency of these craft, which could be hundreds of kilometres long.īanks composed many of the Culture ships' names very carefully to express the attitude of the ship's Mind, and a few names contain puns where both meanings are appropriate to the ship's attitude. The classification of the ship types sometimes implies a degree of cultural embarrassment of the power they can potentially wield, for example their renaming of Demilitarised Rapid Offensive Units ((D)ROUs) as 'Very Fast Pickets', whether or not they are actually 'Demilitarised', while later the term 'picket ship' is used to describe an Abominator-class General Offensive Unit, one of the most powerful front-line warship classes ever built by the Culture. Warship names are similar in retaining the whimsical nature, though the humour tends to be more cynical and threatening. The Minds choose their own names, and thus they usually express something about a particular Mind's attitude, character or aims in their personal life. The machine intelligences called Minds (and, as a consequence, the Culture starships that they inhabit) usually bear names that do a little more than just identify them.

Excession by iain m banks