GSV "Yet more Gravitas"'s page

About GSV "Yet more Gravitas"

General Systems Vehicle:

General Systems Vehicles (GSVs) are the "Culture's" largest type of ship, ranging between 25 km and 200 km in each dimension (including the fields protecting them and forming the exterior of their life-support system). GSVs which provide accommodation for biological members of the Culture generally have populations in the millions or billions, and can be considered worlds in their own right. However, they are also, with some lead time, able to transform into massive factories or warships. In one of the Culture novels (Excession), a GSV unloads its organic population and transforms itself into a very fast-moving shipyard/mothership, effectively deciding the outcome of the main plot thread.

In the Culture novel (Surface Detail) Veppers is informed that a single large GSV would be able to combat a fleet of 230,000,000 simple warships - representative of the combined force of an entire lesser civilisation - alone.

GSVs generally have little resemblance to traditional 'ship' design expectations, as they are enveloped in multitudes of fields which allow them to dispense with anything resembling an outer protective hull or shell, instead often being covered with parks and outside buildings.

Their layers serve different purposes - from atmosphere containment, foreign object barriers and sensory input/signalling to traction fields for interstellar movement.

GSVs are so complex and so vital to the Culture that they are described as generally being controlled by three Minds. So far (2008) Banks generally assumes that a GSV's three Minds agree on major issues, but has also explored the possibility and consequences of major disagreements, which can result in the losing Mind(s) being forced off the ship and the winning Mind(s) taking full control.

About "The Culture"

The Culture is characterized by being a post-scarcity society (meaning that its advanced technologies provide practically limitless material wealth and comforts for everyone for free, having all but abolished the concept of possessions), by having overcome almost all physical constraints on life (including disease and death) and by being an almost totally egalitarian, stable society without the use of any form of force or compulsion, except where necessary to protect others.
Minds, powerful artificial intelligences, have an important role to play in this society. They administer this affluence for the benefit of all. As one commentator has said,
In vesting all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, AI Minds, Banks knew what he was doing; this is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved, by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control. The danger involved in this imaginative step, though, is clear; one of the problems with the Culture novels as novels is that the central characters, the Minds, are too powerful and, to put it bluntly, too good.

The novels of the Culture cycle, therefore, mostly deal with people at the fringes of the Culture: diplomats, spies, or mercenaries; those who interact with other civilizations, and who do the Culture's dirty work in moving those societies closer to the Culture ideal, sometimes by force.

About "Minds"

Minds
Main article: Mind (The Culture)
By contrast to drones, Minds are orders of magnitude more powerful and intelligent than the Culture's other biological and artificial citizens. Typically they inhabit and act as the controllers of large-scale Culture hardware such as ships or space-based habitats. Unsurprisingly, given their duties, Minds are tremendously powerful: capable of running all of the functions of a ship or habitat, while holding potentially millions of simultaneous conversations with the citizens that live aboard them. To allow them to perform at such a high degree, they exist partially in hyperspace to get around hindrances to computing power such as the speed of light.
During the time of Consider Phlebas, Minds were estimated to number in the several hundreds of thousands.
Ship-based Culture Minds choose the names of the craft they inhabit, and their choices are often whimsical and humorous. Ships are identified by a three-letter prefix denoting class (such as GSV or GCU), followed by their personal name, such as:
Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival,
The Just Testing
Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly
Presumably to avoid the cumbersome repetition of such long names, the inhabitants of ships and habitats tend to refer to the overseeing local Mind simply as the "Ship" or the "Hub", for example.
Culture military craft are often designed to be ugly and graceless, lacking the Culture's usual aesthetic style, and it has been theorised that this is because Culture citizens wish to distance themselves from the military aspects of their society. Their ship classes, reflecting the Culture's profound distaste of war and resultant refusal to disguise their weapons with euphemisms, are always unpleasant (such as the Gangster, Torturer, Psychopath, Thug and Abominator classes). Their self-given names are often tinged with menace (but still tend to be whimsical), such as:
All Through With This Niceness And Negotiation Stuff
Attitude Adjuster
Killing Time
Frank Exchange Of Views
Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints
See also: List of ships (The Culture)
Since the Mind concerned chooses its own name this may sometimes even indicate a degree of self-hatred over its purpose for existence. Warship Minds are somewhat out of the normal Culture's behaviour range, designed to be more aggressive and less ambivalent about violence than the usual Culture citizen. Some such Minds choose to "sleep" in between periods of conflict, due to their boredom and uneasiness with typical existence in the Culture.
Minds generally view their crew/inhabitants as 'interesting companions' and interact with them through remotely controlled devices, often drones or humanoid 'avatars'. Examples of more diverse interactive systems are animals such as small fish suspended in their own anti-gravity sphere of water.
As a sidenote, the fact that artificial intelligences are accepted as citizens of the Culture was a major factor in the Idiran-Culture War, which is explored in Consider Phlebas. This citizenship of AIs (which the Culture promotes in other societies it encounters) has other more general consequences. For instance, despite a high degree of automation within Culture technology, menial tasks are often undertaken by non-sentient technology, to avoid the exploitation of sentient lifeforms (though Minds often work at administrative tasks using bare fractions of their enormous mental capabilities).