Observations on the Culture

This section contains information that came to me on a writeable CD-ROM (remember those!) posted anonymously in my university pigeon hole, with the words “Observations on the Culture” written in felt pen across the disc. Fortunately my now somewhat dated gaming PC has a suitable drive so after checking for viruses I opened it up. I found it contains only text files and images that appear to a rather disjointed account of an Earth person’s experience in the galactic civilization known as “The Culture”.

I post them here for your inspection, largely unchanged. I’ve corrected a few spelling errors and regularised it to British English but not made any substantive changes to the content.

There is no obvious ordering to the content (everything had the same creation / modification time, that of noon on the day before it was posted to me), so you can read them in any order.

Indeed, they aren’t necessarily even consistent across the files and possibly unfinished in some cases. They could be drafts of a intended more coherent work that was never completed, or are perhaps just thoiughts and notes that were made without any real purpose, just a way of ordering ones thoughts and ideas on something of an “alien” situation. Nevertheless, errors and inconsistencies aside, I think they still provide an interesting perspective and present them here for your evaluation.

To gain a wider audience I have also posted them on Archive of our Own as if they works of “Fan Fiction”, so please feel free to read them there and give kudos to the original author if you think them worthy!