But you've also written that something like the Culture may happen not as a result of individual, or even societal choice, but as a consequence of advances in technology.

In the purest sense, you get to the Culture almost whether you like it or not. But it does involve getting out to space, and it does involve just a huge amount of manufacturing capability. Because what you end up with is entities, space ships or whatever, that become self-sufficient and free moving in space, and it's very hard to keep effective control of them.

The control a state can exercise is largely about the fact it can just go and get you if you are holed up in your ranch in Waco or wherever. It can surround you and attack you and go in and get you. That is going to be impossible when people can live in space or more or less anywhere. Once that becomes the case, the very idea of the state does start to wither away. But it does all eventually go back to technology. Technology determines the possibilities of society. So as technology progresses, the idea of something like the Culture is almost inevitable. It doesn't really matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state. It might be sort of easier from a free-market one. I don't know.

My worry about the genetic modification of behavior is that if we had that now we might all end up fundamentalist Christians.

Well, you lot might! [Cackles gleefully.]

It's all about who gets the technology first and how you spread it. Is it government run, or by very large corporations, or can it be done in the old-fashioned science fiction way, by one lone genius and an attractive assistant, working in a laboratory somewhere? Obviously, not to be too glib about it, the very idea of evolving ourselves scares large parts of society. It takes a lot of thinking about.

Getting back to the Culture -- not all is peace and light there. Even the Culture has enemies. In your novels, there's this group inside the Culture called Special Circumstances. They're kind of a super-powered intelligence agency that scouts out potential problems and deals with them, often in fairly bloody fashion. Most of the Culture doesn't have to worry about Special Circumstances. They might not even know it exists. It occurred to me to wonder what Special Circumstances would do if they determined that there was an alien warlike culture somewhere in the galaxy that was developing weapons of mass destruction that could destroy the Culture.

Ha, ha. Well, first of all they would know for sure. I think it would be very difficult, however, to come up with a weapon of mass destruction that would affect a society spread across an entire galaxy. But the basic idea is that the Culture has been around so long that it just kind of knows how to do these things, it's been through all this, and it's not very easy to fool. Also, they don't have any kind of imperial ambitions, so there isn't any of that kind of self-interest. The Culture is out to defend itself, but it isn't under any illusions that there is any equivalent of Iraq that could actually do any damage to the Culture, any more than Iraq could have actually done damage to the States or to the U.K.

The idea of the Culture is to use the least amount of force necessary. Ideally, as happened in [my 1992 novel] "Player of Games," it's to send in one guy who doesn't even know he's being used in the first place and get him to tear the empire down. That's like, so cool. That had me in a state of bliss for months after I came up with that.

We should talk a little bit about your new novel, "The Algebraist." It's not a Culture novel?

Definitely not. There is no hint of Culture-ness bout it, although having said that, I have impulses to write a certain kind of character, and the kind of character that gets all the sarcastic lines. In the Culture novels it would be the [artificially intelligent] drones, and in this novel it's this species called the Dwellers that have been around for billions of years. There are some similarities. I guess there's something about sarcastic nonhumans that I feel suited to writing about.

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