I'd give the Galactic Empire about a day in a match up versus the Culture

Any other Iain M Banks fans on here?

Never heard of it, but I'll have to check it out. Sounds interesting. Hopefully I'll actually remember it when I finally get done with my current book list. Now that the Wheel of Time series is finished I started from the beginning and going to read through it all.

Edit: From what I've seen so far looking at the wikipedia for it. It sounds like the the show Person of Interest has similar concepts. The whole AI being put outside the control of humans thing.

Start with 'consider phlebas', its quite frankly a masterpiece that i re-read all the time.

'use of weapons' is amazing too.

Excession is quite heavy going but

phlebas, use of weapons, matter (a bit more fantasy), and 'player of games' are astoundingly good.

If you were local to me i'd lend you my copies.

The time it would take for basically any Culture ship to destroy the Empire by itself is limited entirely by travel time.

Indeed, the tech levels are just staggerinly different.

I imagine if the culture met the empire they would observe them until they had evolved enough to be assimilatd

I love 'Use of Weapons', 'Player of Games', 'Consider Phlebas'.

By Culture standards the Galactic Empire would be about a tech level 6, the Culture themselves being tech level 8. Probably a good candidate for SC intervention rather than war

good point, yeah it is quite high tech. I think all they lack is minds.

They have FTL travel, lasers, genetic modification, cybernetics, AIs of a sort.

Just nothing on the level of a mind.

I might have to read consider phlebas again this weekend... possibly one of the best sci fi novels ever written.

I really want to get the short story where SC got to earth, i've read it but dont own it.