"Special Contact" isn't what they're called. The name is "Special Circumstances".

And the novels point out that the reason you're reading about them, and that's always the situation, is that these are the interesting stories.

So that means you're getting a glimpse of the culture only in the same sense that a James Bond movie tells you about England.

You'd like to think you're seeing Tinker Tailor but you're seeing James Bond. This is a dramatisation of an edge case.

We see brief glimpses in Player of Games (at its very start) and perhaps Inversions (the story about when they were kids) but mostly it's all SC all the time.

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mfro 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Right, definitely important to note the Culture existed for milennia by the earliest (canon chronologically) novel.

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ben_w an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We see brief glimpses in Player of Games (at its very start) and perhaps Inversions (the story about when they were kids) but mostly it's all SC all the time.

Was The State of the Art SC? Been a while since I read it.

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tialaramex an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The short story "The State of the Art" ? Yes, Diziet is a Special Circumstances agent - we also see her in Use of Weapons. Some of the other shorts in the collection of that name aren't set in the Culture. you can probably say "A Gift From the Culture" isn't about SC per se, but it also isn't really about the Culture.

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blobcode an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some of the stories could plausibly have SC involvement (the story of the same name is most likely) - but I don't think it's explicitly mentioned anywhere.

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arethuza an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Pretty sure it was a regular "boring" Contact GCU - the Arbitrary.

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tialaramex an hour ago | parent [-]

The thing about boring things is that if they're in your exciting story it might well be because they aren't boring. The actual British spy building next to the river Thames, Vauxhall Cross - looks exactly like the one in the Bond movies, but it's just an office building with higher than usual security. Bond can launch a speedboat to chase bad guys, but actual employees will be sat in a meeting moaning about the catering or the train delays.

Presumably the Arbitrary is just an ordinary contact ship, but Diziet is definitely not an "ordinary" member of contact. She's the one who recruited the guy in Use of Weapons, the one whose name is not actually Zakalwe.

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arethuza an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes I know she is also in UoW and is in SC then, but I don't know if she is in SC in SoTA. From what I remember to get into Contact you have to apply, but to go from Contact to SC you have to be wait to be asked?

	▲	tialaramex 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Well, in my favourite Culture novel the SC agent doesn't even realise. Yime has apparently chosen to keep her status even from her future self, being I guess mind-wiped or given selective amnesia so in her mind she's important because she chose not to be in Special Circumstances but it turns out that's just even deeper cover.

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dsr_ 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Similarly, the fact that Banks didn't write about internal threats other than the ones he wrote about (Eccentric Minds, Absconders, conspiracies to promote specific agendas, etc etc) doesn't mean that others don't exist. An absence of evidence in the text is not evidence of absence (or presence) in the wider universe.

And so fanfic exists.