Favourite Culture Ship Names

Apr. 3, 2011

As I mentioned before I am re-reading the novels of Iain Banks and this weekend I managed to finish Consider Phlebas. A little post about it will be coming up soon. One of my favourite things about the Culture novels is how the ships are named and having found a list on Wikipedia, I thought I would share ten of my favourites with you!

1. You’ll Clean That Up Before You Leave
2. Ravished By The Sheer Implausibility Of That Last Statement
3. All Through With This Niceness And Negotiation Stuff
4. Prosthetic Conscience
5. Of Course I Still Love You
6. Size Isn’t Everything
7. Hand Me The Gun And Ask Me Again
8. Dramatic Exit, Or, Thank you And Goodnight
9. We Haven’t Met But You’re A Great Fan Of Mine
10. Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The

Great names all I am sure you would agree. Not all of them appear as fully developed characters. In fact (and I will mention this again later) the ships don’t get nearly enough time as characters in the novels apart from Excession, which is almost entirely devoted to them. In that novel, one ship is central to the story and is probably my favourite, an eccentric GCU (General Contact Unit) called Grey Area that has been shunned by the other machines for “non-consensual mind reading”. It turns out the ship is somewhat morbid and likes to confront the perpetrators of genocides with their crimes. It is known by the other ships as “the meatf***er” and is totally badass.

• fun
• books
• science-fiction
• iain-m.-banks
• eleven