Where do I start? The humans are essentially pets, kept around by the Minds mostly for nostalgic reasons and because it's a trivial effort for them. People love their pets, but don't allow their pets to make life-altering decisions.
All of the main characters are Minds or drones. None of the biologics ever get to influence events, they're just along for the ride.
The humans are controlled, both actively and passively. The Minds don't lower themselves to anything as crude as "carrots or sticks". Oh no, they prefer to use a far more subtle forms of "guidance", such as inventing an artificial language (Marain) that influences the way people think. This is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
The Culture's main opponents, peaceful or not, are all primarily-biologics that reject machine minds and associated technologies such as field manipulation. After reading the series, you start to get the inkling that perhaps they are right, and that the Culture made a mistake in allowing themselves to be ruled by computers.
The undercurrent, the persistent theme, in all of Banks' works is betrayal, often of the worst possible sort, the kind that leaves you breathless when fully unveiled in the final chapter. The Culture series has some sort of betrayal in just about every book. Often it is the machines betraying the humans in some way. The drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw in Use of Weapons, for example, was deceiving everyone to some degree, even the protagonist Zakalwe. Some of this deception feels unnecessary, taken to the n-th degree by the drone just because it can.
Similarly, the ship Grey Area is notable for being a "meat fucker" in that it abuses (or merely uses?) its godlike power to torture organics it judges as worthy of punishment. This is called out as unusual, but then in A Look to Windward the hub Mind casually strips Quilan's very soul out of his meat body so that he can experience death at the elevated level that only a Mind can. A worse horror is difficult to imagine.
>> All of the main characters are Minds or drones. None of the biologics ever get to influence events, they're just along for the ride.
Woa. Hold it right there. It's the other way around. Most of the main characters are flesh people. See The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Consider Phlebas (the main characterr are not from the Culture but are made of meat), Feersum Endjin, Walking on Glass... those are the ones I remember from the top of my head (it's been a while). The two books I can think of with prominent Mind characters are Excession and ... the one with the guil-tripping Mind? Is that Look to Windward? Anyway I think I just listed half of the Culture books (I really need to go back and read everything again... after I've re-read all of Discworld first...).
[Continuing to read your comment- it seems we have read the same books in very different ways. The mark of good literature, I believe.]
In Player of Games, the protagonist is a Culture human, but has no control over and no idea what will happen at the end (actually, he is deceived about the nature of his visit), which is all orchestrated by Minds - "his" drone being their prolonged hand, playing a servant until it isn't.
In Consider Phlebas, the main character is defeated by a Mind which then mockingly takes his name.
Read Excession to see the full extent of the Minds' control over Culture - literally nothing is decided by humans, they're played around with.
However, it seems to be possible to live out a full life without any major interference, in total comfort and experiencing unimaginable things. IMHO it's a good tradeoff, one just has to stay far away from Contact and especially Special Circumstances.
I've read Excession - that was not the impression I got. See my sibling comment linking to Iain M. Banks' own summary of the Culture. My reading is that he absolutely did not mean for humans to be exploited, subservient, played around with, treated as pets or anything of the sort. The impression I got from the books you quote is that humans and machines treat each other as equals and neither has any kind of societal power above the other, in theory or in practice, inside the Culture. And I may forget the details of most other Culture books but this is the general impression I got from reading them, also.
In fact, in my view anyway, this harmonious and equitable co-existence of humans and machines is a central part of the Culture's bright-eyed techno-utopianism. The Culture is a utopia partly because humans and machines have managed, together, to create a society where both can exist as equals. The humans did not treat the machines as slaves and the machines did not treat the humans as inferior. Optimist, Roddenberrian sci-fi in its finest.
In Excession, on multiple occassions, the Minds literally say that humans are inferior and ultimately don't matter; and there isn't a single human in the loop anywhere, even in dealing with the most important event in history of the Culture, everything is decided by the Minds. Even killing a human accidentaly in the crossfire of a secret scheme (Gestra) is alright.
Again though, the situations described are the most extreme and special, and ordinary lives are lived out in bliss and peaceful coexistence. I don't view the Minds as dystopian control-freaks, I'd be happy to let them be in charge of the universe while living out a life within the utopia they create; I can't imagine humans creating something better - most probably it'd be much worse, more like the Klingon Empire (or even the Terran Empire, maybe) than the Culture or United Federation of Planets.
The world is viewed primarily through the eyes of human protagonists, but this is to anchor the reader in something familiar. The humans are never in charge. The Minds drive the plots forward, the Minds decide things, and it is the Minds that make decisions that have a material outcome. The humans are pawns at best, and often mere observers or bystanders.
This is an idiosyncratic reading that is at odds with Iain M. Banks' own description of the relation between humans and AI in the Culture:
It is, of course, entirely possible that real AIs will refuse to have anything to do with their human creators (or rather, perhaps, the human creators of their non-human creators), but assuming that they do - and the design of their software may be amenable to optimization in this regard - I would argue that it is quite possible they would agree to help further the aims of their source civilisation (a contention we'll return to shortly). At this point, regardless of whatever alterations humanity might impose on itself through genetic manipulation, humanity would no longer be a one-sentience-type species. The future of our species would affect, be affected by and coexist with the future of the AI life-forms we create.
The Culture reached this phase at around the same time as it began to inhabit space. Its AIs cooperate with the humans of the civilisation; at first the struggle is simply to survive and thrive in space; later - when the technology required to do so has become mundane - the task becomes less physical, more metaphysical, and the aims of civilisation moral rather than material.
Briefly, nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby.
No machine is exploited, either; the idea here being that any job can be automated in such a way as to ensure that it can be done by a machine well below the level of potential consciousness; what to us would be a stunningly sophisticated computer running a factory (for example) would be looked on by the Culture's AIs as a glorified calculator, and no more exploited than an insect is exploited when it pollinates a fruit tree a human later eats a fruit from.
I actually took to this view after reading one of Banks' non-culture novels, The Wasp Factory. The ending of that book simply floored me. The betrayal! It was just... unspeakable, an almost Lovecraftian horror that shook my very soul. Afterwards I re-read his Culture novels and saw them in a new light.
PS: Banks is by far my favourite author, and I mourn his death greatly.
All of the main characters are Minds or drones. None of the biologics ever get to influence events, they're just along for the ride.
The humans are controlled, both actively and passively. The Minds don't lower themselves to anything as crude as "carrots or sticks". Oh no, they prefer to use a far more subtle forms of "guidance", such as inventing an artificial language (Marain) that influences the way people think. This is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
The Culture's main opponents, peaceful or not, are all primarily-biologics that reject machine minds and associated technologies such as field manipulation. After reading the series, you start to get the inkling that perhaps they are right, and that the Culture made a mistake in allowing themselves to be ruled by computers.
The undercurrent, the persistent theme, in all of Banks' works is betrayal, often of the worst possible sort, the kind that leaves you breathless when fully unveiled in the final chapter. The Culture series has some sort of betrayal in just about every book. Often it is the machines betraying the humans in some way. The drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw in Use of Weapons, for example, was deceiving everyone to some degree, even the protagonist Zakalwe. Some of this deception feels unnecessary, taken to the n-th degree by the drone just because it can.
Similarly, the ship Grey Area is notable for being a "meat fucker" in that it abuses (or merely uses?) its godlike power to torture organics it judges as worthy of punishment. This is called out as unusual, but then in A Look to Windward the hub Mind casually strips Quilan's very soul out of his meat body so that he can experience death at the elevated level that only a Mind can. A worse horror is difficult to imagine.
Etc, etc...