The Culture series is relatively hard science fiction, though many of the technologies it involves would be considered extremely advanced by our standards. Faster-than-light travel also exists as well, but despite this, the series portrays the details of both domestic and interstellar politics with great skill.
The war unfolds (obvious spoilers) in a manner similar to our own WW2-era Pacific War, with the Idirans in the role of the Japanese and the Culture as the Allies (particularly the Americans).
The Idirans are described as the peak of biological evolution, having emerged as the 'top monster on a planet full of monsters'. They are also biologically immortal (i.e. they don't age) and for reasons along these lines they have a serious case of what you could metaphorically describe as 'white man's burden'. They believe themselves superior to all other races and that they have a divine destiny (there are religious undertones here as well) to spread out across the universe and rule the 'lesser' races.
There have been various fan-art depictions of the Idirans given their physical description in the books. This is probably my favourite -
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| ^ The Master Race - as imagined by Iain M. Banks |
The Culture meanwhile, could be described as the ultimate hedonists. They are an advanced society all-but free from violence, disease, poverty, money, religion and all other forms of civil ailment. This has been achieved largely by the 'post-scarcity' nature of their economy. They're so advanced in fact, that they no longer even live on planets, considering them useful only as 'nature preserves'. Instead they live on massive spaceships or artificial habitats (think Dyson Spheres and ringworlds).
Here then, we see the comparison between the utterly racist, expansionist, fundamentalist Idirans and the supremely carefree, happy-go-lucky Culture. This is reminiscent of (though greatly exaggerated) the Japanese Empire and the western democracies in WW2.
As for the course of the war, in its initial stages the Idirans conquer a vast number of worlds, while the Culture retreats into the depths of interstellar space and begins ramping up its war production (as they had previously been a peaceful society with no dedicated warships).
The war lasts decades, before the Culture begins launching strikes deep into Idiran territory. Eventually another advanced race who are major supporters of the Idirans - the Homomda, withdraw from the conflict, at which point the Idiran's fate is sealed. In the closing stages of the war they resort to increasingly desperate tactics to change its outcome (including blowing up a bunch of stars) before, after a total of forty-eight years of war, their homeworld is reached by the Culture and their empire dismantled.
Any history students should see the parallels here to the Pacific War. Imperial Japan emerged out of the chaos of the archipelago's medieval period, when it was divided up into many different feuding states. After being isolated so many hundreds of years, Matthew Perry's visit to the islands in 1854 forced Japan to end its isolation and begin modernizing. This led it on a campaign of conquest in East Asia that mirrored those being carried out by European states from halfway across the globe.
In the opening months of the war - essentially from Pearl Harbour to Midway - the Japanese conquered large parts of the Pacific and East Asia, running rampant everywhere from India to Hawaii. After that their expansion came to a halt while the Allies counterattacked. In a series of bloody campaigns from Guadacanal to the Philippines the Allies gradually gained the upper hand. Eventually, closing in on the Japanese home islands, they resorted to the atomic bomb to force Japan into submission.
More than this however, we can see than Iain M. Banks did not choose this comparison randomly.
The Pacific War was, more than most combat theaters, an amphibious war. Army troops were useful only for garrisoning islands. The decisive battles were all fought at sea.
The islands of the Pacific, then, can be compared to individuals star systems and planets on the galactic scale. Assuming that planets are still your targets in any interstellar war (far from a certainty) the key battles will surely be fought far from a planet's surface. Battles in deep space between warships - likely run by autonomous AIs and built in vast numbers, will decide the fate of worlds.
Planetary battles would be somewhat like the marines storming ashore on Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima. Rarely was a naval assault actually repulsed in WW2. Once the enemy's fleet is parked off-shore (or in this case in-orbit) your fate is basically sealed. Without quick reinforcement, it is only a matter of time, and lives.
Bombardment from above - either from planes and Battleships in WW2 or orbiting cruisers in space, would be used to soften up the defenders. Assuming you needed to actually capture the world (and not just destroy it outright - which may be deemed prudent depending on the circumstances) the next step would be to send in the starship troopers.
Just as the Japanese built complex systems of trenches, caves and bunkers from which to defend their positions, a defender on a planetary surface could bury deep into its crust to avoid the preliminary bombardment. Most of the Allied bombardments proved useless against the well-entranced Japanese, requiring weeks-long campaigns of brutal ground fighting to root them out. Even then, in many cases, small groups of Japanese held out even after an island was 'secured', often for years.
Again, on a planet, even advanced weapons such as nukes and lasers will have difficulty attacking positions buried many kilometers into the Earth. The deepest mine on Earth currently is the Tautona gold mine in South Africa, at 3.9 kilometers deep. With great need and more advanced technologies however, its not hard to see us exceeding this depth by quite an amount. The Earth's crust averages 30-40 kilometers thick beneath the continents, though this increases to close to a hundred in some places (particularly under large mountain ranges like the Andes and Himalayas).
The infamous fanaticism of the Japanese could also be paralleled by soldiers far from human. These could be either advanced machines or creatures that have been genetically modified in some way. In all seriousness, think of Terminators or even Transformers - and self-replicating ones at that. Imagine such a machine burying into the Earth, perhaps via existing mineshafts or underground tunnels, and slowly making copies of itself deep underground. Then one day, perhaps years later, a whole army of them bursts forth from the ground, set on re-conquering the surface once more.
In this way, a defending force could wage a guerrilla war against the surface occupiers of a world almost indefinitely. Assuming they had a manufacturing capacity of some kind (and there are plenty of metals and lots of geothermal energy to facilitate this in the depths of the Earth) they could retreat and regroup there before launching regular attacks on the surface. Presumably the purpose of this is not so much to liberate the world as to make things uncomfortable for the occupiers, perhaps compelling them to abandon the planet someday.
As far as I'm aware, such a scenario has not really been depicted in science fiction before. Many of the separate elements are there - we've seen terminators and Red Dawn-style guerrilla warfare and underground cave systems, but I don't think anyone has yet married these different elements fully. This is a shame, as such a strategy actually seems to make sense, and may very well happen one day.
In fact, since no one else seems to have thought of this, I'm going to coin a new term here - 'Lithospheric Guerrilla Warfare'.
The 'lithosphere' of a planet is its solid outer surface. This includes not only the crust but the viscous uppermost part of the mantle. I find it difficult to imagine than any creatures or machines could actually operate in the mantle itself, the laws of material science don't appear to allow it, but anywhere in the crust could be fair game, and eventually become a battlefield. The term 'terranaut', which somebody else has already coined (I recall hearing it in the movie 'The Core' - otherwise a thoroughly awful film by the way...), could very well be used here.
Just as wars have previously been fought on land, at sea, in the air (over the last century or so) and theoretically could occur in space, countries may one day be compelled to create a 'Terranaut Corps' as well. Already we have precedents like the WW1-era Battle of Messines. British miners spent months tunneling under the German lines before detonating 19 enormous piles of explosive - almost 500 tons in total, beneath them in preparation for an attack. Ten thousand German soldiers were killed in moments, still the deadliest non-nuclear explosion of all time. The blast was loud enough to be heard in London and Dublin, hundreds of kilometers away.
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| Early Lithospheric Warfare (film - Beneath Hill 60) |
While science fiction talks often of 'holding the high ground' in a battle - i.e. space, controlling the low ground could be just as essential. Imagine doing what the British did in 1917 - but with nukes. Consider digging a tunnel, perhaps one tens or even hundreds of kilometers long (projects like the Channel Tunnel prove this is possible) to sites beneath major cities, or other targets. Imagine how much damage a large nuke could do if buried a few hundred meters below London or Tokyo.
Of course, I'm talking about all this in a theotetical, currently-relegated-to-science-fiction sense. I'm not saying we should be worried about Al Qaeda tunneling from Afghanistan to New York and setting off a bomb, but I don't see any fundamental reason why an attacking (or even more-so a defending) army might not do this in the far-future. Wait until the enemy's forces have landed, then set off a bomb right beneath their camp. By doing this repeatedly, a resisting force could make a world untenable for an occupying force to live in.
I wonder if the Idirans thought of this,
cool post, I liked it
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