The Involved

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The Involved are a subset of galactic societies that exist in the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks.

[edit] Overview

An Involved society is a highly advanced group that has achieved galaxy-wide involvement with other cultures or societies. There are a few dozen Involved societies, and hundreds or thousands of somewhat well-developed (interstellar) but insufficiently influential societies or cultures, or those well-developed societies known as "galactically mature" which do not take such a dynamic role in the galaxy as a whole. In the novels, the Culture might be considered the premier Involved society, or at least, the most dynamic and energetic, especially given that the Culture itself is a growing multicultural fusion of Involved societies. The Involved are contrasted with the Sublimed (sometimes colloquially referred to as the Elder Civilisations due to the fact that they are no longer around), groups that have reached a high level of technical development and galactic influence but subsequently abandoned the physical Reality, ceasing to take serious interventionist interest in galactic civilisation. They are also contrasted with what some Culture people loosely refer to as "barbarians", societies of intelligent beings which lack the technical and social development to know about or take a serious role in their interstellar neighbourhood.

It should be noted that the Involved are also contrasted with hegemonising swarms (a term used in several Banks' Culture novels), which are (usually) newly-arrived members of the galactic community whose primary goal is mass conquest, control, and colonisation (in a word, hegemonisation), a goal which both the Culture and the author (in his Notes On the Culture) find both quixotic and ridiculous. Typically, hegemonising swarms consist of species or groups which take it upon themselves to spread to as many regions of the universe as possible and exploit those regions and the inhabitants to the greatest degree deemed necessary to the goals of the swarm.