Words&Dirt

“Restoria was the part of Contact charged with taking care of hegemonising swarm outbreaks, when––by accident or design––a set of self-replicating entities ran out of control somewhere and started trying to turn the totality of the galaxy’s matter into nothing but copies of themselves.  It was a problem as old as life in the galaxy and arguably hegswarms were just that; another legitimate––if rather over-enthusiastic––galactic life-form type.

Even the most urbanely sophisticated, scrupulously empathic and excruciatingly polite civilisation, it had been suggested, was just a hegswarm with a sense of proportion.  Equally, then, those same sophisticated civilisations could be seen as the galaxy’s way of retaining a sort of balance between raw and refined, between wilderness and complexity, as well as ensuring that there was both always room for new intelligent life to evolve and that there was something wild, unexplored and interesting for it to gaze upon when it did.  The Restoria section was the Culture’s current specialist contribution to this age-old struggle.”

––Surface Detail, by Iain M. Banks, loc. 3021-30