Special Circumstances - Place in Society

Place in Society

In times of war (as seen in Consider Phlebas), the Contact section of the Culture, and in particular Special Circumstances, acts as a military intelligence and special forces service. In general life, SC is rarely seen or heard of, and is one of the few organizations within the Culture which does not provide information about its actions, working largely in secret, apparently controlled and guided only by a number of the more secretive Minds. The special status of Special Circumstances is best explained by Bora Horza Gobuchul in Consider Phlebas:

"Even before the war, its standing and its image within the Culture had been ambiguous..."

"It had about it too an atmosphere of secrecy (in a society that virtually worshipped openness), which hinted at unpleasant, shaming deeds..."

Contact membership is seen as a high achievement for people of the Culture as even the best of the best still tend to be too many for the limited available places. SC membership, even more difficult to obtain (and attributed only by invitation) is seen as still more desirable; while SC often deals with (and sometimes furthers) what Culture citizens hate the most (barbarity, violence and actions of questionable ethics), it is also seen as romantic and dashing.

Examples range from Ulver Seich in Excession ("She sighed. 'I suppose so,' she said, rolling her eyes. 'Join Contact and go exploring…' ou will never have a better chance of getting into Contact, even Special Circumstances, and with them owing you a favour; or two. Do you understand? This is your big chance, girl.'"), to Yime Nsokyi in Surface Detail ("This is the bod who’s famous in the Culture because she turned down SC").

Surface Detail even mentions a competition to take the place of avatars on SC ships; “Poor fool won some sort of competition to replace a ship’s avatar for a hundred days or a year or something similar... if I’d really been sneaky I’d have left the dumb fuck with a batch of implanted false memories full of whatever Contact-wank fantasies he’d been imagining before he took the gig in the first place.”.

The morally ambiguous role of Special Circumstances is best explained by Diziet Sma in Use of Weapons :

"... in Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws - the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe - break down; beyond those metaphysical event-horizons, there exist ... special circumstances. That's us. That's our territory; our domain."