Editing The Culture (section)

==Fictional history==
In this fictional universe, the Culture exists concurrently with human society on Earth. The time frame for the published Culture stories is from 1267 CE to roughly 2970 CE, with Earth being contacted around 2100 CE, though the Culture had covertly visited the planet in the 1970s in ''[[The State of the Art]]''.

The Culture itself is described as having been created when several humanoid species and machine sentiences reached a certain social level, and took not only their physical, but also their civilisational evolution into their own hands. In ''[[The Player of Games]]'', the Culture is described as having existed as a space-faring society for eleven thousand years. In ''[[The Hydrogen Sonata]]'', one of these founding civilisations was named as the Buhdren Federality.