The rest make do with as much life as they can live, in a universe whose meaning-structure (if there “is” one) is not ascertainable through meat senses. There are millions - perhaps trillions - of sentient flesh creatures in the Culture who occasionally regret an absence of owners (and the penury they impose because that is what scorpions do), but they’re a drop in the Culture bucket. Be that as it may, Banks’s Culture was post-scarcity from the get-go - as the appendices attached to Consider Phlebas demonstrate - which may in fact help explain his relative lack of success in the American market (he has sold millions of books elsewhere), and he has never succumbed to the temptation (again characteristic of American SF) to treat free plenty as a poison chalice.
Among the blindnesses of hegemonic American SF, up until the Five-Finger Exploding Palm of Sputnik delivered the death blow to the dream, was a double presumption: that the future could be Engineered Like Orlando (I don't think that's a song title) and that the world to come would be arranged around the maintenance of scarcity-based guy hierarchies, with an occasional Empress or Lady President to do sin-eater for the real boss, in a universe of stupefying plenty. The only non-scarcity multi-planet civilizations in Banks’s Culture are isolated and pitiable trickle-down tyrannies conspicuously modeled on the conviction-capitalist hegemonies now consuming - because that is what scorpions do - our one and only planet.
Everything that draws upon the universe-as-a-whole is, therefore, free. THIS IS THE tenth Culture book by the avatar of Iain Banks with Middlename burned into its forehead, and a lot has happened since, twenty-five years ago, Consider Phlebas first introduced into space opera, a form previously dominated by Americans and those who wrote like Americans to pay the rent, the seemingly radical premise that a successful pan-galactic civilization, one able to make low-entropy draws upon the almost infinite energy banks of the universe-as-a-whole, would almost certainly be post-scarcity.
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