There’s a relevant bit in The Player of Games from The Culture series. It purports that the book you’re reading is actually translated from the original Marain (in-universe language), and has been adapted suitably:
Still with me?
Little textual note for you here (bear with me).
Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of
personal pronouns, so I’d better explain that bit of the translation.
Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover
females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything
remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying
a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is
that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.
So, in what follows, Gurgeh is quite happily thinking about the Azadians just as he’d think about any other (see list above)… But what of you, O
unlucky, possibly brutish, probably ephemeral and undoubtedly disadvantaged citizen of some unCultured society, especially those unfairly (and the
Azadians would say under-) endowed with only the mean number of genders?!
How shall we refer to the triumvirate of Azadian sexes without resorting to funny-looking alien terms or gratingly awkward phrases not-words?
…. Rest at ease; I have chosen to use the natural and obvious pronouns for male and female, and to represent the intermediates - or apices - with
whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise
translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated.
(Those which can fairly claim to be neither will of course have their own suitable term.)
There’s a relevant bit in The Player of Games from The Culture series. It purports that the book you’re reading is actually translated from the original Marain (in-universe language), and has been adapted suitably:
Banks was ahead of his time in so many ways. What an absolutely brilliant writer.