In this fictional universe, the Culture exists concurrently with human society on Earth. The time frame for the published Culture stories is from roughly AD 1300 to AD 2800, with Earth being contacted around AD 2100, 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 civilizational 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.