Seen it a couple of times on /r/theculture, once or twice on spacebattles as well. The lack of purpose in the Culture, of meaning of life, spawns in some readers all kind of coping mechanisms.
Most sane take was that the relationships between the Minds and humans is like the relationship between grown-up children and their elderly parents.
> On HN I've seen the reading that Culture humans are pretty much housecats to the Culture Minds. Is that a mainstream reading, or fringe?
I think it's a pretty mainstream reading. I've seen it a lot, and, IMHO, it'd be pretty hard to interpret those books any other way. IIRC, there's even one other species in that has that view, and chose to use "accelerated copies" of themselves to command their ships instead of AI, to avoid that fate.
It has been a while since I read any of the books but I feel like this is a thing that is explicitly noted in the text of the books here and there. It's certainly in "A Few Notes On The Culture", a post Banks made to rec.arts.sf.written back in 1994:
"Humans and independent drones (the Culture's non-android individual AIs of roughly human-equivalent intelligence) are unnecessary for the running of the starships, and have a status somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites."
What's not so mainstream [knowledge] is that housecats are de facto sacred to Iain Banks' millieu (as well as to the otherwise iconoclastic Mohammedans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_cats)
Ok, I(M)B himself has compared lesser beings in the Culture to peasants
>On HN I've seen the reading that Culture humans are pretty much housecats to the Culture Minds.
HN is the only place I've seen that take. It may be present in the books of the series I haven't read yet, but I feel like it was mostly one person's interpretation that gets repeated here.
No it's not, I agree, except I think they're worse off than housecats. Not that cats have it the best: https://gwern.net/review/cat "Cat Psychology & Domestication: Are We Good Owners?"
