Slashdot Mirror
Look to Windward
I can't go into any great detail about Iain M. Banks' latest novel of the highly-advanced Culture civilization without giving away too much of the plot. The book opens as the light of two suns which were induced to explode in a war 800 years past -- the Idiran wars, the gigadeathcrimes mentioned in previous Culture books -- is about to fall upon the scene. The stage is set.
Unlike some of his other Culture books, this is not an action novel. While there is some action, that isn't the focus of the novel. Rather than rushing ahead, this book takes a leisurely pace through an exploration of war. Where Use of Weapons didn't give you time to think, Look to Windward gives you nearly infinite time - the rest of your life, in fact - to consider the consequences of war.
Ponder, if you will, a shell of light 1600 light-years in diameter. Outside of that shell, a war is still going on -- two planetary systems are still full of life. Inside that shell, the war is over and nothing remains of those systems but two stars gone nova. If this image moves you, so will the book.
Banks is intent upon sculpting a symphony, a tribute to war veterans of all times and places. Threads wax and wane, appear and disappear. Lifelines are cut short. Heroes aren't. Soldiers do their duty. As with most of his science fiction works, things are not as they seem, and you won't figure out just how things are put together until the final bars are being played. It is easy to imagine this book played aloud.
I still might start new Banks readers on Use of Weapons or Player of Games. But this would be an excellent second novel for them. Well, I take that back. Consider Phlebas should be read before Look to Windward.
(As an aside, does anyone else remember "All The Way Back", a short story by Michael Shaara?)
the gigadeathcrimes? Hmmm, gigadeath. Sounds like a bad band name. Like megadeth. Gigadeth...
oh well, i'm bored...
How is it that i spend all day on the net, but don't have time to "read"
I have a love-hate relationship with his works. He is a master storyteller, and his worlds are really neat -- well-drawn, fascinating places -- but he is SOOO mean to his characters! He really wrenches the reader around some, too. Years after the fact, I am STILL wondering about the protagonist of Use of Weapons. Nonetheless, I'll snatch the new book up as soon as it arrives in the US.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Try before you buy and read the prologue online.
-- Anne Marie
Hrm, I didn't even realize it was a book review for a sec. Maybe a 'Book Review: " would be appropiate? Maybe a book review section?
Putting it under news just didn't feel right.
Offtopic blah blah.. at least I'm not trolling or flaming. Constructive critism!
The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts (forgive the blatant Amazon link, but you just might like it). My English professor gave me a copy of the chapter: "Coda: The Faustian Pact." Excellent reading, since I'm doing an essay on how the Internet is turning us into the Borg. True food for thought, since the UCLA study that came out almost wrecked my concentration.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Ponder, if you will, a shell of light 1600 light-years in diameter. Outside of that shell, a war is still going on -- two planetary systems are still full of life. Inside that shell, the war is over and nothing remains of those systems but two stars gone nova. If this image moves you, so will the book.
Great Moogly Googly! They wrote a book about the US election and the aftermath.
Between this book and /Consider Phlebas/ Mr. Banks shows himself to Love T.S. Eliot's /The Waste Land/ and particularly:
Part 4 - Death by Water
Phelbas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering whirpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
this space intentionally left blank (oops)
If this image moves you, so will the book.
I hate being told how I will or do feel. I think the review could have used another draft - or one less.
I also ordered and read _Look to Windward_ from the UK, and I'm having a hard time believing that this guy and I read the same book. _Look to Windward_ is disjointed, shallow, lacking in characterization, and definitely lacking in the complexity that was present in _Use of Weapons_ and _Consider Phlebas_. It's two hundred pages of a single character doing absolutely nothing besides moping around, followed by two pages of actual story ... and if we want that, Dave Sim did it brilliantly in _Melmoth_. There's material about life in the Culture that was done better in _Player of Games_, material about Minds that was done better in _Excession_, material about Special Circumstances's screwups that was done better in _Use of Weapons_ ... this is, basically, a pretty lousy book all by itself, and once you compare what qualities it *does* have with other books by Banks, it suffers - badly - in the comparison. If you have to have all Banks's work ... wait for paperback. Possibly even wait for it to appear in paperback in used bookstores.
Anyway, I love Banks stuff. He is my favourite SF writer. He is not really a 'hard' SF writer, I think he concentrates on the society rather than the technology - hence 'the Culture', and this is what makes him so interesting. Indeed one of the attributes of the Culture is that technology no longer advances from the perspective of the average citizen. Once you are capable of manufacturing anything, anywhere, and effectively for free what more can you do that will affect the average human?
Also, his work is very refreshing when compared to that of most other SF writers, as it regards communism as inevitable, something I would agree with, in the long term. The only other writer I can think of writes about this is Ken MacLeod, his fellow Scot. I think Americans especially, who dominate the field, tend to write about future Megacorporations and the like. Is this because they really think this or because they are scared of losing sales - I mean Americans (rightly) have been totally opposed to communism for decades, so possibly their SF writers are scared of being branded commies?
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
If they were running windows, it would have changed itself. Oh well.
---
GetSystemMetrics(SM_SECURE) == FALSE
I've read this book, and I have to say I am a bit disappointed. It seems to me that the author has cheapened himself some for this book. What is he trying to say? As far as I could tell, the book had no real point. The earlier works seemed a bit more tasteful, too. Quite a number of offcolor bits in this one that frankly flat out offended me. If I were you, I'd save my money for the next Asimov book.
---
GetSystemMetrics(SM_SECURE) == FALSE
...you might want to check out www.phlebas.com which is all about Ian M Banks' books. :) )
By the way, I love his books too. He is "mean" to his characters, but I think that adds something, rather than takes anything away. Banks usually has much to say, between the lines, as well. Inversions is the most obvious example, but look at the other books too. (But don't look too hard and forget to enjoy
Note: I am not affiliated in any way with that website..Just thought I'd pass it on.
...Corruption in the goat herd Flesh crumbles in the real world.
Iain Banks is a sick writer. I cannot think of any other author so inventively grim. The Wasp Factory and Song of Stone are just incredibly depressing.
Iain M. Banks is a sick writer. He has created one of the great future civilisations (Galactic Empire? pulease!), which he describes as "a fucking utopia", and yet within it, he manages to set stories every bit as fucked up as the Wasp Factory and Song of Stone.
I love his writing, but I try and make a point of never reading two of his novels back to back, lest I be tempted to orphan my children.
--
--
E_NOSIG
really, his sf books aren't as great as all that. For a start they are waaay to long, usually padded out with wholly irelevant episodes. And while they often have a half-decent tale in the middle somewhere, they NEVER have a decent ending. Also, they're not particularly inventive, as claimed: Consider Phlebus, the last i read, was totally lame (warmed up Ringworld, mostly) and it amazes me when I see people commending it. I favour anything by Ken Mcleod, another Scot and a friend of IMB, especially The Cassini Division or The Sky Road; intellegent, tight, funny sf without the need to wade thru 500+ pages of fluff.
[Vague spoiler follows. You've been warned.]
This thing that I found really chilling about the book was (without giving too much away) that it seemed to be a prologue for a larger conflict to come. banks goes out of his way (in other books, too) that the Culture needs someone to kick its ass. It appears that Banks has decided just who is going to do that, even if he hasn't let us in on it yet.
Look to Windward, indeed.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
I agree with you completely about the editing of the draft.
Part 4 - Death by Water
Phelbas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering whirpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
(for those who were wondering as to the provenance of the titles. T.S Eliot's wasteland)
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
While it is poor form with HTML, the author still needs to underline any titles, as that is good writing... ;)
Remember, folks, computers and English don't mix!
Karma whorin' since 1999
I haven't read any of Banks's stuff yet (in fact this is the first time I've heard of him), but his books sound very much like C.J.Cherryh's Cyteen. The book is extremely involved and extremely hopeless. The feeling of fatalism permeates the entire book - nothing can stand against the main "protagonist", whom by the end of the book I was ready to ponud into smithereens with my bare hands. Cyteen has that "wheels within wheels, plans within plans" Dune feeling, combined with the totalitarian state of 1984, and a serious discussion of the ethics of cloning, politics and mind control. A great book.
>|<*:=
It's a series, referred to as (surprise) the Culture series... i.e. a "Culture" novel (note the capital) rather than a culture novel.
"See grades here equal status or power, it's just like college; you so caught up in letter grades you skipped the F-in knowledge..."
- J-Live, "School's In"
Though clever, this piece relied too much on one joke. Sentences were also long and unwieldy at times.
I'm a big admirer of Iain Banks, but it seems like
he's starting to run out of ideas as far as the
Culture books go. The Culture, while one of the
most impressive SF backgrounds ever dreamed up by
anyone (way more impressive, IMHO, than the Foundation or the background to Dune), has a basic
problem: not enough death and suffering and Bad Stuff for someone like Banks to write about. So his stuff is always on the periphery, about the rough edges where the Culture meets the rest of the galaxy (usually primitive, nasty and militarized).
Unfortunately, this has started to get old. It was done very well in the first few books, but doesn't really bear repetition very well. The Culture always seems to hold too many of the cards (both in terms of power and morality), and there are always big Minds from Contact or SC willing to jump out and play "deus ex machina" to wind up the plot (Player of Games, Excession, Look to Windward).
Iain Banks hasn't written a bad sf novel, but as far as the Culture ones go, once you've read Use of Weapons, Player of Games and Consider Phelebas, you're going to be in serious diminishing-returns territory.
As with a number of British-published books (most notably Pratchett's Discworld series), they're more often than not also available in Canada. One place that sells online is Chapters. They do have Look To Windward, although they say it'll take 3 to 5 weeks to get it to you.
All the sympathetic characters die without resolution of the plot. One bit-character survives by simply staying alive until everyone else is dead. the Mind doesn't count as a character, it's a prop. And where are people getting the idea that IMB sf ideas are so "new?" There wasn't a single provocative idea in Phebus, which is what sf is really about. Spaceships and laser-weilding mercenaries are just dressing. The Culture is quite cool, but, hey, not actually very novel. Ask your local librarian for a long list of books in the last 300 years that have addressed Utopian ideas.
--
I read through some of the news items. The latest item there is from October 1999.
Save your time.
http://www.genmars.com/adrian/books/b ank s/
I bought the book last month. (Nice to get something before the Americans for a change :-)) I think it's fairly good, but not up to books like Use of Weapons. The novel has a kind of travelougue feel in parts, which makes it feel like the story might have made a good short story if the filler had been cut out. The Chelgrans are - arguably - derivative of David Niven's Kzini. Still, don't take this as a reason not to read the book! Banks builds some incredibly imaginative worlds in this book as in his others. Banks' average is still better than most writers' best.
Incidentally, if you prefer SF about (semi)evil corps, (as discussed in a previous thread) you might want to look at The Business, Banks' latest non-SF novel.
But whatever. I loved the book, and the sensawunda throughout it, including from the airspheres.
I really like the exchanges between the Minds in Excession, all that cynicism and scheming is remarkably similar to Trolltalk at times ;)
It seems to me that the only thing that keeps the Culture going is it's own belief in it's moral superiority. So if this belief were shattered, by some demonstration, then the Culture would disintigrate. The only thing that could destroy the Culture then, is the Culture itself, because the immoral act would have to be by the Culture.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
I agree with the poster who characterized Banks' writing as "inventively grim." Wish I'd thought of that... The thing is, he draws you into sympathizing with, liking, even identifying with the protagonists, and then he trashes them. Every single time. In every book.
Case in point: The shape-changer character in (I believe) "Player of Games" and his crew of mercenaries are decently likeable sorts; and in the end, Banks does a Hamlet number on them; everyone winds up dead meat but the single adversary/almost-lover who gets to do the Hamlet-esque death-march with his corpse.
By now, every time I start reading one of his novels (and they are very well crafted, interesting places), I go into it KNOWING that everyone in it whom I will care about in the least is going to be destroyed in one way or another. These novels are NOT for the easily-depressed...
One of Heinlein's last novels broke the divide between the author and his/her characters by having them all mixing it up in Valhalla or thereabouts; I shudder for Banks if his characters were ever to catch up with him in a dark alley there...
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
silently, and correctly.
And that's exactly the problem. My Windows box kindly notified me that I could stay in bed for another hour.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I have a love-hate thing with daylight saving(s?)time in the autumn. Basically, it's like this. For the first night, when the clocks go back, it's great - you can either spend an extra hour out having a good time, an extra hour in bed, or a mix of the two. Every night afterwards, however, it's that little bit colder when you go out and come back, and in a scottish winter that's not great. It's also getting dark & cold in the mid-afternoon when I'm coming back from lectures etc, and when I might well have things I need to do around the town.
To be fair, though, it does make it marginally easier to get up in the morning.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Loved the book by the way, not the funniest nor grimmest, but overall the best Culture novel in my mind.
--
TC - My Photos..
What are The Culture novels?
e faq.txt
Iain M Banks has created a highly advanced space faring society called
The Culture. In it phenomenally intelligent machines called 'Minds' run a
civilization that many would consider as utopia or as close as you can
get to it.
Banks realized that a science fiction book set in utopia would be very
dull and so he created 'Contact' the branch of The Culture that handles
the dealing with, and meeting of, other civilizations. The plots of his
Culture books all revolve around Contact and its espionage division
called 'Special Circumstances'.
In published order The Culture novels are:
Consider Phlebas (1987)
The Player of Games (1988)
Use of Weapons (1990)
Excession (1996)
Inversions (1998) (Not a 'full' Culture novel, see below.)
Look To Windward (2000)
What is The Culture?
The Culture is a kind of anarchist utopia (for the most part). It's
inhabitants are a mixture of mostly humanoid species and intelligent
machines. These machines fall into several categories: Minds are very
intelligent and are generally found in the Culture's ships - in fact it
could be said they 'are' the ships. Sometimes in the case of a huge
ship, say, a General Systems Vehicle (which may have a population
measured in the billions) there may be more than one Mind, typically
three. Hub's are a special kind of Mind but one that is located on one
of the Culture's non-ship habitats (more on this later) and performs a
similar role. Finally Drones, these come in all kinds of shapes and
sizes and have varying levels of intelligence typically one and a half
times that of the intelligence of a typical Culture humanoid.
There is no hierarchy as such in the Culture's society every individual
is equal (machine or organic). The Culture is post-scarcity due to
sophisticated technology. That is to say because the Culture can
manipulate things at an atomic level (maybe below even that) anything
can be produced with ease so anybody can have anything they want. Money,
therefore, has no place in the Culture (in fact the Culture considers
money to be a sign of poverty).
The Culture has no laws, anybody can do pretty much what they want to
do. It would be very hard for a member of the Culture to kill someone
else (it would be considered very strange to even want to) but if you
did do this you would be slap-droned, which is having a drone follow you
around forever, making sure you didn't do it again. Worse though would
be the social reaction; no one would want to talk to you.
Organic life forms in the Culture have been genetically modified
(geno-fixed) with all kinds of things. You can initiate a sex change by
thinking about it. Drug glands in your brain allow all kinds of mood
enhancements like; improving speed of thought, relief of tiredness,
inebriation among many others. You don't get sick and a typical life
span would be several centuries.
Inhabitants of the Culture live in/on a variety of habitats. A few live
on planets but there are only a few hundred inhabited planets in the
Culture. The Culture's 'cities' are its GSV's, most have hundreds of
millions of residents or even billions. Rocks consist of a converted
asteroid and, like planets, living on one is unusual rather than the
norm. The other forms of habitat are all manufactured. The most abundant
are Orbitals which are giant rings in orbit around a star. Plates are
similarly in orbit but are a pair of huge plates. Rings are an even
bigger version of an Orbital, instead of orbiting a star they encircle
one. Many members of Contact live on ships called GCU's (General Contact
Units) on which they travel to observe, meet or interfere with other
civilizations.
more here http://home.freeuk.net/m.stanfield/culture/cultur
I agree that it's unfair, but it was hardly Zakalwe lying to the reader. All the way through I felt that the characters would make perfect sense if only ... things were different. And in the event they were. You may well accuse IMB of lying to you in Use Of Weapons, but the characters are true to themselves. And there is a clue on the back cover (of the paperback at least).
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
The Culture is a technological Utopia, in which death has lost its sting. How does such a civilisation relate to death?
Banks has touched on this issue in previous Culture novels, but here he gives it a fuller treatment from an extraordinary array of perspectives. This is what makes SciFi such a wonderful genre: the ability to play themes out on a grander stage, and look at things from a completely alien point of view.
Two slight disappointments:
1) The Chelgrain (not sure about the spelling... it's a while since I read it) are human's wearing furry suits. Banks probably had his reasons for doing this, but I still found myself wishing for something a little more exotic.
2) As I said earlier, Banks has already touched on this theme (eg. State of the Art), so Look to Windward doesn't seem quite as fresh as some of his earlier novels.
Also, his work is very refreshing when compared to that of most other SF writers, as it regards communism as inevitable, something I would agree with, in the long term.
Hate to break this too you, but the culture is not a commune. It's not even vaguely socialistic. Part democracy, part benevolent dictatorship. You seem to be missing the fact that the Minds are in charge.
Sure the humans have a say. But the ultimate decisions are nearly always left to the Minds. Once you get past the orbital/plate/GSV stage then you end up with a anarchic commitee system, where the Minds decide the direction of the culture.
When it comes down to it it is a lot better solution that what most humans currently use. Human politicians are fallible. Once we make an adequate enough AI then, once we're sure it has our best interests at heart, we should put it in charge. Less likely to be distracted by matters mundane.
--quote here--Nope. The Culture is Socialist, materialist and anarchist. If you don't believe me , maybe you'll believe Iain.