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andrew smash posted:Jupiter is considered a desert planet and therefore terribly unfashionable by the dwellers and they basically never go there because it sucks so much dick and they would lose cred Dwellers are the best loving race.
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May 18, 2010 20:20
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MeLKoR posted:The Culture is certainly a utopia to live in but SC certainly does some seriously questionable poo poo. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that. yeah, it's a particular kind of hedonistic utopia. If you want to be a human being and do meaningful work, though, it probably isn't -- no matter what you do, there's a machine doing it better, etc. Show the Culture through a different lens -- something closer to, say, E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops -- and you'd have essentially the same "Culture" viewed as a horrific dystopia. It's basically a perfect utopia for individuals who are perfectly hedonistic, with no ambition or desire to achieve.
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May 18, 2010 20:34
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The one thing that bothers me in Look to Windward is that when Masaq' Hub is describing how it had to destroy orbitals during the war, and how it recorded the deaths of all the humans it had to kill in minute detail... It's a great scene, but what about all the thousands of Idirans it presumably slaughtered in the war? The way it's written makes it sound like it's only the biped deaths that give Hub pangs of guilt.
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May 18, 2010 22:24
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:yeah, it's a particular kind of hedonistic utopia. If you want to be a human being and do meaningful work, though, it probably isn't -- no matter what you do, there's a machine doing it better, etc. Show the Culture through a different lens -- something closer to, say, E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops -- and you'd have essentially the same "Culture" viewed as a horrific dystopia. It's basically a perfect utopia for individuals who are perfectly hedonistic, with no ambition or desire to achieve. Given Banks' interview answer posted earlier it's interesting how many of the Culture novels feature protagonists who are bored or unsatisfied (or in some cases, just plain dislike) this Utopia. I think you're pretty spot on here and it's a theme that's explicitly explored in the books. He might be being a little facetious in his reply as he is often a bit self-deprecating in interviews.
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May 19, 2010 10:34
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:It's basically a perfect utopia for individuals who are perfectly hedonistic, with no ambition or desire to achieve. Not true. Yes, whatever you can do a Mind can do a million times better, but this doesn't stop people in the Culture striving to create and achieve things - either for their own satisfaction, or for the admiration of their peer group (however they'd like to define that). The two examples that spring to mind: Jernau Morat Gurgeh - Accomplished game master, respected by players throughout the Culture and possibly beyond. Tutored in Azad by a ship's Mind who would consistantly beat him. Mahrai Ziller - Famous composer who straight up asks the Hub of Masdaq orbital whether it could do what he can do, and gets the answer 'yes'. I think it's Masdaq's Hub that gives the example of a mountain climber scaling a sheer cliff face to arrive at the top of a mountain, only to find a group of picnicers who have arrived by helecopter. The fact that they're there in no way invalidates the achievement of your climb. Gravy Jones posted:Given Banks' interview answer posted earlier it's interesting how many of the Culture novels feature protagonists who are bored or unsatisfied (or in some cases, just plain dislike) this Utopia. I think mainly because it's hard to write stories about people that are perfectly content. Most Culture novels are about people on the edge of the Culture - either Special Circumstances agents or individuals from other civilisations interacting with the Culture.
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May 19, 2010 10:35
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:
Yeah, how's that work out for him though? It's been a while since I read The Player of Games, but from what I remember it was basically an indictment of his entire lifestyle.
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May 19, 2010 13:32
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, how's that work out for him though? It's been a while since I read The Player of Games, but from what I remember it was basically an indictment of his entire lifestyle. More an indictment of his attitude. The dude was easily swayed into cheating on a game he could have won anyway just to look good, which says something about him. Compare that to the young female prodigy who seemed to be doing alright for himself. My main point was that people in the Culture know full well that the Minds are superior to them in pretty much every way, but try to excel anyway. Though I guess you do have to be a massive narcissist to want to be famous Culture-wide.
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May 19, 2010 14:02
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:More an indictment of his attitude. The dude was easily swayed into cheating on a game he could have won anyway just to look good, which says something about him. Compare that to the young female prodigy who seemed to be doing alright for himself. My main point was that people in the Culture know full well that the Minds are superior to them in pretty much every way, but try to excel anyway. That's touched on in Look to Windward, even. Ziller and Hub have a conversation about, if the Minds can create the same symphonies, and do them better, then why don't they? Hub's response was more or less: 'Why should we? You guys have it down pretty good.' In fact, LtW has a whole lot of stuff dealing with the human role inside the Culture. They're allowed to do whatever they want. If they get bored, they can do anything they want to entertain themselves - including being dumped into Storage for a few hundred years or 'until things get interesting' again - which was another thing the book talked about in one scene. I think it's kind of a parent-child complex. You might better at, say, using a smartphone or writing a short story, but that doesn't mean you take the reins from them if they want to try those things out for themselves. As for SC: Eeeh, a necessary evil, I think. When we see them being used, they're always targeting very specific and very terrible entities and/or machinations. Again, LtW with the entire Chelgrian conspiracy group. They were going to kill, potentially, close to 50 billion people for a war that was more or less perpetuated by their own cultural psychology. The group gets killed, and a ton of people from various species were saved. Gruesome, yes, but an extremely 'responsible' weapon.
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May 19, 2010 19:14
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One other thing about the humans in the Culture, some of them are as good as the Minds at analysis. I believe it's in Use of Weapons, one of the characters is an SC strategic analyst. She's one of a couple dozen people (out of trillions) who regularly outperforms a Mind at analysis tasks out of intuition, lucky genes or whatever. That's one reason why a group as coldbloodedly pragmatic as the Culture Minds will always keep humans around and as full members of the society: out of trillions of people you're going to get some geniuses who can perform at an amazingly high level. That, and if the Minds are anything like me or some of my friends, maybe they just love hosting parties.
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May 19, 2010 19:42
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mllaneza posted:That, and if the Minds are anything like me or some of my friends, maybe they just love hosting parties. Sometimes even the harshest-looking phallic war machine wants to dress up like a fuzzy creature and host a party. 
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May 19, 2010 20:03
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A Gift From The Culture posted:Money is a sign of poverty. This is an old Culture saying I remember every now and again, espe cially when I'm being tempted to do something I know I shouldn't, and there's money involved (when is there not?). What a great summarization of a post-scarcity world: "money is a sign of poverty"
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May 19, 2010 20:46
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The Dark One posted:Sometimes even the harshest-looking phallic war machine wants to dress up like a fuzzy creature and host a party. Yeah and many of the drones and Minds have genuine, long-term friendships with different humans. I think keeping the humans around and helping them sort of gives them something to do, also. If they felt differently they're free to Sublime anytime, and many do. LtW mentions that all AIs bear some distant, distant marks of their original animal creators, because the successfully blank-slate, no-mammalian-baggage AIs that have been produced inevitably choose to sublime very quickly. So through self-selection the only drones and Minds that interact so much with the Culture's people are ones who like that sort of thing, thus furthering the cycle.
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May 19, 2010 20:48
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mllaneza posted:One other thing about the humans in the Culture, some of them are as good as the Minds at analysis. I believe it's in Use of Weapons, one of the characters is an SC strategic analyst. She's one of a couple dozen people (out of trillions) who regularly outperforms a Mind at analysis tasks out of intuition, lucky genes or whatever. Yeah, I remember reading that and thinking "ok, suspension of disbelief gone."
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May 19, 2010 23:37
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mllaneza posted:One other thing about the humans in the Culture, some of them are as good as the Minds at analysis. I believe it's in Use of Weapons, one of the characters is an SC strategic analyst. She's one of a couple dozen people (out of trillions) who regularly outperforms a Mind at analysis tasks out of intuition, lucky genes or whatever. That's one reason why a group as coldbloodedly pragmatic as the Culture Minds will always keep humans around and as full members of the society: out of trillions of people you're going to get some geniuses who can perform at an amazingly high level. Actually, with this talk about Gurgeh, one thing in The Player of Games I didn't quite understand was: in regards to getting black-mailed, apart from the cheating, the other one appeared to be Gurgeh having sex with another character, but I never really understood the importance of that. Especially in regards to the Culture having ultimately zero laws in terms of sexual relationships, what was the significance of this?. It was the one piece that I never quite got and on reflection made little to no sense, did I miss something?
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May 19, 2010 23:50
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Flipswitch posted:That was Consider Phlebas to my memory, she even had her own assigned drone to monitor her. The person he was having sex with, earlier in the story, had asked him why he'd never changed gender. It's pretty normal for people to swap their genders once or twice during their lifetimes within the Culture, but Gurgeh had never done it. At the end of the book, he did the whole biological fuckery to change himself over, and they boned while she was changing back to a female, or something to that effect. The whole story is about Gurgeh changing himself over after seeing how droll and frankly pathetic he was. As for the humans as good as the Minds at analysis: if I recall right, it wasn't that they were as good as, just that they were the top of their peer groups. Basically the super-geniuses of a race of super-geniuses.
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May 20, 2010 04:58
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Just sat down and read The Player of Games in a single session, a fantastic read. Going to pick up Use of Weapons for next week I think.
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May 29, 2010 17:17
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Flipswitch posted:That was Consider Phlebas to my memory, she even had her own assigned drone to monitor her. I just finished Consider Phlebas a couple of months ago, and you're correct. It's not that she was a smart as a mind, but it was that if she could make the same leaps in logic as a Mind. I think it was described as if she was given a set of facts, she'd reach the same conclusions as a Mind would, just not as quickly.
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May 30, 2010 11:10
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Flipswitch posted:That was Consider Phlebas to my memory, she even had her own assigned drone to monitor her. That's the chick near the start, not the one who wants to design Plates who he sleeps with near the end, right? I think the point of recording Gurgeh loving was to show him as being constantly under surveillance and to put further pressure on him (he reacts against this and wanders around without his contact earring afterwards), as well as to put him off-balance and make him react as SC wanted him to. It's not like he was having some sort of illicit affair, because as you point out, it's very difficult to have an illicit affair in the Culture at a social level - you can still have one at a personal level, like in the "oh god you slept with someone else while we were having babies I cannot possible move on from this and will be pregnant for years" subplot in Excession.
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May 30, 2010 12:36
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Penguingo posted:That's the chick near the start, not the one who wants to design Plates who he sleeps with near the end, right? I think the point of recording Gurgeh loving was to show him as being constantly under surveillance and to put further pressure on him (he reacts against this and wanders around without his contact earring afterwards), as well as to put him off-balance and make him react as SC wanted him to. It's not like he was having some sort of illicit affair, because as you point out, it's very difficult to have an illicit affair in the Culture at a social level - you can still have one at a personal level, like in the "oh god you slept with someone else while we were having babies I cannot possible move on from this and will be pregnant for years" subplot in Excession.  TheHeadSage posted:I just finished Consider Phlebas a couple of months ago, and you're correct. It's not that she was a smart as a mind, but it was that if she could make the same leaps in logic as a Mind. I think it was described as if she was given a set of facts, she'd reach the same conclusions as a Mind would, just not as quickly.  With all of that said, I picked up Against A Dark Background earlier in the week but have yet to start it properly, I read the first two chapters and it seemed interesting enough, but RL stuff keeps getting in the way so I haven't had a proper chance to get into it, what are peoples (spoiler free!) thoughts on it before I start?
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May 30, 2010 14:14
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Flipswitch posted:With all of that said, I picked up Against A Dark Background earlier in the week but have yet to start it properly, I read the first two chapters and it seemed interesting enough, but RL stuff keeps getting in the way so I haven't had a proper chance to get into it, what are peoples (spoiler free!) thoughts on it before I start? AaDB is a fantastic caper story filled with unusual settings and situations.It's dark, edgy and action packed. It'd be an absolute bitch to film but I'd love to see HBO or Showtime tackle it as a big budget miniseries.
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May 30, 2010 15:49
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mllaneza posted:AaDB is a fantastic caper story filled with unusual settings and situations.It's dark, edgy and action packed. It'd be an absolute bitch to film but I'd love to see HBO or Showtime tackle it as a big budget miniseries. On the other hand, I hated AaDB, it seemed meandering, pointless, and generally depressing, with only a few interesting ideas it in. It's got more in common with Consider Phlebas than any of his other books, which is not really a good thing.
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May 31, 2010 12:42
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 Just picked this up today and absolutely love the cover. 
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Jun 4, 2010 00:46
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BUCKET OF FARTS posted:
The bomb lives only as it is falling. Oh how I absolutely adore _Use of Weapons_. If you haven't read it yet you're in for a treat.
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Jun 4, 2010 03:46
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BUCKET OF FARTS posted:
There was an older version of that same cover that looks like crap, that new version is gorgeous. Do not do what I did, which is a google image search for "use of weapons". Very bad pics in there. But that's how I saw the different versions.
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Jun 5, 2010 05:21
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Kire posted:There was an older version of that same cover that looks like crap, that new version is gorgeous. Well, there's the weird not-really-a-spoiler-unless-someone-tells-you-it-is one with the chair on the cover, and then there's the cheesy '80s generic SF one with the space-plane, are there any others?
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Jun 5, 2010 05:38
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In The Algebraist, were the Dwellers technological badasses for the reasons stated (they had been around literally forever and just never talked about the badass parts of their technology) or more because of help they got from the refugee AIs?
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Jun 16, 2010 19:52
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withak posted:In The Algebraist, were the Dwellers technological badasses for the reasons stated (they had been around literally forever and just never talked about the badass parts of their technology) or more because of help they got from the refugee AIs? Reasons stated, I'm pretty sure. It was implied that they'd been around and been badasses since before the AI's/AI war.
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Jun 16, 2010 20:04
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 Apparently this is now the cover of Surface Detail. I dig the fractal motif, but I still kind of like the other one better. Maybe they're both being used for different editions?
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Jun 23, 2010 16:31
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Entropic posted:
i had to go back and find the other edition you mentioned, but that style is identical to the last set of UK issued covers.
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Jun 23, 2010 19:59
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That cover will fit nicely with my library array of Iain M Banks covers.  Honestly, that cover is pretty awesome though.
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Jun 23, 2010 22:24
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I like the old one with the bridge and the forest better.
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Jun 24, 2010 16:53
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Kire posted:I like the old one with the bridge and the forest better.
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Jun 24, 2010 18:35
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The Algebraist's cover was pretty rad, but then again it's an actual picture of Jupiter.
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Jun 24, 2010 21:41
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Entropic posted:Yeah, I think the new one is just too much like every other SF cover out there these days. There's so much terrible design in SF publishing and I think it contributes to the ghettoization of the genre. Authors basically have no say over it though. I've seen Peter Watts and Charlie Stross both make interesting blog posts about how that whole process is basically out of their hands. I agree with you, but it's not like publishers are actively out to make their books lose money or something. They've found that genre readers are more likely to buy books with rocket ships and busty chicks on the cover, and non-genre readers don't like to pick up a book and find those things inside (rocket ships, at least). The Dark One posted:The Algebraist's cover was pretty rad, but then again it's an actual picture of Jupiter. I love the cover art for The Algebraist, it's one of my favorites of all time. If it was available as a poster/print, I'd probably buy it and put it on my wall. That said, I recently re-read it (actually listened to the audiobook, which was pretty well done) and I'm not sure it's as strong a book as I originally thought. It feels like two or three separate plots mashed together that don't really gel together that well, especially what's-her-name in the military coming back for the industrialist guy, but also Epiphany Five Disconnect invasion - I get that it's in there to ratchet up the tension on Fassin's delve, but Banks never really sells it, despite (or maybe because of) that mustache-twirling Luseferous dude. I mean, they inhabit the same book and are sort of tied to the same events, but it just feels kind of... disconnected. There are also lots of exposition sessions/info dumps just thrown in, but I mostly give Banks a pass on it where I'd normally roll my eyes, because it's generally pretty fascinating stuff. I could probably read a whole book of just straight Dweller Studies stuff Overall, it felt like it had the makings of a great book, although the execution was a bit clumsy. I loved the big reveal(s) at the end; he really did a good job on selling how game-changing the Dweller List would be, as well as the AI's, and as usual, his prose was often humorous and always pretty well-written. For me, it's kind of a B- to B range book.
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Jun 25, 2010 00:10
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Pompous Rhombus posted:
It's not cheap, but you can buy it here: http://www.spaceimages.com/io.html
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Jun 25, 2010 06:20
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Pompous Rhombus posted:I agree with you, but it's not like publishers are actively out to make their books lose money or something. They've found that genre readers are more likely to buy books with rocket ships and busty chicks on the cover, and non-genre readers don't like to pick up a book and find those things inside (rocket ships, at least). Yeah, I agree with most of this. The biggest part of the plot that didn't gel for me was the old AI genocide war being the motivation for the beyonders to hate the mercatoria. It just didn't seem necessary, the mercatoria seemed like enough of a stuffy, repressive pain in the rear end to want to be separate from without branding it space nazis.
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Jun 25, 2010 06:54
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I'm about halfway through The Player of Games, and I have to say some of the more overt comparisons between the Empire of Azad (as seen through the eyes of the Culture) and our society are either incredibly dumb or pretty hilarious. This for instance:quote:"It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which sex and class one belongs to, one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one's labour or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In the case of males, they give themselves most totally when they become soldiers; the personnel in their armed forces are like slaves, with little personal freedom.... Females sell their bodies, usually, entering into the legal contract of 'marriage'...." Oh Banks, you rascal. I'm enjoying Player of Games well enough, but I'm having a hard time not picking up Use of Weapons before I finish. It just sounds so much more interesting and that cover is so cool looking. I should be reading Player of Games right now in fact instead of writing this stupid post so I can get through it and read Use of Weapons. In retrospect, Consider Phlebas (the only other Banks novel I've read) was a bit of a mess. Definitely a fun mess though, except for the last bit, where it seemed to fall apart even more. The Idiran-Culture war was an interesting concept, especially after reading more about the Culture, but I don't think Consider Phlebas really did it justice. I kind of wish he'd revisit it in some capacity from the point of view of the Culture.
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Aug 5, 2010 02:45
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I don't know, I thought Use of Weapons was the weakest Culture novel. It wasn't fun figuring out what was going on every time the book went back in time in a chapter; I just couldn't get myself to care. The protagonist dude was bland and the twist at the end seemed like it was there for its own sake.
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Aug 5, 2010 11:43
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Bonus posted:I don't know, I thought Use of Weapons was the weakest Culture novel. It wasn't fun figuring out what was going on every time the book went back in time in a chapter; I just couldn't get myself to care. The protagonist dude was bland and the twist at the end seemed like it was there for its own sake. I tend to agree, wasn't a huge fan of Use of Weapons. Right now I'm reading Look to Windward which started a bit slow as these books usually do but I'm enjoying it. My favorites so far are definitely Excession and Consider Phlebas.
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Aug 5, 2010 15:25
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Excession was fun as a tech nerd. I loved the added insight we got in the Minds, and I loved that entire space battle that took place in 11ms, or whatever it was. The problem is that I don't think I could've appreciated it as much without some background on the Culture and its Minds first. Was Look To Windward the one that that old war veteran Mind who was running the Orbital? That was another good one that gave us lots of insight into how the Culture works while still having a neat story. (I have problems remembering which titles went with which stories)
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Aug 6, 2010 00:38
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