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Yup, that's Look to Windward. Which is easily my favourite out of the lot simply for the character interaction scenes on the Orbital. Looking back on the Culture novels, for me the lowest of the lot I think is Matter, largely because I didn't care much for the main story, but it however does have one of my favourite endings when the book suddenly jumps the gun and the pace rockets forward, I was glued to it from then on.
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Aug 6, 2010 01:45
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I've always rather disliked the Culture. I know that it's Bank's idea of heaven but I find it hard to view it as anything but a bunch of self-indulgent, overgrown children and their sanctimonious robot babysitters. I read Look to Windward and spent the whole time rooting for the Chelonians to succeed in blowing the Orbital up: I thought that the Culture totally deserved it. Who the hell do they think they are? "Yeah, we came along interfering in your society and ended up causing a catastrophe but we didn't mean to do it and, hey, you sometimes get these statistical blips. Sorry!"
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Aug 6, 2010 20:42
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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 didn't have much trouble following the narrative style but I definitely agree on the last point. It didn't add anything to the story, or make me reevaluate the characters or their motivations, or do anything besides add shock value. We know so little about the characters before the Staberind incident that it just doesn't have much impact.
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Aug 6, 2010 22:07
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Umiapik posted:I've always rather disliked the Culture. I know that it's Bank's idea of heaven but I find it hard to view it as anything but a bunch of self-indulgent, overgrown children and their sanctimonious robot babysitters. I read Look to Windward and spent the whole time rooting for the Chelonians to succeed in blowing the Orbital up: I thought that the Culture totally deserved it. Who the hell do they think they are? "Yeah, we came along interfering in your society and ended up causing a catastrophe but we didn't mean to do it and, hey, you sometimes get these statistical blips. Sorry!"
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Aug 7, 2010 00:47
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Flipswitch posted:Yup, that's Look to Windward. Which is easily my favourite out of the lot simply for the character interaction scenes on the Orbital. That said, I think my least favorite was Consider Phlebas - which is a shame because I felt like there was a really interesting story int here trying to get told, but that it kept getting caught up in sidetracking "filler."
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Aug 7, 2010 04:25
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Mr. Peepers posted:We know so little about the characters before the Staberind incident that it just doesn't have much impact. This was kind of the same problem I had with Excession and Genar-Hofoen.
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Aug 7, 2010 08:04
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Umiapik posted:I've always rather disliked the Culture. I know that it's Bank's idea of heaven but I find it hard to view it as anything but a bunch of self-indulgent, overgrown children and their sanctimonious robot babysitters. I read Look to Windward and spent the whole time rooting for the Chelonians to succeed in blowing the Orbital up: I thought that the Culture totally deserved it. Who the hell do they think they are? "Yeah, we came along interfering in your society and ended up causing a catastrophe but we didn't mean to do it and, hey, you sometimes get these statistical blips. Sorry!" Taratang fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Aug 7, 2010 |
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Aug 7, 2010 10:59
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Umiapik posted:I've always rather disliked the Culture. I know that it's Bank's idea of heaven but I find it hard to view it as anything but a bunch of self-indulgent, overgrown children and their sanctimonious robot babysitters. I read Look to Windward and spent the whole time rooting for the Chelonians to succeed in blowing the Orbital up: I thought that the Culture totally deserved it. Who the hell do they think they are? "Yeah, we came along interfering in your society and ended up causing a catastrophe but we didn't mean to do it and, hey, you sometimes get these statistical blips. Sorry!"
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Aug 7, 2010 11:36
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quote:I find it hard to view it as anything but a bunch of self-indulgent, overgrown children and their sanctimonious robot babysitters. I think that's exactly what he was going for to be honest, think about the opening scenes for the Player of Games where the main guy (can't remember his name) is bored with his perfect life at the height of his career on the orbital, the girl on the rock habitat in Excession acting like a whiny bitch when she didn't get her gently caress on and the drone dragged her away to listen to the Contact message, people being put into storage on the GSV that created strange tableaux of the bodies. Or in Use of Weapons when an unmodified "normal" human Cheradenine (atleast I think he is at this point) is exploring the GSV after being rescued from the ice planet. I don't think it's his view of heaven at all, but his take on the human realities of a supposed idealistic universe with limitless technology. ed balls balls man fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Aug 7, 2010 |
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Aug 7, 2010 12:00
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Well, it's inevitable that novels about the Culture will concentrate on eccentrics, outcasts and disasters. After all, in Utopia nothing much ever happens. Nothing that you could write a gripping adventure story about, anyway.
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Aug 8, 2010 18:19
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Mr. Peepers posted:I didn't have much trouble following the narrative style but I definitely agree on the last point. It didn't add anything to the story, or make me reevaluate the characters or their motivations, or do anything besides add shock value. We know so little about the characters before the Staberind incident that it just doesn't have much impact. Perhaps, I found re-reading it at a later date made it somewhat bizarre, like a form of super-atonement.
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Aug 9, 2010 03:32
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I was totally unable to finish Use of Weapons. I got about 3/4 of the way through and simply dropped it for other books, and I haven't been able to come back to it. Such a boring book. Excession and Player of Games were the only ones I really enjoyed, and with Excession I had to skip all of the chapters that were flashbacks and/or didn't involve Minds.
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Aug 9, 2010 21:31
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Just picked up perfect condition trade paperback copies of Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons from my local library's book corner (donated books, not ex-library) for $1.50 each 
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Aug 9, 2010 21:36
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Graviton v2 posted:I was totally cheering for the Affront! You're supposed to. The point of the Affront is that evil isn't always moustache twirling and sinister. Monsters can be quite pleasant when you're not one of the ones being genetically altered to find sex more painful.
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Aug 10, 2010 13:52
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Umiapik posted:Well, it's inevitable that novels about the Culture will concentrate on eccentrics, outcasts and disasters. After all, in Utopia nothing much ever happens. Nothing that you could write a gripping adventure story about, anyway. Kire posted:I was totally unable to finish Use of Weapons. I got about 3/4 of the way through and simply dropped it for other books, and I haven't been able to come back to it. Such a boring book.  v Opinions vary. I just re-read Use of Weapons all the way through in the last couple days and enjoyed it even more this time. It's a lot more fun the second time around once you've got your head around the chronology and are able to spot all the little clues about Zakalwe's past. You can definitely tell it was written a while ago; it reads like a cross between '70s Larry Niven space opera and Banks' earliest non-SF.Look to Windward is still my favourite though. I could read a whole book of just Ar. Kabe, Hub and Cr. Ziller arguing amiably with each other.
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Aug 10, 2010 16:09
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:You're supposed to. The point of the Affront is that evil isn't always moustache twirling and sinister. Monsters can be quite pleasant when you're not one of the ones being genetically altered to find sex more painful. For someone who's explicitly writing utopian fiction, Banks really goes out of his way to force the readers to deal with shades of gray. The Culture really are a bunch of bullies who cheerfully impose their will on anyone they come across, and in all the culture novels there are very few villains who don't have some kind of clearly explained and at least marginally sympathetic motivations.
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Aug 10, 2010 16:24
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I finished Look to Windward last night and it's really a book that is significantly improved by its ending. Compared to most science fiction, it's light on big dramatic plot but the characters are pretty interesting and the ending really ties everything nicely together. I enjoyed the ambiguity about how Hub found out about the Chelgrian plot. You assume it's because Uagen's report reaches them in time, but the whole Huyler is a Contact agent thing was a cool twist. Also, the mystery of the other Involved civilization assisting the Chel (rogue Minds?) is cool. Would be an interesting thread to pick up in later books though that's not really Banks' style.
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Aug 10, 2010 18:19
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Kire posted:What a great summarization of a post-scarcity world: "money is a sign of poverty" Not to mention a sign of mortality.
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Aug 10, 2010 21:03
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Kire posted:Excession and Player of Games were the only ones I really enjoyed, and with Excession I had to skip all of the chapters that were flashbacks and/or didn't involve Minds. I liked Excession as a whole but goddamn, no human character in the book did a single thing of any consequence to the actual plot at all. It's like Banks took a perfectly good story about Minds, spaceships, and interstellar intrigue and watered it down with melodramatic bullshit and unbelievably annoying characters. In other news I ordered Matter and State of the Art from Amazon using the free 2-day shipping from the student Prime deal on Sunday, and it arrived Monday morning. 
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Aug 10, 2010 21:23
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silly posted:Would be an interesting thread to pick up in later books though that's not really Banks' style.
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Aug 11, 2010 12:57
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Mr. Peepers posted:I liked Excession as a whole but goddamn, no human character in the book did a single thing of any consequence to the actual plot at all. It's like Banks took a perfectly good story about Minds, spaceships, and interstellar intrigue and watered it down with melodramatic bullshit and unbelievably annoying characters. I read a theory somewhere that Excession, Inversions, and Look to Windward can be seen a sort of loose trilogy: They show us The Culture as seen (respectively) from above, from below, and head-on from the point of view of its rivals.
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Aug 11, 2010 13:01
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Entropic posted:I read a theory somewhere that Excession, Inversions, and Look to Windward can be seen a sort of loose trilogy: They show us The Culture as seen (respectively) from above, from below, and head-on from the point of view of its rivals. Doesn't Excession encompass these 3 perspectives on its own, via the Excession itself, the Elench, and the Affront respectively?
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Aug 12, 2010 01:43
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Entropic posted:His upcoming book Surface Detail is supposed to be going further into all the "afterlife" stuff with Sublimed involvement that was established in LTW, so we'll see... From the blurb (and what I hope) it sounds to me more like a Feersum Endjinn style set-up which will deal with some epic virtual reality type plane of existence which hasn't been touched upon too much yet in the culture universe and a different matter to subliming.
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Aug 12, 2010 18:43
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Finally got around to The Algebraist. About 160pp in and I don't see why it got such a reputation of being slow/boring/full of opaque jargon, it seems pretty straightforward so far. Though of all Banks' various attempts at weird dialects, the TXT SPK interlude at the end of part II of this book is my least favourite ever. Really coulda done without that.  The whole no-FTL-except-through-wormhole-gates system makes for a neat universe though. What with that and the lack of A.I. or nanotech, it feels like he was trying to make the universe of this book as explicitly Not The Culture as possible.
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Sep 12, 2010 23:19
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Notahippie posted:The Culture really are a bunch of bullies who cheerfully impose their will on anyone they come across, and in all the culture novels there are very few villains who don't have some kind of clearly explained and at least marginally sympathetic motivations.
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Sep 13, 2010 05:21
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creamyhorror posted:Kind of like the colonial British, eh? (Mainly because of the "cheerfully") I don't think the colonial British had control groups and statistics showing their rule was better than the alternative.
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Sep 14, 2010 07:23
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pseudorandom name posted:I don't think the colonial British had control groups and statistics showing their rule was better than the alternative.  That said, one of the books does mention the Culture as being a bit of a bunch of know-it-alls in that regard, I think it was Look to Windward.
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Sep 14, 2010 13:40
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Entropic posted:I read a theory somewhere that Excession, Inversions, and Look to Windward can be seen a sort of loose trilogy: They show us The Culture as seen (respectively) from above, from below, and head-on from the point of view of its rivals. I always though Look to Windward should be seen as a sequel to Consider Phlebas, it's the first part of that TS Elliot line. "Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you."
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Sep 15, 2010 10:43
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creamyhorror posted:Kind of like the colonial British, eh? (Mainly because of the "cheerfully") More like the USA 
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Sep 15, 2010 11:47
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The Dwellers are the imperial British 
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Sep 15, 2010 14:12
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The first chapter of Surface Detail enormous spoilers obviously. Reads pretty well and I'll be interested to see where he goes with this. Hope fully i'll be able to get the book on kindle as soon as it's out.
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Sep 28, 2010 21:34
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Nifty. Didn't think it was coming out so soon. I got through A Song of Stone the other week and what the gently caress? I think I sort of get what he was trying to do with having the narrator who completely lacks any control over his situation taking refuge in flowery prose, but the complete lack of any sympathetic characters made it an unpleasant read. And again with the incest, which I saw coming a mile off, having read Walking on Glass and The Steep Approach to Garbadale already. Weirdly, it's dedicated to his parents. Thoroughly enjoyed The Algebraist though. I love the Dwellers. He's tried a few times to do aliens with weird psychology that humans find baffling or repellent, and I think the Dwellers succeed a lot better in that role than the Affront or the Oct.
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Sep 28, 2010 22:48
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Entropic posted:I got through A Song of Stone the other week. A Song of Stone was my least favourite Banks book by a distance (I think I've read them all apart from Espedair Street) which is a pity because I thought the setting and premise were both quite cool. To be honest I didn't really get the characters motivations, it wasn't so much that I didn't understand why they were doing what they were doing, I just didn't believe that's what they would have done in the circumstances. In my opinion the end of a Steep Approach also had this problem and was a bit disappointing as a result. Both of the books are quite political in nature, a topic Banks has dealt with well in the past when he looked at it conceptually (intervention vs. non intervention) however in my opinion hasn't done as well with since the massive test case.
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Sep 29, 2010 13:30
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I just can't handle these gibberish sections in Feersum Endjinn. Good god.
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Sep 29, 2010 17:44
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gvibes posted:I just can't handle these gibberish sections in Feersum Endjinn. Good god. 
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Sep 29, 2010 18:29
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I kind of got to like Bascule's phonetic prose after a while. Banks has always had a weakness for throwing in crazy dialects whenever he can. The (mercifully short) secret communication bits in The Algebraist are the worst.
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Sep 29, 2010 20:09
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gvibes posted:I just can't handle these gibberish sections in Feersum Endjinn. Good god. Like the others said, I got into a groove with it after a while. Besides, it also helped sell the Ergates stuff.
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Sep 29, 2010 20:32
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Was anyone else disapointed with Transition? It started off a bit like Jerry-Cornelius-era Michael Moorcock fanfiction (which I was fine with), then just got a bit lazy and preachy.
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Sep 30, 2010 23:56
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Was anyone else disapointed with Transition? It started off a bit like Jerry-Cornelius-era Michael Moorcock fanfiction (which I was fine with), then just got a bit lazy and preachy. It's not just you: Transition was dreadful. A potentially good idea that Banks knocked together into an incoherent, sloppily written novel. It reads as if he just wrote stuff down as fast as he possibly could, then sent it straight off to be published the moment he reached the requisite number of pages. Every time Banks brings out one of these lazy, unprofessional insults to his readers, I always vow never to buy one of his books again. Trouble is, he then goes and writes something decent, like The Algebraist, or Matter and I'm forced to forgive him, through gritted teeth. I'm hoping Surface Detail will be one of his good ones: he always seems to put more effort into his books with these sort of themes.
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Oct 2, 2010 19:31
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00v12rv Radio interview for UK people. Good till the 9th of October I think. 15 minutes in.
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Oct 6, 2010 23:55
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