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fookolt posted:Could someone explain the reason why Banks's Excession isn't available on the US Kindle store when all the other Culture books are? http://www.amazon.com/Excession-ebook/dp/B002TZ3DEO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1343697475&sr=1-1&keywords=excession I mean, that's a Kindle version in the Canadian version of the store and I'd be amazed if it's not available in the US.
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Jul 31, 2012 02:18
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Less Fat Luke posted:Does this link work? code:
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Jul 31, 2012 02:22
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Krinkle posted:
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Jul 31, 2012 02:30
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Given that Excession is available elsewhere, but not in the US, suggests something weird is going on with the publisher, probably related to rights. It's possible the publisher doesn't actually own electronic rights in the US, or there's some other snag that we're not privy to, and nobody (at the publisher) is motivated to get it resolved. Which would be too bad because I loved Excession.
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Jul 31, 2012 02:57
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Argh, this sucks. If we lived in a post-scarcity technoanarchosocialist society, surely this would not be an issue  
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Jul 31, 2012 03:03
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Just finished the first Culture book. Is it explained in later books why the rescued mind takes the changers name? Also when Horza wakes up and it seems like everything was just a virtual reality sim for a second?
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Aug 2, 2012 21:05
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jax posted:Just finished the first Culture book. Later books no, all the culture books are stand alone, there is a very rare callback to a certain SC agent a couple of times but thats it.
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Aug 2, 2012 21:15
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RebBrownies posted:I just want to say that I loving loved The Wasp Factory. My dad has a ton of Ian M Banks books downstairs that I should probably also read. (I'll comb the thread for favorites) I listened to a really interesting Q&A with Banks about The Wasp Factory. Apparently, the big spoilery thing at the end was a (relatively) last-minute change to a story he had been working on for years, and he almost didn't go through with it, because he was worried that it would come off as one of those gratuitous twist-for-twists-sake endings. But it doesn't - it fits and complements the story perfectly. Nobody ever asks Banks the question that I want to know though. Did he have Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle on his mind when he wrote The Wasp Factory? Frank and Merricat have a lot in common, and there are other plot/situation/character correspondences too.
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Aug 2, 2012 23:51
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jax posted:Just finished the first Culture book. (Consider Phlebas) Are you talking about when he is waking up and doesn't know who he is? His brain is having trouble because part of being a changer is taking on personality traits from who you're emulating, so he doesn't know who he is at first
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Aug 3, 2012 09:37
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I'll just copy the segment if that's ok. Consider Phlebas [Falls asleep in the Command Station] He slept fitfully; his dreams woke him. Ghosts chased him in echoing docks and silent, deserted ships, and when he turned to face them, their eyes were always waiting, like targets, like mouths; and the mouths swallowed him, so that he fell into the eye’s black mouth, past ice rimming it, dead ice rimming the cold, swallowing eye; and then he wasn’t falling but running, running with a leaden, pitch-like slowness, through the bone cavities in his own skull, which was slowly disintegrating; a cold planet riddled with tunnels, crashing and crumpling against a never-ending wall of ice, until the wreckage caught him and he fell, burning, into the cold eye tunnel again, and as he fell, a noise came, from the throat of the cold ice-eye and from his own mouth and chilled him more than ice, and the noise said: ‘EEEeee...’ *Skips to a 'state of play' chapter then: He was being shaken gently. ‘Wake up, now. Come on, wake up. Come on, now, up you get...’ He recognised the voice as Xoralundra’s. The old Idiran was trying to get him to wake up. He pretended to stay asleep. ‘I know you’re awake. Come on, now, it’s time to get up.’ He opened his eyes with a false weariness. Xoralundra was there, in a bright blue circular room with lots of large couches set into alcoves in the blue material. Above hung a white sky with black clouds. It was very bright in the room. He shielded his eyes and looked at the Idiran. ‘What happened to the Command System?’ he said, looking around the circular blue room. ‘That dream is over now. You did well, passed with flying colours. The Academy and I are very pleased with you.’ He couldn’t help but feel pleased. A warm glow seemed to envelop him, and he couldn’t stop a smile appearing on his face. ‘Thanks,’ he said. The Querl nodded. ‘You did very well as Bora Horza Gobuchul,’ Xoralundra said in his rumbling great voice. ‘Now you should take some time off; go and play with Gierashell.’ He was swinging his feet off the bed, getting ready to jump down to the floor, when Xoralundra said that. He smiled at the old Querl. ‘Who?’ he laughed. ‘Your friend; Gierashell,’ the Idiran said. ‘You mean Kierachell,’ he laughed, shaking his head; Xoralundra must be getting old! ‘I mean Gierashell,’ the Idiran insisted coldly, stepping back and looking at him strangely. ‘Who is Kierachell?’ ‘You mean you don’t know? But how could you get her name wrong?’ he said, shaking his head again at the Querl’s foolishness. Or was this still part of some test? ‘Just a moment,’ Xoralundra said. He looked at something in his hand which threw coloured lights across his broad, gleaming face. Then he slapped his other hand to his mouth, an expression of astonished surprise on his face as he turned to him and said, ‘Oh! Sorry!’and suddenly reached over and shoved him back into the- He sat upright. Something whined in his ear. He sat back down again slowly, looking round in the grainy darkness to see if any of the others had noticed, but they were all still. He told the remote sensor alarm to switch off. The whine in his ear faded. Unaha-Closp’s casing could be seen high on the far gantry. Horza opened his visor and wiped some sweat from his nose and brows. There's a bit more  at the end but that could easily be explained as 'changer symptoms'.
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Aug 3, 2012 13:56
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Just started Consider Phlebas. Is there any general order in which to read the Culture series or do they all stand on their own pretty well?
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Aug 4, 2012 20:20
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Chiba City Blues posted:Just started Consider Phlebas. Is there any general order in which to read the Culture series or do they all stand on their own pretty well? 
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Aug 4, 2012 20:24
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Chiba City Blues posted:Just started Consider Phlebas. Is there any general order in which to read the Culture series or do they all stand on their own pretty well? Seaside Loafer posted:Nah they stand alone. Quite often the timeframe is 1000's of years apart. Enjoy thats a cracking read The only thing I would suggest is holding off on Look to Windward until after Consider Phlebas, and saving Surface Detail until after you've read Use of Weapons. Of course not even that is necessary, probably. Lasting Damage fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Aug 4, 2012 |
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Aug 4, 2012 21:23
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They are, however, chronological, so while there are no direct links between the books, you can still generally track the Culture's tech progression over the 1000 years or so between Consider Phlebas and Surface Detail. It's definitely in no way essential, but if you're planning on reading them all anyway, it's fun to do so like that. This also means you get to jump straight to Player of Games next, which is easily one of the best Culture novels.
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Aug 4, 2012 21:57
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I can never tell if the Culture's supposed to be getting better tech or if the advancement of real-world technology and time are simply giving Banks bigger and better ideas. Like how in Shadowrun, wireless internet is apparently not a thing until the edition published after the real-world got wifi.
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Aug 5, 2012 06:57
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Pope Guilty posted:I can never tell if the Culture's supposed to be getting better tech or if the advancement of real-world technology and time are simply giving Banks bigger and better ideas. Like how in Shadowrun, wireless internet is apparently not a thing until the edition published after the real-world got wifi. I definitely think there's an element of that - stuff like how everyone starts getting neural laces, whereas before they had to use pen terminals and things like that. Everything (inevitably) feels a bit more '80s' in the early books - so more hands on and 'chunky'. I've also noticed that the Minds seem to use human avatars more and more as the series goes along, and they become more and more 'human' in the biological sense. But I think sometimes it is meant to be pretty clear that they're progressing quite rapidly. The Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints is presented throughout as being something preposterously overpowered by Idiran War-era standards.
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Aug 5, 2012 10:13
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I don't know, I seem to remember it's mentioned a few times that technological advances within the Culture are generally pretty slow - they basically already have everything they could possibly need or want so where's the impetus for advances? Though this probably doesn't apply to SC. And while everyone has access to limitless technomagic, that doesn't necessarily mean that every person (or ship/Mind/world) chooses to be at the cutting edge; it's pretty likely that in some places it's fashionable to only use thousand year old tech.
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Aug 5, 2012 12:59
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big scary monsters posted:I don't know, I seem to remember it's mentioned a few times that technological advances within the Culture are generally pretty slow - they basically already have everything they could possibly need or want so where's the impetus for advances? Though this probably doesn't apply to SC. And while everyone has access to limitless technomagic, that doesn't necessarily mean that every person (or ship/Mind/world) chooses to be at the cutting edge; it's pretty likely that in some places it's fashionable to only use thousand year old tech. I'd imagine that if you were an average Culture citizen, you wouldn't notice any difference beyond your day to day needs, but I think there's definitely a lot of room for progression on the cutting edge. If only because of the various other Civs that are equiv-tech or better, it's likely the Culture aren't at the zenith of technical advancement. Again, the Offensive Units produced during the Idiran War were cutting edge at that point (why wouldn't they be?), but in Surface Detail the Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints cuts through an entire fleet of Torturer Class-esque GFCF ships like butter. Ditto Killing Time in Excession.
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Aug 5, 2012 14:14
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I'm reading Look to Windward and I enjoyed the parts about the warning signs for societies who are about to Sublime. I am enjoying the detail being spent on Subliming, as it was only tangentially mentioned or discussed before. I like the idea that it's a society-wide fugue state and that the culture tuts to itself that it couldn't have been completely consensual to happen all at once.
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Aug 9, 2012 04:30
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Krinkle posted:I'm reading Look to Windward and I enjoyed the parts about the warning signs for societies who are about to Sublime. I am enjoying the detail being spent on Subliming, as it was only tangentially mentioned or discussed before. I like the idea that it's a society-wide fugue state and that the culture tuts to itself that it couldn't have been completely consensual to happen all at once. There's a phenomenal RPG.net thread about sublimation and the dodgy space pirate dudes who pick through the wreckage and sell the bits. Search for Counting to Infinity.
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Aug 9, 2012 12:33
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sebmojo posted:There's a phenomenal RPG.net thread about sublimation and the dodgy space pirate dudes who pick through the wreckage and sell the bits. Search for Counting to Infinity. That.. sounds amazing.
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Aug 9, 2012 14:36
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sebmojo posted:There's a phenomenal RPG.net thread about sublimation and the dodgy space pirate dudes who pick through the wreckage and sell the bits. Search for Counting to Infinity. any chance you could link to that as im having a devil of a time finding it.
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Aug 9, 2012 15:36
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Oldmangray posted:any chance you could link to that as im having a devil of a time finding it. This one, I think forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?294175-Sci-Fi-Setting-Riff-Counting-to-Infinity
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Aug 9, 2012 16:06
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I just finished Feersum Endjinn, wondered if anyone could shed some light about the ending? So the big reveal about what the technology the Diaspora left behind was that it was a wormhole hidden in the Chapel Engineers' altar beneath their city, and that they needed to get to the top of the tower to be able to activate it - but then at the end Bascule basically seems to say "But we didn't need that anyway" as the sun stopped dimming and became bright again, and the stars changed or something like that I'm racking my brains trying to work out what's going on there - I really enjoyed the book and I'd love to get my head around what happened at the end. I'd thought that maybe the earth had somehow been moved a safer distance away from the sun? but then surely it'd be too cold... and the sun would be dim. Moving the whole planet to a different solar system maybe?. Long story short, I don't know what the gently caress so if anyone has an opinion on it I'd be interested to hear it.
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Aug 9, 2012 19:59
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Is the no gravitas thing from look to windward, or is it from an interview outside of the book series? Ziller and the Homomdian were listing about a hundred silly ship names in a row in a chapter titled no gravitas but it never came up, otherwise. Also, to my shame, I cannot provide a page number and quote - for the life of me I have no idea how to access a bookmark in my kindle 2. I can make them, and if I click past the exact page it will indeed look dog-eared in the corner, but I can't say "hey, show me my bookmarks.", nor will tabbing through chapters stop at a bookmarked page as if it has any importance... So I can't quote this without manually backpedaling about a hundred times, but when Not-Ziller is getting the tour and explanation of the plates, it literally says that the top of the orbital is open to space and that the air is kept in by nothing but the artificial gravity of the centrifugal motions... So there's that. Lots of great science fictions have bad science. Jules Verne is great but I know from experience that an undersea jungle under natural sunlight isn't going to have any color but red in it after about 30 meters. And a Positronic brain would have made every Asimovian robot a walking matter/anti-matter explosion factory but it sounds cool. Doc Brown can mispronounce Gigawatts all he wants for the same reason. Sorry to ramble, I'm up late and I just wanted to touch on that issue I had from a few pages back where everyone assured me that "fields did it" and to "not worry so much it's cool" Also I don't understand how it is a giant ring that orbits a star at the radius that a habitable planet would go, but there's also a hub? Inside the star? And that nighttime is when it goes behind... something? I read the segment several times and it never said what it goes behind. Is it a giant mobius strip? Krinkle fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Aug 10, 2012 |
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Aug 10, 2012 10:57
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Orbitals aren't ringworlds like in Known Space, they don't go around a star. They float somewhere (I think usually at a LaGrange point) with only the hub in the center.
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Aug 10, 2012 11:13
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Yeah, an orbital is dozens or hundreds times the surface area of Earth. A ring around a star would be millions of times. That said, there's been reference to there being Rings (and Dyson Spheres) in the Culture in the Phlebas appendices, but they're rarer. And the Morthanveld capital nestworld from Matter is a ring that encircles a star, but made of entwining water-filled tubes rather than a relatively flat surface.
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Aug 10, 2012 11:34
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Krinkle posted:Is the no gravitas thing from look to windward, or is it from an interview outside of the book series? Ziller and the Homomdian were listing about a hundred silly ship names in a row in a chapter titled no gravitas but it never came up, otherwise. It's from a QnA session on the website of The Guardian, a British newspaper.
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Aug 10, 2012 12:19
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:It's from a QnA session on the website of The Guardian, a British newspaper. But a few have popped up in books. Hell, he mentioned Look to Windward there; pretty sure the ship that was set to take over from Hub after Hub died was a Gravitas ship
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Aug 10, 2012 14:34
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That's true, but AFAIK the actual reason for the running gag was only ever explained here.
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Aug 10, 2012 17:32
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Krinkle posted:Also I don't understand how it is a giant ring that orbits a star at the radius that a habitable planet would go, but there's also a hub? Inside the star? And that nighttime is when it goes behind... something? I read the segment several times and it never said what it goes behind. Is it a giant mobius strip? As has been said, Orbitals are not ringworlds. Night and day are made just by the fact that as it rotates there is part of the inner surface that is not facing the sun, and a part that is. The Hub resides in the exact center of the ring. This means its around 1.5 million kilometers from the inner surface, it must be massive to still be visible to the naked eye.
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Aug 11, 2012 02:50
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Owlkill posted:Feersum Endjinn If I remember it correctly, the diaspora turned the sun itself into the fearsome engine. It would dim a bit overall as it ejected more mass in one direction until it could get out of the way of the cloud.
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Aug 11, 2012 04:46
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Am I misunderstand how in-construction orbitals work or are they gonna have a hosed day/night cycle if there's still plates missing? I guess it's not too bad if you don't live right next to a missing plate, welp Vanadium fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Aug 11, 2012 |
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Aug 11, 2012 05:45
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Vanadium posted:Am I misunderstand how in-construction orbitals work or are they gonna have a hosed day/night cycle if there's still plates missing? Orbitals get their day/night the same way a planet does (except inside-out): by rotating once a day at a fixed distance from a star. It's nothing to do with shadows from plates (the orbital is inclined at an angle so that the far side is always in sunlight) The center hub of an orbital basically follows the same orbit around a start a planet would. The hub doesn't emit light. And it's small enough you can barely see it from the surface of the orbital. Entropic fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Aug 11, 2012 |
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Aug 11, 2012 06:35
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Imagine a ribbon around the equator of Earth. Now remove Earth: The inside of the ribbon will be where people live, the center of where Earth was is the hub. Since it's angled, the ribbon mostly doesn't shadow onto itself. The ribbon itself rotates, giving a day/night cycle, where the part furthest from the sun is noon, the part closest is midnight. This is of course much smaller than a Culture orbital, which is orders of magnitude larger than Earth's circumference.
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Aug 11, 2012 08:41
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The ending of Look to Windward is weird. What was the point of sending the T-fur-thousand after the conspirators, torturing the ever loving poo poo out of them, then destroying their soulkeepers so that they are lost and can't even tell those dicks in the afterlife "whoa maybe you don't want to mess with the culture."? And was there an error in my kindle with a doubled-up epilogue or was that intentional because the man got twinned? And to clarify, his twin wasn't the kitty man dying in the brain-tube meat-hell interior of the behemothsaur? Finally: The monkey-man scientist who was going to warn the culture, at what point was he handed over from the feather-bubble traders to the conspirators who gutted him and tossed him on a long rear end journey around the galaxy? Strongly implies the culture has sublimed or disappeared in the time he was gone, and then it just ends. Feels like I don't even know how he feels about it.
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Aug 12, 2012 19:55
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Krinkle posted:The ending of Look to Windward is weird. What was the point of sending the T-fur-thousand after the conspirators, torturing the ever loving poo poo out of them, then destroying their soulkeepers so that they are lost and can't even tell those dicks in the afterlife "whoa maybe you don't want to mess with the culture."? It was mentioned that the surveillance and evidence and remains were very deliberately left in place, if I recall correctly. They got the message. If they'd let them reach their heaven afterwards it wouldn't have been as effective. Krinkle posted:And was there an error in my kindle with a doubled-up epilogue or was that intentional because the man got twinned? And to clarify, his twin wasn't the kitty man dying in the brain-tube meat-hell interior of the behemothsaur? That was an error. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Aug 13, 2012 |
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Aug 12, 2012 20:00
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Turin Turambar posted:This one, I think Yes, that's it. Sorry, was on my phone. It's a long thread, but definitely worth paging through for the awesome posthumanist braincandy. Bailywolf posted:Counting to Infinity sebmojo fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Aug 13, 2012 |
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Aug 13, 2012 04:58
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:I wonder how many Culture based usernames are on the forums. Aside from the ones on this page there's a Zero Gravitas and a Zakalwe at the very least. I've got one, and I used other culture names on other boards ("Zero Gravitas" and "Gray Area").
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Aug 13, 2012 05:26
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Just finished Use of Weapons. I already found Player of Games pretty harsh in the emotional impact, but this is something else. I don't think I've ever felt this awful over a book before. There's monstrosity and there's... that. That loving chair and the thought of ever having sympathized with the guy is going to cost me some sleep tonight.
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Aug 14, 2012 22:09
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