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Yesssss! And imagine CAM warheads going off all around in real space, and then following a ship in to hyperspace where the expanding radiation spheres become flat expanding circles, easily dodged... and warheads going off in hyperspace, which interact only partly with real space, creating flowering hypersphere cross sections in 3D, billowing with evolving voids and spaces; ships can dodge 4D fire by dropping strategically back down to 3D... Back and forth, riots of color, churning the e-grids, warping the skein with absurd matter/energy densities...
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Nov 19, 2012 07:29
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I've wondered for a while what Culture (or other sufficiently advanced) ships look like in more-than-three dimensions. Since Culture ships tend to have silly, flat, 3d humans living on them, I kinda assumed they were just your average 3d spaceship except for the Mind(s) extending into some abstract higher dimensions, and jumping into a non-euclidean starwars-like hyperspace mainly for beating the speed of light. But with the ease that in Hydrogen Sonata the Mistake Not... confounded the Gzilt warship by navigating the local hyperspace as if it's really just another handful of additional directions and nothing abstract, I have started to think it's probably more complicated than a flat 3d structure wrapped in a 4d field enclosure. Presumably ships also turn a bit in funny 4d directions when they're navigating hyperspace, so if they were only three-dimensional, wouldn't they appear two-dimensional in 3d space when not perfectly aligned with it? Do ships have TARDIS-like interiors that don't conform to their exterior as perceptible by humans and get really confusing to walk around in? Is the volume of a ship measured in m^4? What does that even mean for its mass, and energy requirements to get moving? Can other advanced Culture sentients move in four dimensions or does it take the power output of a ship to turn in funny directions?  Less Fat Luke posted:What I kind of found weird at the end of Surface Detail was the fact that the Culture ended up just carpet bombing the hidden substrate processors containing the Hells. Like, really? Wouldn't you at least try to recover some of the minds uploaded into there? The ones that had just been brought into the Hell would be sane and probably happy to be rescued from there. Surface Detail talk: The minds uploaded to the hells were those of legitimately dead people, and the Culture generally doesn't seem to generally be in the business of resurrecting everybody from other civilizations or even offering them alternative afterlives. Still-living people connected to them would presumably be perfectly fine after their destruction like real-world Chay was. Oblivion seems like a decent enough outcome. Vanadium fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Nov 19, 2012 |
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Nov 19, 2012 15:42
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Pope Guilty posted:I've been thinking about the amount of text devoted to the horrors of Hell in Surface Detail, and what strikes me is that it's an effective preventative for even a shred of sympathy for the pro-Hell forces. This is what they're fighting for. This is the thing they think is worth fighting other cultures over. Getting a whiff of moral ambiguity? gently caress you, here's a reminder that the pro-Hell forces are morally indefensible on every level.
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Nov 19, 2012 16:29
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Lex Talionis posted:I know these are still people who believe in a Hell like this (although probably not nearly as many as Banks thinks) Just by a quick headcount of world faiths, there are a lot more people who believe in punitive afterlives of one kind or another than people who don't. Just because you live in a relatively secular corner of a first world country doesn't mean it's representative. (Which is probably one of the major points of the Culture novels in general.) EDIT: Also I'd say the point of having the indefensibly-sociopathic pro-Hell forces is to lull to reader into agreeing with the Culture's actions, even though their plan through Surface Detail is to use the digital spirit of an ancient murderer to cheat and destroy the validity of a peaceful conflict-resolution system, all so they can impose their cultural values on every other society in the galaxy. I mean, I'm not even sure I disagree with their decision, but that's the scary part. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Nov 19, 2012 |
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Nov 19, 2012 16:46
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Prolonged Priapism posted:I made it (in Photoshop) and then posted it. I think a Consider Phlebas movie would be pretty rad, and at the very least you could cut one hell of a trailer for it (Excession too). So what I posted was the crappy, storyboard version of how I might like to see such a trailer end - with a representation of the event that kicks off the whole story, which is the kid Mind trying to evade capture by a group of Idiran ships. Thanks for the follow-up; it's a wonderful piece of work you posted. I feel like The Culture stories really would be more suited for animation than live action, simply because it would just be ridiculously expensive (or not feasible) to do everything in live action and still do the universe and its characters justice.
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Nov 20, 2012 01:54
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Vanadium posted:I've wondered for a while what Culture (or other sufficiently advanced) ships look like in more-than-three dimensions. Since Culture ships tend to have silly, flat, 3d humans living on them, I kinda assumed they were just your average 3d spaceship except for the Mind(s) extending into some abstract higher dimensions, and jumping into a non-euclidean starwars-like hyperspace mainly for beating the speed of light. But with the ease that in Hydrogen Sonata the Mistake Not... confounded the Gzilt warship by navigating the local hyperspace as if it's really just another handful of additional directions and nothing abstract, I have started to think it's probably more complicated than a flat 3d structure wrapped in a 4d field enclosure. I think the ships have to be at least some part only 3D, for people to live on them. I mean I guess in principle there's no reason you couldn't have a ship that's a Klein bottle, but maybe that freaks people out. The spaciobatics in The Hydrogen Sonata and the intro of Consider Phlebas imply the "actual navigable directions" interpretation - A hollow in an otherwise solid planet is accessible from the sort of 4D Banks is talking about (although it requires finesse). In the same way we can think of 3D as just a bunch of 2D planes all on top of each other, 4D is just a bunch of 3D spaces, always just one step away (in the right direction). So one can just step outside our 3D, move in hyperspace, and pop back in to 3D at any other point as if by magic. Same way you can touch your pencil on a piece of paper, lift if up (in to 3D) and put it back down anywhere you like, without having to actually draw a 2D path from one point to the next. And yeah, there are several mentions of ships that are in both real and hyperspace at the same time. Presumably they look pretty strange doing that. I think the living sections of ships are conventional 3D. But the engines, the Mind, sensor apparatuses, weapons and so on have both 3D and 4D components. In Matter, the Culture ship can't enter the Shellworld under its normal power (engines pushing off the e-grid) because the Shellworld is closed in 4D. Also recall that a hyperspace signal to the ship wasn't possible - a series of explosions was needed to get a message out. In The State of the Art it's mentioned that ships abide by Special Relativity in real space - when the Arbitrary leaves Earth it accelerates in real space for longer than usual, enough that its increasing mass might just show up on a gravity wave experiment on Earth, giving us a chance to spot it and start wondering. So it sounds like 4D mass works differently (light does, so why not). The ships accelerate in hyperspace by switching between the hyperspace "above" real space and the one "below," tunneling through real space briefly with each transition. Like a flying fish, splashing through a thin layer of water and in to another sky on the other side. It's a cool image, but it doesn't really say much about how it's supposed to work. I guess the idea is that one can only push so hard against the e-grid for so long, eventually the speed gain is more trouble than it's worth so you switch to the virgin, undisturbed e-grid on the opposite side of real space and churn it up for a while. And so on until you're going as fast as you can. This fits with the idea of "crash stops" (or super hard accelerations) that can hurt a ship's engines and disturb the e-grid enough that it can function as a signal (or give away your position). And I think ships (or at least fields) are required for hyperspace. The only thing that isn't a ship that goes there is the personal warp unit Horza uses in CP and the "hollowed out warp animal" the Idirans use to try and get past the Silent Barrier. Presumably both of those generate some sort of field enclosure that lets you stay alive in hyperspace, or at least gets you there. Lastly, fookolt, thanks! To some extent I agree that animation is the right way to go. The hyperspace battles would be so surreal anyway, "live action" would be meaningless there. But then again, Banks goes out of his way to point out that these are (mostly) basically human characters. He still hasn't told us why "pan-humanity" is a thing, but he has a habit of referring to it like he will someday explain more. And he did say (more or less) that he wrote CP as the craziest action movie he could think of. The spectacle of some of those set pieces would be pretty amazing in live action quality CG!
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Nov 20, 2012 04:54
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Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games would both make great films. Matter and Surface Detail would work loving fantastically in a TV miniseries format.
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Nov 20, 2012 05:07
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Agreed. I don't think Excession would really work as either, but for some reason I think it would have the coolest trailer.
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Nov 20, 2012 05:17
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:
I think that may be the key reason behind both the sociopathic villain and the extended torture-porn scenes of hell. The Culture agreed to a system for conflict resolution that avoided actual death, but a group of people decided to cheat when the result of that didn't go their way, with the potential result that a whole bunch of people would actually die. To me, that's the key moral dilemma at the heart of that book, and it's something that I don't know how I personally feel about it. What level of awfulness is necessary before it becomes okay to be the instigator of violence rather than simply responding to violence with other force?
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Nov 20, 2012 20:08
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Prolonged Priapism posted:
This is actually one of my favorite Banks things, although he only mentions them a few times. The Idirans use the warp animal, and in Matter the Xinthian is briefly described as being able to neutralize the antimatter buildup on its own. Come to think of it, that's a pretty good idea, Matter could easily be an HBO miniseries. The easiest way I know to conceptualize extra-dimensional motion is from Flatland. If a sphere can float over the plane of a circle and see its insides, then something can float over the plane of the sphere and see its insides, and so forth. Also, a four dimensional object casts a three dimensional shadow in realspace. Ish. It's wonky.
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Nov 23, 2012 16:28
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Here's everyone's favourite cuddly physicist Carl Sagan providing a very approachable demonstration of that very concept! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0WjV6MmCyM
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Nov 23, 2012 17:55
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Finished Hydrogen Sonata last night and enjoyed it a lot. Probably one of my favorite Culture novels. I love the interaction between the Minds and this had a lot of that, but I thought otherwise it was a pretty good mix of action and ideas. And the (minor spoiler) reveal of Mistake Not My...'s full name was so awesome.
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Nov 26, 2012 17:11
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silly posted:And the (minor spoiler) reveal of Mistake Not My...'s full name was so awesome. I actually thought this was kind of stupid. What it implied was obvious even if the specific content was hidden. There was no need to "reveal" anything and I felt doing so detracted from the exchange.
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Nov 26, 2012 17:49
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andrew smash posted:I actually thought this was kind of stupid. What it implied was obvious even if the specific content was hidden. There was no need to "reveal" anything and I felt doing so detracted from the exchange. I'm of the same opinion. The reveal of what the ship was actually capable of was enough and the name 'Mistake Not...' and the fact the other ships/civilisations couldn't find any reference to its name or class already made its meaning pretty clear. That said, I do like the idea of the ship itself being so loving smug about what it did and wanting to rub its full name in the Gzilt ship's face.
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Nov 26, 2012 19:15
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andrew smash posted:I actually thought this was kind of stupid. What it implied was obvious even if the specific content was hidden. There was no need to "reveal" anything and I felt doing so detracted from the exchange. Well it wasn't obvious to me so maybe it's just a difference in how we read it. And I thought it was a pretty deft way of delivering a very serious threat in a situation that was ambiguous since we the reader weren't really aware that Mistake Not... was essentially a military super ship..
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Nov 26, 2012 19:22
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silly posted:we the reader weren't really aware that Mistake Not... was essentially a military super ship..
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Nov 26, 2012 19:38
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I'm not so sure it is a super ship anyway, I think it's just really really good at one thing - field manipulation, which seems to include displacement. Funnily enough, I thought the reveal of what it could do was poorly done, as it moved away from the Gzilt ship first then displaced itself, which seems kind of redundant. It was nice to see a ship doing something different for once. The previous books have way too many engagements which basically boil down to effector battles. No one uses gridfire any more!
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Nov 26, 2012 22:09
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I didn't mind the name reveal - it suggested even more strongly that the Mistake Not... was an Abominator prototype given what we know of the behavior of such ships/Minds/avatars from Surface Detail. The Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints was a big pile of brash and barely contained smuggery after all.
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Nov 26, 2012 22:35
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aparmenideanmonad posted:I didn't mind the name reveal - it suggested even more strongly that the Mistake Not... was an Abominator prototype given what we know of the behavior of such ships/Minds/avatars from Surface Detail. The Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints was a big pile of brash and barely contained smuggery after all. I don't see how they're connected, they're a totally different design and size for a start.
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Nov 27, 2012 14:42
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Prolonged Priapism posted:Agreed. I don't think Excession would really work as either, but for some reason I think it would have the coolest trailer. That reason is Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time.  
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Dec 24, 2012 20:08
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and not the country-sized Sleeper Service dashing across half the galaxy to plunge itself and a few thousand ship-sized knife missiles into a seemingly aggressive spatial anomaly at a few thousand times the speed of light?
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Dec 24, 2012 21:49
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Yeah, let's put the climax of the thing into the trailer. That's never annoying.
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Dec 24, 2012 23:00
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rejutka posted:That reason is Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time. Was that the ship that hacked the other ships to direct their engines directly into their brains? That was badass as hell, but totally unfilmable. I'm always struck by how much better the non-human fight scenes are, and how much more interesting the machines are as characters. Has Banks ever said anythng about toying with a wholly non-bio book?
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Dec 25, 2012 00:14
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Was that the ship that hacked the other ships to direct their engines directly into their brains? That was badass as hell, but totally unfilmable. I was thinking more the bit that precedes that aka Killing Time versus a fleet, looking for one ship.
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Dec 25, 2012 00:18
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rejutka posted:I was thinking more the bit that precedes that aka Killing Time versus a fleet, looking for one ship. The best part is later when he joins up with the rest of the fleet that was secretly conspiring against him and is casually like "oh yeah btw, I got attacked by an unidentified fleet on the way here and had to wipe out all of them."
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Dec 25, 2012 05:08
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Was that the ship that hacked the other ships to direct their engines directly into their brains? That was badass as hell, but totally unfilmable. On a separate note I somehow saved Use of Weapons for last and just finished it. Holy poo poo I did not see that coming.  Is there a decent litcrit/reader's guide for that book? Because it reads like Serious Literature in a way the rest of the novels just don't, and I am sure a lot of that book went right over my head.
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Dec 25, 2012 06:00
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Bass Concert Hall posted:Is there a decent litcrit/reader's guide for that book? Because it reads like Serious Literature in a way the rest of the novels just don't, and I am sure a lot of that book went right over my head.
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Dec 26, 2012 10:23
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Updated OP bibliography for first time in years. (sorry) Did I miss anything? New M-less coming out this year apparently called "The Quarry". No details yet other than it's set in Northumberland and will probably involve dark family secrets.
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Jan 4, 2013 18:13
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Prop Wash posted:. . . I do wonder where the Culture's going from here. That's the whole point of the Culture at this point, though, interestingly. The only logical course which could be considered "forward" for them at this point involves them simply disappearing from the known universe. But the Culture think of Subliming as almost cowardly, and besides which they are having far too much fun casting themselves as the know-it-all, we're morally better than you, almost cowards themselves - who wants to be involved in everyone else's business, but without getting to a point where they'll start a nasty war. Not because they're scared they'll lose said war, but because the other big boys in the Galaxy might realize they're silly little children in many ways. Not having a determined course or ambition is pretty much the only thing that does define the Culture.
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Jan 5, 2013 01:13
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rejutka posted:Yeah, let's put the climax of the thing into the trailer. That's never annoying. Well you'd put that in (I would), but in a way that's mysterious and only lasts half a second. I'd say the initial outpouring of ships from the SS's field envelope, it'd look like a mercury fountain/shotgun blast. Cool, but totally incomprehensible. I'd also put in the scenes of the inside of the SS changing - big sections of the seaside cliffs just neatly folding up and away. It'd be almost Inception like. And you could do big panning shots of the inside of the SS with the giant frozen battle scenes. And in the naval battle you'd pan far enough to show that the sea just ends in a vertical wall and is only a few meters deep. And then of course one of the moneyshots is the winged guy looking out his porthole just as the Affronter ship passes between him and the planet. Seriously, the trailer would be incredible. The movie would probably be garbage though.
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Jan 5, 2013 01:23
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Illuyankas posted:Looking forward to BastardySkull's take on the elevenstring for his Hydrogen Sonata cover mockup. Yeah, hence why I've taken so long to actually do a cover. I really didn't enjoy it that much and found it disappointing! Also I'm pretty busy now that I graduated. By the way I only got 65% (2:1) for the project where I did all of those covers. Bastards. I've not really thought of what I'd put on a cover for the Hydrogen Sonata actually, front or back. Red Crown posted:Does anyone know where I can find a higher resolution image of this: It would suck. I'd be able to do you a decent print of it but I'd have to take the text off for legal reasons. If you're interested email lukejfrost at gmail dot com. Someone else has emailed me about a print (just checked my gmail for the first time in a while) so I will be doing that if they are still interested. It's weird coming back to this thread and seeing my stuff referred to, cheers guys.
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Feb 5, 2013 01:13
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Mmm, is that Vitesse Sans/Forza BastardlySkull?
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Feb 5, 2013 02:22
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BastardySkull posted:I've not really thought of what I'd put on a cover for the Hydrogen Sonata actually, front or back. Personally the things that spring to mind as appropriate for your covers are either The Presence, or something with the equatorial world-spanning city (exterior, or inside the giant tunnel the final battle happens in)
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Feb 5, 2013 03:08
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Moist von Lipwig posted:Mmm, is that Vitesse Sans/Forza BastardlySkull? It's Eurostile. It's used on the Orbit book covers for his sci-fi stuff here in Britain. MikeJF posted:Personally the things that spring to mind as appropriate for your covers are either The Presence, or something with the equatorial world-spanning city (exterior, or inside the giant tunnel the final battle happens in) Yeah I think the Presence would be interesting. I think 'visually' it is the only thing I remember from the book except the city and the asteroid spinning around the planet which was pretty cool. However, all the other covers I did had a (rather arbitrary) colour assigned to them, like red for Use of Weapons etc. I ran out of colours and ended up doing 'black and white' for Look to Windward so I'm not sure what colour I could use for this one either. If I hear he's doing another book I might show the publisher my covers. The cover for the Hydrogen Sonata is naff and is just some random planets. I'd do it cheap just so they could have more interesting covers..
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Feb 5, 2013 10:21
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rejutka posted:Yeah, let's put the climax of the thing into the trailer. That's never annoying. Actually, this is one where putting the climax wouldn't be a problem, seeing as it's only about one second long (if I recall correctly). BastardlySkull posted:You'd have to take the text off? Dang. Nevermind then.
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Feb 5, 2013 15:24
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Red Crown posted:Actually, this is one where putting the climax wouldn't be a problem, seeing as it's only about one second long (if I recall correctly). It has a climax? As I recall it was building to one and then pulled it out from under you.
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Feb 5, 2013 17:17
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MikeJF posted:Personally the things that spring to mind as appropriate for your covers are either The Presence, or something with the equatorial world-spanning city (exterior, or inside the giant tunnel the final battle happens in) I thought the idea of Ablate was striking. I sort of imagined something like a floating island (only bigger) that looked like it was eternally plunging down into the supernova remnant.
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Feb 5, 2013 23:51
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I know it's a bit wierd because it's such a throwaway line but the ending (the reveal) at the end of Surface Detail really gets to me: Did Zakalwe kill himself? Did he realise who he was? Why is he still fighting? I just find it so relentlessly sad.
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Feb 6, 2013 11:40
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I just want to say that Iain [M.] Banks showed me that symbolism doesn't have to be stupid and/or boring. Growing up, I basically formed the opinion that symbolism existed to make critics spray their pants and nominate you for awards and stuff and get you onto lists, but it made for a boring read. For example, something like Brave New World. I just can't suspend my disbelief or whatever the thing is called that literature does that makes you as a reader go "Ok, I understand and I'm intrigued and want to know more, please continue. I will take your hand and follow you to wherever you are going with this and absorb it because I trust you that there will be a payoff and who knows maybe BAM my beliefs will be challenged or something." Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I never "got" poetry. But after reading Consider Phlebas I had to call up my parents, siblings, and friends in order to demand why on earth I was never informed of this book. What a wonderful book. Anyone have any idea or suggestions on how to write to Iain Banks to thank him for writing? Ever since I read "You say you have enjoyed my writing for years. Why did you wait until one displeased you before writing to me?" in a letter [sent to someone else] from Robert Heinlein, I try to make a point of letting someone know when I really enjoy something. It's hard, though. The last one I wrote was to Cormac McCarthy, and it came back undeliverable. By the way, has anyone else thought that the way the Culture's ships name themselves (odd or jocular names that seem to suggest they just can't quite bring themselves to take things entirely seriously) has got a lot in common with internet usernames? Culture ship names would not stand out in any way whatsoever on this board, for example.
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Feb 7, 2013 00:59
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Mister Sinewave posted:Culture ship names would not stand out in any way whatsoever on this board, for example. Interesting that you should mention it
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Feb 7, 2013 01:03
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