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I would go with Culture Vs. Other civs if I was writing it. Because that's the one I'd most like to read, and because between Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Look To Windward, and Surface detail, there are a lot of different ways to explore that theme, and it's the one I'd most want to write.
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Sep 21, 2015 01:02
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Some of those things in A Few Notes From The Culture are clearly things that changed later since he wrote it in 1994. Like the idea that GSVs are exclusively Contact vehicles and average Culture civilians would rarely see one. Later on it's clear many GSVs are just full-blown mobile civilian habitats.
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Sep 21, 2015 06:25
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Taeke posted:The other direction is taking a more literary/narratological approach and closely examine the many instances of misdirection in Use of Weapons, and how it's basically the ambiguity of a sentence like "The officer killed the man with a gun." as a novel. As I'm typing this I realise that (unless I or someone else comes up with a better idea) I've pretty much decided on this one. I've actually got an idea of what I'd be writing about and it's pretty much the perfect scope for a thesis, not too narrow to be restrictive and not too broad to be overwhelming. Yeah, you've got it exactly right. That sounds pretty tight to me, especially if you've only got 16k words to play with. The whole parallels-to-real-world-liberal-interventionism thing is great and interesting, but I think it'd need a more in-depth treatment (and a lot more theory/secondary source material) than that word count could properly allow for. This way, you can stick much more closely to the primary text. Let us know how it goes!
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Sep 21, 2015 10:20
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xian posted:I would go with Culture Vs. Other civs if I was writing it. Because that's the one I'd most like to read, and because between Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Look To Windward, and Surface detail, there are a lot of different ways to explore that theme, and it's the one I'd most want to write. While I agree that thematically that's one of the more interesting aspects of the novels, it's very hard to narrow down to a 16k words subject. I'd be constantly doubting myself on the scope I'd have limited myself to, and there'd be the constant nagging feeling that whichever aspect (and corresponding examples) I chose there's a better suited one I missed. There's simply too many different ways to go. There's also the problem that I'm not well versed at all in the political, socio-economic, and cultural sciences, so I fear I'd be setting myself up for failure by choosing a subject that I'm ill equipped to tackle. Barry Foster posted:Yeah, you've got it exactly right. That sounds pretty tight to me, especially if you've only got 16k words to play with. Thanks, will do! Once I start on it proper I'll probably float some ideas here, ask for second opinions and stuff, but that won't be until February if all goes well. I've still got some electives to complete this semester and because I'm recovering from minor surgery (and my dad will be going in for major surgery in October) it's not 100% sure that I'll manage that. If all doesn't go well I'll have to postpone it until September, but let's hope not.
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Sep 21, 2015 11:40
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I'm halfway through Inversions right now. It's pretty good.
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Sep 21, 2015 23:36
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Anyone shocked to see that someone named so similarly to Mawhrin-Skel would be a giant rear end in a top hat?
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Sep 22, 2015 04:47
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The Dark One posted:Anyone shocked to see that someone named so similarly to Mawhrin-Skel would be a giant rear end in a top hat? The Culture rejects all forms of economics based on anything other than voluntary activity. "Money is a sign of poverty" is a common saying in the Culture. Inversions is pretty good, I'm also about halfway though it. I do kind of want the doc to just say "gently caress IT I'M A SPACE ALIEN AND THIS IS MY DROOONE gently caress YOU!!!" but it's not that kind of book.
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Sep 22, 2015 04:51
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Murgos posted:Yeah, picket implies militarization and the Culture want to avoid reminding you that they can kick your rear end. No, I meant packet, as in salsa packet. As in a pun on the image of salsa packets with culture ship names.
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Sep 22, 2015 09:00
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But "packet" was also the historical name for the fastest sailing ocean going boats in the 18th and 19th century - they'd be small craft, carrying mail, official orders, and VIPs. They didn't have to patrol or chase enemies (I think they were contracted by the government, and not part of the actual navy) and could sail close to the wind, so they were usually the fastest way to get from A to B. Generally they'd be very lightly armed, if at all. So you made a double joke without meaning to!
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Sep 22, 2015 17:00
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Having never gotten around to it, I finally finished The Algebraist, and you know, it was so meandering and odd at first I thought I wasn't going to like it to the point it would sour my view on how much I loved Banks in general, but by the end, I really enjoyed it? The whole concept was actually really clever, and I'm thinking of shamelessly stealing the plot for an RPG game now.
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Sep 28, 2015 11:31
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I read a bunch of the Culture novels a few months ago, and loved the gently caress out them. Somehow I got derailed by Stephen King books for the ensuing months though. I just started Surface Detail and it was absolutely shocking how great the writing was compared to King. King's a good story teller, but man can Banks write.
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Sep 28, 2015 17:37
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Anyone read any Ann Leckie(huge rear end spolier in plot summary)? It's got future humanity and AIs and is being tipped to be a worth successor to Banks. I've only read the first one so far and they're well written but I feel they are missing some of the charm(gravitas ?) of the culture books
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Sep 28, 2015 19:51
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I've read the first one as well and think your assessment is spot on.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:04
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xian posted:I've read the first one as well and think your assessment is spot on. I might pick up the next two in the series and hope for some massive world-building backfilling
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Sep 28, 2015 21:12
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Pound_Coin posted:Anyone read any Ann Leckie(huge rear end spolier in plot summary)? It's got future humanity and AIs and is being tipped to be a worth successor to Banks. I've only read the first one so far and they're well written but I feel they are missing some of the charm(gravitas Might be a killer; The charm (and that's a perfect description) is really what makes Banks for me. Space Opera isn't that uncommon, but that... that touch and bit of amusement needs to be there, too.
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Sep 28, 2015 21:55
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The Ancillary books are pretty good. I'll definitely get the third. However, I do think that Ancillary Justice got a lot of undeserved press/hype from the whole "Radchai language does not recognize gender" thing earning it a lot of social justice points, despite the fact that it really isn't a plot-relevant thing; the only thing the non-gendered language does is point out that Breq is Radchai when she guesses somebody's gender wrong, and that matters maybe once and it could be handled by some other linguistic gaffe pretty easily. I know when the first book came out that's all anybody was loving talking about and it's basically completely meaningless to the actual story, which nobody actually talked about.
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Sep 28, 2015 22:01
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The Ancillary books are great but also not really at all like the Culture novels. Definitely worth a read if you enjoy sci-fi with themes of identity, and imperial colonialism.
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Sep 29, 2015 10:34
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:The Ancillary books are great but also not really at all like the Culture novels. Definitely worth a read if you enjoy sci-fi with themes of identity, and imperial colonialism. Unfortunately, those books have got all the wit and charm of the Geseptian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy.
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Sep 29, 2015 10:56
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Kesper North posted:Unfortunately, those books have got all the wit and charm of the Geseptian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy. I'd say they're usual but etymologically unsatisfactory
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Sep 29, 2015 12:55
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Argali posted:Anyone read Walking On Glass? I'm about to give it a whirl. It's interesting to read if you're familiar with his later work. It hits a lot of the same notes that he'll return to all the time (dysfunctional families with dark secrets, high tech castles, people caught up in schemes of vaster scope than they can imagine...). As a few people have said, his early books are all very clearly the work of someone who wants to be writing SF and is bending the rules of "literary" fiction as much as possible to fit his weird concepts in. The Bridge is very much like that as well.
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Sep 29, 2015 20:46
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:The Ancillary books are great but also not really at all like the Culture novels. Definitely worth a read if you enjoy sci-fi with themes of identity, and imperial colonialism. Agreed. And the second book is a tremendous step back in terms of the series - scales everything way down, removes a ton of urgency and challenge from the story, and repeats several plot beats without acknowledging it. Hopefully in the third we'll get all the actual SF the first promised. I also tend to think of the Raadchai as The Affront but East Indian. They're just the worst. Has anyone read her short stories? I have heard they are good.
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Sep 30, 2015 16:14
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Entropic posted:It's interesting to read if you're familiar with his later work. It hits a lot of the same notes that he'll return to all the time (dysfunctional families with dark secrets, high tech castles, people caught up in schemes of vaster scope than they can imagine...). As a few people have said, his early books are all very clearly the work of someone who wants to be writing SF and is bending the rules of "literary" fiction as much as possible to fit his weird concepts in. The Bridge is very much like that as well. I'm halfway through, and it's a strange book. Quite slow, and I'm not sure where the love story or crazy guy story arcs are going. I'll probably power through it this weekend. At this point, I think my main observation is that it's a step back in quality from The Wasp Factory.
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Oct 2, 2015 12:05
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Argali posted:I'm halfway through, and it's a strange book. Quite slow, and I'm not sure where the love story or crazy guy story arcs are going. I'll probably power through it this weekend. At this point, I think my main observation is that it's a step back in quality from The Wasp Factory. But then, much Banks is. Though I was delighted when I first picked up Consider Phlebas to see it started with a scene of unrepentant grossness every bit as good as the unremitting barrage of such in Wasp Factory.
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Oct 2, 2015 14:15
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Argali posted:I'm halfway through, and it's a strange book. Quite slow, and I'm not sure where the love story or crazy guy story arcs are going. I'll probably power through it this weekend. At this point, I think my main observation is that it's a step back in quality from The Wasp Factory. The Bridge is a much better book if you're looking to read some early Banks.
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Oct 2, 2015 15:03
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You could pick a specific topic in culture v other civs, like sexuality or war. Both could be interesting...
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Oct 7, 2015 02:51
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Quarter of a way though the first Ancillary and not digging it. I will finish out of 'want to see what happens' but it annoys me, the calling everyone she thing is annoying, it fucks up the image in my head of the characters, I actually had to go and google it when I starting thinking 'hang on everyone appears to be a woman so far' to find out what the gently caress was going on, i dont want to have to have to re-construct the character in my mind all the time. I get the point but its just not needed and annoying.
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Oct 7, 2015 23:27
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Seaside Loafer posted:I starting thinking 'hang on everyone appears to be a woman so far' to find out what the gently caress was going on... If this was your reaction it seems to me like you don't get the point, and you did need it demonstrated in such a way.
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Oct 8, 2015 00:12
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Prolonged Priapism posted:If this was your reaction it seems to me like you don't get the point, and you did need it demonstrated in such a way.
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Oct 8, 2015 14:50
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Yes. You wrote that you were so confused by "everyone appearing to be a woman" that you had to Google the book to find out "what the gently caress was going on." The book explicitly tells you that ships see every human as being a "she," that's just how they think. It waits a little while to do this, but if you were confused about everyone being a woman before that, then it seems like you've got some issues. And you don't have to update your mental picture of the characters "all the time." It's once. At most. The point you're missing is that aside from the pronoun, you are responsible for the constellation of assumptions you projected on these characters. If finding out that a character is actually male represents such a huge shift in your mental image of them (such that you need to "re-construct the character" instead of going "oh, ok, male"), that means you brought a lot of extra baggage to the character, based only on what gender you thought they were. In other words, male vs female seems to be pretty important to you. So it seems like in your case, it was needed. Here's another way to think about it - if at the end of a conventional novel it turns out that everyone in the story was black, is that "annoying?" Have you ever read The Left Hand of Darkness? Is that an annoying book? If not, why not? And how is that fundamentally different from what this book does?
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Oct 8, 2015 17:41
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For gods sake it was before the book told me, this is a stupid argument, the fact I noticed before I was told suggests I noticed something was up yes? And yes even after knowing I still find it annoying, but thats just like opinion man.
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Oct 8, 2015 18:11
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I can't not:quote:Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person's sex in Marain, but they're not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it's brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.
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Oct 8, 2015 19:56
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Prolonged Priapism posted:Yes. You wrote that you were so confused by "everyone appearing to be a woman" that you had to Google the book to find out "what the gently caress was going on." I dunno, the novelty of the gimmick wears off about book 3, for me at least, and it gets kind of annoying.
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Oct 8, 2015 20:21
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hatesfreedom posted:I dunno, the novelty of the gimmick wears off about book 3, for me at least, and it gets kind of annoying. Why? To me what was interesting was realising that I was coding nearly everyone as female - which had zero impact on the actual plot btw, I'm not sure why it's that confusing - EXCEPT for certain background grunt soldier types, who I was picturing as male. Sure, it's different to have one pronoun and for that to be "she" but it doesn't make the books any more difficult to read imo. What it does do is force the reader to examine their assumptions, which is what good books should be doing anyway. EDIT: I totally get why people don't like them but I never saw the pronoun use as one of the problems. Gravitas Shortfall fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Oct 9, 2015 |
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Oct 9, 2015 11:31
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Why? To me what was interesting was realising that I was coding nearly everyone as female - which had zero impact on the actual plot btw, I'm not sure why it's that confusing - EXCEPT for certain background grunt soldier types, who I was picturing as male. Well to be fair I'd of been just as annoyed for the pronoun to be "he", and by book three I was no longer interested in challenging my assumptions regarding gender. If I'm a flawed human, so be it. I was interested in getting a clearer picture of who everybody was and what they looked like, and not having to remind myself occasionally that the character described was male. Easier reading I guess.
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Oct 9, 2015 16:30
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hatesfreedom posted:Easier reading I guess.
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Oct 9, 2015 16:35
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hatesfreedom posted:I was interested in getting a clearer picture of who everybody was and what they looked like, and not having to remind myself occasionally that the character described was male. Easier reading I guess. What part of the plot was it necessary to know that a main character was male or female? This is an honest question, I haven't read the first two books in a while (and I haven't read the third yet so no spoilers please). I seem to remember sex not being a massive deal in the setting and found it just as easy to imagine everyone as female. EDIT: Wasn't everyone supposed to be really androgynous anyway?
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Oct 9, 2015 16:43
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:What part of the plot was it necessary to know that a main character was male or female? This is an honest question, I haven't read the first two books in a while (and I haven't read the third yet so no spoilers please). I seem to remember sex not being a massive deal in the setting and found it just as easy to imagine everyone as female. Not so much the plot as some people like the good ol' brain-TV while they read and it's annoying to keep getting it wrong and knowing it the whole time.
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Oct 9, 2015 16:57
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Reminds me Baxter's Proxima, in which there's a gender neutral character. The use of gender neutral pronouns was a bit jarring but only because I wasn't used to it. Every time it was used it disturbed the flow of the sentence because I became too aware of the linguistics I guess. It was interesting but also a bit annoying. E: not Baxter, but Reynolds I think.
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Oct 9, 2015 17:08
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:What part of the plot was it necessary to know that a main character was male or female? This is an honest question, I haven't read the first two books in a while (and I haven't read the third yet so no spoilers please). I seem to remember sex not being a massive deal in the setting and found it just as easy to imagine everyone as female. I can't think off hand of any part of the plot that would have been better served by gender pronouns. Hmm. All I can really say is it annoyed me for Seivarden to constantly be referred to as a "she". It's entirely likely that's on me though, as I really found Seivarden boring, tedious, unbelievable, and I wish he'd go away. Yah, the Raddchai were described as super androgynous. Were the original Raddchi, still perhaps holed up in their isolated dyson sphere, were they androgynous as well? Who knows I guess. Is the lack of pronouns because all genders are equal in their eyes or because gender had no place when you're being governed by an AI? I mean probably the former. I'm stretching I know, but the amount of things Ann Leckie doesn't tell us is.... well, she left a lot of things unexplained.
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Oct 9, 2015 17:09
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Explaining everything is boring. Just dump me in medias res and tell me the bare minimum that's needed at each point in the story and let me figure the rest out.
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Oct 9, 2015 17:23
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