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Entropic
Feb 21, 2007

patriarchy sucks

Cuntpunch posted:

I was dismayed to find out that Look To Windward is currently out of print.

I saw it in Chapters just last week.

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Shameless
Dec 22, 2004

We're all so ugly and stupid and doomed.
For anyone interested, the abridged audiobook of Transistion is being released as a free, twice-weekly podcast on iTunes. There's seven parts released so far. I'm in the UK so it might be different for other territories.

FelchTragedy
Jul 2, 2002

FelchTragedy.
Internet, I call forth your power!
Let's T_Roll.

Shameless posted:

For anyone interested, the abridged audiobook of Transistion is being released as a free, twice-weekly podcast on iTunes. There's seven parts released so far. I'm in the UK so it might be different for other territories.

Thanks. Unabridged or nothing for me though.

Graviton v2
Mar 2, 2007

by angerbeet
Can you listen to that without iTunes? Last time I installed that thing (which was years ago) I found it really invasive on my computer, it catalogued all my mp3's, installed some sort of DRM, made itself default player for eveything and I couldnt get rid of it.

Shameless
Dec 22, 2004

We're all so ugly and stupid and doomed.
The first part is here too:

http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/features/transition/transition_podcast.xml

Looks like it's only part one on that site at the moment though.

edit: How bizarre, in the UK it's a plain old Iain Banks book but in the US it's an Iain M Banks book.

lilbean
Oct 2, 2003

Graviton v2 posted:

Can you listen to that without iTunes? Last time I installed that thing (which was years ago) I found it really invasive on my computer, it catalogued all my mp3's, installed some sort of DRM, made itself default player for eveything and I couldnt get rid of it.
They're unencrypted MP3s, so you can just grab them out of the feed yourself or use any downloader that supports podcasts.

Graviton v2
Mar 2, 2007

by angerbeet

Shameless posted:

The first part is here too:

http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/features/transition/transition_podcast.xml

Looks like it's only part one on that site at the moment though.

edit: How bizarre, in the UK it's a plain old Iain Banks book but in the US it's an Iain M Banks book.
Deffo first part there as an mp3, everything else wants to install iTunes. Im not a fan of that program.

Opal
May 10, 2005

some by their splendor rival the colors of the painters, others the flame of burning sulphur or of fire quickened by oil.
Anyone up for synching some new usernames after the No Gravitas jokes? :) There's a whole bunch plus a few that haven't been in any books that he apparently dropped in an interview.

Kind of a waste of money I guess but it would be fun.

sparky_malarkey
Jun 16, 2005
It's not a just, good idea; it's the law.
I love Banks. I've read a number of his non-M books and all the M except Feersum Endjinn.

I always think of the Culture series as Star Trek Done Right. Given access to teleportation, FTL communication and travel, tremendous amounts of energy, molecular duplication technology, artificial intelligence, and computer power commensurate with all the other gee-whiz stuff, what do you get?

Star Trek took these incendiary ingredients and managed to cook them into soothing gruel, suitable for recovering ulcer sufferers and insomniacs. There are surely other realms besides Star Trek where writers took breathtaking technological developments and made sure that their societies were quite literally retarded so they could easily retell familiar stories In Space, but none so well-known come to mind. In the 24th century, during ship combat the captain gives a verbal order to a weapons officer, who presses buttons on a console, which finally fires the weapons. The captain's most amazing experience was living an accelerated lifetime inside his own head thanks to an alien probe, where he learned to play the flute. The ship he commands is apparently intelligent enough to convincingly stand in for Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking on the holodeck, but most of the time is about as passive as a rowboat.

In the Culture-verse, there's little basic technology that wouldn't be at home in Star Trek. But molecular duplication means molecular duplication of brains too -- people don't (permanently) die unless they want to. People were long-ago surpassed by machines in intellectual strength as well as every other kind of strength. People who yearn for a world where the machines aren't better at everything can be a bit romantic and sympathetic, but more so they're comically thick, like they're trying to win a staring contest with the sun. The most intelligent entity on a ship is the ship, who plays universes instead of music and can fight an entire fleet scale space battle before a human can utter the first syllable of "fire photon torpedoes."

To top it all off, this hypertech utopia has unabashedly radical social norms too. There are no gods, no masters, no scarcity, no responsibility, no temperance for 99.999% of the population. And for the tiny minority involved in SC, there are apparently no holds barred -- see for example the Culture terror weapon in Look to Windward.

I think Banks does a great job of telling stories that are exciting without making the mayhem actually look "fun" so you want to become the protagonist instead of observe him. I also love the way he ends his stories, as in Consider Phlebas for example. Single humans' actions are tiny and insignificant compared to the Culture. The Culture is tiny and insignificant compared to the universe. Humans are no less smart, capable, or creative in the Culture-verse than they are in other fiction. They've just been painted onto a breathtakingly large canvas.

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




Cuntpunch posted:

when it finally sees the traitor self-destruct in despair and ends it's assault - time passed: fractions of a second

No, the ROU got its effectors into the traitor ship's Mind. It committed suicide because it was compelled to. That shows the power and cruelty of an ROU very well. If it got in that far the ROU was capable of tearing the enemy Mind apart by itself, but instead it made it rip itself apart. Very cool and one of the most telling scenes about the Minds in a book that's all about the scheming and manipulation the Minds get up to.

proudfoot
Jul 17, 2006
Yak! Look! a Yak!

mllaneza posted:

No, the ROU got its effectors into the traitor ship's Mind. It committed suicide because it was compelled to. That shows the power and cruelty of an ROU very well. If it got in that far the ROU was capable of tearing the enemy Mind apart by itself, but instead it made it rip itself apart. Very cool and one of the most telling scenes about the Minds in a book that's all about the scheming and manipulation the Minds get up to.

Wait really? I was pretty sure that the traitor ship committed suicide after realizing what it was doing.

syphon
Jan 1, 2001

proudfoot posted:

Wait really? I was pretty sure that the traitor ship committed suicide after realizing what it was doing.
Yeah this is how I read it too.

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




It's mentioned that a Culture warship can convince an opponent to suicide. The scene before the suicide is the avenging ship starting its attack. Then there's an abrupt scene transition and the traitor suicides out of guilt. I'm reading that as "an attack is made" and "a possible result occurs". There's a setup and a punchline, so I believe it's an induced suicide.

I can find sources for the skeptical.

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




mllaneza posted:

It's mentioned that a Culture warship can convince an opponent to suicide. The scene before the suicide is the avenging ship starting its attack. Then there's an abrupt scene transition and the traitor suicides out of guilt. I'm reading that as "an attack is made" and "a possible result occurs". There's a setup and a punchline, so I believe it's an induced suicide.

I can find sources for the skeptical.

Afterwards, the surrounding warships mention that it was an incredibly cruel thing for the attacking warship to do to the traitor, so I'll take that as confirmation.

uXs
May 3, 2005

Mark it zero!

MikeJF posted:

Afterwards, the surrounding warships mention that it was an incredibly cruel thing for the attacking warship to do to the traitor, so I'll take that as confirmation.

It's definitely the result of an effector attack. The Killing Time was sweeping the warships, looking for the Attitude Adjustor. The AA first commands the 6 closest ships to disguise themselves, and then all the others as well. It realizes it made a mistake by doing this, as the effector swings towards it and targets it very, very briefly. It's immensely relieved when the effector goes away again, thinking its ruse has worked, and then practically immediately starts to doubt its actions, its mission, and itself, and commits suicide.

And then a few pages after that, the KT takes stock of the situation (still in the middle of the battle), and checks if the AA is still killing itself.

It's all pretty obvious really. And loving awesome.

There are other similar passages in the book, where a mind has to shut off all communication (and communication = every single goddamn thing that can contain any form of information, no matter how small or indirect) to protect itself from being taken over.

Graviton v2
Mar 2, 2007

by angerbeet
Kindly dont ban me, its just a segment and i think ive bought this book 3 times. This is the segment being discussed and im like 50/50 on the argument. It either killed itself out of guilt or it was effectorised in in the first pass.

Insufficient elapsed time, the Attitude Adjuster whispered to itself. The ROU being quizzed at the moment was still reconfiguring its internal systems signature to resemble that of the Attitude Adjuster. The effector sweep flicked away from it, dismissing. The Attitude Adjuster quailed.

It had made itself a target! It should have- HERE IT CAME!

A feeling of-

No, it had gone, swept over it! Its own disguise had worked. It had been dismissed too, like the ROU alongside!

The effector focus jumped to another craft still further away. The Attitude Adjuster was dizzy with relief. It had survived! The plan still held, the huge filthy trick they were pulling was free to continue!

The way to the Excession lay open; the other Minds in the conspiracy would commend it if it survived; the-... but it mustn't think of the other ships involved. It had to accept responsibility for what had happened. It and it alone. It was the traitor. It would never reveal who had instigated this ghastly, gigadeathcrime-risking scheme; it had to assume the blame itself.

It had wrestled with the Mind at Pittance and pressed it when it had insisted it would die rather than yield (but it had had no choice!); it had allowed the human on Pittance to be destroyed (but it had fastened its effector on his puny animal brain when it had seen what was happening to him; it had read the animal's brain-state, copied it, sucked it out of him before he'd died, so that at least he might live again in some form! Look! It had the file here... there it went...). It had fooled the surrounding ships, it had lied to them, sent them messages from... from the ships it could not bear to think about.

But it was the right thing to do!

... Or was it just the thing it had chosen to believe was the right thing to do, when the other ships, the other Minds had persuaded it? What had its real motives been? Had it not just been flattered to be the object of such attention? Had it not always resented being passed over for certain small but prestigious missions in the past, nursing a bitter resentment that it was not trusted because it was seen as being - what? A hard-liner? Too inclined to shoot first? Too cynical towards the soft ideologies of the meat-beings? Too mixed up in its feelings about its own martial prowess and the shaming moral implications of being a machine designed for war? All those things, a little, perhaps. But that wasn't all its fault!... And yet, did it not accept that one had an irreducible ethical responsibility for one's own actions? It did. And it accepted that and it had done terrible, terrible things. All the attempts it had made to compensate had been eddies in the flood; tiny retrograde movements towards good entirely produced by the ferocious turbulence of its headlong rush to ill.

It was evil.

How simple that reductive conclusion seemed.

But it had been obliged!... And yet it could not say by whom, so it had to accept the full responsibility for itself.

But there were others!... And yet it could not identify them, and so the full weight of their distributed guilt bore down on the single point that was itself, unbearable, insupportable.

But there were others!... And yet still it could not bear to think of them.

And so somebody, some other entity, looking in from outside, say, would have to conclude, would it not, that perhaps these others did not really exist, that the whole thing, the whole ghastly abomination that was this plot was its idea, its own little conspiracy, thought up and executed by itself alone? Was that not the case?

But that was so unfair! That wasn't true!... And yet, it could not release the identities of its fellow plotters. Suddenly, it felt confused. Had it made them up? Were they real? Perhaps it ought to check; open the place where they were stored and look at the names just to make sure that they were even the names of real Minds, real ships, or that it was not implicating innocent parties.

But that was terrible! Whichever way it fell after that, that was awful! It hadn't made them up! They were real!... But it couldn't prove it, because it just couldn't reveal them.

Maybe it ought to just call the whole thing off. Maybe it ought to signal all the other ships around it to break away, stop, retreat, or just open their comm channels so they could accept signals from other ships, other Minds, and be persuaded of the folly of their cause. Let them make up their own minds. They were intelligent beings no less than it. What right had it to send them to their deaths on the strength of a heinous, squalid lie? But it had to!... And yet, still, no; no it couldn't say who the others had been.

It mustn't think of them! And it couldn't possibly call off the attack! It couldn't! No! NO! Grief! Meat! Stop! Stop it! Let it go! Sweet nothingness, anything was better than this wracking, tearing uncertainty, any horror preferable to the wrenching dreadfulness boiling uncontrollably in its Mind.

Atrocity. Abomination. Gigadeathcrime.

It was worthless and hateful, despicable and foul; it was wrung out, exhausted and incapable of revelation or communication. It hated itself and what it had done more, much more than it had ever hated anything; more, it was sure, than anything had ever been hated in all existence. No death could be too painful or protracted...

And suddenly it knew what it had to do.

It de-coupled its engine fields from the energy grid and plunged those vortices of pure energy deep into the fabric of its own Mind, tearing its intellect apart in a supernova of sentient agony.

uXs
May 3, 2005

Mark it zero!
I don't see how you can read that any other way than as a forced suicide. Going even further, I'm positive that when the AA is thinking about looking up the names of its co-conspirators, that's also the work of the KT, trying to find out who sent the AA on its mission. It's probably a combination of both; trying to get the names and convincing the AA of its own guilt when it can't/won't reveal them.

Graviton v2
Mar 2, 2007

by angerbeet
Yeah that makes sense now. I never read it like that before. Thanks dude! After all the KT was a super class warship and the others from the rock were just medium type things.

Graviton v2 fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Oct 7, 2009

the fart question
Mar 21, 2007

College Slice

Graviton v2 posted:

Yeah that makes sense now. I never read it like that before. Thanks dude! After all the KT was a super class warship and the others from the rock were just medium type things.

It's just that they're all out of date tech compared to KT; top of the line when they were built but crap compared to the latest the Culture has to offer.

e: anyone read the new Banks book? sounds pretty mad.

WE DOIN IT NOW
Jun 18, 2005

Never compromise, not even in the face of Armageddon.
About halfway through it right now. It's...interesting. Mostly about reality shifting and the conflicts in a big kind of political organization overseeing the shifting between the infinite realities. I'm enjoying it, but not as much as I usually enjoy his novels set in the culture or a space setting.

It definitely is picking up the pace though and seems to be going somewhere interesting. There was a pretty big shift in the story that I just read. Ha, puns.

proudfoot
Jul 17, 2006
Yak! Look! a Yak!

gender illusionist posted:

It's just that they're all out of date tech compared to KT; top of the line when they were built but crap compared to the latest the Culture has to offer.

e: anyone read the new Banks book? sounds pretty mad.

In Matter, its pointed out that after a while, you can't really advance technologically, once you hit the peak of technological progress. After rereading the passage though, I am fairly convinced KT killed the AA. I just wonder why a fleet of several hundred warships doesn't simply blow away the Killing Time.

Also, the Attitude Adjuster was a Limited Offensive Unit, which is substantially weaker then a Rapid Offensive Unit(KT).

You kind of get the idea that the Culture has been technologically stagnant for a while - and the only way forward for them would be to sublime.

proudfoot fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Oct 9, 2009

WE DOIN IT NOW
Jun 18, 2005

Never compromise, not even in the face of Armageddon.

proudfoot posted:

You kind of get the idea that the Culture has been technologically stagnant for a while - and the only way forward for them would be to sublime.

I'm pretty sure this is actually stated in Look To Windward when the societies in the Universe are being explained on a technological level. They mention the Culture as being one of the races that has reached its peak and simply chooses not to sublime for whatever reason. Think it happens in one of the chapters on the Behemothaurs.

andrew smash
Jun 26, 2006

smooth soul

WE DOIN IT NOW posted:

I'm pretty sure this is actually stated in Look To Windward when the societies in the Universe are being explained on a technological level. They mention the Culture as being one of the races that has reached its peak and simply chooses not to sublime for whatever reason. Think it happens in one of the chapters on the Behemothaurs.

That's interesting, in Consider Phlebas the Culture is depicted as making some staggering advances (especially in Mind and warship technology) all within the few years between the start of the war and the events of the novel. The Player of Games also features a war-era military ship that's called 'geriatric' so obviously their capabilities have continued to advance in the intervening period (about 700 years). I guess though that Look to Windward takes place last in the Culture's timeline, so conceivably they could have at that point only recently entered a period of developmental stagnation.

alkanphel
Mar 24, 2004

WE DOIN IT NOW posted:

I'm pretty sure this is actually stated in Look To Windward when the societies in the Universe are being explained on a technological level. They mention the Culture as being one of the races that has reached its peak and simply chooses not to sublime for whatever reason. Think it happens in one of the chapters on the Behemothaurs.
Does the ending of Look to Windward suggestthat the Culture died out eventually or they sublimed instead?

the fart question
Mar 21, 2007

College Slice

proudfoot posted:

In Matter, its pointed out that after a while, you can't really advance technologically, once you hit the peak of technological progress. After rereading the passage though, I am fairly convinced KT killed the AA. I just wonder why a fleet of several hundred warships doesn't simply blow away the Killing Time.

Also, the Attitude Adjuster was a Limited Offensive Unit, which is substantially weaker then a Rapid Offensive Unit(KT).

You kind of get the idea that the Culture has been technologically stagnant for a while - and the only way forward for them would be to sublime.

I'm sure excession mentions that the reason KT rapes that whole old fleet is that it's newer and more advanced.

proudfoot
Jul 17, 2006
Yak! Look! a Yak!

alkanphel posted:

Does the ending of Look to Windward suggestthat the Culture died out eventually or they sublimed instead?

Yup, after one galactic year, the Culture no longer exists, presumably having sublimed, destroyed by an outside context problem, or somehow switched galaxies/universes or changed into something unrecognizable as the Culture.

proudfoot fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Oct 9, 2009

Unbudgingprawn
Feb 13, 2008

Has anyone finished Transitions?
I think I'm going to have to read it again before I can really get what's going on.

Yuppie Scum
Nov 28, 2003

Fortune and glory, kids. Fortune and glory.

Unbudgingprawn posted:

Has anyone finished Transitions?
I think I'm going to have to read it again before I can really get what's going on.

I did, what exactly did you want to know?

Away Message
Apr 8, 2003

alkanphel posted:

Does the ending of Look to Windward suggestthat the Culture died out eventually or they sublimed instead?
Not enough information, I think.


- That form was once known to us, we are sure, just as this one might have been once known to us. The representation that you have shown here corresponds to the form which is, or was, known as human. Appended to the deep search of our memory archives which was mentioned earlier will be the image that you are showing here. This search has not discovered anything of note thus far. It will take a little longer to complete because of the appendment of the visual image of the human form to it.
- Human. This is interesting to us, though the nature of the interest is historical.


Some time later,

...came to study the embodiment of the self to which you speak from the civilisation which was once known as the Culture.

That's really all there is about it.

Away Message fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Oct 10, 2009

syphon
Jan 1, 2001
Could imply that they sublimed, went extinct, or even just morphed into a different civili(z|s)ation.

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




syphon posted:

Could imply that they sublimed, went extinct, or even just morphed into a different civili(z|s)ation.

Or even just changed their name.

creamyhorror
Mar 11, 2006
the incredible adventures of superworm across America

Graviton v2 posted:


It had wrestled with the Mind at Pittance and pressed it when it had insisted it would die rather than yield (but it had had no choice!); it had allowed the human on Pittance to be destroyed (but it had fastened its effector on his puny animal brain when it had seen what was happening to him; it had read the animal's brain-state, copied it, sucked it out of him before he'd died, so that at least he might live again in some form! Look! It had the file here... there it went...). It had fooled the surrounding ships, it had lied to them, sent them messages from... from the ships it could not bear to think about.

I also hadn't realized it was an induced suicide. Now the bolded bit about the human's brain-state makes sense - I was wondering where exactly the file was going - and further confirms that it was the ROU's doing.

Take the plunge! Okay!
Feb 24, 2007



I finished reading Transition last week and it took me until today to decide I hated it. It reads like a Banks parody, everything about the Concern seems like a bad attempt at developing another society on the Culture model. The storytelling really blows, I couldn't help myself thinking I was reading a second rate Use of Weapons.

The worst part is probably the Prologue, but I can't really hold it against Banks because he really sucks at that in his other books. I don't even know why I bother reading them any more.

I especially hated whole Adrian part which was just a thinly veiled attack on the nature of the capitalist system, presumably written after the author had lost most of his savings in the AIG collapse.

And what's with this parallel universe poo poo? First Ian McDonald pulls it in Brasyl, then Stephenson and Anathem, now Banks. Honestly, it stinks of low effort.


So, why did you hate it?

Barry the Sprout
Jan 12, 2001

mcustic posted:

So, why did you hate it?

I didn't hate it exactly, but I do agree that his politics were showing a little bit too much. In particular when the torturer was dealing with the policeman who insisted that he should be punished for what he did concerning a terrorist attack.

However, I did enjoy it in spite of it seeming a little bit formulaic over all.

Entropic
Feb 21, 2007

patriarchy sucks

Barry the Sprout posted:

I didn't hate it exactly, but I do agree that his politics were showing a little bit too much.

Sounds like the most annoying parts of Garbadale.

Incidentally
Nov 11, 2005

free yourself, first thing.

MikeJF posted:

Or even just changed their name.

Or got bored of their monkey collections, turned off the HVAC, and left.

Barry the Sprout
Jan 12, 2001

Entropic posted:

Sounds like the most annoying parts of Garbadale.

I didn't really notice it in Garbadale (at least it wasn't one of the most memorable things about the book for me), but I certainly did in Transition. I am kind of oblivious to these kind of things normally, so it goes to show how in your face it all is in his latest.

communism bitch
Apr 24, 2009
Hey skanks. A Gift From The Culture is being made into a film directed by Dominic Murphy.

Entropic
Feb 21, 2007

patriarchy sucks

Oberleutnant posted:

Hey skanks. A Gift From The Culture is being made into a film directed by Dominic Murphy.

That could be so awesome. Fingers crossed.

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alkanphel
Mar 24, 2004

Oberleutnant posted:

Hey skanks. A Gift From The Culture is being made into a film directed by Dominic Murphy.
THat's pretty cool. Would have preferred to see Player of Games as a movie though.

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