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I'm trying to understand Excession, but I can't get through this extremely obtuse book and understand what's going on where with who and why... Which ship was taken over in the second chapter, and by who? The ship where the drone escapes via displacement using its twin.... I'm almost at the end of the book and now I'm wondering if it was the Attitude Adjuster, and if it was the Affront who took them over, instead of the Excession artifact as I thought. The book is told like the movie Memento, bouncing back and forth in time and not one character has a name that I can keep separate from all the others (except for the Sleeper Service).
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Apr 27, 2010 18:21
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Also Frank Exchange of Views is a great warship name.
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Apr 27, 2010 18:38
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Consider Phlebas was terrible, I mentioned that earlier in the thread. Player of games was much better and I'm glad I read it because I was about to give up the whole series based on how awful Consider Phlebas was. Almost finished with Excession and it is really poorly written, I find myself skipping over any chapter with Byr and Daniel in that tower.
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Apr 29, 2010 14:28
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Juuuuust finished Excession. Great book if you skip over every chapter that's just human navel-gazing and focus on the Mind intrigue. I especially like the opening sequence of the drone trying to escape a ship, pages and pages of highly technical strategy that takes place in real-time micro-seconds.
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Apr 29, 2010 21:27
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Entropic posted:Yeah, I didn't hate it that much, but it took me quite a while to get into it. It does pick up a lot in the back half. But by the time I got to the end I just had this tremendous sense of "so what?" It probably didn't help that I finished it around the same time as I read Charles Stross's loving amazing novella Palimpsest, which isn't strictly-speaking a many-worlds story, but has some similar ideas executed far, far better. Thank you so much for linking to that free copy of Palimpsest. I just finished reading it, what an amazing book. It gets far, far better toward the ending too, the opposite of so many other books that weakly peter out.
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May 3, 2010 19:37
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I'm reading more of the culture novels and I am getting really irritated at Banks' insistence on having suits which "had to be sentient by the rules of the Culture" (which isn't true at all, there's no reason a simple spacesuit has to have sentience, they have non-sentient ships for example) and then giving them an extremely nagging personality so he can have pages of lame attempts at comedy. I think he's done this in each of the three Culture books I've read so far, I look forward to skipping over any future sections that include this cliche.mllaneza posted:Read this. It's the Cold War with weaponized Mythos creatures. Read the gently caress out of this, it has the XB-36 nuclear powered bombers, 300 megatons aimed right at Cthulhu. _______/  Entropic posted:The Wasp Factory is amazing, and short, just don't let anyone spoil it for you! To counter this, I hated that book and was terribly offended (yes i know writing that makes me sound like an old lady) and I actually boycotted Banks for many years because of that book. I would tell you what specifically offended me, beyond the awful torture of children and animals which happens on nearly every page, but I don't want to spoil anything for you.
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May 10, 2010 20:39
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Flipswitch posted:Excession had one, but that was it as far as I can recall. Yeah I'm thinking of Excession, Consider Phlebas (but I read that quite a while ago, maybe I'm thinking of an annoying drone?) and Player of Games. It's a minor nitpick, it just bugs me so much that the smarty-pants Culture would design a suit like that. Excession has been my favorite so far just for the detailed hardware analysis of the drones and Minds. Edit: You know what I'm thinking? It would be really amazing to have a few other authors take a stab at setting a story in the Culture universe. But I can't think of anyone else who writes utopian sci-fi, as opposed to dystopian or steampunk/cyberpunk. Maybe Dan Simmons (the Hyperion/Endymion/Olympos author). Entropic posted:
I don't mean offensive like "How dare that character do that!" I mean 'offensive' as in, it turns my stomach and makes me sick to even think about. I think I would have had a much different opinion of the book if I had known it is a horror novel or read it as such. Kire fucked around with this message at 22:27 on May 10, 2010 |
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May 10, 2010 22:21
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Pompous Rhombus posted:Is The Culture a utopia? I think the fact that it's somewhat ambiguous is one of the more interesting facets of the books. I didn't get to Endymion yet, but giving Simmons as another example of utopian SF is interesting. Not to derail, but he seems similar to Banks in that his futuristic setting isn't entirely black or white. Simmon's books obviously are not utopias, but wow I don't know how you think the Culture isn't the greatest thing ever. Can you think of something more utopic than the Culture? I can't. I was going to say "maybe a hedonistic VR" but you can do that in the Culture anytime you want. What makes you think it's ambiguous? Even Greg Egan's "Diaspora" is pretty utopic but not anywhere near the Culture and actually kind of sucks in comparison.
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May 11, 2010 15:10
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*wipes brow* just finished Look to Windward, that is definitely the best Culture novel I've read so far. Very fun. I'm starting on Use of Weapons right now.
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May 18, 2010 19:55
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A Gift From The Culture posted:Money is a sign of poverty. This is an old Culture saying I remember every now and again, espe cially when I'm being tempted to do something I know I shouldn't, and there's money involved (when is there not?). What a great summarization of a post-scarcity world: "money is a sign of poverty"
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May 19, 2010 20:46
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The Dark One posted:Sometimes even the harshest-looking phallic war machine wants to dress up like a fuzzy creature and host a party. Yeah and many of the drones and Minds have genuine, long-term friendships with different humans. I think keeping the humans around and helping them sort of gives them something to do, also. If they felt differently they're free to Sublime anytime, and many do. LtW mentions that all AIs bear some distant, distant marks of their original animal creators, because the successfully blank-slate, no-mammalian-baggage AIs that have been produced inevitably choose to sublime very quickly. So through self-selection the only drones and Minds that interact so much with the Culture's people are ones who like that sort of thing, thus furthering the cycle.
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May 19, 2010 20:48
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BUCKET OF FARTS posted:
There was an older version of that same cover that looks like crap, that new version is gorgeous. Do not do what I did, which is a google image search for "use of weapons". Very bad pics in there. But that's how I saw the different versions.
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Jun 5, 2010 05:21
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I like the old one with the bridge and the forest better.
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Jun 24, 2010 16:53
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I was totally unable to finish Use of Weapons. I got about 3/4 of the way through and simply dropped it for other books, and I haven't been able to come back to it. Such a boring book. Excession and Player of Games were the only ones I really enjoyed, and with Excession I had to skip all of the chapters that were flashbacks and/or didn't involve Minds.
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Aug 9, 2010 21:31
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:I didn't know people hated it, but I thought it was a bit mediocre. The ending was telegraphed so far ahead that it wasn't a surprise in the slightest, and it contains the most incredibly hamhanded caricature of an american that I've ever seen in a book - and he's not so much "slipping in" his politics as he is beating us over the head with them. Which is kind of annoying even though I agree with him. Hehe yeah Banks "slips in" his politics the same way Avatar had a hidden message.
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Jun 1, 2011 04:44
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