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I love Banks, I prefer the M version though. I've read The Bridge (excellent mind-gently caress), The Business (eh, it was OK. Didn't really go anywhere), Canal Dreams (boring and pointless), The Steep Approach to Garbadale (I only liked it because I have a lost love named Sophie  otherwise it would have been pointless, and Alban was such a worthless pussy and Banks's author mouthpiece political bollocks and  Banks signed my copy, though)Use of Weapons, Player of Games, Against a Dark Background, The Algebraist are all exceptional. Excession was very good, Inversions was OK. I liked it when I met Banks at a signing and he told the story of how he asked one of his friends what he thought of the TV serialisation of Crow Road and the guy said "Oh aye, it was goood, but it felt a bit like an overlong episode of Taggart." 
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Feb 22, 2009 23:18
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darkgray posted:I wrote that. I have a thing against every single character dying, though, so we can blame that. The fact that Sharrow nearly had sex with her own son was pretty creepy.
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Feb 23, 2009 22:00
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Calenth posted:The Player of Games seemed like he was pulling a reverse Heinlein and using sci-fi to take cheap shots at opposing ideologies -- i.e., he's positing a post-scarcity environment, then writing a sci-fi novel attacking a capitalist (and conveniently also inherently sexist, etc.) society because, hey, look, they aren't an enlightened post-scarcity socialist economy! How evil of them! Of course, plenty of great SF has been just a political vehicle -- from H.G. Wells on down -- so that's not really a criticism as such, just something I personally found irritating. It seemed like he was taking cheap shots. It's been a while since I read PoG, but they aren't really capitalist, are they? More like feudalist/caste system/meritocratic. Also, I wonder if I could get your interpretation of the ending? I kind of think that he essentially falls in love with the savage beauty of the Azadian society, realises he's won the ultimate game and got back to the sterile Culture with a woman who he'll never "possess" in the way the Azadians do so he commits suicide. Anything to add?
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Mar 20, 2009 23:05
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Entropic posted:That's certainly how I took it. He's had "centuries later" epilogues in half the other Culture books. I didn't think of it that way, fair enough.
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Mar 21, 2009 15:33
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