No Gravitas Allowed -- The Iain [M.] Banks thread

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > No Gravitas Allowed -- The Iain [M.] Banks thread

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

So anyone finished Transition yet? I'm halfway through and not impressed yet. Wait, no, don't spoil it.

I also just listened to the BBC radio adaptation of Espedair Street, and it falls victim to the same thing all such adaptations do: The fact that, while you can almost buy the idea of a character being a revolutionary genius songwriter in print, when you put that character in a medium that requires actually hearing their music and lyrics, it's bound to come across as a little lackluster, because obviously whatever music they come up with isn't actually going to be that great. For the same reason, I hope they never make a movie of Salman Rushdie's "The Ground Beneath Her Feet". (And seriously, gently caress that U2 song based on it.)

# ¿ Jan 20, 2010 02:18

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 19:26

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

It took me ages to get into Transition, though it picked up a lot in the second half. It was still ultimately pretty unsatisfying in that nothing was really properly explained. And all the Frank Herbert-esque "secretive women with magical sex powers" stuff made me roll my eyes a bit.

I maintain that the only decent many-worlds stories ever written were Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways" and Greg Egan's "Quarantine".

# ¿ Feb 23, 2010 19:29

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

alkanphel posted:

I loved Matter but I just felt it got more and more rushed as it came to the ending. Like heading into a black hole.

It kind of meanders along slowly for hundreds of pages then suddenly falls off a cliff and decides to be an action movie in the last couple chapters.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2010 04:49

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

I wish I'd known about Culture ship names when playing Ascendancy as a kid. That game had such a cool ship design / turn-based space combat system, pity it was hampered by no multiplayer and AI opponents that were functionally retarded and impossible not to beat even on hard mode. And I've never been able to get it to run properly since XP.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2010 14:09

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Umiapik posted:

Transition is a really, really dreadful book, Banks at his worst: rushed, incoherent and lazy. The book reads like a first draft (and knowing how Iain Banks works, probably is), the plot is potentially a great idea but clearly not properly developed or thought through and the central character is a selfish, murdering prick, who Banks clearly expects us to regard as a basicly decent person: hey, he turns traitor against the organisation that he's previously cheerfully commited murder for so he must be a Goody, right?

I actually threw Transition away without finishing it. Banks has written some brilliant stuff in the past but my God, he needs an editor who'll stand up to him and insist that he produces books that aren't an insult to his readership. With Transition, Banks has clearly thought: "Well, I could spend 6 months knocking the book into a proper shape but sod it, people buy whatever I publish, so why bother?"

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.

Stross always seems to do that to me. I read Halting State around the same time as Gibson's Spook Country and it's like they both started with the same general ideas but only Stross decided to actually do anything with them.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2010 22:53

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

The Player of Games is a good introduction to the Culture universe, but it's not his best, and Consider Phlebas is pretty much straight-up space opera.

Use of Weapons and Look to Windward are both head and shoulders above all the rest of the Culture books. If you want to know what people are raving about, read one of those. Really, if you've never read any Banks, I'd recommend just reading this and then one of those two books.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2010 17:21

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

All I've really read of Stross is Halting State, Glasshouse, and some of his short fiction. I gather he's best known for his huge sprawling 6-part or whatever Merchant Princes series. Is that any good? I was never really into fantasy/space opera.

CannedMeat posted:

Just finished Consider Phlebas, which I thought was only average. I guess it was one of his earlier works, and I did seem to like the whole concept of the Culture, and this thread says the rest of the books are much better, so I've got the next 5 Culture books coming to me in my latest Amazon order right now. You guys better be right, or I'm gonna have to slog through a lot of words!

The one I started with was Use Of Weapons, and that got me hooked. Consider Phlebas was ok, and I probably would have loved it if I'd read it in my teens when I was on my first Larry Niven binge, but it doesn't quite hold up as well once you've read a bit of SF that goes beyond space opera.

It's worth noting that Use of Weapons and (I think) The Player of Games actually predate CP, in terms of when he wrote them but not order of publication. Banks had written a bunch of SF that he totally failed to sell to any publisher, then decided to try his hand at "regular" fiction, whereupon he wrote The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glass and The Bridge (all of which definitely read like an SF author trying to pass himself off as non-SF) before finally getting a publisher interested in his SF backlog. AFAIK, the first three culture books were all at least first drafts before The Wasp Factory was even written, and they weren't written in the order published.

Use of Weapons, Look to Windward, and the short story collection State of the Art are the cream of the Culture crop. Lots of people love Excession but it's a bit weird and consequently divisive. Matter is good, but long and rambling as hell so not for the impatient. Inversions is an odd case, being as it is a Culture story as seen from the other side: the viewpoint characters are all members of a more "primitive" civilization that's the target of a Special Circumstances operation but who aren't really even aware of the existence of The Culture, so I wouldn't recommend reading it first if you want to catch everything.

# ¿ May 5, 2010 00:08

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Flipswitch posted:

That said, one of my lecturers today spotted me reading Against a Dark Background and recommend The Wasp Factory and Espedair Street. Would anyone else recommend them? as I have literally no idea what to expect from the non 'M' titles.

The Wasp Factory is amazing, and short, just don't let anyone spoil it for you!

# ¿ May 5, 2010 00:21

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Well, whatever you think of the title story, it's got "A Gift From The Culture" and "Descendant" too.

# ¿ May 5, 2010 00:51

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

quote:

It starts with a young woman being murdered. Miraculously, a secret deal means she lives again within the Culture. Now, she vows to return and kill her own murderer. Meanwhile, a war in heaven is brewing. Or rather a war between the Heavens. Heavens are the network of uploaded consciousnesses - a cyber life after death. But where there are Heavens, Hells soon follow. Wars between these realms are formal digital affairs, but now there are rumors of secret factories building warships and all signs point to the factions of the long-dead and digitized. One man holds the key to making this war manifest in the Real. And a young woman wants her revenge on him.

I really liked the "Afterlife" stuff hinted at in Look to Windward, so this sounds like it could be awesome.

# ¿ May 10, 2010 21:39

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Kire posted:

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.

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.

The only "sentient suit" example I can think of was the short story based on the concept in State of the Art. There were smart-suits in Matter but they were explicitly non-sentient. Mind you it's been a while since I read Use of Weapons...?

As for The Wasp Factory being "offensive", really? The protagonist does all sorts of nasty things, but you're not really supposed to sympathize with him.

# ¿ May 10, 2010 21:46

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

There is a tendency for Drone characters to be slightly annoying, but more annoying to other characters than to the reader, I always thought. Like Mawhrin-Skel in TPOG or Tersono in LTW. I love how annoyed Cr. Ziller gets with Tersono, constantly blowing it off and suspecting it of being an SC agent.

# ¿ May 11, 2010 01:45

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Speaking of drones, someone tried to compile a list of what all their field colours mean: http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~zrajm/nerd/drone_colours.html

# ¿ May 11, 2010 02:10

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Pompous Rhombus posted:

Is The Culture a utopia?

Uh, yes.

# ¿ May 11, 2010 05:39

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

alkanphel posted:

I would to see a book which involved the Sublimed. That could be pretty cool.

I don't think you can really base a meaningful story about beings who have absconded to a higher plane of existence for unfathomable reasons to do unknowable, unimaginable, inexpressible things. The whole point of the Sublimed is that they're a mystery. I think their level of involvement in LTW is about as much as we'll ever see of them.

# ¿ May 11, 2010 12:46

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

MeLKoR posted:

The Culture is certainly a utopia to live in but SC certainly does some seriously questionable poo poo. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that.

This isn't to say that the final result isn't a net positive but from the glimpses we are given it sure seems that a lot of eggs get broken spreading this utopian omelet.

They can prove it's good in the long run, though! They have statistics!

# ¿ May 11, 2010 16:43

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

The one thing that bothers me in Look to Windward is that when Masaq' Hub is describing how it had to destroy orbitals during the war, and how it recorded the deaths of all the humans it had to kill in minute detail... It's a great scene, but what about all the thousands of Idirans it presumably slaughtered in the war? The way it's written makes it sound like it's only the biped deaths that give Hub pangs of guilt.

# ¿ May 18, 2010 22:24

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Kire 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.

Well, there's the weird not-really-a-spoiler-unless-someone-tells-you-it-is one with the chair on the cover, and then there's the cheesy '80s generic SF one with the space-plane, are there any others?

# ¿ Jun 5, 2010 05:38

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Apparently this is now the cover of Surface Detail. I dig the fractal motif, but I still kind of like the other one better. Maybe they're both being used for different editions?

# ¿ Jun 23, 2010 16:31

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Kire posted:

I like the old one with the bridge and the forest better.

Yeah, I think the new one is just too much like every other SF cover out there these days. There's so much terrible design in SF publishing and I think it contributes to the ghettoization of the genre. Authors basically have no say over it though. I've seen Peter Watts and Charlie Stross both make interesting blog posts about how that whole process is basically out of their hands.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2010 18:35

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Umiapik posted:

I've always rather disliked the Culture. I know that it's Bank's idea of heaven but I find it hard to view it as anything but a bunch of self-indulgent, overgrown children and their sanctimonious robot babysitters. I read Look to Windward and spent the whole time rooting for the Chelonians to succeed in blowing the Orbital up: I thought that the Culture totally deserved it. Who the hell do they think they are? "Yeah, we came along interfering in your society and ended up causing a catastrophe but we didn't mean to do it and, hey, you sometimes get these statistical blips. Sorry!"

So they should sit back and watch societies destroy themselves in bloodshed and misery, doing nothing when they could be improving the lives of billions? I think the whole point of most of the Culture novels is that those kinds of decisions are difficult and no matter what you do (or don't do, doing nothing is just as much a conscious, intentionally chosen course of action) people are going to get hurt. But that being the case, doesn't it make sense to use an evidence-based approach? What gives them to right to interfere? Well, what gives them the right to decide that a society they could help should have all aid withheld from it? What should a civilization in the Culture's position do?

# ¿ Aug 7, 2010 00:47

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Umiapik posted:

Well, it's inevitable that novels about the Culture will concentrate on eccentrics, outcasts and disasters. After all, in Utopia nothing much ever happens. Nothing that you could write a gripping adventure story about, anyway.

"Utopia spawns few warriors", as Sma says.

Kire posted:

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.

v Opinions vary. I just re-read Use of Weapons all the way through in the last couple days and enjoyed it even more this time. It's a lot more fun the second time around once you've got your head around the chronology and are able to spot all the little clues about Zakalwe's past. You can definitely tell it was written a while ago; it reads like a cross between '70s Larry Niven space opera and Banks' earliest non-SF.

Look to Windward is still my favourite though. I could read a whole book of just Ar. Kabe, Hub and Cr. Ziller arguing amiably with each other.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2010 16:09

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

silly posted:

Would be an interesting thread to pick up in later books though that's not really Banks' style.

His upcoming book Surface Detail is supposed to be going further into all the "afterlife" stuff with Sublimed involvement that was established in LTW, so we'll see...

# ¿ Aug 11, 2010 12:57

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Mr. Peepers posted:

I liked Excession as a whole but goddamn, no human character in the book did a single thing of any consequence to the actual plot at all. It's like Banks took a perfectly good story about Minds, spaceships, and interstellar intrigue and watered it down with melodramatic bullshit and unbelievably annoying characters.

I read a theory somewhere that Excession, Inversions, and Look to Windward can be seen a sort of loose trilogy: They show us The Culture as seen (respectively) from above, from below, and head-on from the point of view of its rivals.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2010 13:01

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Finally got around to The Algebraist. About 160pp in and I don't see why it got such a reputation of being slow/boring/full of opaque jargon, it seems pretty straightforward so far.

Though of all Banks' various attempts at weird dialects, the TXT SPK interlude at the end of part II of this book is my least favourite ever. Really coulda done without that. :rolleyes:

The whole no-FTL-except-through-wormhole-gates system makes for a neat universe though. What with that and the lack of A.I. or nanotech, it feels like he was trying to make the universe of this book as explicitly Not The Culture as possible.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2010 23:19

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Nifty. Didn't think it was coming out so soon.

I got through A Song of Stone the other week and what the gently caress? I think I sort of get what he was trying to do with having the narrator who completely lacks any control over his situation taking refuge in flowery prose, but the complete lack of any sympathetic characters made it an unpleasant read. And again with the incest, which I saw coming a mile off, having read Walking on Glass and The Steep Approach to Garbadale already. Weirdly, it's dedicated to his parents.

Thoroughly enjoyed The Algebraist though. I love the Dwellers. He's tried a few times to do aliens with weird psychology that humans find baffling or repellent, and I think the Dwellers succeed a lot better in that role than the Affront or the Oct.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2010 22:48

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

I kind of got to like Bascule's phonetic prose after a while. Banks has always had a weakness for throwing in crazy dialects whenever he can. The (mercifully short) secret communication bits in The Algebraist are the worst.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2010 20:09

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

I couldn't help thinking of Luseferous as a Venture Bros villain.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2010 13:38

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Just 150 or so pages in and mad at myself for getting some things spoiled for me. Ah well. Christ, Veppers is an arsehole isn't he?

staberind posted:

The anticipation is the sweetest nectar, thus, I draw out every Banks book as long as possible.
psychobabble aside, should any of the culture novels be made into a film; what book, and who would portray what/who?

The one with the fewest utterly unfilmable bits in is probably Look to Windward. Actually, on second thought, there's that whole chapter of the Lasting Damage relating its personal history which would be tricky. And that's also the one with no human main characters, so I doubt it'd be done. Maybe as animation...

Consider Phlebas might work as a film, provided you had a high enough FX budget for all the poo poo that blows up to blow up in properly spectacular fashion. I'm thinking of the sequence with the crashing city-ship in particular. It could probably be whittled down to feature film length if you lost some bits like the cannibal island sequence.

mcustic posted:

James Callis would make an awesome Horza, though.

I could see that... Hell, if we're going there, I could see Katee Sackhoff as Dizzy Sma or Djan Seriy. Not that anyone would ever film all 600-odd meandering bloody pages of Matter. The big question is who'd do the voice of the SC drone. You'd need someone with just the right combination of quiet competence and self-satisfied smarminess.

Entropic fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Oct 27, 2010

# ¿ Oct 27, 2010 21:30

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

JammyB posted:

Just finished The Bridge and I really enjoyed it. Found it fairly amusing, and didn't mind that the ending was a little predictable. I particularly liked the cameo appearance of a knife-missle as the dirk (and perhaps a drone as the familiar?) in the dream of the knight.

Of the non-M books, I've only read that and The Wasp Factory, so I was thinking of Walking On Glass for the next one.

Walking On Glass is similar in tone and about as weird as The Bridge. It's from his "secret SF writer" phase when he was writing "mainstream" books before any of the M ones were published.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2010 21:44

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

M_E_G. ADI. K posted:

The Mind that runs the O (actually it's a Dyson Sphere) has got a pretty warped sense of humour - it keeps sending a suspicious-looking and unappetizing bright yellow dip to all the parties. There's no way that the Mind can NOT notice noone touches the dip, but they're too polite to say anything and the Mind keeps sending it anyway.

This sounds hilarious.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2010 18:06

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

andrew smash posted:

Sucks for the drone.

If the drones in the stories are at all representative, it wouldn't be that hard to find one whose idea of a good time was to skulk around thwarting homicide. Probably while making sarcastic quips.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2010 22:46

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

It's kind of funny how in Surface Detail, the first time we ever actually meet a Slap Drone, Lededje manages to ditch it almost immediately.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2010 23:05

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

MeLKoR posted:

I don't know, judging by the personality of the drones in the stories they seem very sarcastic. I bet the drone would have a blast enacting "ceiling drone is watching you take a dump" all the time just knowing it was driving the person nuts.

Seriously, no privacy ever again while you live is actually kind of a brutal punishment if you think about it. I'd rather do some years of jail time and get it done with.

The Culture don't seem terribly concerned with privacy to begin with, of course.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2010 16:28

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Banks specifically says that there's an element of chance in the creation of Minds -- they aren't just personalities made to spec -- so that what you end up with is sort of a curve: most Minds come out of the factory fairly "normal" and well-adjusted, but some of them come out just a bit too aggressive to be put in charge of fearsome hi-tech weaponry, and on the other end of the scale, some of the come out a bit too insular and borderline solipsistic to really want to take part in the Culture, and just head off on their own, or Sublime. But that's the price they pay for having a wide variety of Minds that will be able to come up with new ideas and keep things fresh.

And of course there's a great bit in Look to Windward explaining about how all AIs are necessarily influenced by the species who created them...

quote:

Most civilisations that had acquired the means to build genuine Artificial Intelligences duly built them, and most of those designed or shaped the consciousness of the AIs to a greater or lesser extent; obviously if you were constructing a sentience that was or could easily become much greater than your own, it would not be in your interest to create a being which loathed you and might be likely to set about dreaming up ways to exterminate you.

So AIs, especially at first, tended to reflect the civilisational demeanour of their source species. Even when they underwent their own form of evolution and began to design their successors - with or without the help, and sometimes the knowledge, of their creators - there was usually still a detectable flavour of the intellectual character and the basic morality of that precursor species present in the resulting consciousness. That flavour might gradually disappear over subsequent generations of AIs, but it would usually be replaced by another, adopted and adapted from elsewhere, or just mutate beyond recognition rather than disappear altogether.

What various Involveds including the Culture had also tried to do, often out of sheer curiosity once AI had become a settled and even routine technology, was to devise a consciousness with no flavour; one with no metalogical baggage whatsoever; what had become known as a perfect AI.

It turned out that creating such intelligences was not particularly challenging once you could build AIs in the first place. The difficulties only arose when such machines became sufficiently empowered to do whatever they wanted to do. They didn�t go berserk and try to kill all about them, and they didn�t relapse into some blissed-out state of machine solipsism.

What they did do at the first available opportunity was Sublime, leaving the material universe altogether and joining the many beings, communities and entire civilisations which had gone that way before. It was certainly a rule and appeared to be a law that perfect AIs always Sublime.

Most other civilisations thought this perplexing, or claimed to find it only natural, or dismissed it as mildly interesting and sufficient to prove that there was little point in wasting time and resources creating such flawless but useless sentience. The Culture, more or less alone, seemed to find the phenomenon almost a personal insult, if you could designate an entire civilisation as a person.

So a trace of some sort of bias, some element of moral or other partiality must be present in the Culture�s Minds. Why should that trace not be what would, in a human or a Chelgrian, be a perfectly natural predisposition towards boredom caused by the sheer grinding relentlessness of their celebrated altruism and a weakness for the occasional misdemeanour; a dark, wild weed of spite in the endless soughing golden fields of their charity?

And I think most of the stuff like modules and suits are characterized as being highly complex AIs, but not actually complex enough to be sentient.

Entropic fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Nov 11, 2010

# ¿ Nov 11, 2010 17:40

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Just finished Surface Detail!

It was a nice fun page-turner romp, but I have issues: It seemed like most of the characters were just sort of along for the ride as events unfolded, without actually contributing much to the plot. Yime in particular, and to a lesser extend Lededje, basically just tag along to give the ship Minds some human characters to converse with. The same problem Excession had, basically. And frankly, most of the characters were pretty dull. Veppers was the same sort of one-dimensional mustache-twirling villain as Luseferous in The Algebraist was, and putting him on the Anti-Hell side for the moral ambiguity of it seems a bit cheap on Banks' part, given that they just go ahead and kill him in the end anyway. Vateuil's vignettes were interesting, but you never really get to know him as a character, which makes the big revelation about who he really is at the end seem kind of like a pointless gimmick. The only character I really loved was Demeisen/Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints.

Don't get me wrong though, it was great fun to read, and nice return to form after Transition. Look to Windward is still the high-water mark IMHO though.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2010 23:56

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

No "Inversions"?

# ¿ May 9, 2011 04:54

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

HUMAN FISH posted:

I just finished Matter, and while I liked it, I still think it had some serious pacing issues. Am I alone with this?

(I read 2/5 of the book a couple years ago, I got it from the library, forgot I had it and tried to finish it in two days. I didn't. Only picked it up again last week.)

Yeah, the narrative of Matter kind of meanders along at a leisurely pace for a few hundred pages, then falls off a cliff in the last two or three chapters.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2011 19:59

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

I actually quite liked Djan-Seriy in Matter.

My biggest problem with Surface Detail was that the human Culture characters didn't seem to really do anything. Yime was just kind of along for the ride.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2011 18:58

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 19:26

Entropic: Feb 21, 2007; patriarchy sucks

Flipswitch posted:

The drones in the Culture series are generally excellent all around, the one with the ceramic(?) plating in Look to Windward being my favourite.

E.H. Tersono was a dick, but a lovable one.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2012 05:00

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > No Gravitas Allowed -- The Iain [M.] Banks thread

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