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Do people seriously not read the epigrams at the beginning of books?
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May 25, 2012 05:01
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:02 |
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Pope Guilty posted:Is Look to Windward the one with the Chel? I had read CP, UoW, and PoG also, and went with Surface Detail next, and I keep seeing references to something happening with the Chell, but no explanations. Yes, and it's awesome. The Culture kinda-sorta caused the Chelgrian Civil War because Contact/SC hosed up. Some Chelgrians were understandably upset about this.
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Jun 22, 2012 14:17
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Hedrigall posted:I've also heard that this is the longest Culture novel yet. Of course it is. His editor lapsed into a coma sometime around The Algebraist.
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Jun 28, 2012 15:36
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I quite liked The Algebraist, but that was where he seemed to start letting his SF novels sprawl a bit. Matter was the worst culprit.
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Jun 28, 2012 17:22
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Vanadium posted:Am I misunderstand how in-construction orbitals work or are they gonna have a hosed day/night cycle if there's still plates missing? Orbitals get their day/night the same way a planet does (except inside-out): by rotating once a day at a fixed distance from a star. It's nothing to do with shadows from plates (the orbital is inclined at an angle so that the far side is always in sunlight) The center hub of an orbital basically follows the same orbit around a start a planet would. The hub doesn't emit light. And it's small enough you can barely see it from the surface of the orbital. Entropic fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Aug 11, 2012 |
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Aug 11, 2012 06:35
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shrike82 posted:This is actually the first I've heard of the new book and I'm a bit disappointed. He seems to be in a bit of rut with plots - isn't this the 3rd book after Crow Road and Steep Approach to Garbadale to focus on the same plot conceit? 'Dark Family Secret' has been his go-to plot structure for the M-less books since the very beginning.
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Aug 24, 2012 15:00
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Updated OP bibliography for first time in years. (sorry) Did I miss anything? New M-less coming out this year apparently called "The Quarry". No details yet other than it's set in Northumberland and will probably involve dark family secrets.
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Jan 4, 2013 18:13
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Well, poo poo.
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Apr 3, 2013 14:53
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I always had a soft spot for (d)ROU Frank Exchange of Views.
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Jun 10, 2013 20:56
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gender illusionist posted:I loved the easter eggs for the M. readers.
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Jul 10, 2013 23:50
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Peel posted:I finished The Player of Games today. I read The Player of Games after reading a few of the other Culture books first, so I knew about The Culture and what its deal was already, so when I read TPOG it seemed really needlessly trying to hard to make The Culture be unambiguously the Good Guys. I much prefer the more morally complicated stories like Look to Windward or Use of Weapons.
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Aug 15, 2013 02:28
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Seldom Posts posted:We've had this conversation in the thread before, but I don't see how POG presents the Culture as good guys. They completely manipulate and tear down Gurgeh, using him as an agent to essentially genocide the Azad. They may not be as bad as the Azad, but they're not good guys. I just think the book goes out of its way to show that the Azad are so comically bad that it justifies whatever Contact and SC do.
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Aug 15, 2013 03:17
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MikeJF posted:Culture ships are spheres of forcefield. I seem to recall the outer fields being more ovoid in shape in most descriptions. It's all a bit vague. The Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall is described as being a big rectangular slab blotting out a good portion of the sky when it's hanging about Masaq orbital in Look To Windward. But it might have had its fields off as it was in-atmosphere.
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Nov 5, 2013 06:39
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It doesn't make for pretty visuals, but I'm pretty sure that at that level of technology, reaction drives are a thing of the distant past. Whatever exotic means of propulsion are moving these ships through space it problem doesn't leave a trail that's visible in fewer than 5 or so dimensions.
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Nov 5, 2013 19:19
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Updated the OP for the first time in too long, added his final book to the bibliography. 
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Aug 13, 2014 16:11
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eriktown posted:Kevin J. Anderson. We don't speak that name here.
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Sep 19, 2014 17:50
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Brain Herbert. 
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Sep 19, 2014 17:52
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Look To Windward was the best of the Culture books IMHO.
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Nov 4, 2014 04:48
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I always liked the idea that Excession, Inversions and Look to Windward form a sort of informal trilogy of "The Culture seen from above, The Culture seen from below, The Culture seen head-on".
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Nov 10, 2014 15:28
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I feel like I need to re-read Excession sometime. But the Culture books that are really essential reads are Use of Weapons and Look to Windward. Then Player of Games or Consider Phlebas. After that it's debatable. It's been mentioned a bunch of times, but I love the idea that you can view Excession, Inversions and Look to Windward as a sort of loose trilogy where you get to see The Culture from, respectively, above, below, and straight on from a roughly equal civilization.
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Apr 28, 2015 06:03
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:One day I'll format all the ship conversations in Excession as an SA thread, complete with avatars. Complete with probations and bannings? I like to think Grey Area would have a big red title.
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Apr 28, 2015 14:04
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Eschatos posted:Just finished Look to Windward. That was excellent, definitely my favorite Culture book so far. As usual there were a few parts I didn't understand. What was the deal with the behemothaur scholar? When he's revived after a "galactic cycle" is that supposed to mean a year passed, or a huge amount of time? I was also pretty disappointed that Banks never went into detail on how the Chelgrians killed the Sansemin. Also, was the Chelgrian terminator supposed to be modeled on Quilan's wife? A ridiculous amount of time has passed. Enough time for the airsphere to complete an orbit of the entire galaxy, basically. Enough time that the Culture and the Chelgrians and other civilizations of the era assuredly no longer exist. And if you pay attention to what's said when they're reviving him, it's implied that the Chelgrians were punished for their interference, just maybe not quickly or directly. The behemothaurs and whatever actually controls their little ecosystem are implied to have links to the Sublimed, who are nothing if not patient. If you mess with them they won't shoot you, they'll make sure your whole civilization declines over millennia and loses whatever power it had.
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Jun 9, 2015 21:11
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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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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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I like that Feersum Endjinn isn't explicitly a Culture-universe book, and isn't much like those books, but it isn't explicitly not in the Culture universe.
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Mar 16, 2016 23:51
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Speaking of audiobooks, I haven't listened to any of the recent audiobook versions, but I used to have the audiobook version of Look to Windward read by Robert Lister. I was looking for it again recently since that was a great one to listen to when I wanted background noise since I've read the book so many times I could just hop in wherever. But all I can find now is the Peter Kenny version, since he seems to be the official Banks reader on Audible and such sites these days. Listening to the sample, it just doesn't match up to the Lister version for me. (He pronounces all the names wrong!) Does anyone know where I can purchase the Robert Lister narrated version of Look to Windward? I can't seem to track it down anywhere. I think it was recorded as one of those big-box-of-10-cassettes deals back before you could just buy audiobooks as digital downloads. I used to have a version of it ripped to mp3 by my file is corrupt.
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Mar 17, 2016 02:36
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If you started with Excession and haven't been completely turned off, the rest of the series should be no problem.
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Apr 28, 2016 05:04
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mdemone posted:I was under the impression it was thought well of by Culture readers; is that not the case? It's not bad, it's just weird and probably one of the harder ones to get into without a little prior knowledge of the Culture universe. There's a semi-serious view held by some that Excesion, Inversions and Look to Windward form a sort of loose trilogy, showing the Culture seen, respectively, from above, from below, and from head-on from a roughly equal civilization. Look to Windward is my favorite Banks book fwiw.
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Apr 28, 2016 05:20
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I started with Use of Weapons and got hooked fwiw.
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Apr 28, 2016 14:55
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xian posted:Matter was long by necessity to support the bait + switch, IMO. Matter is a weird one where the narrative meanders along for most of the book going nowhere in particular, then falls off a cliff in the last 100 pages when poo poo actually starts to go down. But by the time there was the reveal of The Iln I had completely forgot what an Iln was and why we were supposed to be afraid of it.
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May 1, 2016 15:02
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Strawman posted:Anyone here tried reading Use of Weapons in chronological order (I-XIII, numbered chapters, prologue, epilogue)? Is it worth doing? No. The written ordering is only confusing when you don't quite grok what's going on yet. Once you understand the structure (one story going forward, intercut with vignettes going backwards) it's pretty easy to follow.
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Nov 29, 2016 23:24
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stephenfry posted:
I had the exact same problem. My problem with Matter was that by the time there was the big reveal of an Iln at the end, it had been so many hundreds of pages of meandering since the initial explanation that my reaction was "Wait, what's an Iln? is that bad?"
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Dec 23, 2016 06:26
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I really liked Spook Country and I keep meaning to get around to Zero History and The Peripheral. I like his more recent stuff generally, but the early books like Neuromancer really do not hold up well as anything but artefacts of a particular period of SF.
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Jan 25, 2017 07:35
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That would be blue these days.
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Jan 25, 2017 07:42
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Ugly In The Morning posted:So, I started Use of Weapons and Player of Games 4 years ago, bounced off them a bit, and then moved. Look to Windward is arguably the best Culture book and Use of Weapons is arguably the only prerequisite book for it, so read Look to Windward next.
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May 26, 2017 02:52
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Inversions is a Culture book that kinda-sorta tries to pretend it isn't for a while but it's obvious by the end. There's an old fan theory that Excession / Inversions / Look to Windward form a sort of trilogy that presents the Culture as seen, respectively, from Above, Below, and Head-On.
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May 26, 2017 03:15
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:02 |
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If a a book has Knife-Missiles in it, it's a Culture book. The Bridge is a Culture book.
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May 26, 2017 03:45
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