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Im huge Banks fan, with the M and not, but I have to say im not really enoying Matter. I quit half way through it though i'll probably try again. Its a bit like inversions in that the focus is a 'non-involved' but they do vauguely know about the culture. It seems to be to much of a comedy, I prefer the dark sci-fi stuff banks makes.
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Feb 21, 2009 17:39
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Kerbtree posted:Heads up, UK goons - radio 4's airing State of the Art this week. Get yer arse over to iplayer.
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Mar 6, 2009 23:34
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Psiharis posted:Am I alone in thinking Complicity was utter poo poo? Loser with no redeeming characteristics plays some Civ, rapes some peeps, slaughters some dogs... yeah, raping the husband with his wife's pink dildo (in loving detail
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Mar 21, 2009 13:02
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) was as far as I made it into that book, and I haven't picked up a Banks book since.
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I think we have all concluded that matter was a bit poo poo. Its the only one I never finished. Such a shame as most of the M.Banks books are at least in my top 20.
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Jul 4, 2009 11:05
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Turpitude posted:While we're on the topic of Horza, I love the chapter where he gets stranded on the cannibal island. That poo poo read like a Stephen King short story and made an amazing interlude between action setpieces. It was also fantastic when he sweet-talked the Culture escape shuttle into letting him dick around inside it until he figured out where its brain was and shot it with a cannon.
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Jul 15, 2009 18:31
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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.
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Sep 25, 2009 13:19
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Shameless posted:The first part is here too:
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Sep 25, 2009 16:31
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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.
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Oct 7, 2009 07:11
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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 |
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Oct 7, 2009 18:21
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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!"
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Aug 7, 2010 11:36
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gvibes posted:I just can't handle these gibberish sections in Feersum Endjinn. Good god. 
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Sep 29, 2010 18:29
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Pompous Rhombus posted:Nerdy but cool: Creating a Marain font
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Oct 12, 2010 18:27
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Just finished reading Surface Detail and for me that was a return to form for the culture novels. Cracking read, go get it.
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Oct 27, 2010 03:17
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andrew smash posted:Nah, the player of games might be the best of his books that would make a passable movie but Consider Phlebas has more or less already been made into a movie more than once. It's a series of sci-fi set pieces, basically unconnected in terms of thematic significance, strung together as the adventures of a plucky crew in a lovely spaceship. It's basically star wars with cursing and loving. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 30, 2010 03:01
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Danith posted:Just finished reading Use of Weapons and ehh... not a fan Shame you didnt like, thats one of my faves. I did have to read that one a few times before I fully wrapped my head round it, give it another crack maybe?
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Oct 30, 2010 17:24
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I always felt that a sub-text to it was that the minds knew he was the chairmaker and were giving him a chance to redeem himself, probably just overthinking it though.
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Oct 30, 2010 22:50
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FelchTragedy posted:Going to meet Iain next week. Anything worth asking maybe?
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Nov 5, 2010 05:40
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Ask whether the identity of the outside influence the minds hinted were behind the the events in Look To Windward will be revealed at some point.quote:Only a little. I had my back-up by then. A couple of GSVs have been here or hereabouts for a while, as well as the Experiencing A Significant Cravitas Shortfall. Once we knew what you were up to, they could protect me even from an attack like the one you envisaged. We let it happen because we’d like to know where the other ends of those wormholes are. Might tell us something about who your mysterious allies were. Graviton v2 fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Nov 6, 2010 |
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Nov 6, 2010 03:23
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Thats one thing that bugged me about mind design, here they are super utopia where anyone or anything can do what they want in theory, yet they design minds to be violent bastards for warships and some stupid docile plebs who are happy to be gelfield suits. The suit minds are for example built to be happy with their lot. They are stupid slaves by design.
Graviton v2 fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Nov 11, 2010 |
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Nov 11, 2010 16:52
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BastardySkull posted:Also what do you guys imagine ship Minds to 'look like'.
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Feb 20, 2011 19:05
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Zimadori Zinger posted:Just finished Use of Weapons. 
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Mar 2, 2011 10:26
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That was heart-wrenching and well done. Definitely going to give it another go at some point.
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andrew smash posted:are you at all surprised by this?
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Mar 2, 2011 16:05
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Vanadium posted:I have only read Excession so far and am getting started with The Player of Games and I was wondering to what extent the sentient AI constructs are effectively forced labor. The obvious purpose of drones for example is that people don't have to perform manual labor, and it just seems kinda handwaved that drones don't really mind cleaning up after everybody and are really enjoying themselves, and I cannot help but wonder what a Mind does when it gets bored of running an Orbital or some backwater colony, or to a lesser extent the sentience of some guy's living space. Is there a procedure to transfer them to a new spaceship or something or are all of them forcibly programmed to enjoy whatever they were constructed for? Its strongly hinted that there is a level of design in the creation of the minds, the warships being the obvious example, they are built to be moody motherfuckers who delight in blowing stuff up. As for what they do with their spare time, in one of the books Banks introduced the concept of 'infinite fun space' where a mind or minds hangs around making staggeringly complicated 12 dimensional mathematical constructs
Graviton v2 fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Jun 6, 2011 |
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Jun 6, 2011 19:42
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Lasting Damage posted:I like the comparison, but does this mean Hubs are like crazy cat ladies that keep 20 of them?
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Jun 6, 2011 23:24
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andrew smash posted:I don't think this needs to be spoilered at all. "Panhumanity" is banks' term for it, it's just a given in his universe that lots of species seem to have evolved to look basically like humans to a greater or lesser extent. Most of the Culture's biological sapients are panhumans for historical reasons (the culture that would become the Culture initially arose from a loose conglomeration of a few panhuman civs and their AIs).
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Sep 28, 2011 16:56
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andrew smash posted:The afterword(i think) from consider phlebas mentions formal earth-culture contact taking place in like the 23rd century or something. That's the only other instance of it though as far as i know.
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Sep 29, 2011 00:55
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syphon posted:Well, I guess that settles it. I'll have to grab that book. Deffo worth buying, its very touching. (not gay)
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Sep 29, 2011 02:29
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TjyvTompa posted:I started reading Feersum Endjinn and I was wondering if I could skip the "weird" chapters without missing out on the general story? Graviton v2 fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Dec 29, 2011 |
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Dec 29, 2011 16:55
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