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Are all 'M' books Culture novels? All of the ones I've read so far are, but maybe I'm just selectively buying Culture books.
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Jun 21, 2009 13:32
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Use of Weapons. Didn't I read somewhere (maybe even this thread) that it's even Banks' favorite book? After that, I kinda liked Look to Windward or Matter.
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Jul 3, 2009 23:04
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I liked it. It had a good sense of how under-developed species interact with the more developed ones. I liked how the main character's species had a mentor species, who themselves had a mentor species, who themselves had a mentor species, that was roughly equal to the Culture.
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Jul 4, 2009 19:39
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Heh yeah, I liked that part. Pages and pages of battle, then at the end the ship says something like 'total elapsed time in the battle, 11 milliseconds'.
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Jul 7, 2009 12:30
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I thought started with Use of Weapons, and while it was a decent starting point, I thought Player of Games seemed like the best place to start. It introduced and spent a decent amount of time in the Culture (so you got a great sense of how it worked), but then also had action and adventure throughout.
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Jul 14, 2009 10:15
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proudfoot posted:Wait really? I was pretty sure that the traitor ship committed suicide after realizing what it was doing.
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Oct 6, 2009 04:53
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Could imply that they sublimed, went extinct, or even just morphed into a different civili(z|s)ation.
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Oct 10, 2009 22:43
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Is 'Matter' his latest Culture novel? I haven't heard of anything newer, but I haven't been paying a whole lot of attention. I actually really liked Matter, although it seemed to get mixed reviews here on SA.
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Feb 24, 2010 00:58
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Excession was fun as a tech nerd. I loved the added insight we got in the Minds, and I loved that entire space battle that took place in 11ms, or whatever it was. The problem is that I don't think I could've appreciated it as much without some background on the Culture and its Minds first. Was Look To Windward the one that that old war veteran Mind who was running the Orbital? That was another good one that gave us lots of insight into how the Culture works while still having a neat story. (I have problems remembering which titles went with which stories)
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Aug 6, 2010 00:38
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You should check out Alistair Reynolds... particularly the Revelation series. There's no FTL travel in his series either, and I think it makes for a really really interesting sci-fi setting. The crews of most spaceships are used to several hundred years passing by whenever they travel to different worlds... and there's one particular convoy that departs earth, and 3 generations go by on the ship before it actually arrives at its destination. I thought he dealt with the culture (no pun intended) of such a scenario in a very interesting manner.
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Feb 15, 2011 09:27
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I love having relativity being a factor in the stories. During the aforementioned "3 generation voyage across the stars", there's a bit about how the various ships were doing their best to shed any excess weight. Having a lighter ship meant that they could hold off 'braking' on their approach by an extra few seconds, which had the relative effect of them arriving at the planet 10 years earlier. I love reading about that kind of poo poo. While I love the culture novels, Banks tends to just hand-wave his explanation of FTL travel (or rather, he doesn't discuss it at all).
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Feb 15, 2011 23:01
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The scenes in the latest book (whose name I already forget) were pretty interesting in that regard. The GSVs are so big that they often have MANY minds hanging out on them (due to the number of ships docked with the GSVs). I got the impression there were upwards of dozens/hundreds of Minds on a GSV at any given time.
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Jun 3, 2011 01:16
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Wait, can you guys cite some specifics? It's been a little while since I've read some of these, but I don't recall any reference to anything even remotely Earth-like in any of the Culture books. Specifically, I don't remember anything to imply one of the books was during medieval earth! It's possible I just missed them, but I always assumed it was a "long time ago in a galaxy far away" type of deal. Sure, they're roughly humans, but either so far away or so long from now that Earth isn't even a memory anymore.
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Sep 29, 2011 00:51
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MikeJF posted:You've not read State of the Art. The story is about a contact GCU finding Earth in the 70's.  EDIT: Boo, not available for Kindle. syphon fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Sep 29, 2011 |
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Sep 29, 2011 02:10
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Well he IS a British Author after all. Commonwealth's loyalty to the queen and whatnot.
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Sep 30, 2011 00:53
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I felt the same way. I was pretty amused by the personality of the War Ship... Banks also does a pretty good job of making humans seem useless (what with the Fabricaria pumping out hundreds of millions of automated warships). However, the characters seemed a bit weak.
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Oct 13, 2011 00:36
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I argue that Use Of Weapons is the best Culture book, but not the one you should start with. That was the first Culture book I read and I didn't fully understand what the Culture was all about (despite it being a pretty good story). While the story isn't as good, I thought Player of Games would've been the perfect book to start the Culture series with. It gives you a pretty good insight into the people of the Culture and the tech around it. syphon fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 20:31
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It's also possible that Banks changed his mind (or further refined) the concept of drones and sentience as he wrote each book... so something said in one book might not entirely make sense in another.
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Jun 5, 2012 00:27
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Yeah, the call backs are really minor too (in my opinion) and not really worth reading the books in a specific order. Most of the time I read the books far enough apart that I've already forgotten a character's name (so the call back is lost on me anyway). I'm a big fan of reading books in published order anyway. That way you experience the evolving world (universe) the same way the author did. I feel that's the best experience when there isn't a direct sequel.
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Apr 19, 2013 19:30
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I may be opening a Can Of Worms but I don't really think Game of Thrones is non-linear. Sure, the timeline occasionally jumps back (as he switches POVs) but that's more an artifact of having several simultaneous POVs. Lots of books do this, and it only becomes very obvious when the individual timelines get longer (think Wheel of Time where the entirety of book 10 was devoted to various people's reactions to the climax of book 9... or maybe it was 9 and 8, I don't remember). Use Of Weapons' non-linearity is much more explicit in that he jumps from a character's adolescence (or young adult) up to present day in an attempt to weave a story together. It's more akin to flashbacks.
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Dec 2, 2013 21:16
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