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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > No Gravitas Allowed -- The Iain [M.] Banks thread
 
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Calenth
Jul 11, 2001

Entropic posted:


The Player of Games - The second of the Culture books, and a very straightforward tale. It has none of the disjointed jumping back and forth in time that shows up in so many of Banks' books, and it's a very good introduction to The Culture as a setting. Personally I found it to be a fun read, but a little too simplistic. It has far less moral ambiguity than most of the rest of the Culture series.
Personally, I found the first of his SF books, Consider Phlebas, to be a bit lacklustre and I'm glad I didn't start with it. It's an entertaining enough space opera romp, but by the end I was left thinking "so what?"


I read a fair number of Culture novels a while back, and while I respect Banks as an author, I remember having a significant distaste for both of those books in particular -- Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games.

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.

Consider Phlebas I just found depressing. I read it as a deconstruction of the heroic sci-fi epic -- taking the standard SF trope of individual, capable, hero protagonists and deconstructing it. Which is well and good intellectually but an approach I found somewhat fundamentally nihilistic and depressing. Again, it's not a bad book at all, but I found myself just disliking its world-view.

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