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I've only gotten into Banks this year after getting an itch for some sci-fi that wasn't just the heroic Terran Federation fighting off the animal-themed alien hordes. I started with Consider Phlebas, which was tasty but really did come across like a space romp I was trying to get away from and the /big/ ideas tended to be the sort of 1 to 3 paragraph thoughts like the destruction of Vavach. It was enjoyable enough that I moved to The Player of Games and while it took a little while to take off, was a thoroughly enjoyable ride - possibly because I went into it without much in the way of preconceptions. Matter came next and I was just utterly disappointed. Perhaps just due to expectations again, I wanted a headful of sci-fi and spent half a book in feudal drama. When things finally fell together and stayed on the move and the pace built up-bam everyone dies. The End. A bit of a disappointment after slogging through so much king's-evil-advisor. Excession was brilliant. Perhaps just because the Minds have personalities that are arguably rampant - and they're the friendly ones. Currently working through Use of Weapons. It's good, but I've found that it seems to take Banks half a book to really put pieces in place and get rolling with the real story. I'm just about there now.
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Jul 4, 2009 09:41
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syphon posted: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. I really like the idea, but it felt tossed in and not explored to it's fullest. The early-industrial and court drama just bored me, I suppose. Banks seems at his best with his big ideas that carry a sense of mystery. In Matter I was really entranced by some of the things thrown out there - Why were the Shellworlds built? Why did the Iln want them destroyed? Why do Xinthians occasionally take up residence? These sort of questions really hooked my attention but went mostly untouched. Excession, in contrast, ended up more or less explaining itself, albeit abstractly.
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Jul 4, 2009 23:07
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LtSmash posted:I rather enjoyed Matter although the pacing could have been better and the whole feudal intrigue was kind of bland compared to George R R Martins stuff which I read not too long ago. There are still lots of Banks' 'What the gently caress' moments like the aquatic species' dyson sphere that incapacitates the main character when he realizes how insignificant he is in comparison. Or the former culture agent who carries on a one sided conversation with the nano spy machines the culture set on him when he left and who the locals all assume is insane but made him supreme commander of their army anyway. The finale when they make it back home and have to fight the drones in the shellworld's core and the SC agent tells them to go limp since the suits will fight on their own better and faster than they could and will break their limbs if they struggle was also a very nice image of really high tech fighting. Usually sci-fi end up like modern fights only shinier like Han Solo shooting stormtroopers with a blaster. Instead when the the top end culture gear is involved its not something humans can fathom or interact with. I quite enjoyed a similar moment in Excession - when the ROU dispatched to check on the recently commandeered fleet decides to attack and you get pages of description of it shredding through the fleet, trying to find the traitorous command ship, making passes back at it - when it finally sees the traitor self-destruct in despair and ends it's assault - time passed: fractions of a second
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Jul 7, 2009 08:14
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It was a good battle... I just finished Use of Weapons and I'm still trying to pick my brain up off the floor. There were parts of the book that I sort of struggled through, and for a while figured that since it wasn't as smooth and fun as Excession that there'd be no way that even a solid ending could change my favoritism, but I'm completely rethinking it and already considering another reading to sort things out.
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Jul 11, 2009 04:55
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GrandpaPants posted:I was thinking about picking up The Bridge, but it seems to have mostly disappeared from Amazon. I was dismayed to find out that Look To Windward is currently out of print.
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Jul 28, 2009 03:40
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You see both sides of the issue with the Affront. There's a strong desire to just let them have their wild gasbag party, and an equally strong desire to step in and enforce the Culture's ideals.
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Jul 28, 2009 15:39
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BUCKET OF FARTS posted:
The bomb lives only as it is falling. Oh how I absolutely adore _Use of Weapons_. If you haven't read it yet you're in for a treat.
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Jun 4, 2010 03:46
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Barnes & Noble just hosed up and sold me _Surface Detail_ for $10. It's a sign that only good things can come from this book!
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Oct 29, 2010 22:14
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Danith posted:Oh, also with the culture We need to get this guy out so instead of using super jesus technology lets send a random neanderthal down there to buy a street and waste billions of space bucks - finally convinces the guy to leave to see a park or something and instead of being sneaky about it he just blows everything up. And at the end.. Oh, we didn't think you would win so we made a deal with the other side and now they should win The entire point was that the Culture couldn't show their hand in the conflict. If they popped in and either declared for a side, or otherwise could be blamed for involving themselves, it would cause the war to grow unpredictably. They really did need a 'man on the ground' approach.
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Oct 30, 2010 18:59
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andrew smash posted:No they didn't. Use of weapons is a book about cheradenine zakalwe so I don't blame Banks for putting cheradenine zakalwe in the book but the excuse the culture gives to use him at all in that situation is really loving thin. Their technology is literally magic and the aliens they were loving around with were benighted primitives in comparison. They could have resolved that situation any number of ways without revealing themselves. The book doesn't clearly paint the conflict in a very obvious way, but it isn't a single planet of just some backwater pre-space civilizations involved - it's a spacefaring civilization spanning _many_ worlds. They're aware of the Culture, they have the tech to take down a module, and so any overt 'magical' actions by the Culture will likely result in backlash that would truly polarize the entire region and drag them directly into war.
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Oct 31, 2010 05:37
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Just finished _The Algebraist_ and was pleasantly surprised, albeit not with the usual Banks ending(poo poo HAPPENS gently caress YES, then the book ends 10 pages later). Was expecting something worse or more generic sci-fi-y given it's not a Culture novel, but it was a fun romp with more zany Banks aliens.
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Feb 9, 2011 01:28
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syphon posted:
I don't think this is necessarily the case, Banks deals with it by simply noting that The Culture has a loving gigantic area of influence and things can take a while. Sure he doesn't get down into how things go fast, but he definitely takes into account distances and travel times - it's just a non-issue in his books because it's a non-issue to his characters for the most part. Sure his ships go "fast" but there's no "instant point to point" travel like with the Algebraist's wormholes. In at least a couple of his books, The Player of Games for instance, characters(Gurgeh) contemplate the huge time they'll be separated from their 'home'. Gurgeh spends years travelling but because it's somewhat normal we don't spend huge portions of the book worrying about the trip itself as a gigantic undertaking. Immortality dulls the importance of a few years spent at high speed travelling the galaxy.
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Feb 19, 2011 09:31
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Just finished Surface Detail. The reveal at the end. Oh my. What I don't quite understand though is where he even fits in. I recognize that he was a plant by the pro-Hell side into the anti-Hell forces, but exactly how then did he even end up working against the Culture and for which of the other L8s? Did I miss some glaring hints somewhere or are those questions left entirely for speculation?
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Mar 11, 2011 17:56
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Has nobody simply quoted Banks on the matter yet?quote:It is, of course, entirely possible that real AIs will refuse to have anything to do with their human creators (or rather, perhaps, the human creators of their non-human creators), but assuming that they do - and the design of their software may be amenable to optimization in this regard - I would argue that it is quite possible they would agree to help further the aims of their source civilisation (a contention we'll return to shortly). At this point, regardless of whatever alterations humanity might impose on itself through genetic manipulation, humanity would no longer be a one-sentience-type species. The future of our species would affect, be affected by and coexist with the future of the AI life-forms we create. http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm My reading of his assertions regarding the relationship between Minds/Humans is less one of master/pet, and more one that at some point you stop thinking of them as machines and more as people or at the very least - neighbors. When there is no scarcity, which is the other very central point to The Culture, the entire concept of ownership and of indebtedness is forgotten. Banks refers to it repeatedly, in various contexts, that every sentience in the Culture basically does whatever it wants, unless it infringes upon another's right to the same. The Minds don't see themselves as dedicated enablers or caregivers, any more than the humans see themselves as dedicated hedonists.
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Jun 7, 2011 01:00
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Matter is, by far, the worst of the proper Culture novels. It has all the drifting of Consider Phlebas, but unlike that story it just feels like hits the last page and goes "well, I guess I"m done now time to go ride bikes." The general synopsis for Hydrogen Sonata sounds fantastic, though, but the trope of 'the immortal man' is one of those things that strikes a chord with me so I'm biased.
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Jun 29, 2012 08:23
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