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I love Banks. I've read a number of his non-M books and all the M except Feersum Endjinn. I always think of the Culture series as Star Trek Done Right. Given access to teleportation, FTL communication and travel, tremendous amounts of energy, molecular duplication technology, artificial intelligence, and computer power commensurate with all the other gee-whiz stuff, what do you get? Star Trek took these incendiary ingredients and managed to cook them into soothing gruel, suitable for recovering ulcer sufferers and insomniacs. There are surely other realms besides Star Trek where writers took breathtaking technological developments and made sure that their societies were quite literally retarded so they could easily retell familiar stories In Space, but none so well-known come to mind. In the 24th century, during ship combat the captain gives a verbal order to a weapons officer, who presses buttons on a console, which finally fires the weapons. The captain's most amazing experience was living an accelerated lifetime inside his own head thanks to an alien probe, where he learned to play the flute. The ship he commands is apparently intelligent enough to convincingly stand in for Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking on the holodeck, but most of the time is about as passive as a rowboat. In the Culture-verse, there's little basic technology that wouldn't be at home in Star Trek. But molecular duplication means molecular duplication of brains too -- people don't (permanently) die unless they want to. People were long-ago surpassed by machines in intellectual strength as well as every other kind of strength. People who yearn for a world where the machines aren't better at everything can be a bit romantic and sympathetic, but more so they're comically thick, like they're trying to win a staring contest with the sun. The most intelligent entity on a ship is the ship, who plays universes instead of music and can fight an entire fleet scale space battle before a human can utter the first syllable of "fire photon torpedoes." To top it all off, this hypertech utopia has unabashedly radical social norms too. There are no gods, no masters, no scarcity, no responsibility, no temperance for 99.999% of the population. And for the tiny minority involved in SC, there are apparently no holds barred -- see for example the Culture terror weapon in Look to Windward. I think Banks does a great job of telling stories that are exciting without making the mayhem actually look "fun" so you want to become the protagonist instead of observe him. I also love the way he ends his stories, as in Consider Phlebas for example. Single humans' actions are tiny and insignificant compared to the Culture. The Culture is tiny and insignificant compared to the universe. Humans are no less smart, capable, or creative in the Culture-verse than they are in other fiction. They've just been painted onto a breathtakingly large canvas.
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Sep 26, 2009 08:01
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 14:36 |
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