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The oddest thing about stranger in a strange land (to my perspective anyway) is that it managed to introduce a word as stupid as 'grok' to the point that i occasionally hear people say it in a tone other than scornful irony like 50 years after the book came out. What the gently caress.
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Jan 6, 2014 15:15
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Did I touch a nerve? For the purposes of the book i get it but seriously, saying it aloud either earns you puzzled stares from people who don't get it or the eternal disdain of people who do.
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Jan 6, 2014 18:01
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Barry Foster posted:I'm not sure I can face a universe without more Culture novels, but I can't think of anyone other than El-Bonko who'd be able to pull one off. China mieville is excellent in his own right but not all that reminiscent of banks IMO. Read his stuff anyway, start with embassytown, then perdido street station if you are interested in fantasy.
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Jan 6, 2014 20:41
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Tony Montana posted:No poo poo. I've only read UoW, there are other civilizations more advanced than The Culture? So using humans with humans is political as much as anything else. Mind blown, dudes, cheers After the Idiran war the question really hinges on what constitutes a civilization. Some of the sublimed probably are but they don't really bother with galactic events.
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Jan 12, 2014 22:54
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MikeJF posted:There are probably places within the Culture where people treat death as a hobby and use the backups repeatedly, but hey, there's an Orbital for everyone. look to windward has an extended scene in which a bunch of culture humans go lava rafting and several of them are incinerated to no major dismay among the rest, i think. it's been a while since i read it though. Ed: beaten of course.
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Jan 14, 2014 14:25
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For those of you who haven't seen Her you should do so, it reminded me of Banks in that it's basically the story of a mind being born in the frame of an oddball love story. It also has some pretty cool near-future speculation sprinkled in the background that is really interesting.
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Feb 16, 2014 00:49
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Fragmented posted:Thanks. The movie is a little slow but its a Sunday edible day so its perfect. I considered the OSes to be roughly human-level AIs and the event at the end of the movie to be the creation of a group consciousness proto-Mind. I'm pretty sure some of the culture stuff mentioned a similar process in culture early history.
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Feb 17, 2014 04:19
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For those interested in this topic the excellent Ancillary Justice explores it in a fascinating if initially confusing way.
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Mar 5, 2014 15:32
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Fragmented posted:Yeah but that's still just a skirmish. Banks wrote some awesome battle scenes. I wish we got one giant one. I know he would say that's not the point but what can I say...it wouuld have been awesome. I never got the impression that there were Trafalgar- style battles with a bunch of ships of the line on either side that banks wasn't showing us. The sides were too asymmetric (especially at first), units too fast, objectives too distributed and volumes too large to be anything other than a guerrilla campaign on a huge scale.
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Mar 6, 2014 14:14
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Lasting Damage posted:Although I guess its possible some Mind did, and decided to keep that information to itself. It amuses me to think of that interaction as very similar to the arrested development scene where the gym teacher lets tobias direct the school play.
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Mar 7, 2014 21:33
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If you're a culture fan in general you'd probably enjoy the algebraist, it's similar in content but just has a different setting. Plus the dwellers are very entertaining.
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Mar 19, 2014 18:24
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General Battuta posted:Knew it wouldn't go unloved. Banks fo lyfe Am i misinterpreting this or are you involved with Destiny in some way?
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Jul 24, 2014 04:04
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Ah, cool. Congrats. I've been kinda interested in the game but all my video gaming takes place on a 5 year old mac or a 3ds at the moment so I had kind of forgotten about it for a while.
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Jul 24, 2014 04:48
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It could work but it would need a strong and ruthless editor.
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Sep 21, 2014 03:05
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LOU Let it Go
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Oct 20, 2014 04:29
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Hedrigall posted:I just read a review of Surface Detail that said this Look to windward is really, really good.
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Oct 29, 2014 16:59
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FrozenDorf posted:Honestly I think Look to Windward suffices. It has good coverage of the setting; bits on culture life, tech, orbitals, Minds, old wars, Contact meddling, etc. The couple dozen pages of ship name banter may or may not go over well, though. You can probably just skip over that part and explain it's an in-joke for long time series readers
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Jan 22, 2015 06:00
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Was i the only person who didn't like the big 'mistake not' reveal? I honestly thought the idea was cooler before that happened, it's not like it wasn't abundantly clear what 'mistake not...' was implying anyway.
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Oct 28, 2015 06:57
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If you're able to "hear" words as you read them feersumm endjinn is not super difficult.
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Mar 19, 2016 18:58
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mallamp posted:That's slow reading, most people try to unlearn it as soon as they can Yes, because doing it all the time is both a good idea and what i suggested.
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Mar 21, 2016 04:33
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Excession is a very good book but I've always thought despite that, it was one of the weaker culture novels. Hopefully you're in for a real treat when you get to the rest of them.
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Apr 28, 2016 05:44
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Combed Thunderclap posted:a Mind using its leverage as a key player in that conflict just to try to help a single human psychologically heal. It was a nice reminder that there are Minds who are incredibly good (or who at least care about humans above all) after all the other Mind shenanigans. I dunno man, I'm not sure Sleeper Service did anything admirable, it basically enabled a human to throw a decades long tantrum after assaulting a pregnant woman and killing her fetus, then risked annihilation of the meta civilization just to make its favorite pet feel better. I thought the whole point was that Sleeper Service was exactly as eccentric as it was ostensibly pretending to be.
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May 12, 2016 22:08
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Notahippie posted:Alastair Reynolds has some of the scope and epic-ness and the analysis/deconstruction of social systems of Banks, but completely lacks the playfulness that Banks has. Behold.. the wedding gun!
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Jan 25, 2017 08:08
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I would be totally down with assimilating into a culture-equiv society of galactic fish people
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Jan 25, 2017 23:49
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I don't like the mistake not because I felt like it didn't need the full name dramatic reveal. Mistake not makes it perfectly clear all by itself.
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Feb 21, 2017 22:13
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Kesper North posted:It's totally a knife missile. It's just stolen and salvaged from the Culture and they don't have an AI to work it, so they have to use a lovely off-market neural interface fin. It's not a knife missile, it's a whiphound from The Prefect
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May 27, 2017 23:37
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