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I re-read The Player of Games. (I read quickly.) Through luck not judgement, this was pretty much the last Culture book I read, or one of the last. It had previously left me very cold and I couldn't really see the point of it. That impression is completely transformed by reading it immediately after Phlebas and I now understand why it's so often recommended as a starting point. The point of the book is now crystal clear. Having introduced the broad, fuzzy concept of the Culture, we are now introduced properly to it was we're presented with one of its archetypal citizens, and the extended timescale allows for some picture of how Gurgeh's associates live their lives while he's away. We start to see from the inside how Contact and Special Circumstances work, through the clash between Gurgeh and Flere-Imsaho. We start to get a sense of the, ahem, mindset of the Minds. For an Iain Banks book, like Phlebas it's a very straightforward read. Everything we expect to happen, as promised by the blurb, happens. There's no messing around with switching viewpoints or flashbacks or inherently surreal settings. The unreliable narrator hangs a lampshade on itself frequently to prime people to expect the twists and not to take Gurgeh's viewpoint at face value. It does have the common Banks theme of someone on a half-conscious search for something, they're not even sure what it is they're after, and which completely upends their view of previous events when they stumble upon it. There's also relatively few set pieces; this is not the place to come if you want to see how he tops the doom of Vavatch, and it's interesting to see Banks handle a SF protagonist who can look after himself but isn't an action hero. mdemone posted:Which should I try next if this has been my order so far? At this point you might as well go ippy-dippy and you won't go too far wrong; although I'm often an advocate of publication order so you don't lose the sense of how the author's style evolves over time, which my current re-read is currently reinforcing.
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Jun 21, 2021 10:57
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multijoe posted:I really liked Matter until the ending, where Banks seemed to realise it was 10pm the night before the deadline and he didn't have one.
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Jun 21, 2021 11:08
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the Plaper of Hames 
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Jun 21, 2021 11:24
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JOHN SKELETON posted:I felt the same way on the first time reading it, but on reread once you know it's coming it feels very thematic and fitting, and the slow build to it is very melancholy in a good way. All their machinations and plots and concerns were meaningless once real powers start to move, and suddenly everything is unraveling too fast to react or even comprehend. Also all the royals / important people died, only the "butler" survived.
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Jun 21, 2021 11:46
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His Divine Shadow posted:Also all the royals / important people died, only the "butler" survived. Love a book with a happy ending
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Jun 21, 2021 13:03
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JOHN SKELETON posted:It's interesting how among the Culture books there doesn't seem to be clear favorites or clear duds. Everyone has their own taste. For me: To prove your point, half of these I'm nodding sagely along with, the other half I'm about to declare you my life-long enemy. No, I will not tell you which.
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Jun 22, 2021 09:26
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https://twitter.com/ConnySpaceplone/status/1397819269719678976?s=20 "Oh poo poo!" and "I'm A Bad-rear end Spaceman" should be OUs of some kind
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Jun 24, 2021 12:16
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I jumped into the culture series with Player of Games over the last week and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. I think I'm going to stick to publication date from here on out and maybe try Consider Phlebas once I get closer to the end of the list.
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Jun 25, 2021 01:18
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I've been cracking up over this for days (from Surface Detail). quote:"What happened to them?"
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Jun 26, 2021 18:45
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Whoa, that's loving epic.
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Jun 26, 2021 19:05
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I re-read Use of Weapons. Having introduced Special Circumstances, Banks now decides to follow the concept to its logical conclusion, showing us in precise and painful detail exactly what SC is capable of doing with and to individuals, in the name of protecting the Culture and arranging intergalactic geopolitics to benefit the Culture. And, having established himself with two relatively conventional-in-form SF novels, he now turns the taps wide open and makes it clear that adding M to his name doesn't stop him being the same person who wrote The Wasp Factory and The Bridge. I remembered very little of this from the first time through, and trying to write about it a few days afterwards is equally difficult. I'm glad that other people seem to like it, but I think that at this point in my life I'm well over agonising over whether the ends justify the means and to what extent, and the extreme violence/body horror elements aren't really carrying the inherent shock value that they might once have had. That seems to be what most of the book is concerned with, and there's precious little else about it. Again, we spend most of the book following Zakalwe, cut off from the levity that the Minds and drones are usually good for. The relationship between Zakalwe and Sma is vaguely reminiscent of Horza and Balveda, in a rather different context. There's some pretty good set pieces, I guess. I'm happy it makes other people happy; I'm happy to leave it aside.
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Jul 5, 2021 01:33
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Rereading The Algebraist, god its such a fun book. Luseferous is such a delightfully over the top evil baddie.
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Jul 5, 2021 14:18
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I think Banks was getting alot of his chest when he had space america try to invade the Dwellers and get immediately blown up by self-defence death stars
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Jul 5, 2021 14:31
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It's sad to see Iain Banks SFF hardcover books getting deselected/discarded from local libraries catalogs around me while garbage tier SFF authors like Stephen Baxter and Greg Bear hardcover books stay around forever. Don't really have any opinions on Iain Banks normal fiction also disappearing from local library catalogs since I almost universally hate his no-middle-initial mainstream novels. Anyway I have mixed feelings about the novel Excession. The various factions within the Culture playing eighth-dimensional chess versus the Cenobite floating gasbags, and then everyone's plans getting wrecked by someone not-in-the-loop playing checkers was cool. The Mind to Mind IRC logs could have been reworked with little loss, it's just that the 4 human characters in Excession heavily remind me of preexisting characters from Iain Banks mainstream novels... which as I said earlier, I am not a fan of.
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Jul 7, 2021 07:10
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I thought it was pretty weird that the affront are supposed to be dwellers, or dweller young or clones or whatever that the culture supposedly made as a gently caress you to the dwellers for inhibiting space travel so long, the two universes don't really fit with each other, but apparently the affront is what you get when you have a society of juvenile dwellers. I dunno if that is canon or not, read it online somewhere. I think it's just some fan fiction on closer thought, it was many years ago I read it on some wiki site.
His Divine Shadow fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Jul 8, 2021 |
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Jul 8, 2021 21:53
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His Divine Shadow posted:I thought it was pretty weird that the affront are supposed to be... British? To me, they were basically supposed to be the British Empire - the combination of "hale fellow well met" cheerfullness combined with absolute unthinking brutality and also their general style seemed to me to be based on the British in India.
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Jul 8, 2021 22:57
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Notahippie posted:British? It's absolutely this, they're a parody of the unthinkingly cruel but sometimes charismatic English upper classes.
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Jul 8, 2021 23:13
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The Affront struck me as what would happen if housecats ran a space empire. Cute, charming, and openly, ludicrously sadistic.
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Jul 9, 2021 07:04
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:It's absolutely this, they're a parody of the unthinkingly cruel but sometimes charismatic English upper classes. This isn't really true though. The Affront thought very hard about their brutality
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Jul 9, 2021 08:34
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The Affront were the british public school system and the british gentlemens club system expanded out into a complete alien culture.
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Jul 9, 2021 12:25
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multijoe posted:This isn't really true though. The Affront thought very hard about their brutality Yeah that's part of why it's such a biting parody: a culture that tries to be brutal AF is indistinguishable in surface behavior from rich British dudes.
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Jul 9, 2021 13:38
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I re-read The State of the Art; which is really one-half The State of the Art, and then some random short stories dropped in to fill out the running time. I'm actually fine with that; I'd far rather read that than what would have happened if he'd been forced to artificially extend the main story. The short stories are unsurprisingly a mixed bag, none of them original, all of them pulled together from different contexts and previous publications. For me, Road of Skulls was "yeah, okay then", Odd Attachment was a well-done piece of body horror, Descendant got a lot better once I realised who the main character was, Cleaning Up is a lot of fun in its extreme unsubtlety (but also extreme subtlety judged by where Banks went 10 years later), and Piece is the clear stand-out, paced to absolute perfection, and well worth reading the whole rest of the book for. The State of the Art, along with A Gift from the Culture, exists to show us how and why people choose to leave the Culture. It also gives a useful insight into Contact, the halfway house between being an ordinary Culture citizen and being in Special Circumstances. For me the good ship Arbitrary, denied David Bowie requests and all, is the clear star of the show. The image of the Mind sending drones into a polar region to pluck out a couple of snowflakes for its collection is the one thing that really sticks with me. As for the rest of it? I guess it's fun to see how the Culture views 1978, but absolutely none of it's surprising, or seems to offer any insight. The comedy asides among the ship's crew I've never seen the purpose of, except perhaps to drive home how unimportant they are and how they're very much passengers at the Mind's pleasure. Oh yeah, and also there's "A Gift from the Culture". Reading this was very helpful, in that it helped crystallise something that's insidiously soured both the previous two books for me, without my being able to properly get a handle on it. On the one hand, Banks keeps taking pains to point out how very tolerant the Culture is of homosexuality and orgies and changing one's gender and how this sort of thing is Totally Okay Now; and on the other, at this stage of his career he seems constitutionally incapable of undercutting that presentation at every turn. In Player of Games it was Gurgeh, and how it was apparently vitally important to point out that the main character of the book is Kinsey 1 even though it affects literally nothing else. There's a few things sprinkled round Use of Weapons (such as, it's important to know that Zakalwe accepts the attentions of Culture women but turns down one young man) and The State of the Art gives us an entire Mind with "a distinctly heterosexual bent". Standing above all of them is definitely A Gift from the Culture, which is all about how a Culture self-exile in a homophobic society receives the titular gift, so enabling his gay relationship to become a wearyingly familiar doomed one. In 2021, this sort of thing can definitely get tae gently caress, no matter how right-on Banks may have thought he was being at the time. It's just unnecessary. After four Culture stories in five years, Banks then stepped away for a while. His next SF novel, two years later, was Against a Dark Background, which I've already re-read, and again I now understand my love for it a bit better; all the stuff I love about Banks is there, but also there's none of the annoyances that for me drag his other stuff down.
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Jul 10, 2021 17:49
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EDIT: wrong thread
Gravitas Shortfall fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jul 10, 2021 |
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Jul 10, 2021 19:06
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Trin Tragula posted:
You can't trust the publishing data on most of Iain Banks stuff, about a quarter of his stuff was originally written in the 1970's then published later with minimal changes. The 3 Iain Banks stories/story collections you mentioned and have mixed feelings about (State of the Art, Use of Weapons, Player of Games) were all literally written in the 1970s. As per Iain Banks himself in a interview with the May 1989 issue of Journal Wired; summarized by a guy on the SF-LOVERS mailing list in 1990. *** {Summary of the 1989 Journal Wired interview} . . . Quotes from Banks derive from the interview. THE HUNGARIAN LIFT JET. Written in 1970, unpublished. '[A] spy story, absolutely full of sex and violence, neither of which I'd had any experience with at the time [laughter].' TTR. Written in 1972, unpublished. 'Just gigantic. ... It had a cast of thousands and was very silly.' Quasi-SF in the mold of CATCH-22 and STAND ON ZANZIBAR. THE USE OF WEAPONS. Written in 1974 or 1975, unpublished in its original version; apparently rewritten in the summer of 1989 for publication. SF; the first novel of the Culture. Like the later novels THE PLAYER OF GAMES and CONSIDER PHLEBAS, it apparently concerns a misfit or outsider in the interstellar utopian anarchy of the Culture. AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND. Written after WEAPONS; unpublished. SF but not connected to the Culture stories. THE PLAYER OF GAMES. Written three years after BACKGROUND, published in 1988 after a bit of rewriting. The second Culture novel. A story about the nature of competition and cooperation that takes place on a planet where society is built around an incredibly complex game. Fun, although the politics is a bit heavy-handed. THE STATE OF THE ART. Written in 1979, published in 1989 after some polishing. A novella about Earth and the Culture published as a book. A Culture starship discovers Earth and members of the crew have different reactions to our own culture circa 1977. How does a utopia like the Culture react to an ugly mess like Earth? Some interesting insights into the Culture but the story doesn't stand by itself. . . . {Followed by 7+ more paragraph synopsis's of Iain Banks published/in-the-editing process stories as of 1989.}
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Jul 10, 2021 22:13
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Just finished Use of Weapons - that's some hosed up poo poo. On to the next novel!
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Jul 11, 2021 22:23
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Just finished Use of Weapons - that's some hosed up poo poo. On to the next novel! Use of Weapons is pretty hosed up, but it also illustrates how, despite their utopian ideals, the Culture can and does use monsters as their weapons.
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Jul 11, 2021 22:56
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Use of Weapons is pretty hosed up, but it also illustrates how, despite their utopian ideals, the Culture can and does use monsters as their weapons. Yeah I don't want to portray that it wasn't a great read - just reinforcing that it's a great read that's also really hosed up. Do the remainder of the series focus a lot of time on Contact and SC like Player of Games and Use of Weapons?
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Jul 12, 2021 00:42
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Do the remainder of the series focus a lot of time on Contact and SC like Player of Games and Use of Weapons?
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Jul 12, 2021 12:17
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Yeah I don't want to portray that it wasn't a great read - just reinforcing that it's a great read that's also really hosed up. Yeah, or on non-Culture citizens. You don't really get as much 'Normal Culture' stuff as you do bookending Player of Games in pretty much any other novel.
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Jul 12, 2021 13:16
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Zore posted:Yeah, or on non-Culture citizens. You don't really get as much 'Normal Culture' stuff as you do bookending Player of Games in pretty much any other novel. You get a piece of it in Use of Weapons when Zakalwe is given some time to wander a GSV and spends the next week drinking and loving his way through it. “Everyone has drug glands and drinks a lot and plays games and fucks all the time” is a fun model for the future but it also gets old quick in a book which is why I imagine the books only give tastes here and there. Even in Player of Games it’s used to mentioned that Gurgeh is a bit of a prude because he doesn’t gently caress other dudes and he hasn’t changed his sex to experience loving like a woman, and then after his adventure it’s used to show that he’s lightened up a bit because one of the first things he does when he gets home is gently caress an acquaintance who is mid sex change. A GIANT PARSNIP fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Jul 12, 2021 |
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Jul 12, 2021 18:09
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MikeJF posted:My culture reading order reference: you can read in any order, but I've got a few notes. I didn't realize there was such a big gap between Look to Windward and the stuff after that. not shocking to me because, imo, there's a pretty noticeable drop in quality; none of matter/surface/hydrogen are as good as the earlier ones. Surface Detail is the best of the "late" ones for me but Matter and Hydrogen were p. bad by banks standards (caveat I have not read State of the Art or Inversions yet)
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Jul 12, 2021 20:20
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I enjoyed all three of them. What turned you off about Matter and HS? Just some guesses but... Matter: The prince is unlikeable but obviously meant to be and it works for me. The shellworld is a cool setting for the story and I enjoy how events just completely outpace even the Mind characters by the end. It's a nice look into what SC really gets up to when poo poo hits the fan and it's not just Minds holding back from getting too involved for territorial/civ-level-mismatch reasons. HS: The Mistake Not... feels a bit cheesy to me but the overall themes and storytelling are solid, especially considering Banks found out he had cancer just before finishing the book. Vyr works pretty well for me as a sympathetic host for the reader's perspective, though she has a bit more advanced knowledge than some of the other protagonists in the series.
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Jul 12, 2021 21:10
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Inversions is a fairly decent low fantasy novel which becomes a lot better when read as part of the Culture series, since it's about a rogue Culture citizen performing well meaning but unsanctioned intervention on a late-medieval world, while a sanctioned Contact, or perhaps Special Circumstances agent does the same but two kingdoms over.
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Jul 12, 2021 21:49
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Am I the only one who thought Look to Windward was a great final read of the Culture books? I know HS is the designated farewell, but something about a human and mind, both war-exhausted and unhappy in the utopia they fought for, dying together one last time got me good. It was also the first Culture book I picked up years and years ago, but only made it a few chaperts in.Best Friends posted:The Affront struck me as what would happen if housecats ran a space empire. Cute, charming, and openly, ludicrously sadistic. 
Strategic Tea fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jul 12, 2021 |
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Jul 12, 2021 22:19
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From what I know of the character, the Affront strike me as being space Flashman.
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Jul 15, 2021 09:17
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One of the better culture images I've seen: Masaq'
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Aug 11, 2021 16:40
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His Divine Shadow posted:Matter was one of my favorites actually, seems most people don't agree, but I thought it was really interesting, left me wanting to know more in the end, sadly we never got it and never will. I think Matter is the most interesting read while Player of Games is still fresh in a mind, but knowing they were written twenty years apart. Its a real fresh change of pace to see how his writing style both evolved and yet stayed the same in that time. Both are good though. I've been away from the culture series a while; and I didn't really like use of weapons (it was my first; and should probably have read it second) I've read the one that deals with the concept of hells, too. If i've been away for a bit but have an understanding of the setting, what's top of the stack as far as recommendations go for a next read? Idly, does anyone have opinions on the polity series, by neal asher? Its sort of culture-lite, and hits some of the same notes while doing its own different thing. I discovered it a little after matter, and i'm curious if there's any fan crossover
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Aug 14, 2021 09:12
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MikeJF posted:One of the better culture images I've seen: Masaq' Nice. I just did a mini re-read, Phlebas, Player of Games, Look to Windward. The same artist did these images of Vavatch getting chopped up. I've always thought that scene was ripe for a scientific/detached "CGI Titanic sinking in real time" sort of video treatment. Vavatch is big enough that the realspace light from the gridfire cuts would take ~15 seconds to hit the opposite side of the orbital. You'd be able to watch the light propagate and bounce around like ripples in water, especially as there are more and more expanding ice clouds from the atmosphere/ocean pouring in to vacuum. Of course a view zoomed out far enough to see the whole thing means you lose the dramatic up-close perspective from the linked images. And an edited version that cut between different perspectives would sort of defeat the cold detached feeling - the edits would imply an author. The best would be to have full length videos of the destruction from multiple views (as though captured from different ships leaving the orbital), and then let the viewer switch between them at will, and possibly change what spectrum of light to display. The total effect would be something like "annihilation made into an aesthetic experience," the "spectacle for machines" that Horza muses about. The real question is, how long would it take? The GSV cuts Vavatch in to 400 square pieces. How long between those methodical cuts? It doesn't seem like it takes too long in the text - one second between cuts would mean about 6:40 for the gridfire, then another few minutes for the multiple rounds of CAM that successively blast every piece in to vapor. Say ten minutes from start to finish. Does that feel right? Prolonged Panorama fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Aug 15, 2021 |
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Aug 15, 2021 01:30
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multijoe posted:I really liked Matter until the ending, where Banks seemed to realise it was 10pm the night before the deadline and he didn't have one. So that would mean nothing they did... mattered? 
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Aug 15, 2021 02:26
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I have been going through the culture novels on audiobook since I have a longer commute and I also like having something to listen to while doing stuff around the house. I was ready to jump into State of the Art tonight, but it seems that State of the Art, Excession, Inversions, and Look to Windward are not available in audiobook format? Does anyone know of a place that offers them via audiobook?
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Oct 6, 2021 03:11
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