Iain Banks is two writers in the same man. One is a moderately scarifying horror writer, who, without his middle initial, writes novels like The Wasp Factory. He’s good, but not one of my favorite writers. It’s when he uses his middle initial, and writes science fiction, and in particular his stories of The Culture, that he really shines.
The Culture is a highly advanced, utopian, technologically powerful galactic civilization. It is post-economic; food, energy and everything a citizen could conceivably want are instantly available. And there are two kinds of citizens: some mostly human, protoplasm based, and a bewildering array of machine intelligences, A.I.s, many of them living as spaceships, orbital constructs and more exotic ideas.
The Culture isn’t the only civilization; simply the most advanced. And where it interacts with those other civilizations, Contact, a branch of the loose government of The Culture, handles matters. Where those other civilizations are . . . difficult . . . then a rarely mentioned branch of Contact gets involved, Special Circumstances. Like many names in The Culture, it’s a euphemism. While Contact doesn’t generally interfere in other civilizations, sometimes there are Special Circumstances. Many of Banks’ novels involve, at some level, Special Circumstances. Because, as Banks’ has noted, utopias are boring to write about.
The novels are sly, ironic, amusing and tightly plotted. Banks’ does a terrific job in novels like Excession helping understand the thought processes of Minds, advanced A.I.s that think millions of times faster than meat-based creatures like ourselves. Ship names – and these are ships the size of mid-sized asteroids controlled by A.I.s that are to us as we are to a snail – are bad puns, oblique references to their real purposes or euphemisms. Alien names are likewise oblique: a seriously sadistic group calls itself the Affront.
The Culture books are
- Consider Phlebas (1987)
The first Culture novel. Its protagonist is working for the religious Idiran Empire against the Culture. A rich, although basically linear story about kidnapping one of the artificial sentiences of the Culture, it takes place against the backdrop of the galaxy-spanning Idiran War. The protagonist is an utterly amoral criminal.
The Player of Games (1988)
A brilliant though bored games player from the Culture is entrapped and blackmailed to work as a Special Circumstances agent in the brutal stellar Empire of Azad. Their system of society and government is entirely based on an elaborate strategy game.
Use of Weapons (1990)
A non-linear story about a Culture mercenary called Zakalwe. Chapters describing his adventures for Special Circumstances are intercut with stories from his past, where the reader slowly discovers why this man is so troubled.
The State of the Art (1991)
A collection of short stories (some Culture, some not) and a Culture novella. The (eponymous) novella deals with a Culture mission to Earth in the 1970s.
Excession (1996)
Culture Minds discover an Outside Context Problem: something so strange it could shake the foundations of their civilization.
Inversions (1998)
Seemingly a Special Circumstances mission or missions seen from the other side – on a planet whose development is roughly equivalent to 13th Century Europe. This novel is not labelled as “A Culture Novel”, but is widely regarded as being set in the same milieu.
Look to Windward (2000)
The Culture interfered in the development of the Chel with disastrous consequences. Now, in the light of a star that was destroyed 800 years previously during the Idiran War, plans for revenge are being hatched.
Matter (2008)
Djan Seriy Anaplian, a Special Circumstances agent, returns to her war-torn feudal world. The Culture has to decide whether or not to involve itself in this world’s problems.
Banks’ plotting is superb. In Use of Weapons, two unrelated plots wind around each other, faster and faster, until they collide at the end. In Inversions, which sees The Culture from the point of view of the civilization being manipulated, the two plot lines are inversions of each other.
The other characteristic of Banks’ works is that the stories are morally ambivalent. It can be very hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys; Banks’ point is that the question itself is meaningless.
Wildly imaginative, brilliantly written; I only wish there were more of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment