I gather I'm pretty unusual among sf fans in not enjoying the Culture novels, which I find maybe a little sere in their prose and a little too far gone in their post-Singularity space opera to really resonate. I do like the ship names, though.
I also suspect that series plays a heavy role in inspiring Howard Tayler's webcomic Schlock Mercenary, whose very humble beginnings I've had the distinct pleasure of watching it far outgrow over the years. Definitely worth a look for any sf fan, mil-sf fans especially.
I came at the Culture novels after a childhood of (mi)spent cyberpunk reading and enjoyed them immensely. But there are novels enough for all of us to find what works for us. Banks' stuff feels surprisingly similar to Gibson's post-scifi novels to me, though I can't put a finger on the shared characteristic.
I too came from a cyberpunk reading habit and a friend recommended the Culture series as a change.
I didn't like the first book I read which I believe is the first in the series. I guess I just am a Tech Noir / Hardboiled kind of guy (I like hard scifi as well).
My problem with "world/universe/space operas" books is I don't want to read them in a linear manner. I prefer to read it in a wikipedia like format where I can explore the author's created world instead of going through a story (there are exceptions of course). For example in a story when they passingly mention some alien civilization I immediately want to know everything about that civilization and am annoyed I have to wait 4 novels later to find out.
In fact I have often read one book from a series and just go ahead and read up on wikipedia the plots of the rest of the novels. I often wonder if I'm the only one who thinks like this.
It would be interesting if a world building type author had a wiki style pay to read collection of writings. I know some authors or fan-authors will write encyclopedias (e.g. Tolkien).
The exception of course is extremely suspenseful stories. Those I can enjoy in a non encyclopedia manner.
To me, world building through pacing is one of the aspects I enjoy. I guess you could call it lazy exposition evaluation.
My favorite feature of cyberpunk and derivates was the willingness to mention a thing in passing, that the author knew the reader had no idea about, then gradually shade in context through the story. The "how quickly can you figure out what this thing is in this world" schtick feels... more engaged with the reader as a sentient creature than "brain dump, here's a bunch of information."
Or, in the writer's quip, "Show [with skill], don't tell."
Not crazy about them either. For me, the issue is that they're basically gods (level 8 civilisation) and everything just feels like one big deus ex machina.
This is lampshaded pretty hard in Consider Phlebas, I think, where Horza basically hates the Culture for that reason (among others). I also consider Star Trek's Federation boring as well, but worse: at least The Culture meddles in the affairs of other groups (for better or worse!).
There's an SF fan theory which tends to show up around the late-night bars in conventions that the Star Trek Federation and the Blake's Seven Federation are, in fact, the same Federation --- it's just we're seeing the propaganda films released by both sides.
Naturally, the anti- side doesn't have nearly as much money as the pro- side, which is why the special effects in Blake's Seven are so bad.
The things I miss out on by not going to sf conventions.
It makes a lot of sense, too. I mean, TNG started out with political commissars, even - take a look at Troi's character in Season One, especially e.g. Conspiracy, and tell me that's not exactly the role she's playing.
The Federation has the problem of being completely undefined; it has a president but no elections, politics, news? Does it have money or not? If not how does that work? We haven't really seen how normal people live inside the Federation.
The Culture is a benevolent Matrix where machines make decisions taking the desires and opinions of humans into account to whatever extent they choose to. The amorphous nature of the society is actually part of its explicit nature (whether a ship or population is part of The Culture is kind of up for debate and reassessment at any given time)
The difference between the Federation and the Culture is that Banks actually considered the societal impacts of matter compilers, godlike AI, etc. and tried to describe the results as he imagined them. THe Federation is "kind of like the modern US" with a bunch of tech that would make the modern US make no sense at all.
One of the big themes in the series is how people find meaning in their lives given that they basically want for nothing. When you can have any material possession created for you on demand, what do you do with yourself?
For example, in The Player of Games, Gurgeh devotes his life to games of strategy, and Yay to orbital architecture. Neither character needs to work for a living, so why bother working at all?
IMO, there are much better novels about this subject not involving any techno-magic. Lem's Return from the Stars is an excellent work that explores this very question, and unlike Culture novels, it's down-to-earth and fully self-aware. Hard to explain what that means. Lem realized that the very notion of "meaning" will change in the future.
Many works by Strugackiy brothers also deal with this question.
I realize these writers belong to preceding generations of SF, but their works are still very much relevant and (IMO) far more plausible than futures of Vinge and Banks.
To answer the last question: to define themselves as more than average by joining a community of practice. It is a society where what you do is considerably more distinctive than what you have and where you come from, which is likely to seem strange to us.
Vernor Vinge's two Deep books (I haven't read the third) were right up there for me. Albeit simultaneously terrible from a "Jesus, this is %&#$ed up, but also plausible" perspective.
Good call on Excession. I love the Culture books but can see why folks wouldn't, but Excession is the best in my opinion because it reveals the Culture's flaws and limitations. The rest of the time it's just invincible good guys.
I feel Banks tried to write a novel about the Culture dealing with peer civilizati0ns, but they a;ways ended up being significantly inferior and we're back to Consider Phlebas (which is The Culture vs a clearly weaker civilization).
I feel like several of the other books make it quite clear that invincible, well-meaning good guys can cause a lot of pain. Sometimes it works, sometimes they convince themselves that it was worth it, because clearly their ideology is the better one, sometimes they are terribly sorry for what they did. In any case it will hurt if you are on the wrong end of their meddling. And most of their population doesn't care or even notice, so happy or unhappy are they in their utopia. Really, tons of material to draw parallels from, to all sorts of things in our lives.
I'd put Look to Windward in the "best of" category. It addresses with the issue by introducing a character who has been personally, very poignantly affected by the Culture's meddling, and seeks revenge for it, a bit like a reverse Use of Weapons. It's also the only book to directly reference the events of Consider Phlebas.
I also liked how Matter described a very-low-on-the-civilizational-ladder (literally: It's a located on the lower level of a "shell world", an artificial planetoid constructed of concentric layers of habitation, each home to a different civilization) society whose players discover the Culture and ultimately seek to improve on themselves, while the book concurrently illustrates the other civilizations' underhanded attempts at playing the Culture.
Minor nitpick regarding Consider Phlebas: The Idiran Empire are militarily vastly superior to the Culture at the outset of the war.
Fun fact: "Consider phlebas" and "Look to windward" are both phrases appearing in T S Eliot's poem "The Wasteland".
They're the only two titles drawn from the poem, so I find it particularly interesting that you mentioned the way that they're more directly referential than other works. Makes me think I should try a closer reading of both.
Yes, it's a "sequel" of sorts — in the weakest possible sense — to Consider Phlebas, so it's not an accident that he used another line from the same poem.
I tried to like them, but too often the main character is a total asshole and nobody calls him on it. Also, the author is a little too enthusiastic about too-clever narrative tricks like having the story told forward and backwards in alternating chapters.
But mostly I got annoyed at the protagonists naval gazing and being only concerned with their immediate problems (that they usually created) when there was a giant interesting universe shoved into the background.
I also tried reading one of his non-culture novels (Transition), and it had exactly the same problem of a main character that just seems to be killing time until the novel ends.
My favorite characters in the Culture books are the AIs, not the humans they are keeping around as pets.
...did you know that in English, the names 'Ian' and 'Iain' are, in fact, unrelated? It's a little-known fact that the word 'Ian' is actually an abbreviation for the word 'Cyclopian' --- which, as everyone knows, means to have only one I.
(Stolen from Mr. Banks himself, when he came to my university to do a talk. Still miss him.)
Just a whole lot of nothing. I've read all of his works right from when Wasp Factory came out. This one fell flat. Which is obviously a double shame for me, in context.
A frank exchange of views is my favourite. Whenever I hear key terms in the media I think they'd make good ship names. One example is how the BBC says "so called Islamic state" - if I ever own a boat (or a sentient AI) I might call it that.
For those who miss Iain Banks, Ken McLeod is a good read. The Cassini Division is a great post-singularity novel with interesting tech ideas and ideological musings. Iain and Ken also wrote a book of poetry together which is worth a read.
If you can find a copy, Ben Aaronovitch's _The Also People_ is a Doctor Who tie-in novel set in a Culture-with-the-serial-numbers-filed off. If you like both fandoms, it actually has interesting things to say about both.
Newton's Wake is kind of variable. Some bits I like, some bits are meh.
If you feel like giving Macleod another try, I think his best books are The Cassini Division and The Stone Canal; they're part of a quartet, but these two books are the best and are very much a thematic pair, and if you read one you should read them both. (In part they show us the same setting from drastically opposed viewpoints, both done sympathetically.)
Giant spaceships, explosions, god-like beings, wormholes through space and time, sentient robots, non-sentient robots, maybe-sentient robots, full on ultralibertarian capitalism, full on ultraliberal socialism, nanotechnology, pre-, post- and intra-singularity technology, and some very big guns.
I just read a copy of his latest, "Dissidence" which is part one of the corporation wars series, part two "Insurgence" will be out at the start of December. I thought it was a great return to his harder post-singularity SF styles like "Cassini Division", but still plenty of political and social commentary. Another good author is Michael Cobley with his humanity's fire series: "Seeds of Earth", "Orphaned Worlds" and "Ancestral Machines" - if you like Banks and Macleod I think this would also be appreciated...
ok, based on this I'm going to give him another go.
Wake had some great ideas but I thought they weren't knitted together particularly well. And all that stuff with the two folk musicians and the playwright was pointless.
Edit: Now that I think of it, if Song of Stone had been the first Iain Banks book I read, I would not have read more.
YMMV I thought The Nightmare Stacks was extremely entertaining - invasions of fascist elves, air to air combat with fluorine breathing dragons, extremely tense family dinners - what's not to like?
Hah, I must admit that after being disappointed with the previous two or three I didn't bother with The Nightmare Stacks (and hadn't in fact realised it was out yet). If it's a return to form (and to be fair Stross has always been pretty variable) them I'll check it out.
I'd recommend Neal Asher as the closest substitute for Banks, though he can be quite variable. Hilldiggers in particular is the best Culture novel I've read, so to speak.
Don't think so. I assume it is straight editorial decision to cope with the fact that although the organisation calls itself 'Islamic State' it isn't recognised as a state.
If I were to call myself "The world's best lover" they would probably do the same.
"Its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee which is charged to all British households... the fee is set by the British Government, agreed by Parliament..."
