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Iain M Banks' Culture novels

Started by Mister Six, October 05, 2020, 01:18:32 AM

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Norton Canes

Ragged it, then. It was good; as pacy and imaginative as the other two Culture novels I've read, Consider Phlebas and Excession.

I think the problem I had is that when I read the synopsis a couple of years ago, I jumped to the conclusion that with the theme of Subliming, and it being published only a year or so after Banks died, it would be a sombre meditation on the transience of existence and the nature of the afterlife. And of course though there are touches of that, its really just a big James Bond In Outer Space, with characters traversing the cosmos to all kinds of exotic locations before an action-backed finale in a huge what-might-as-well-be-a secret base.

Twenty nine novels in as many years makes Banks a highly prolific author (especially given the size of some of those works) and I did get the impression that a lot of The Hydrogen Sonata was written pretty frenetically. Still, plenty to like, such as unfolding secrets of the Zihdren, the Liseiden/Ronte sub-plot; and of course, those garrulous Culture Minds.

Alberon

I think he'd finished it before his diagnosis. In fact, I think he'd got through most of his final novel (a non M one) before he knew he had cancer.

HAVANAGILA

I can't find the exact quote, but he definitely mentioned in one of his final posts or interviews that : "It would have been nice to have made the last book a great big all-out space opera, but it turns out it's this relatively small novel [meaning The Quarry] instead. Ah well."

katzenjammer

IIRC the quote is from this interview which is well worth watching

https://youtu.be/v2vrypvdqWI

Mister Six

Quote from: HAVANAGILA on November 09, 2020, 09:34:58 AM
I can't find the exact quote, but he definitely mentioned in one of his final posts or interviews that : "It would have been nice to have made the last book a great big all-out space opera, but it turns out it's this relatively small novel [meaning The Quarry] instead. Ah well."

The Quarry is also about a bloke with cancer, so he joked when it came out about taking his research too seriously.

He also proposed to his long-time partner after the diagnosis by asking her if she would do him the honour of becoming his widow.

What a guy, truly.

kittens

i am reading player of games and enjoying it a lot. once i am done am i free to go hog wild reading these books or are they in order or what

Mister Six

Whatever order you want, but you might as well do publication order. If you're freestyling, it might be better to read Consider Phelbas before Look to Windward and Use of Weapons before Surface Detail, but it doesn't make a massive amount of difference.

Mister Six

If you fancy some Culture methodone, someone's written a new Culture novel, Tessellation, and stuck it up on Amazon. It's fanfic, of course, but was written in 2017 and somehow hasn't been blasted by the Banks estate's lawyers. I've picked up a copy out of curiosity and will strip out the Amazon DRM in case it gets unpublished. Apparently it's not too bad. Probs not going to read it any time soon though.

kittens

did player of games then consider phlebas. both good but glad i started with player of games as it was a lot more fun. consider phlebas started to feel like just one crazy thing after another. got state of the art for christmas but that only has two culture stories in it doesn't it. will buy excession once i'm done with that

mothman

Given the richness of the Culture universe, it seems bizarre that there were only ten Culture novels - and one is actually just three short stories or novellas in a larger anthology of mostly non-Culture work.

Mister Six

Quote from: kittens on January 09, 2021, 10:53:55 AM
did player of games then consider phlebas. both good but glad i started with player of games as it was a lot more fun. consider phlebas started to feel like just one crazy thing after another. got state of the art for christmas but that only has two culture stories in it doesn't it. will buy excession once i'm done with that

Three - "Descendant" is Culture too.

touchingcloth

I've just finished Player of Games. Enjoyed it, thanks to all who recommended, would read some more. Phlebas next, or...?

Famous Mortimer

Read everything in order. Even the worst Culture novel is better than most of everything else.

touchingcloth

Quote from: touchingcloth on May 30, 2021, 11:31:52 PM
I've just finished Player of Games. Enjoyed it, thanks to all who recommended, would read some more. Phlebas next, or...?

Based on this earlier post...:

Quote from: Poobum on October 09, 2020, 09:48:42 AM
I'd say Player of Games. My favourite is Excession but I feel it would be less accessible without having a grasp on what the minds are, and their role in the Culture.

...I guess my question is really which books will give the best primer into The Culture to let me get the most o out of things like Excession and Surface Detail? Player of Games was largely focussed on your (then) man Gurgey, and things like the Minds were only really hinted at. I like the idea that The Culture is only really introduced piecemeal, and not in any specific order. I had Never Let Me Go lined up a my next novel, but I'm feeling I'd like another Banks.

Mister Six

I wouldn't worry too much at this point, if Player pulled you into the world and ideas enough. Isn't the ship that flies Gurgeh to the game a Mind?

Excession and Use of Weapons are the only "difficult" books, I think - the former because a lot of it is composed of (quite funny) discussions between the minds, which is easier to get a handle on once you're embedded in the universe, and the latter because of its composition (with alternating chapters moving backwards and forwards in time).

The order of release leading up to Excession is Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons, State of the Art, then Excession. Phlebas is one of the weaker entries, but if you're onboard now, it's still fun and won't put you off the series, so maybe loop around and read chronologically from there.

My only other bit of advice would be to not leave Inversions or (especially) Matter till the end, because they're the weakest Culture books, and it's best to go out on a high. The last released Culture book, The Hydrogen Sonata, is a solid story and has a slightly melancholic vibe, so it works as one to wrap up the series.

mothman

Trying to think of my favourite Culture novel, and I really can't decide between The Player Of Games, Use Of Weapons, Excession or Look To Windward.

Favourite ship: Torturer-class ROU Killing Time. It just perfectly encapsulates the mindset of the Rapid Offensive Unit.
Spoiler alert
It acts as if it's walking into a trap even though it has no need to do so, and having successfully escaped the trap in a way which leaves the Affront with no reason to suspect it had, sends a message "Missed me, you fuckers!" before proceeding to seek revenge with extreme prejudice.
[close]

Fave non-Culture M novel: Against A Dark Background.

Fave non-M novel: Bit of a cliche I know, but The Crow Road probably.

Mister Six

I should re-read The Crow Road. I remember thinking it seemed meandering and badly in need of losing about 100 pages, but I was also 18 and a fucking moron, so maybe I was wrong.

MojoJojo

I think that's fair - I think Bank's said that the murder mystery was tacked on to make it have some sort of point. Caveat - I was probably about 18 when I last read it too.

It feels like the TV adaption has been forgotten about too. It was supposed to be good wasn't it?

SOMK

Quote from: mothman on June 04, 2021, 09:41:47 PM
Trying to think of my favourite Culture novel, and I really can't decide between The Player Of Games, Use Of Weapons, Excession or Look To Windward.

Favourite ship: Torturer-class ROU Killing Time. It just perfectly encapsulates the mindset of the Rapid Offensive Unit.
Spoiler alert
It acts as if it's walking into a trap even though it has no need to do so, and having successfully escaped the trap in a way which leaves the Affront with no reason to suspect it had, sends a message "Missed me, you fuckers!" before proceeding to seek revenge with extreme prejudice.
[close]

Fave non-Culture M novel: Against A Dark Background.



Fave non-M novel: Bit of a cliche I know, but The Crow Road probably.

The segment in Surface Detail, where the bored & somewhat psychopathic Abominator-Class (LOL!) Offensive Unit Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints gets "to shine baby", might be my favourite in any book ever (though the full name reveal towards the end of Hydrogen Sonata gets a nod)

Spoiler alert
"Well, happy fucking day!" Demeisen said. He turned to Lededje with a grin that extended into a broad smile.
She looked at him. "I have the feeling that what you think of as good news might not strike everybody else as being quite so smashing."
"Some nutter's building a bunch of ships in the Tsungarial Disk!" Demeisen sat back in the seat, staring at the module's screen, still smiling.
"How is that good news?"
"It's not, it's a fucking disaster," Demeisen said, waving his arms.
"This'll end in tears, mark my words."
"So stop smiling."
"I can't! There are natural ... Okay, I can,"' the avatar said, turning to her with a look of such abject sadness she instantly wanted to take him in her armour-suited arms, pat his back and reassure him everything would be all right. Even as Lededje realised quite how easily she was being manipulated, and started to feel furious at herself as well as Demeisen, he dropped the sad look and went back to looking quite gloriously happy. "I can help it," he admitted, "I just don't want to help it." He waved his arms again. "Come on! This avatar naturally recognises my own emotional state and reflects it, unless I'm deliberately trying to deceive. Would you rather I lied to you?"
"Then what," Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar's obvious enthusiasm, "is making you smile about a disaster?"
"Well, first, I didn't cause it! Nothing to do with me; hands clean. Always a bonus. But it's looking clearer and clearer there's going to be some heavy fucking messing hereabouts very shortly and that's precisely what I'm built for. I'm going to get to strut my stuff, I'm going to get to be me, girlie. I tell you, I can't fucking wait."
"We are talking about a shooting war?" she said.
"Well, yes!" Demeisen exclaimed, sounding borderline-exasperated with her. He waved his arms again. He seemed to be doing this a lot, she noticed.
"And people are going to die."
"People? Very likely even ships!"
She just looked at him.
"Lededje," the avatar said, taking one of her armour-fat hands in his own. "I am a warship. This is in my nature; this is what I'm designed and built for. My moment of glory approaches and you can't expect me not to be excited at the prospect. I was fully expecting to spend my operational life just twiddling my metaphorical thumbs in the middle of empty nowhere, ensuring sensible behaviour amongst the rolling boil of fractious civs just by my presence and that of my peers, keeping the peace through the threat of the sheer pandemonium that would result if anybody resurrected the idea of war as a dispute-resolution procedure with the likes of me around. Now some sense-forsaken fuckwit with a death wish has done just that and I strongly suspect I shortly get a chance to shine, baby!"[/quote]
[close]



Argument to be made Against A Dark Background is a in-universe culture book. The so called 'dark background', starless sky could be an indication this could set around the early stages of the heat death of the universe, the sense of humour of the lazy gun hints at culture tech.

First Banks book was Against A Dark Background, first Culture book proper Look to Windward, of all series I think the reading order matter the least, save you'd want to have read Use of Weapons prior to Surface Detail and ideally Consider Phelibas before Look to Windward, but because Phelibas is arguably the weakest of the books (though in other respects the most conventional) there's a case for it be be the last one, as you would want to be kindly disposed to the universe to get through it, it's by no means BAD mind.

I don't think any of them are particularly challenging to get through, it's a universe that pretty much explains itself in whichever book you choose to begin with, in a way you could argue it'd be more fun understanding the world through a more difficult book because it makes piecing together the reality of it more satisfying.

I really like the aesthetic of the Novel covers, they just push the border between abstract and figurative which suits the books themselves, as much as I will certainly get the forthcoming book of illustrations via Ken McLeod I kind of like the depiction of culture vessels on those cover as these ominously large shapes that look like a detail from a modernist sculpture filling up your field of view, you can't improve on that. It's just the right balance of giving your imagine a prompt without doing all the work for it.

There's one or two decent books on the Culture Novels themselves, read The Culture Series A Critical Introduction' few years ago and it pointed me in the direction of this little gem of a blog post by Ken McLeod, where he talks about how Iain saw the Culture coming about http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2013/07/use-of-calculators.html

QuoteWhen Iain Banks and I were students back in the early 1970s, I was one of the first readers of Use of Weapons. I seem to recall reading the first draft in weekly instalments as the pages flew from the typewriter, and discussing the unfolding content almost as often. Iain explained that the Culture was his idea of utopia, in which advanced technology, inexhaustible resources and friendly artificial intelligence made possible a society in which nobody had to work and there was no need for money or a separate state apparatus. At the time I was reading with some excitement a slim paperback edited by David McLellan and titled Marx's Grundrisse, a collection of extracts from Marx's notebooks, in which he allowed himself some bolder speculations than he ever saw into print. I explained to Iain that the Culture was very similar to Marx's conception of communism: a stateless and classless society based on automation and abundance.

Iain was interested and I think persuaded. But, I went on, the Culture on his telling didn't seem to have come about through class struggle, revolution, and the rest. How, then, could it have come about, given that Iain was as sceptical as I was about the likelihood of such a society being handed down by benevolent rulers from above? By way of answer, Iain pointed to his pocket calculator. He said that on his last vacation job, on a construction site, one of the full-time workers had borrowed it and worked his way through a stack of wage slips, to discover that he and his mates weren't getting all the pay they were due. The site workers had taken the result to the management, who duly if perhaps reluctantly shelled out the back pay that was owed. That, Iain said, was how he'd envisaged the Culture coming about. Conflicts of interest between classes and other groups there would be, but the sheer availability of information and computing power would arm the majority with facts and arguments that would enable them to prove, as well as enforce, their claims. The consequent advance in consciousness would allow the opportunities offered by automation and abundance to be grasped, first in imagination then in reality, and make opposition to their realisation irrational, futile, and weak.

So there

Mister Six

Quote from: SOMK on June 05, 2021, 02:15:52 PM
Spoiler alert
"Well, happy fucking day!" Demeisen said. He turned to Lededje with a grin that extended into a broad smile.
She looked at him. "I have the feeling that what you think of as good news might not strike everybody else as being quite so smashing."
"Some nutter's building a bunch of ships in the Tsungarial Disk!" Demeisen sat back in the seat, staring at the module's screen, still smiling.
"How is that good news?"
"It's not, it's a fucking disaster," Demeisen said, waving his arms.
"This'll end in tears, mark my words."
"So stop smiling."
"I can't! There are natural ... Okay, I can,"' the avatar said, turning to her with a look of such abject sadness she instantly wanted to take him in her armour-suited arms, pat his back and reassure him everything would be all right. Even as Lededje realised quite how easily she was being manipulated, and started to feel furious at herself as well as Demeisen, he dropped the sad look and went back to looking quite gloriously happy. "I can help it," he admitted, "I just don't want to help it." He waved his arms again. "Come on! This avatar naturally recognises my own emotional state and reflects it, unless I'm deliberately trying to deceive. Would you rather I lied to you?"
"Then what," Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar's obvious enthusiasm, "is making you smile about a disaster?"
"Well, first, I didn't cause it! Nothing to do with me; hands clean. Always a bonus. But it's looking clearer and clearer there's going to be some heavy fucking messing hereabouts very shortly and that's precisely what I'm built for. I'm going to get to strut my stuff, I'm going to get to be me, girlie. I tell you, I can't fucking wait."
"We are talking about a shooting war?" she said.
"Well, yes!" Demeisen exclaimed, sounding borderline-exasperated with her. He waved his arms again. He seemed to be doing this a lot, she noticed.
"And people are going to die."
"People? Very likely even ships!"
She just looked at him.
"Lededje," the avatar said, taking one of her armour-fat hands in his own. "I am a warship. This is in my nature; this is what I'm designed and built for. My moment of glory approaches and you can't expect me not to be excited at the prospect. I was fully expecting to spend my operational life just twiddling my metaphorical thumbs in the middle of empty nowhere, ensuring sensible behaviour amongst the rolling boil of fractious civs just by my presence and that of my peers, keeping the peace through the threat of the sheer pandemonium that would result if anybody resurrected the idea of war as a dispute-resolution procedure with the likes of me around. Now some sense-forsaken fuckwit with a death wish has done just that and I strongly suspect I shortly get a chance to shine, baby!"
[close]

Is this the bit where she's watching the battle and it slowly dawns on her that it's a slo-mo action replay of the actual conflict, which had already happened in just seconds while she was talking to the ship's avatar, and is now being broadcast to her because the ship is so delighted with its own work.

Quoteyou'd want to have read Use of Weapons prior to Surface Detail

I actually think Surface Detail is a great introduction to The Culture, and the only benefit to reading UoW beforehand is that one tiny (though prominent) Easter egg in SD. Agree on CP before LtW though.

[Quite] because Phelibas is arguably the weakest of the books (though in other respects the most conventional) there's a case for it be be the last one, as you would want to be kindly disposed to the universe to get through it, it's by no means BAD mind.
Quote

I think Matter is weaker than CP by some way, and I'd probably favour the bombastic CP over Inversions, too, which I found a little bit dull, although I wasn't in the best mood at the time. I definitely wouldn't leave the worst books (whichever they are) to the end though. Stick 'em in the middle so you can go out on a high. The Hydrogen Sonata was the last Culture novel by circumstance rather than design, obviously, but I think it works as a capper to the series, being about the fast approaching end of a civilisation - and it's a rollicking action adventure to boot.

Zetetic

Quote from: SOMK on June 05, 2021, 02:15:52 PM
There's one or two decent books on the Culture Novels themselves, read The Culture Series A Critical Introduction' few years ago and it pointed me in the direction of this little gem of a blog post by Ken McLeod, where he talks about how Iain saw the Culture coming about http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2013/07/use-of-calculators.html

So there
That was interesting, and makes me a bit glad that Banks is dead so as not to risk either being disabused of notion or having to deal with the facts in a more unpleasant fashion.

mothman

I really, really struggled with Matter especially, and with The Hydrogen Sonata to a lesser extent. To date I don't think I've bothered re-reading them. I think I might have re-read Inversions once but I wouldn't swear to it. I'd hesitate to declare them the three worst books without first revisiting them, but I suspect a re-read wouldn't change my opinion.

I thought near the end of Against A Dark Background it was made fairly clear what was going on:
Spoiler alert
The planetary system is a rogue, wandering one, its star flung out of whatever galaxy had first birthed it by some long-ago cosmic happenstance. The species is doomed to live out its existence without even some interstellar colonisation outlet, because the vast distance to the nearest galaxy is beyond the range of any FTL drive or duration of any generation ship that such an otherwise high-tech race might create. In some ways they really are no different than us - is it likely that going interstellar would in itself save the human race , or happen in time to have any possibility of doing so?
[close]

All Surrogate

Quote from: mothman on June 05, 2021, 11:55:28 PM
I thought near the end of Against A Dark Background it was made fairly clear what was going on:
Spoiler alert
The planetary system is a rogue, wandering one, its star flung out of whatever galaxy had first birthed it by some long-ago cosmic happenstance. The species is doomed to live out its existence without even some interstellar colonisation outlet, because the vast distance to the nearest galaxy is beyond the range of any FTL drive or duration of any generation ship that such an otherwise high-tech race might create. In some ways they really are no different than us - is it likely that going interstellar would in itself save the human race , or happen in time to have any possibility of doing so?
[close]

Yes, that's my interpretation of it,
Spoiler alert
though I think the 'doom' of the civilisation isn't so much that it can't expand, but that it's cut off from the possbility of interaction with other civilisations. When I think about the setting from that perspective, one of loneliness and isolation, it explains the anachronistic jumble of the system, especially Golter, with its hodge-podge of primitive, medieval, modern and futuristic forms. It's a society turned inwards, frantic, picking over itself because there's no-one else to share existence with.
[close]

mothman

Viewed in that light then,
Spoiler alert
it becomes even more of a fantasy world analogous to our own. In SF we always assume that some sort of interstellar travel will at least be attempted, eventually, which will set our species in a new paradigm.

One equivalent has just occurred to me - Asimov's The End Of Eternity, in which a cabal of timeless scholars restrict humanity to not just our solar system but the Earth itself, for reasons i can't now recall. Only when Eternity is destroyed - actually caused to have never come into existence to begin with - can humanity truly begin its destiny as an interstellar species (later retconned to be the actual Galactic Empire of his Robots and Foundation continuity).
[close]

MojoJojo

We're spoiling End of Eternity now
Spoiler alert
the reason the block any extra terrestrial projects is because they're all expensive failures resulting in lots. Earth needs to have many failures before having any success at getting off planet, and the time travellers never looked beyond the failures and the consequences of not trying. I think they start putting earth on the path to space, but allowing the discovery of nuclear weapons, which they'd blocked before, but which leads to the first space - but I might be making that up, it's been a while.
[close]

mothman

I didn't set out to spoiler-protect The End Of Eternity, but I guess it's only fair for anyone who might want to give it a go?

Spoiler alert
Eternity is ultimately caused to cease to exist. It turns out the man who invented their kind of time travel was one of the Eternals, sent back in time to do so - a bootstrap paradox. The book's protagonist is semi-manipulated into foiling the plan and braking the loop by a woman from the far future he's fallen in love with - the Eternals can't travel past 100,000 centuries into the future for unknown (to them) reasons. There (or rather then), humanity has learned of Eternity and somehow learned to block them. But by that time, when humanity tries to colonise the galaxy, they find an alien species has evolved to the point it can achieve space travel has got there first, and the stars are closed to Man. Therefore the far future humans resolve to destroy Eternity so that humanity can go to the stars ten million years earlier.
[close]

Milo

Quote from: Mister Six on June 05, 2021, 05:10:16 PM
Is this the bit where she's watching the battle and it slowly dawns on her that it's a slo-mo action replay of the actual conflict, which had already happened in just seconds while she was talking to the ship's avatar, and is now being broadcast to her because the ship is so delighted with its own work.

Yep, the ship says something like, "here comes my favourite bit!"

The ROU Killing Time main battle in Excession is also wonderful as it hunts for the traitor ship before
Spoiler alert
effectorising the fuck out of it until it concludes it's a worthless abomination and rips its own intellect apart with its engine fields
[close]

All the sequences with Sisela Ytheleus 1 of 2 from the initial Zetetic Elench ship are brilliant as well. Probably my favourite part of the entire series although the bit in Look to Windward where the Hub talks about the time it
Spoiler alert
had to destroy an orbital and about how easy but disgusting it is to kill people
[close]
is up there too.

I'd highly recommend the Peter Kenny audiobooks on Audible of these. I think he does an absolutely brilliant job with the voices (his Killing Time is ace) and they're all there with the exception of Matter which is narrated by someone else.

Endicott

I found an adaptation of The State of The Art on R$. Thought it was worth a thread in picture box.

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,88068.msg4612473.html#msg4612473