Iain Banks is like Counting Crows: none of his work is my absolute favourite, but almost everything he does is at least very good. The quality of his writing is consistently high, often very high, and occasionally perfect. Can you imagine a gruesome death for a computer? IMB can.

I first read about Banks’ Culture books nearly two years ago, but didn’t get around to reading Consider Phlebas, the first published (but not first written) Culture novel until February last year. Since then I’ve been hooked enough to read all the others, as well as some of his mainstream fiction which, truth be told, is actually better than the SF books! I hereby present a shrine to Scottish sci-fi, with minimal spoilers.

Introduction

The place for a Banksian neophyte to begin is Consider Phlebas, but unless you’re in a book shop right now, you’ll probably want some kind of introduction to see whether you’ll like the books or not. Try the seminal net essay A few notes on the Culture (txt mirror, HTMLified mirror), written by Iain Banks and posted to rec.arts.sf.written by fellow Scot and SF author Ken MacLeod. If you can’t be bothered to read that, try this: the Culture books are science fiction novels about a utopian semi-human/machine hybrid civilisation, featuring godlike artificial intelligences and Big Dumb Objects, and should be loved by anyone who likes space opera or large numbers. They’re also dryly funny and somewhat gory.

Consider Phlebas

It would, as the author puts it himself, “make a fucking brilliant film”. As this bibliography puts it, “it would, too.” High-order space opera: aliens, more aliens, castaways, war, cannibalism, Orbitals (think of Ringworld, but smaller, and orbiting suns rather than encircling them), Minds (think of AIs, but bigger, and society revolving round them), spaceships to dwarf anything in screenbound sci-fi, and destruction on an epic scale. Highly brutal.

The author apparently decided to tell the story from a viewpoint outside the Culture to avoid rubbing the utopia in the readers’ faces. Plenty of that later.

The Player of Games

Ofted cited as the best Culture novel, and even recommended as a better introduction than Consider Phlebas. I almost agree, were it not for the fact that publication order is always the best order to read in.

Like the title suggests, this is a book about a game player, and about one game in particular, where the winner becomes Emperor of a classic Evil Empire. It has that Ender’s Game-style “working up the ranks” feeling. If Hollywood can’t find the budget for a Phlebas film, they could do this for a fifth the cost, and get a film with a better story and a phenomenal ending.

Prescient quote:

… it would hardly be war as such because we’re way ahead of them technologically, but we’d have to become an occupying force to control them, and that would mean a huge drain on our resources as well as morale; in the end such an adventure would almost certainly be seen as a mistake, no matter the popular enthusiasm for it at the time. The people of the empire would lose by uniting against us instead of the corrupt regime which controls them, so putting the clock back a century or two, and the Culture would lose by emulating those we despise; invaders, occupiers, hegemonists.

Do the appropriate search-and-replace for empire and Culture.

The State of the Art

Excellent title for what is actually a collection of short stories, including the eponymous novella, where the Culture finds 1970s Earth, and the short story A Gift from the Culture, which doesn’t seem to go anywhere. TSotA suffers from power trip exposition and infodumps, and “hey look, isn’t the Culture cool?”-itis. But what exactly is wrong with that as a form of entertainment? See below for comments on the socialist aspect to this and other stories.

Use of Weapons

Everyone seems to like this one best, but I consider it merely excellent. I probably need to do some re-reading, and there’s no time for that while there’s so much good stuff out there I haven’t even read once.

Deep style, powerful story. A tale of rehabilitation and studded with magnificent SF set-pieces.

Excession

This book is about the Minds. There is a human subplot, but it’s slow and trivial compared to the ultra-epic space opera scale of the main story. This is the first ‘modern’ Culture novel, written in 1996. The writing seems aware of its place in the SF ecosphere. It skirts around, but tips its hat toward, the issue of technological Singularities. If you still can’t think of a gruesome way for a computer to die, and you really want to know, this is the one to read.

The furious excess of high-tech wizardry feels a bit like the Worms 2 intro, or that Itchy & Scratchy cartoon where they pull ever-bigger guns on each other, although this is not the excession referred to in the title.

You absolutely need to read this twice if you want to stand half a chance of figuring out what went on. Either that, or take notes on which Minds are called what and belong to which groups at which time, and for which reasons.

Inversions

The blurb calls this science fiction, but unless you’ve read another Culture novel before, you couldn’t classify it as anything other than medieval fantasy, and maybe not even fantasy. If you are familiar with Culture modus operandi, the whole book is one monumental piece of extended dramatic irony. It’s great. Contains possibly the only decent romantic paragraph in all of SF.

The plot is complicated and subtle. This FAQ goes some way to explaining what happened.

Look to Windward

This books feels tired. Elegiac, I heard someone describe it as. Banks’ next novel (due out end of this year) is SF, but not Culture, so I can very easily imagine LtW being the last. In some ways I think this is my favourite. It’s set predominantly on a single Orbital, so Culture life is really fleshed out in all its exciting detail. There’s something of everything here. Excession couldn’t be topped for SF gadgetry, so IMB followed it up with the calm, medieval Inversions, and then bounced back to this ’something of everything’ book. Lesser authors would’ve taken any one of the dozen or so Cool Ideas ™ and spun it off into a whole novel. On the other hand, perhaps IMB was just clearing out his ideas drawer as a way to end the series on a high note.

The Bridge

This is not a Culture novel. It’s not SF or fantasy either. Not sure I’d describe it as mainstream, but that’s where you’ll find it in the book shop. It’s packed full of Culture references, oblique and not so oblique. It was published before any of the SF novels. Maybe at the time, IMB didn’t expect the Culture work to ever be published. Seeing references to SF minutiae in a fairly literary book is odd; imagine reading War and Peace and having net lingo slyly inserted.

You might think you’re not interested in non-SF, but if you like the Culture books, you’ll like this even more. It’s truly IMB’s finest.

Set on a Kafkaesque* bridge of indeterminate length, the tone is a cross between 1984 and Beneath a Steel Sky. Overall, there’s even some Red Dwarf in there.

* So I am told. I haven’t read anything by Kafka. He’s way down my reading list. Er, whoever he is.

An aside on the covers

The UK wraparound covers by Mark Salwowski are without fail massively superior to the US ones. Look to Windward in particular has cover art you can stare into for days, taking in the detail beyond detail.

Socialism

When Banks fans post to rasw for similar authors, Vernor Vinge is often recommended, and many people can’t understand why, citing the seemingly opposing politico-economic models in the novels, i.e. Socialism vs. Anarchism. However, the Culture is clearly a post-scarcity society where economic issues are minor, hence branding it socialist is not quite right. As it happens, Banks really does have socialist leanings, while Vinge really does have libertarian leanings, but why on earth should that mean they can’t write novels enjoyable to both sides?

(For what it’s worth, I think they’re both gr9.)

Conclusion

What is there to conclude? Read Banks now! But stay away from The Wasp Factory unless you’re a bit disturbed. That is to say, it’s marvellous.