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I think if I ever do a whole big reread of the Culture series I'll put The Hydrogen Sonata immediately following Excession as it really seems like a sort of coda to the ideas that Excession presented. It seems fitting that there's not much swashbuckling in the book. I do wonder where the Culture's going from here.
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Nov 2, 2012 19:53
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I don't know if people form outside of the UK can watch this but here's a 5 minute interview with the man himself! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-20181130
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Nov 3, 2012 10:22
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I quite enjoyed Surface Detail. I found it a far darker book compared to onesd previously. The writing about the hells was pretty vivid and horrendous to imagine. The Culture's stance on heaven and hell (and the spaces in between) also seemed to present a rather darker side to the Culture, particularly toward the end (payback is a bitch!) Matter on the other hand was a bit of a disaster for me really. The Shellworld wasn't interesting, the sub plots were unnecessary and the ending was rushed. Also it really felt like it wasn't a Culture novel. The Culture had no real reason to be there. The Hydrogen Sonata seems to be plodding along at a decent rate and I'm enjoying it. Then again I did enjoy Excession, so that's probably why.
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Nov 3, 2012 10:24
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Blaminator posted:I don't know if people form outside of the UK can watch this but here's a 5 minute interview with the man himself! Not an in-depth or hugely interesting interview (considering the time limit and the boring questions), but hot drat, he's articulate. It's almost as if he memorised his answers beforehand. He must be a great conversationalist.
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Nov 3, 2012 12:55
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Barry Foster posted:Not an in-depth or hugely interesting interview (considering the time limit and the boring questions), but hot drat, he's articulate. It's almost as if he memorised his answers beforehand. He must be a great conversationalist. Being asked the same questions so often gives you plenty of opportunity to refine your answers.
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Nov 3, 2012 13:52
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WMain00 posted:
I put Matter in the same category as Consider Phlebas - it's basically a stand-alone space opera. There's nothing really wrong with it, but if you wanted more Culture it kind of leaves you disappointed.
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Nov 4, 2012 23:45
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On the other hand, Matter is the only Culture novel that tells a story from the perspective of a (very nearly almost) Special Circumstances agent and gives details about another of the Involved.
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Nov 5, 2012 04:08
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Saros posted:Massive Hydrogen Sonata Spoilers. It's not just that, it's the line a little before that; "Has it ever been known for a culture ship to overstate/boast about itself?" Makes it even cooler 
Pound_Coin fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Nov 5, 2012 |
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Nov 5, 2012 12:15
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I enjoyed matter, and surface detail as well. Recently got a shedload of kindle vouchers for my birthday so I've just picked up the whole culture series on kindle. I love having them in paperback form, but there's something special about reading sci-fi (and especially culture sci-fi) on a tiny machine used to ape the printed word. We're living in the future.
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Nov 5, 2012 14:31
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The ironic thing is in The Culture they'd probably just have it as a book just because it feels nicer to them and takes zero effort. They'd be all 'Hub, give me a book copy of Consider Phlebas' and bam.
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Nov 5, 2012 14:44
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pseudorandom name posted:On the other hand, Matter is the only Culture novel that tells a story from the perspective of a (very nearly almost) Special Circumstances agent and gives details about another of the Involved. Use of Weapons is told from the perspective of not one, but two SC agents, and so is Excession if you think about it.
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Nov 5, 2012 16:05
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Hey, you've got die-hard gliding and lava flow purists who will only accept things if they've done all the work themselves. I'm sure there are some obstinate people who would only read a book if they had personally mulched its fibers and set the type themselves.
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Nov 5, 2012 16:11
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So is Inversions and Player of Games although in the later case Gurgeh is unaware of it.
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Nov 5, 2012 16:12
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Does anyone know where I can find a higher resolution image of this: I'm trying to use Vistaprint to make myself a nice poster of that, but the site says that the image is low-res enough that it'll suck.
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Nov 6, 2012 15:33
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Dunno, but I'm pretty sure the guy who made those (unofficial) covers posts in this thread, so you might get lucky. EDIT: Yeah, it's BastardySkull. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Nov 6, 2012 |
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Nov 6, 2012 16:32
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Red Crown posted:Use of Weapons is told from the perspective of not one, but two SC agents, and so is Excession if you think about it. Zakalwe isn't a SC agent, he's an outside contractor. And it doesn't really tell any of the story from Sma's perspective.
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Nov 6, 2012 17:31
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Well, I started Player of Games as per an earlier recommendation, I'm enjoying it so far. It seems like it's really putting the spotlight on the idea of "what do you get the person who has everything?" but as applied to life in general. You know, like, what's the point? Is anything worth anything if there's no struggle or sacrifice involved? And if that's the only way something has value then isn't that kind of immature? The Culture itself seems like a way to explore questions like that in a meta-sense but Gurgeh (the protagonist, if anyone else hasn't read it) focuses that idea on a much more personal level. It's interesting and I like it very much so far.
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Nov 6, 2012 17:35
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pseudorandom name posted:Zakalwe isn't a SC agent, he's an outside contractor.  Actually he could correctly be called an agent. An agent is someone who acts on someone else's behalf. A non-SC person doing SC things is SC's agent.To use the CIA as an example, "agents" is the name more properly applied to the (non-CIA) people that CIA people recruit or otherwise employ. The CIA people are called case workers, handlers, etc and the non-CIA people in their network are the agents. The agents are the non-CIA people doing things on behalf of/for the CIA.
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Nov 6, 2012 17:41
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I like that Gurgeh is a dude whose life is sperging about the minutia of games and Banks is quite clear that he's kind of an unlikeable dick.
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Nov 6, 2012 17:46
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Pope Guilty posted:and Banks is quite clear that he's kind of an unlikeable dick. Isn't that all of the male protagonists in the Culture books?
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Nov 7, 2012 09:36
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Vanadium posted:Isn't that all of the male protagonists in the Culture books? DeWar is, at worst, a former unlikeable dick.
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Nov 7, 2012 09:44
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:DeWar is, at worst, a former unlikeable dick. I didn't read that book because it didn't have A Culture Novel on the cover. 
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Nov 7, 2012 09:45
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Okay, I finished Matter a week-ish ago, and I've not been able to stop thinking about the ending: It all concluded a bit quickly, and it kind of echoed the Everyone loving Dies thing that at least one other Culture novel is guilty of, but I think it actually worked in the plot's favour. Tyl Loesp's campaign for the throne was a deeply engaging plot thread and did a lot to progress the main chunk of the story, but looking back, it was all just setup for the final showdown. While I was still reading the book, I felt like Banks wasn't doing enough to flesh him out as a character; his exploits made for some entertaining reading, but I got the impression quite a few times that he was a bit of a repeat of the villain archetype he used in The Algebraist (albeit just slightly less of a moustache-twirlingly evil bastard). Generally, Banks' best sci-fi antagonists are of the ancient cosmic horror variety, so I was absolutely delighted when BAM! The main villain and his crew gets vaporised by a planet-eating machine and the rest of the book focuses on Djan and co.'s suicide mission to stop it. Loved the twist with the Sarcophagus, especially considering I had pretty much forgotten about the Iln at that point. Overall, a deeply fascinating novel with some of Banks' best worldbuilding yet. Also, probably the most interesting locales in any sci-fi I've read. I can understand people's criticisms of it, namely that it isn't much of a Culture novel given that pretty much none of it takes place within Culture territory, but getting to read about truly weird poo poo like the Aultridia and the Morthanveld more than made up for that. One thing that seemed unresolved to me, though – before they went down to the core, Djan left something (multiple somethings? I can't remember) buried in the ice at Hyeng-zhar, and said that it was "insurance". Did I miss the bit where it was explained what she was doing, or was that just never wrapped up? If the latter, I'm kind of suspecting she was backing her mindstate up and that we'll see her turn up in some future novel completely out of the blue. Oh yeah, and I had a really hard time not picturing the Oct as these guys.  Anyway, onto Surface Detail now. 250-ish pages in and I'm loving all the Hell stuff.
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Nov 11, 2012 12:49
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Mammal Sauce posted:Okay, I finished Matter a week-ish ago, and I've not been able to stop thinking about the ending: The "insurance" is the anti-matter bombs she uses to signal the ship.
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Nov 12, 2012 00:13
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Avulsion posted:The "insurance" is the anti-matter bombs she uses to signal the ship. She actually deploys two different things - one's a tiny coin-like object that flies off into the air, the other's a snakey tube that wiggles off into the ice. One is the antimatter charges, the other isn't ever clarified. Probably backing up.
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Nov 12, 2012 01:25
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Prolonged Priapism posted:
fookolt posted:What is this supposed to be? Did anyone answer this question because I would like to know.
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Nov 12, 2012 02:20
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Krinkle posted:Did anyone answer this question because I would like to know.
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Nov 12, 2012 02:30
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I think it's supposed to be the GSV fighting the Idiran fleet in the prologue?
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Nov 12, 2012 18:42
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Red Crown posted:I think it's supposed to be the GSV fighting the Idiran fleet in the prologue? Yeah I figured it was that ship that was on the run in the beginning. The only other proper ring-ding space battle that I recall in Consider Phlebas is when that GCU bushwhacks the Idiran ship extracting Horza from captivity by hiding in the local sun's photosphere or something.
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Nov 12, 2012 21:59
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I just read The Wasp Factory and The Player of Games and enjoyed both very much. I think I probably would have liked Use of Weapons better had I read it after PoG, rather than when I did (which was right after Consider Phlebas.) Since that's actually the order in which they were written, I think I'll just try to read the remaining books the same way. (I HAD been going to read Look to Windward next on recommendation.) The Eyes Have It fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Nov 13, 2012 |
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Nov 13, 2012 02:25
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Red Crown posted:I think it's supposed to be the GSV fighting the Idiran fleet in the prologue? Yeah, I figured. Who made it though? Where's it from?
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Nov 13, 2012 04:07
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Finished Surface Detail today, looks like I should have waited until I'd read Use of Weapons first  I find Banks novels entertaining and fascinating in equal measure no matter what, and I can say without a doubt that I felt that way about this one, but it's still probably my least favourite Culture book out of the ones I've read (which, now, stands at everything except Use of Weapons, Inversions, The Hydrogen Sonata and the Culture stuff in The State of the Art). HIGHLIGHTS: Demeisen/Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints - probably my favourite avatar in the whole series. What an absolutely brilliant, completely reprehensible, cool-as-a-cucumber conniving piece of poo poo. Don't know if this differs between printed versions, but in my edition, the page layout of the scene where he and Lededje displace into the Culture embassy on Sichult was like this: "Won’t you introduce your guest, Demeisen?" the ambassador said. [turn page] "Tsk!" the avatar said, slapping his forehead. "My manners, eh?" Demeisen waved one arm from Lededje to Veppers. "Doll, this is your rapist and murderer. Veppers, you ghastly oval office, this is Lededje Y'breq, back from the dead." Regardless of whether that was intentional or just a lucky publication quirk, it had me grinning like a maniac for a bit. Vatueil - really loved the way Banks was able to convey the total abstract weirdness of the Virtual during his chapters. The bit with his disjointed thought process while he was embodied as some kind of heavily armed robo-tripod was very well-presented, as was the part that depicted the mission he undertook in the form of a high-pressure ice amoeba (or whatever). As I said above, the reveal at the end probably would have had far more of an impact on me had I read Use of Weapons first, but I enjoyed the character so much that I'm inclined to read it as soon as I can to get a better picture of his backstory. Veppers' estate, the Bulbitian, Iobe Cavern City - I'm a sucker for big long passages in Banks novels where he doesn't really do anything except describe locations in almost too-vivid detail, and he really knocked it out of the park with this one (as if he ever doesn't). That said it took me a while to clock that the Tsungrial Disk was supposed to consist of a massive amount of individual fabricaria orbiting freely - for most of the book I pictured it as a single vast, flat, solid ring around the gas giant, with a surface dotted with buildings. Chay - She became an angel in Hell.  LOWLIGHTS: Lededje - A likeable and generally well-written character, but I am really not impressed with the disproportionate amount of revenge stories with female protagonists that hinge on rape. Yes, it's internally consistent in the context of the novel, and yes, this one bucked the trend by ostensibly focusing on her wanting to get revenge for her own murder, which is certainly a bit different, and yes, we're supposed to get that Veppers (and Sichultian society in general) has pretty deep issues with misogyny, but I feel like rape is leaned upon as a go-to plot device for this sort of thing far too often. This is probably just a matter of personal taste but it's a cliché that always does a lot to turn me off from a work of fiction. Prin - Similarly, I didn't have any problems with the character himself, but I felt like his story concluded a bit too abruptly, and I would have enjoyed a bit more detail on the Pavuleans and their place in galactic society. CONFUSING STUFF: Afterlives - Okay, in Look to Windward, it was established that the Chelgrian heaven came about as a result of a chunk of their population having, somehow, partially Sublimed. From what I remember Banks didn't elaborate on the tech involved in the running of their heaven in much detail, mentioning only that personalities were transferred into Soulkeepers upon death, and could be stored (and reactivated from) within substrates before being admitted into Heaven. The implication in Look to Windward was that Chel was unique in having used technology to make its religion real, so I suppose it's a bit of a retcon that in Surface Detail, Banks was able to expand on the idea by explaining that plenty of civilisations maintain artificial afterlives. What's leaving me scratching my head is that despite the essential operating principle of the Chelgrian afterlife apparently being the Sublimation of the Chelgrian-Puen, afterlives as depicted in Surface Detail apparently have nothing to do with the Sublimed and are technologically just a combination of backup tech and traditional (by Culture standards) virtual realities. So, unless I've got this all wrong, the Chelgrian Heaven is unique in that it is situated on the layer of reality occupied by the Sublimed, while all the others are perfectly capable of operating out of glorified datacentres. But, on top of that, the possibility of using the Bulbitian's substrates to host Hells was mentioned, and in one of the Yime chapters it's definitively established that the Unfallen Bulbitians are able to commune with the Sublimed, so it's all a bit unclear to me. I guess I don't really have any specific questions about that. I am definitely being super-pedantic about perceived inconsistencies between my precious space opera novels but I feel like I could well have completely failed to understand something!
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Nov 15, 2012 16:43
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From my reading of the book the Surface Detail hells are literally just everyday VR environments, tuned by assholes. There's nothing metaphysical or Sublime or supernatural about them, they're just simming the involuntarily-backed-up mindstates of people whose flesh bodies died. At least from the perspective of the Culture, it doesn't really seem any different from recreational VR, from people having given up their biological bodies to live in some ship's substrates, or from people being stored without their meat hulls being conserved, like the people in (Hydrogen Sonata) Gzilt society that were stored in preparation for Subliming, unless I totally misread that. That's also why I couldn't really get behind the quietudinal service. It seemed like a really weird fetishation of a completely reversible and normal, by Culture standards, state of existence, which could easily be handled by whatever Mind is closest. Having this apparently really important and solemn group play a (supposedly?) really important role in Culture society and the events of the story without having been so much as hinted at in previous books came off as a fairly lame way to lend the whole contrivance more weight than it really deserved.
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Nov 15, 2012 17:14
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What I kind of found weird at the end of Surface Detail was the fact that the Culture ended up just carpet bombing the hidden substrate processors containing the Hells. Like, really? Wouldn't you at least try to recover some of the minds uploaded into there? The ones that had just been brought into the Hell would be sane and probably happy to be rescued from there. Maybe there were backups stored of people before they were introduced to the Hells that the Culture stumbled across beforehand. I hope.
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Nov 18, 2012 20:15
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I've been thinking about the amount of text devoted to the horrors of Hell in Surface Detail, and what strikes me is that it's an effective preventative for even a shred of sympathy for the pro-Hell forces. This is what they're fighting for. This is the thing they think is worth fighting other cultures over. Getting a whiff of moral ambiguity? gently caress you, here's a reminder that the pro-Hell forces are morally indefensible on every level.
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Nov 18, 2012 20:21
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Less Fat Luke posted:What I kind of found weird at the end of Surface Detail was the fact that the Culture ended up just carpet bombing the hidden substrate processors containing the Hells. Like, really? Wouldn't you at least try to recover some of the minds uploaded into there? The ones that had just been brought into the Hell would be sane and probably happy to be rescued from there. Except they didn't? Parts of the fungal computational substrate were destroyed by explosions on Veppers' compound (and this manifested as solid metallically reflective manifestations in the now nonexistant portions of the Hells), but the majority stayed intact and the inhabitants were extracted. The Angel of Death even ended up in the networked Heavens, offering her services to those who wanted it there.
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Nov 18, 2012 20:24
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pseudorandom name posted:Except they didn't? Parts of the fungal computational substrate were destroyed by explosions on Veppers' compound (and this manifested as solid metallically reflective manifestations in the now nonexistant portions of the Hells), but the majority stayed intact and the inhabitants were extracted. The Angel of Death even ended up in the networked Heavens, offering her services to those who wanted it there. 
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Nov 18, 2012 20:45
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fookolt posted:Yeah, I figured. Who made it though? Where's it from? I made it (in Photoshop) and then posted it. I think a Consider Phlebas movie would be pretty rad, and at the very least you could cut one hell of a trailer for it (Excession too). So what I posted was the crappy, storyboard version of how I might like to see such a trailer end - with a representation of the event that kicks off the whole story, which is the kid Mind trying to evade capture by a group of Idiran ships. Some other poster recognized what it was supposed to be and improved it by redrawing the path of the Culture ship as a crazy complicated squiggle. Pretty funny, and if I knew more about animation in Photoshop I would have tried something more along those lines. I've thought about it a lot actually, and the whole Banks cosmology, with ships skipping in and out of 4D (from which you can see a 2D representation of real space), antimatter warheads going off, and ship drives making wakes/reacting against the sparkling ocean of the energy grid(s), would probably provide some pretty awesome (and unconventional) combat visuals. If you did it right.  
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Nov 19, 2012 06:18
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Prolonged Priapism posted:I've thought about it a lot actually, and the whole Banks cosmology, with ships skipping in and out of 4D (from which you can see a 2D representation of real space), antimatter warheads going off, and ship drives making wakes/reacting against the sparkling ocean of the energy grid(s), would probably provide some pretty awesome (and unconventional) combat visuals. If you did it right. Just imagine the Winnebago in Spaceballs making skid marks in space when breaking hard, only this time there are two sets of marks, one each level of that meta-universal onion. 
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Nov 19, 2012 07:04
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I think it'd be pretty amazing if you showed it from seemingly-real space; warping effects as ships and warheads flitted around and displaced themselves, jumping around the engagement area and materialising behind the targets spectacularly. It'd be a very hard effect to pull off, though. I just hope that if they ever did create it, they wouldn't be tempted to try and make it more conventional.
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Nov 19, 2012 07:20
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