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BastardySkull posted:Inversions isn't strictly 'A Culture novel' so I'm not doing it I'm afraid! I haven't even read it actually, I should get round to it. These look pretty sweet, but the Use of Weapons cover is almost exactly the same as the actual cover. Exact same ship, exact same angle, exact same size.
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Feb 26, 2011 15:44
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a kitten posted:It's really hard to beat Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The for ship names. Or for ships. It's breakdown in Excession when it learns about the Interesting Times Gang is absolutely brutal. Poor ship. I can't remember what happened to it in the end, did it survive? ROU Stop Hitting Yourself
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Mar 6, 2012 22:34
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Seaside Loafer posted:Are suit/knife missile/shuttle minds happy in their jobs? They always seem to be. Are they made that way? Knife missiles are sub- sentient i think, so they don't really matter. Player of Games talks about drones partially designing themselves and choosing how to develop, so I'd guess is the same for suits and modules. I'd worry about the (small m) mind that wants to inhabit a skin tight space suit though
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Sep 14, 2012 11:33
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rejutka posted:That reason is Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time. Was that the ship that hacked the other ships to direct their engines directly into their brains? That was badass as hell, but totally unfilmable. I'm always struck by how much better the non-human fight scenes are, and how much more interesting the machines are as characters. Has Banks ever said anythng about toying with a wholly non-bio book?
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Dec 25, 2012 00:14
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Jerkface posted:One of the things he wrote in an early book about the similar species is that the humans are the food of the galaxy or something. Does anyone remember what that meant? It keeps making GBS threads out humanoid species and gobbling them up or something. Alcohol. Alcohol is one of the most common organic molecules in the galaxy, there are vast clouds of it nebulae. Pan-humanity is the universe's way of using up all this spare alcohol. It was in Use of Weapons, when Zakalwe is chatting up that poet woman, but I forget which one of them says it. Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Jul 16, 2013 |
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Jul 16, 2013 15:07
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Banks' death has made me realise what a disservice I've been doing to the man by only reading his Culture books, so I'm endeavoring to read his complete works. I've just finished The Wasp Factory. This was actually the first book of his I ever read, found it in the college library years ago. It's a much more compelling read now that I'm not 17 and can actually appreciate the shamanistic imagery of it all. My theology is rusty, shamanism might not be quite the right term for Frank's rituals, animism might be more accurate. I like how peculiarly atheistic it is though, objects, animals and people have spirits but there's nothing divine about it, it's just some essential component that's tied up in them materially. Frank definitely seems to feel the contrived nature of his elaborate rituals, but that's sort of the whole point of them. They're not appealing to some higher power for help, they're just a way for him to exert some influence on his surroundings. Frank is even disgusted by the build up of grime he gets after not washing for weeks, but to him it's essential to produce his sacred essences. There's a nice parallel there with his Dad's obsessive labeling, trying to bring some sort of order to the world by measuring every inch of matter. Frank tries to dominate his surroundings by enveloping them in his body (Freudian imagery ho!) while his Dad prefers the intellectual approach, but in the end they're both creating talismans to try and make sense of the scary scary world. I was gutted to hear that interview whee Banks says he put it in just because it was an amusing eccentricity. In the same interview he discusses working on the oil platforms that Frank sees off the coast - like The Bridge it's very tied in to Scottish geography and the weird tone of industry and isolation mixed together is unlike anything I've read, I'm used to my dystopias being crowded. Moving into spoilers for Eric. I'm kind of tempted to say that all the character's psychoses are a result of their environment, but this is probably untrue given the stories Frank tells of the rest of his family. There's some dodgy genes going on with those people. What's interesting is that Eric isn't crazy in the way people think he is. Frank is sure he's just putting on an act because he enjoys playing the boogeyman that everyone thinks he is. His affectation of madness is just as much a ritual as the Wasp Factory. I always feel a bit uncomfortable at gender-based twists, they tend to feel a bit regressive, but I quite like how it was handled here. To me it's not really about gender at all - Frank views his killing as a replacement for his stolen masculine potency, and it is tragic to see his identity crumble away like that. The ending is relatively upbeat though, optimistic almost. It feels Nietzschean in the way it supports the challenging of the identity your parents force onto you, on top of all the anti-religious bits about empty rituals. The descriptions of all the torture I didn't find all that shocking. Like American Psycho we're so tied up in the psyche of the narrator that it's hard to really grasp the magnitude of what he's doing. I'd also compare it to the first half an hour of Upstream Color, which also spends time not just making you sympathise with this psychopath, but shows you the beauty and wonder that they see in the horror they commit.
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Jul 31, 2013 00:45
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Just read Walking on Glass over the weekend. I did not understand this book. Not one bit. The individual stories were fairly interesting, but they felt just like small fragments. The whole Castle Doors bit felt very Culture-y and was enjoyably absurd, but it never really goes anywhere. It's semi-linked to Grout's story (his delusion is what is actually happening to them, the couple in the hospital playing the same games) but I can't figure out why. Other than the general idea of paranoia and Cartesian Demon level of manipulation I don't see why the stories are put alongside each other, or what the point of the weird self-referential ending was. Graham's story also does what a lot of novels drive me mad doing, focusing on tiny minutiae and descriptions of disconnected things as if it's important, as if it gives you some special knowledge about the human condition, but it all feels so pointless.
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Aug 5, 2013 15:18
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General Battuta posted:Those tiny minutiae and descriptions of disconnected things probably are important. When a novel does this, it's talking to you in symbols and subtext. The surface plot of a novel - the stuff every reader gets - is logical and declarative, this happened and then this and then this, but the subtext is supposed to be associative, driven by the connections the reader makes in the back of her head. Oh definitely. I know I tend very much towards the Inception style "spell out a big intricate puzzle for me" method of reading. I remember getting irritated when The Handmaid's Tale kept stopping to discuss the furniture in intricate detail, until it clicked and I could see how all the symbolism fits together.
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Aug 5, 2013 15:40
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Daktar posted:^ Not to mention their use of a weapon that's explicitly designed to cause pain and fear to take out the Chelgrian conspirators in Look to Windward. Even Skaffen-Amtiskaw, for all he's very funny and charming takes out the bandits that attacked him and Diziet Sma in an incredibly brutal way, and he seems to positively revel in it. It's been a while, but isn't it more amoral than actually enjoying it? Like it kills the attackers in the quickest, most efficient way. It's just the quickest way just happens to involve hilarious amounts of gore.
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Aug 15, 2013 21:27
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fookolt posted:I really like that about the Culture's military entities; they aren't just these awesome, noble Mary Sues. They are mean bastards that don't just wield weapons, but actually are used as weapons ( Oh I get it now. Edit: vvvv Oh now I get it Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Aug 15, 2013 |
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Aug 15, 2013 23:46
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Saw in the Graun today that some lunatic is making an opera out of The Wasp Factory, featuring a rotating all-female cast as Frank. It sounds incredible. And it's entirely sold out. Bollocks.
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Sep 21, 2013 17:45
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WeAreTheRomans posted:Cool, in London or Edinburgh? London. Tickets are back! http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/the-wasp-factory-by-ben-frost
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Sep 22, 2013 10:00
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Benagain posted:One of my favorite bits of description was when the one ambassador dude saw a human head mounted in the trophy room and was trying to figure out if it was meant as an insult or a compliment of the "you're not like those other pansies who can't handle seeing a few of their species mounted on a wall" variety. The simplest answer is to remember just who it is the Affront are a parody of: "BANTER!!"
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Oct 7, 2013 23:01
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Barry Foster posted:You misunderstand, I'm not saying that he was specifically writing about uni lad culture, of course he wasn't. But the Affront are a pretty thinly veiled caricature of the fox-hunting, gene pool restricting, cheerfully cruel to anyone who isn't them British Upper Class as a whole. Almost exactly I'd say.
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Oct 12, 2013 16:01
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Tony Montana posted:Ok, seriously now. That's the one that ends with him escorting some Princeling to be crowned or something? Part of it is to show Zakalwe's dissociation and loss of identity. He gets dropped into so many planets, takes on so many aliases that he's starting to unravel. The Culture doesn't care about his mental health as long as he gets the job done. The Culture, that happy-clappy hugbox of kindness doesn't care, they just drop him down certainly knowing that he'll have to undergo a near-fatal spirit walk. The end of the chapter also shows how hosed up Contacts MO is. Zakalwe is convinced the guy he's meant to be helping is a loving idiot, and can't understand why the Culture is suddenly helping a monarchy over the rebels. Surprise! The Prince is infertile and his reign marks the end of the monarchy. Zakalwe had no idea about that, he was just sent in to win the war for him. Things like that are why Zakalawe hosed up so much on the planet he tried to engineer at the start, he has no idea how to do a planetary intervention. The title is Use of Weapons, which means Zakalwe. He's not an agent, he's a weapon. Skaffen-Amitsaw, the sentient giggling gunplatform is more of an agent than him. There's a great line (I think it's in the chapter before the drugs, with the hostage woman, when Zakalwe gets all morose about the battle) about the times when Zakalwe fails on his mission, when everything goes wrong, and the Culture seems strangely unworried. The implication being that his mission was to fail. Sometimes the Culture needs him to lead an army and pull it out the fire in some spectacular fashion. But other times they drop him on a planet where he's going to completely gently caress up the mission, but knowing that he'll gently caress it up in the right way. This is why most people recommend Use of Weapons after Player of Games, which gives a much more thorough look at Special Circumstance's and their methods. It's a shame that Weapons only hints at it, because you need to know that to get Zakalwe's arc. Banks hints at it in the book, but with some more elaboration at the start it would be a fantastic stand-alone character piece on the Culture as well as Zakalwe. Edit: I actually thought the digressions where the best bit. The Mr Staberinde chapters dragged for me.
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Dec 3, 2013 11:03
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So has Tony Montana finished UoW yet?
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Dec 23, 2013 00:55
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SC using ship avatars to do their interventions would also disturb the human population something major. They justify their hedonism with the good works Contact do. Its important that any human could, in theory, join up.
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Jan 12, 2014 22:18
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Seaside Loafer posted:The viewpoint that the mind is is just a biological computer is the hard-reductionist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism position. In this your neural pathways define everything you do, and though you think you have free will you dont. In this the concept of free will is a self sustaining myth defined by the mind to keep us all from going bonkers, if you woke up every morning thinking you didnt have any free will it would be a rather depressing world to live in wouldnt it. But if it feels like free will it doesnt really matter does it. Isn't this more monoism/physicalism? I never really relate reductionism vs emergence to free will. But on the other hand after a lecture on epiphenomenalism I became convinced that we don't actually have thoughts, we just imagine that we do, so my understanding on this is shakey at best.
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Jan 15, 2014 16:20
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Seaside Loafer posted:Im not sure man. It was a very interesting module but there were more 'ism's than I could keep track of! According to Wikipedia Churchland doesn't believe in thoughts. Either that's some heinous strawmanning, or he's gone off the deep end of hyper-reductionism. Either way, I'm gonna check his book out, thanks!
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Jan 23, 2014 16:47
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fookolt posted:Hah, of course. Is there even a way to visualize some of the stuff covered in The Culture? I occasionally replicate GSV battles by spinning round really fast and then staring into a lighbulb while I poke myself in the eye.
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Sep 7, 2014 18:32
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eriktown posted:Kevin J. Anderson. gently caress you for suggesting that, and double gently caress you for beating me to the joke. Brain Herbert.
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Sep 19, 2014 17:50
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MeLKoR posted:Am I mixing two different books or weren't the Chelgrians in touch with a faction of their society that Sublimed? They were, but the was significant help from some mysterious conical floating robots, that look awfully like a PoG style drone suit
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Sep 24, 2014 11:20
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MikeJF posted:Apparently in the sci-fi game Destiny: the records of the mysterious event/invasion that nearly wiped out humanity centuries before show that it was analysed as it happened as being an "OCP" event. Someone was a fan, I guess. OCP is a legit useful term and as an undergrad I kept catching myself trying to use it in essays on Kuhn.
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Sep 25, 2014 16:19
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Pokeylope posted:There was actually a lot of reference to that in Surface Detail. I was hoping one of the other books would take a closer look. Hydrogen Sonata also has a fair chunk that follows a couple of ships. Not in the same league as Excession though.
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Oct 10, 2014 04:00
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a kitten posted:Yeah, I really did not like Consider Phlebas at all when I finished it, or more precisely its ending really pissed me off. it just seemed so pointless and futile and awful. My favourite part of Phlebas is how everybody dies really badly. Loads of war stories make a big deal out of a few horrible deaths, but not a single person from the Clear Air Turbulance dies quickly, or cleanly, or honorably. They bleed out begging for help, kill themselves through grief or stupidity, get side swiped by bullets, splattered with plasma and then crushed by a train. This is despite the Culture's best efforts to pretend that war is clean and noble - the way they constantly shift civilians, the strange gravitas of the Eschatologist, the beauty of grid-fire - it's like the Culture are trying to strip away all the blood and guts and make war as clean and sterile as the Epilogue makes it out to be. It's not quite "war is hell", it's not quite an unironic Dulce et Decorum Est, it's somewhere in between. And this is in a book that I find really hard to describe without the word "swashbuckling"
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Oct 12, 2014 12:15
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eriktown posted:Antigravitas Generator ROU Rotating Frame of Reference-itas
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Oct 22, 2014 18:43
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The important bit is that Anticipation of a new lovers arrival, The is the best drat spaceship and its panic over the ITG is the saddest bit in the book
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Dec 2, 2014 17:37
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andrew smash posted:Was i the only person who didn't like the big 'mistake not' reveal? I honestly thought the idea was cooler before that happened, it's not like it wasn't abundantly clear what 'mistake not...' was implying anyway. I thought that made it even funnier. It's so over the top it doesn't even feel like bragging, just an awesome god like power making a really lame joke.
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Oct 28, 2015 08:16
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xian posted:Matter was long by necessity to support the bait + switch, IMO. What was it? Been years since I read it.
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May 2, 2016 08:49
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Didn't both those things happen, but to different ships?
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May 7, 2016 21:21
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Snapchat A Titty posted:The Idirans are probably worse, what with the slavery and such, though. But they only enslaved beings without souls, so it's all perfectly acceptable. I absolutely loved that detail to them.
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May 8, 2016 22:51
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I don't have my copy to hand, but aren't there some shenanigans aboard the cryo-ship where the ship hands explicitly tell you Zak is travelling under an assumed name?
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Feb 7, 2017 14:33
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Taeke posted:Yeah, but that's because he actually is, under the fake name Darac Livu (obviously based on his sisters' names) and not because he's pretending to be Cheradenine. Darn. Would you be able to share your thesis with us once it's completed? Would be fascinating to read.
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Feb 7, 2017 15:06
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