Where to Begin: Iain Banks

new Culture book out in 3 weeks time!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Matter-Iain-M-Banks/dp/1841494178/

i couldn't finish the crow road, it was interminably meandering and dull

ooh. psyched!

agree on crow road. much of the non-M. stuff is really half-baked. there are obv, and magnificent, exceptions however. (my underrated fave is Walking On Glass.)

OK, I'm excited about Matter. He really should stick to sci-fi these days.

YAY!!!

i love culture books!

Me too!

the business is one of the worst books i have ever finished

That gives me an idea for a thread.

Oh, there already is one.

i was really hoping that was what i would learn when i clicked this thread. about the new culture book i mean.

i couldn't finish the crow road, it was interminably meandering and dull

-- akm, Thursday, 17 January 2008 04:59 (3 hours ago)

^^^

The Bridge <-- A++++

Doesn't he do a good dream sequence Almy? He's so good at depicting the surreal.

I am a geek, Banks and Reynolds are guilty pleasures.

Matter will be a purchase.

Doesn't he do a good dream sequence

Yes. I love his Culture books, but I really think this is his ultimate strength -- surrealism. In fact, a David Lynch adaptation of The Bridge would be... I don't know, something amazing and very different?

Matter is half price at Waterstones at the mo. I bought it today.

get me one?

fuckin hardcover!

sci-fi should come out in paperback. word is bond.

Look to Windward was disappointing, he seemed to have fallen out of love with The Culture, and made it fall out of love with itself. I hope the relationship has recovered.

I really liked LTWW - if you look upthread, Ledge, we had a debate about this a year ago.

The new one is supposed to be a worth inheritor, I just got a copy of the UK trade edition...not read yet. Culture novels being re-released with consistent designs for the US starting this spring, I think...?

*worthy

we had a debate about this a year ago.

note to self, get some new thoughts.

It's alright, I'm sure I exhausted all of my opinions some time back in 2005.

i'd never really heard of this guy. i don't closely follow sci-fi, but i picked up consider phlebas at B&N on whim. it seems great so far.

It's very great. (I much prefer the Culture as a future/past setting to pretty much all others that have come up both in print and on TV.)

As summed up in particular by this upthread from Jarlr'mai:

Most of the Culture novel are about how a supposed fully democractic utopia has to have a dark side in order to survive.

Obviously it's not that this theme hasn't been explored elsewhere; I just think this particular issue is a far more overarching and interesting one to see grappled with in an sf context, and that Banks does so in a way that's more involving on my end than the many other anti-Treks out there (or Trek itself, of course).

Re-reading Consider Phlebas for the first time since '91. I hardly rememeber a word of it, and it's good whizz-bang fast-paced stuff.

Quick Q, as he's been mentioned on this thread, and elsewhere, in comparison to IMB: where should I start with Alastair Reynolds? (I am sort of waiting for House of Suns to come out in paperback)

Anyone else read Matter? I thought it started brilliantly, but dragged a bit in the middle, and by the end it was kind of obvious he'd been ODing on the crazy idea juice -

(SPOILERS)

that shellworld destroying beastie just popped out of nowhere and laid waste to all his elaborately woven plot threads.

Though I liked the pay-off coda with Holse, who was my favourite character by the end.

i felt a bit cheated by Matter, i wanted a 100% Culture book, not (another) medieval set book with Culture interludes. boo. the shellworld & its history was the best thing by miles.
i've read three Alastair Reynolds books & boy could that guy use an editor. the only one i'd recommend was "Century Rain" which (i think) is pretty much self-contained.

I've read Reynold's Inhibitor trilogy, and enjoyed it well enough, though it was clunkily written. Nicely bleak take on the Space Opera.

boy could that guy use an editor.

Ha, that's the genre for you. He's hardly in the big league of SF ramblers (The crown would go to Peter F Hamilton - how many fucking don't-give-a-shit subplots did Night's Dawn have by vol 3?).

I thought I'd never get through the descriptions of the waterfall. Was he being paid for each use of the words "mist" and "spray"? Or had he just glanded blether before writing that chapter?

I passed by a haulage truck the other day emblazoned with a rather Banksian-ship name: Staying Hungry And Humble The Hard Way.

What is the hard way? It's pretty easy if yer poor and unsuccessful.

I thought I'd never get through the descriptions of the waterfall. Was he being paid for each use of the words "mist" and "spray"?

His grand conceits do often outstrip his ability to concisely describe them.

I thought the approach to the Morthanveld Nestworld was evocatively done, on the other hand.

i'm such a slow reader these days i'm still on consider phlebas, should be done later tonight.

but anyway overall i love it....good "literary" sci-fi for my tastes...some really nice passages of writing and deals with some more intelligent themes w.o letting it get in the way of the action and cool "wow" type stuff...

however i would say the last 1/4 has dragged on....all the stuff of looking for The Mind in on Schar's Planet of the Dead or whatever seems to be taking FOREVER.

still love it overall and can't wait to read another book by banks.

the last chunk of phlebas is a bit weak.

just finished matter. SPOILER: some great stuff but ya there's kind of an plot-destroying explosion at the end there.

the last chunk of phlebas is a bit weak.

:-/ I thought it was pretty sharp, but what didn't you like?

maybe I'll try the bridge. but I've not liked his other two books I've read, so this is the last try I'll give him.

SPOILER: some great stuff but ya there's kind of an plot-destroying explosion at the end there.

Yeah, I felt a bit cheated by that. I was looking forward to how he was going to resolve to 8th/9th political stuff, then he just didn't bother.

ya SPOILER but he seemed to be setting up a LOT that never got resolved. i guess he's confounding expectations by not doing a big culture deus ex machina but i figured that whatsherface was a pawn of SC all along, meant to return to the 8th and rule the sarl or something like that... plus the shellworld stuff was so begging for at least some more explanation.

:-/ I thought it was pretty sharp, but what didn't you like?

-- Ned Raggett, Tuesday, June 3, 2008 11:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

i just remember all the running around tunnels stuff taking too long

Hell, I loved the way that slowly racked up the tension -- multiple points of view, everyone chasing after everyone else, and then one forgotten figure slowly making his own last move...

In an interview Banks gave the lame excuse that Matter is supposed to read like the first part of an imaginary trilogy, so of course it leaves loose ends.

Yesterday I walked by a construction lot in which there was a giant two-story concrete cube with one tiny window in it, looking very much like my mental image of the Mysterious Alien Artifact.

>> where should I start with Alastair Reynolds?

> i've read three Alastair Reynolds books & boy could that guy use an editor.

i have never thought this. i get to the end and wish they were longer, if anything. (he has a tendency to introduce completely new things in the last 50 or so pages, stuff that has potential)

> the only one i'd recommend was "Century Rain" which (i think) is pretty much self-contained.

the big trilogy is revelation space / redemption ark / absolution gap and should be read together. chasm city is set in same universe but is unconnected. pushing ice is self contained. century city is self contained (and a bit of a departure from the other stuff). the prefect and the recent one, house of suns (which has only just come out in hardback so you could be waiting a while).

Pushing Ice would be a good start, i think. then The Prefect or Century City.

(there are also two short story collections, Galactic North (which shares a universe with the long stories) and Zima Blues which is all unconnected. oh, and a twofer novella thing, Diamond Dogs and Turquoise Days, which i need to re-read.)

In an interview Banks gave the lame excuse that Matter is supposed to read like the first part of an imaginary trilogy, so of course it leaves loose ends.

-- eater, Wednesday, June 4, 2008 5:19 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

that IS lame!

algebraist was much better.

s1ocki I want you to know that every post of mine on here is the first part of an imaginary googleplexology

Haha, sign of how the language is transmogrified. That should be googolplexology.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hv1dz

Radio 4 Afternoon Play

"Paul Cornell's dramatisation of the science-fiction novel by Iain M Banks. A spaceship from The Culture arrives on Earth in 1977 and finds a planet obsessed with alien concepts like 'property' and 'money' and on the edge of self destruction. When Agent Dervley Linter decides to go native can Diziet Sma change his mind?"

3 days left to listen via bbc iplayer

http://www.iain-banks.net/

The bottom line, now, I'm afraid, is that as a late stage gall bladder cancer patient, I'm expected to live for 'several months' and it’s extremely unlikely I'll live beyond a year. So it looks like my latest novel, The Quarry, will be my last.

:(