Researcher and educator from Sydney, Australia. You’ll usually find me on the forgotten parts of the web.
My ratings ★ Not recommended ★★ Not for me, but may be okay for you? ★★★ Good ★★★★ Very good, recommended ★★★★★ Exceptional, couldn't put it down
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75% complete! Ben Harris-Roxas has read 9 of 12 books.
Investigator Mossa and Scholar Pleiti reunite to solve a brand-new mystery in the follow-up to the fan-favorite cozy space opera …
Part-biography, part-political thriller, The Unaccountability Machine is a rousing exposé of how management failures lead organisations to make catastrophic errors. …
War machines and AI gods run amok in The Archive Undying, national bestseller Emma Mieko Candon's bold entry into the …
Like her other books, Kushner is masterful at evoking times and places, and depicting the inner lives of quite unlikeable but complex characters. Telex from Cuba is ambitious, propulsive and masterfully written – though perhaps not enjoyable? The skill of the author elevates it, she’s a force.
War machines and AI gods run amok in The Archive Undying, national bestseller Emma Mieko …
Abandoned this one I’m afraid
The first ever collection of Iain Banks’s short fiction, this volume includes the acclaimed novella, …
Content warning Non-plot description of a story’s setting
Given the bulk of the volume is the novella The State Of The Art I’ll focus on that. The conceit of the Culture contacting Earth ruins many of the other Culture novels for me and deprives them of their power. It makes it clear how Banks wants both the Culture and the politics of the ‘70s and ‘80s to be understood. I wish I hadn’t read this to be honest, and I kind of wish it didn’t exist because it serves mostly to diminish his other work.
I acknowledge this is very much focused on my own view and experience, but isn’t that what reading is?
The first ever collection of Iain Banks’s short fiction, this volume includes the acclaimed novella, The State of the Art. …
The Culture - a human/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players, …
A well-constructed meditation on games, inequality and brutality, and utopia itself.
I read this 20+ years ago and remembered most of it – itself a measure of quality. It’s interesting that Banks suggests the Culture is only comprehensible by those outside it. Within the Culture docile, pampered beings exist worry-free lives like goldfish in a tank. The pacing and tone are masterful. What a writer!
This book probably needs to be understood in the context it was written. In 1988 the Soviet Union was still extant, and the U.S. and U.K. probably did (and certainly still does) resemble to Empire of Azad much more than the Culture. It’s quite a subversive work.
The Culture - a human/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest …
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, …
Content warning Allusions to the events and arc of the novel, no spoilers about the ending
I re-read this for the first time in 25-30 years and was surprised. It was mostly what I recalled but the book was much more meandering than I expected. It takes its time.
The Culture in Banks’ novels is like water to a goldfish: you can' perceive it if you're in it. Assuming an etic perspective provides an interesting introduction. Our protagonist, the shape-changer Horza, opposes its malleable, A.I.-governed, self-contradictory utopia. He’s thrown his lot in with the Idirans – theistic, immortal, three-legged giant dinosaurs who are at war with The Culture. His character’s oppositional perspective illuminates The Culture’s values in ways that a more straightforward account would not.
Banks makes a number of interesting decisions that increase the sense of scale and complexity of The Culture (I dislike the phrase world-building, but it's appropriate here). Digressions like high(est) stakes card games, monastery raids, and island cannibals take up most of the book. The central animating events of the book are almost an afterthought.
It's more descriptive in its prose than most books I like to read now. Anything that includes lengthy descriptions of action gives me Dan Brown-induced contact hives. However this was written before every hack started treating their novels as long-form screenplays and one needs to keep that in mind. The themes about loss and the nihilism of war remain relevant. Banks doesn't dumb things down for his readers.
But structurally it doesn’t quite work. This galactic conflict–spanning mission is somehow subordinate to a series of stories that seem more like loosely connected role playing game sessions. At the end we’re not much more clear about what motivates Horza or the war itself.
Consider Phlebas remains imaginative, overreaching, flawed, and propulsive.
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced …
