Banks, Iain M. Books

Consider Phlebas

Iain M. Banks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 96 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A universe of cliches 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book based on the glowing reviews found on Amazon. I'll admit it's not entirely unreadable and for enthusiasts of military scifi, there are some things to like here (the cover art, for example, is awesome). However, taken as a whole this novel was far more irritating than engrossing.

The small annoyances: the back cover and the prologue inform us that the central conflict of this novel will be two interstellar nations racing to recover a powerful AI computer that's stranded on an off-limits planet. In the second chapter, the main character learns this as well, and the novel is set up. Promising, eh? Three pages later, our protagonist is thrown completely off the trail and spends an eternity doing things unrelated to the central plot. Meanwhile, the dialogue is awkward and every page has at least one poorly constructed sentence.

The real annoyances, however, are the clichés. Chapter 1 intends to introduce us to the main character in a dramatic prison rescue... straight out of any spy, romance, scifi or western novel you may have read. The primary aliens are giant monsters (who would have guessed that?), with 3-legs instead of two. They're also really loud. In chapter 2, we see the primary character make an escape from a starship under attack that's suspiciously similar to the opening scene of Star Wars episode IV. In Chapter 3, our main character is in a fight to the death to join a crew of pirates. Seriously, points for good taste apply, but I'd still prefer that you didn't rip off Alexandre Dumas and `The Count of Monte Cristo." The Captain of the pirates is a bit of a rogue who won his ship in a game of chance. The ship itself is a beaten down frigate, but the Captain swears that it's the fastest ship in this part of the galaxy. Some of his crewmates are basically humanoid, but covered in light brown fur. Honestly. Continuing the Star Wars motif, we soon see some ground combat (involving laser weapons) in a Temple on a planet looking suspiciously like Yavin IV. I could go on, but you get the point.

It's not entirely awful, and if you're a true scifi junkie you'll get your money's worth. For the non-enthusiasts who just want a decent story with some cool space battles, I strongly recommend Scott Westerfeld's "Succession" novels.

Editorial Review:

"Dazzlingly original." -- Daily Mail
"Gripping, touching and funny." -- TLS

The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender.

Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction.

Use of Weapons

Iain M. Banks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

SF for Grown-Ups 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

For those who haven't encountered Iain M. Banks "Culture" series, this is the third volume. All can be read independently, as each has its own character set and storyline. His setup is ingenious: there are many humanoid species in the galaxy, and the Culture represents a post-scarcity civilization with a self-appointed role as agents of change (or meddlers) in the affairs of less advanced groups. "Use of Weapons" follows the career of Zakalwe, a Culture agent engaged in many military operations over a long career. We follow him backwards and forwards in time, which may be confusing the first time through but makes sense on a second reading. Banks is a superb storyteller, his set-piece episodes are gripping, and throughout this and his other Culture novels he gradually tells us more and more about the Culture, its agents, the sentient machines and ship Minds that wield amazing power and are "citizens" with wills of their own, and the technologies that make things possible. It's the best hard SF on the planet.

Editorial Review:

The man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was one of Special Circumstances' foremost agents, changing the destiny of planets to suit the Culture through intrigue, dirty tricks and military action.

The woman known as Diziet Sma had plucked him from obscurity and pushed him towards his present eminence, but despite all their dealings she did not know him as well as she thought.

The drone known as Skaffen-Amtiskaw knew both of these people. It had once saved the woman's life by massacring her attackers in a particularly bloody manner. It believed the man to be a lost cause. But not even its machine could see the horrors in his past.

Ferociously intelligent, both witty and horrific, USE OF WEAPONS is a masterpiece of science fiction.

The Player of Games

Iain M. Banks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 75 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks presents a distant future that could almost be called the end of history. Humanity has filled the galaxy, and thanks to ultra-high technology everyone has everything they want, no one gets sick, and no one dies. It's a playground society of sports, stellar cruises, parties, and festivals. Jernau Gurgeh, a famed master game player, is looking for something more and finds it when he's invited to a game tournament at a small alien empire. Abruptly Banks veers into different territory. The Empire of Azad is exotic, sensual, and vibrant. It has space battle cruisers, a glowing court--all the stuff of good old science fiction--which appears old-fashioned in contrast to Gurgeh's home. At first it's a relief, but further exploration reveals the empire to be depraved and terrifically unjust. Its defects are gross exaggerations of our own, yet they indict us all the same. Clearly Banks is interested in the idea of a future where everyone can be mature and happy. Yet it's interesting to note that in order to give us this compelling adventure story, he has to return to a more traditional setting. Thoughtful science fiction readers will appreciate the cultural comparisons, and fans of big ideas and action will also be rewarded. --Brooks Peck

Matter

Iain M. Banks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 51 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In a world renowned even within a galaxy full of wonders, a crime within a war. For one brother it means a desperate flight, and a search for the one - maybe two - people who could clear his name. For his brother it means a life lived under constant threat of treachery and murder. And for their sister, even without knowing the full truth, it means returning to a place she'd thought abandoned forever.

Only the sister is not what she once was; Djan Seriy Anaplian has changed almost beyond recognition to become an agent of the Culture's Special Circumstances section, charged with high-level interference in civilisations throughout the greater galaxy.

Concealing her new identity - and her particular set of abilities - might be a dangerous strategy, however. In the world to which Anaplian returns, nothing is quite as it seems; and determining the appropriate level of interference in someone else's war is never a simple matter.

MATTER is a novel of dazzling wit and serious purpose. An extraordinary feat of storytelling and breathtaking invention on a grand scale, it is a tour de force from a writer who has turned science fiction on its head.

Excession

Iain Banks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 76 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

exploring Minds and the wealth of the Culture 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

When expecting a Banks' sci-fi book, expect only excellence.
When expecting a Banks' "Culture" book, expect seven things:
1) war, weapons, death and destruction
2) glanding different sensations to alter reality
3) drones with smart mouths, attitudes and a cunning wit
4) knife missiles slicing through baddie targets
5) quirky aliens in and out of the Culture
6) dark, grim gory scenes that will leave you cringing
7) Minds and their space vessels

Here's the breakdown of this Culture novel:
1) War breaks out between the Affront and the Culture, but there was little death and destruction. One or two deaths were satisfying enough.
2) Glanding different sensations to alter brain chemistry was prevalent throughout the book. It played no key role, but it was remarked upon enough.
3) Three of four drones made an appearance here. None of them were over the top scene catchers, but one drone did have a few choice words to say.
4) Sadly, no knife missiles were used.
5) The Affront species was humorous to read about. They seem like a hearty species to be mixed with, as long as you're not their dinner or hunting game.
6) I very much like the gritty scenes in Banks' novels, especially the island scene in Consider Phlebas. Excession had two gritty scenes (one with a death and one with grisly injury). Not up to par.
7) There were more Minds in this Culture book than any other Culture novel I have yet to read. It was bordering on mind-boggling, but the story cleared up towards the end. Reading the conversations between Minds was extremely interesting to experience (especially the Eccentric Minds).

Not all categories were up to par, but between the greatness of witnessing the Affront and the Minds. Well played out.

Editorial Review:

It's not easy to disturb a mega-utopia as vast as the one Iain M. Banks has created in his popular Culture series, where life is devoted to fun and ultra-high-tech is de rigueur. But more than two millennia ago the appearance--and disappearance--of a star older than the universe caused quite a stir. Now the mystery is back, and the key to solving it lies in the mind of the person who witnessed the first disturbance 2,500 years ago. But she's dead, and getting her to cooperate may not be altogether easy.

The Algebraist

Iain M. Banks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 59 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Just Badly Written 1 out of 5 stars.
5 of 9 people found this review helpful.

The following sentence, which is fairly typical of the prose in this work, appears on the top of page 25 of the hardcover edition of this book:

"Though it would be a pity if Ilen -- achingly beautiful, wanly pale, shamelessly blonde, effortlessly academically accomplished, bizarrely unself-assured and insecure Ilen -- had to perish in the wreck too, Fassin thought."

If you can read sentences like this and not flinch, you may enjoy this work. I cannot, and after twenty or thirty such assaults, I gave up. Mr. Bank's writing is sophomoric and annoying. Hell, it doesn't all have to be Cormac McCarthy, but even science fiction geeks have to have some standards.

Editorial Review:

It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year. The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilization. In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data without order, hunting their own young and fighting pointless formal wars. Seconded to a military-religious order he's barely heard of - part of the baroque hierarchy of the Mercatoria, the latest galactic hegemony - Fassin Taak has to travel again amongst the Dwellers. He is in search of a secret hidden for half a billion years. But with each day that passes a war draws closer - a war that threatens to overwhelm everything and everyone he's ever known.

Look to Windward

Iain M. Banks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Twin Novae battle had been one of the last of the Idiran war, and one of the most horrific: desperate to avert their inevitable defeat, the Idirans had induced not one but two suns to explode, snuffing out worlds and biospheres teeming with sentient life. They were attacks of incredible proportion -- gigadeathcrimes. But the war ended, and life went on.

Now, eight hundred years later, light from the first explosion is about to reach the Masaq' Orbital, home to the Culture's most adventurous and decadent souls. There it will fall upon Masaq's 50 billion inhabitants, gathered to commemorate the deaths of the innocent and to reflect, if only for a moment, on what some call the Culture's own complicity in the terrible event.

Also journeying to Masaq' is Major Quilan, an emissary from the war-ravaged world of Chel. In the aftermath of the conflict that split his world apart, most believe he has come to Masaq' to bring home Chel's most brilliant star and self-exiled dissident, the honored Composer Ziller.

Ziller claims he will do anything to avoid a meeting with Major Quilan, who he suspects has come to murder him. But the Major's true assignment will have far greater consequences than the death of a mere political dissident, as part of a conspiracy more ambitious than even he can know -- a mission his superiors have buried so deeply in his mind that even he cannot remember it.

Hailed by SFX magazine as "an excellent hopping-on point if you've never read a Banks SF novel before," Look to Windward is an awe-inspiring immersion into the wildly original, vividly realized civilization that Banks calls the Culture.

Inversions

Iain M. Banks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Iain M. Banks, the international bestselling author of The Player of Games and Consider Phlebas, is a true original, a literary visionary whose brilliant speculative fiction has transported us into worlds of unbounded imagination. Now, in his acclaimed new novel, Banks presents an engrossing portrait of an alien world, and of two very different people bound by a startling and mysterious secret.

On a backward world with six moons, an alert spy reports on the doings of one Dr. Vosill, who has mysteriously become the personal physician to the king despite being a foreigner and, even more unthinkably, a woman. Vosill has more enemies than she first realizes. But then she also has more remedies in hand than those who wish her ill can ever guess.

Elsewhere, in another palace across the mountains, a man named DeWar serves as chief bodyguard to the Protector General of Tassasen, a profession he describes as the business of "assassinating assassins." DeWar, too, has his enemies, but his foes strike more swiftly, and his means of combating them are more direct.

No one trusts the doctor, and the bodyguard trusts no one, but is there a hidden commonality linking their disparate histories? Spiraling around a central core of mystery, deceit, love, and betrayal. Inversions is a dazzling work of science fiction from a versatile and imaginative author writing at the height of his remarkable powers.

Feersum Endjinn

Iain M Banks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Potentially great book (ride, ideas, characters) reduced to very good by plot 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Well, this guy has six incredible ideas before breakfast. Having enjoyed several of his books now (including a couple from his non-SF `M'-less alter-ego) I'm not quite as easy to surprise (for example, his technique of outrageously incongruous scale - spaceships the size of continents; windows several kilometres high etc. - doesn't make me goggle so much anymore). So it's all the more impressive that given my high expectations and prior experience he still rarely disappoints. It's also cool that he isn't limited to books centring on the `culture' - much as that excellent concept is robust enough to underpin plenty of books. The `culture' could have been a part of Feersum's universe, but Banks largely goes somewhere else here.

How on earth did he get away with all those chapters of `phonetic' writing? At first I thought, "OK, sure, I get your point: Bascule thinks laterally.... I presume you're going to revert to conventional spelling any time now." And for a little while I was like, "That's enough now, this isn't novel or quirky anymore, it's getting annoying." But after a while I was surprised by how fluent I'd become in reading it. Moreover, even though I would have dismissed this method as a cheap stylistic trick, it really does give Bascule a distinct voice. Not only visually, but in allowing someone to sound like the artful dodger in the deep deep future. Alone the phonetic thing would soon reverse its appeal, but this is Banks, and he can write. Bascule - cockney urchin meeting dry Tom Sawyer - is a triumph of charm.

Typically we have adrenalin charged passages of frying pan to fire action (I don't think I've had less chance to draw breath in any book than the opening of Consider Phlebus), which at one point is like watching a video on fast forward (Sessine's - hmmm, what's the plural for `demise'). Moreover I just like the way Banks writes. He can evoke a mood, lace conversations with humour, present an idea with sting, paint a character... Banks' original ideas would have been enough to establish him as an SF writer, but - unlike some others in this field - he can cross over to novels as well because he doesn't need galactic level sensationalism to make him a good read (but here you get that as well). Banks soon had me in, and pretty much held me.

Listen to me - gushing like a schoolgirl. Well, fair enough - there is a lot of mediocre stuff out there, and this is refreshingly good. The strengths are greater than the weaknesses, but there are weaknesses. The ideas are great, and likewise the narrative, but at some point the crypt becomes an excuse for sloppy and indulgent plotting. There are similarities to the Matrix concept (cf. Neuromancer et. al.) of inhabiting virtual realities, and philosophising about whether computer based existence is any more or less authentic. Matrix 1 was wonderfully cohesive - the realisation that the `reality' was constructed enhanced a tight, incisive plot. Matrix Reloaded, however, was a dog's breakfast. Unfortunately the further I got into Feersum, the more it felt like Reloaded. Nice idea that, for example, the heroes can have an alternate self working in a different time-scheme to protect and aid their `base-reality' selves - but why don't the far greater resourced villains have the same thing? And why do these alternate selves - who appear to be as developed as the originals, devote their lives to utter service? Surely they'd be more like a twin who of course wants their own life. Why? Because it feels good - but it doesn't make sense within its own conventions.

Similarly the Asura is a two-edged device. Introducing a god into a story can be fantastic, but it can also remove any suspense: "Hey, how can we get out of this dilemma? I know, I'm a god - zap: there is no problem." Makes for resolution, but takes away much interest. The way writers often get around this is by having the god gradually struggling to be aware of their powers - it works in Matrix 1, gets by in The Fifth Element, and runs along OK for a while in Feersum. I love the way Banks details the precise way Asura defeats various psychological attacks, rather than simply having her deck them Rambo style. He does work a lot harder to give Asura a history rather than just having her appear. But by the time she can just zap the entire government, bound and gagged, miraculously into a room I'm unclear on why they might still be running from them. Any rabbit can be inexplicably pulled out of a hat. The whole odyssey in the unexplored regions of the Crypt had a nice mood, but made no sense at all.

The ride is well and truly enough with Banks. The rich ideas could just about be enough - but imagine if he had have put them all together in a satisfying cohesive structure! It's not a total random mess like a lot of books, and it's got a lot going for it, but for me it takes it from great to very good. Hey, I'll take very good.

Editorial Review:

In a future where the ancients have long since departed Earth for the stars, those left behind live complacent lives filled with technological marvels they no longer understand. Then a cosmic threat known as the Encroachment begins a devastating ice age on Earth, and it sets in motion a series of events that will bring together a cast of original characters who must struggle through war, political intrigues and age-old mysteries to save the world. (B 4worned, 1 oph Banx' carrokters theenx en funetic inglish, which makes for some tough reading but also some innovative prose.)

The State Of The Art

Iain M. Banks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

"Cleaning Up" is quite the work! 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Humor & sci-fi wrapped up in a nice little package. Banks works wonders in this regard. Here are my top 5 (of 8) favorites.
5) "Piece" is a look at gritty life outside of the Culture.
4) "Descendant" isn't sci-fi, but a moving and intelligent story.
3) "Odd Attatchment" is about an astronaut and his, sometimes, humorous relation ship with his AI spacesuit.
2) "The State of the Art" is highly original.
1) "Cleaning Up" is weird (my dad says). I say it's head-shaking, tongue-biting, tear-rolling, seen-in-public-laughing-by-yourself sci-fi/humor at its finest. Ever.

Editorial Review:

The first ever collection of Iain Banks' short fiction, this volume includes the acclaimed novella, The State of the Art. This is a striking addition to the growing body of Culture lore, and adds definition and scale to the previous works by using the Earth of 1977 as contrast. The other stories in the collection range from science fiction to horror, dark-coated fantasy to morality tale. All bear the indefinable stamp of Iain Banks' staggering talent.