After the successful publication of The Player of Games, Banks returned to his pile of unpublished manuscripts and selected the remaining two Culture stories—the novella The State of the Art, which was first published as a standalone in 1989, and the novel Use of Weapons, which came out in 1990. The novella, by Banks’ own reckoning, required little in the way of alterations or improvements, while Use of Weapons had to be vastly rewritten (Garnett 1989, 54–56). The State of the Art and Use of Weapons are treated together in this chapter for two reasons: first, because the timelines of the two stories are connected through an intertextual synching too precise to be casual—therefore suggesting a dovetailing of thematic concerns—and second because they share two fundamental characters, the Contact/SC operative Diziet Sma and her accompanying offensive-model drone, Skaffen-Amtiskaw.
Timelines first. Sma herself, with a number of editorial interpolations from Skaffen-Amtiskaw, narrates The State of the Art. Hers is a memoir, one hundred and fifteen years after the facts (78), of the time she spent on Earth in the year AD 1977, when the General Contact Unit Arbitrary (and what a resonant name for the story in which it participates) arrived in orbit around our planet and started studying us. Sma is composing this memoir for a Culture scholar specializing on Earth, a man by the name of Petrain, and in the brief cover letter she appends to the manuscript she apologizes for keeping him waiting a long time. The reason for the wait, Sma explains, is that she’s had to leave her current post in an uncontacted stage three planetary civilization for about a hundred days to attend to urgent business (77–78), which is where the connection to Use of Weapons comes in. At the beginning of the novel, when Skaffen-Amtiskaw tells Sma that she has to pack and leave immediately to reconnect with the other protagonist of the story, Cheradenine Zakalwe, she tells the drone to “send a stalling letter to that Petrain guy” (37). This quick aside implies that, at that point in Use of Weapons, Sma has yet to write the memoir, and that therefore the hundred days off-planet she mentions at the beginning of The State of the Art comprise the span of events in the novel, after which she returns home, writes the memoir, and sends it out to Petrain, cum apologies for her tardiness.1 Also, so she tells Petrain, she has left Contact at large and moved on to Special Circumstances (77), which is where we find her at the beginning of Use of Weapons.
Thus, Banks went to some trouble to link the two stories together, arguably because both narratives present Sma with one or more aspects of the intervention dilemma—the moment when, confronted with a less advanced civilization on the cusp of either disaster or transcendence, Contact has to decide whether to (A) throw the Prime Directive out the window and come in, or (B) stay away and observe. The contrast in this pairing is that, whereas in State Sma plays the role of enthusiastic interventionist while others counsel caution, in Weapons she is the voice of caution, trying to restrain her associate’s excesses in the name of the greater good.
Of all the Culture stories, The State of the Art is probably the most openly didactic. This is perhaps unsurprising, considering the specimen under the scope. The whole novella is shaped like a continuing debate on the ethics of civilizational interference, occasionally interspersed with bouts of mostly peaceful exploration and sightseeing. The key voices in this debate are four: first there’s Sma herself, who advocates immediate intervention lest 1977 Earth plunges into global thermonuclear war, ecological catastrophe, or any other human-made doomsday scenario. “I didn’t want to leave,” she writes to Petrain. “I didn’t want to keep them safe from us and let them devour themselves; I wanted maximum interference; I wanted to hit the place with a program Lev Davidovitch would have been proud of” (105).
The second voice belongs to the Arbitrary itself. While it spars with Sma concerning the advisability of contacting Earth, the Arbitrary is conducting the same dialogue—at speeds and levels of cogency that beings of flesh cannot dream of—with a quorum of other Minds housed within various craft scattered across the volume of space surrounding the solar system (80). Serene and poised in the sublime clarity of Mind-thought, the Arbitrary counters Sma’s viewpoint with an argument of its own:
How do we know what is—or would be—for their own good, unless, over a very long period, we observe matched areas of interest—in this case planets—and compare the effects of contacting and not contacting? … They’re on a cusp; a highly heterogeneous but highly connected—and stressedly connected—civilization. I’m not sure that one approach could encompass the needs of their different systems. The particular stage of communication they’re at, combining rapidity and selectivity, usually with something added to the signal and almost always with something missed out, means that what passes for truth often has to travel at the speed of failing memories, changing attitudes, and new generations [83].
The Arbitrary is gently pointing out that our scientific, technological, and sociological state of the art have not yet enabled us to first create and then acknowledge as fellow sentients the Minds we’d need to retain a complete, coherent picture of ourselves and our interactions. Our collective memories fade and warp over the years, obfuscated and distorted by shifting ideologies and imperfect generational transmission, and our relationship with the machineries that at the same time make comfortable, endanger, and control the lives we lead is deeply ambivalent. Should the Culture contact us, would we hail them as friends or recoil in horror from a civilization that has willfully given over its decision-making processes to the distant descendants of the machines we know? Sma’s answer to this question is that the longer-term benefits of immediate contact would be well worth the price of any short-term cultural upheaval. The Arbitrary, less sanguine on this score than Sma is, keeps playing devil’s advocate, countering her bleak view of humanity’s near-future prospects if left alone with a more optimistic outlook. “What hope for these people, Ship?” Sma asks at one point, and the Arbitrary replies: “Their children’s children will die before you even look old, Diziet. Their grandparents are younger than you are now […] In your terms, there is no hope for them. In theirs, every hope” (130).
And so the debate between flesh sentient and sentient machine continues, ranging from far-out philosophical discussions of such concepts as beauty to the practicalities of stopping the nukes of World War III once they’re in flight. Sma knows that she’s going to lose the debate, and that Contact will use Earth as a Control Group (105),2 but still she tries to the very end. The Arbitrary faithfully copies the other Minds on Sma’s argument—in the Culture, one always has a voice and the right to expect this voice to be heard—but things don’t change. For the time being, Earth will remain a read-only file (143).
But there’s more. If Sma and the Arbitrary were the only two voices involved in the debate, the story would be rather pat—a high-flying set of exchanges between a near omnipotent machine intelligence and a female flesh sentient, neither of whom is in the slightest danger from anyone or anything on the planet below. Banks, who knew that, introduced two more characters into the proceedings, each with his profoundly quirky response to the Earth dilemma. The first of these two characters, and the third voice in the debate, is also the engine of the story, the dramatic force that turns The State of the Art into a profoundly stressed dialogue on the morality of ecumenical good works. His name is Dervley Linter; like Sma, he’s a Contact operative and a member of the Arbitrary’s crew, but something has happened to him: he has made the decision to remain on Earth for the rest of his life, irrespective of whether Contact comes in or not (99). He has gone native because, so he tells Sma, he feels more alive on Earth than he ever had in the Culture, and accordingly he wants nothing more to do with his place of birth and its representatives, especially the Arbitrary (100–103).3
Linter’s revelation sends Sma on a frenzy of speculation about the cause of his decision (she initially thinks it’s a woman; 99) and the Arbitrary in search of an expedient to make him change his mind (the Ship asks Sma to drop in on Linter in the hope that she might jolt him out of his decision; 100). When neither gets results, and when it becomes clear that Linter means what he says, the contact-or-merely-observe deliberation acquires a new aspect of urgency. Aside from the security risks involved—should Linter get hurt and taken to a hospital, his alien physiology would immediately give him away, thus initiating a dangerously out-of-control form of contact (105–106)—the situation is made problematic precisely by the ethics the Culture upholds. Should the Arbitrary snap Linter off-planet to protect us Earthlings from discoveries we’re not ready for, or should it guarantee his wishes since, as a Culture citizen first and foremost, he’s entitled to having those wishes fulfilled? According to the rulebook Contact and the Culture as a whole swear by, both courses of action are defensible—even advisable—in ethical terms, so the ultimate decision, here in the fringe territories, comes down to the employment of ad-hoc predictive models.
Linter makes things even more difficult than they already were. For reasons he himself doesn’t seem to fully understand, he has developed a fondness for Sma and a desire for her approval, which he can’t have. On every occasion they meet after their first talk, always at his request, Sma makes it clear that she’s vehemently opposed to his decision, and that he’s being a fool for rejecting the very utopia the people of Earth are striving, however dysfunctionally, to achieve. They, she tells him, would be the first to declare him a madman (121). Her outrage spikes on the day Linter tells her that, at his request, the Arbitrary removed most of the biological enhancements with which Culture citizens are born—now he’s vulnerable to illness, doesn’t see as well as he used to, doesn’t have control over his digestive system any longer, and so on (118–119). “I could only think of them as mutilations,” Sma writes to Petrain of these changes, and her disgust prompts her to confront the Arbitrary: why did it agree to carry them out, she asks, and when the Ship replies that it simply granted Linter’s wishes as it was its duty to do, she accuses it of going along with his masochistic scheme because it expected that the discomfort that came with those alterations would push Linter to come back into the fold, begging to have his genofixed Culture body returned to him (123). The Arbitrary’s riposte cogently captures the quintessential mindset of the Culture’s ethics of contact and relations with other societies. First off, it tells Sma, it acquiesced because it didn’t find Linter any less valuable as a sentient being than it had before altering him. It’s his mind that’s relevant, and physical characteristics don’t come into the assessment (124). Secondly, there is a pragmatic angle in acquiescing to Linter’s request: acting reasonably toward him even when he’s not reciprocating might well be the only way to make him see that the Culture—and specifically its representative orbiting Earth—truly are the good guys, thus possibly convincing him to come back to them. But it’s the third reason that really strikes home:
What are we supposed to be about, Sma? What is the Culture? What do we believe in? … Surely in freedom, more than anything else. A relativistic, changing sort of freedom, unbounded by laws or laid-down moral codes, but—in the end—just because it is so hard to pin down and express, a freedom of a far higher quality than anything to be found on any relevant scale on the planet beneath us at the moment. The same technological expertise, the same productive surplus which, in pervading our society, first allows us to be here at all and after that allows us the degree of choice we have over what happens to Earth, long ago also allowed us to live exactly as we wish to live, limited only by being expected to respect the same principle applied to others…. Dervley Linter is as much a product of our society as I am, and as such … he’s perfectly correct in expecting to have his wishes fulfilled [124–125].
The Arbitrary’s argument illustrates the conundrum Linter landed on its lap when he decided to stay on Earth, and at the same time lays down the Ship’s application of the Culture’s basic principles: as the most powerful thinking entity in that theatre of operations, and as the quintessential embodiment of everything the Culture stands for, the Arbitrary is determined to make sure that its conduct “is beyond reproach, and in as close accord with the basic principles of our society as it is within my power to make it” (125). This means that Linter gets to have his wish, and that any hope that he’ll come back to the GCU now rests exclusively with him.
Thus, Sma finds herself not only frustrated in her desire to intervene on Earth, but also confronted with the explicit, if problematized, validation of a viewpoint that embraces a diametrically opposite stance: if she want maximum interference, Linter wants no interference whatsoever—not even observation. He wants the culture to leave Earth utterly and completely to its own devices, and to her considerable annoyance Sma recognizes that the final decision of the quorum of Minds will come closer to Linter’s desires than to her own (105). So she travels the Earth, observing and cataloguing and interviewing just like a dutiful Contact operative must, and all along she worries about Mr. Problem, as the Arbitrary has begun to call Linter (130). Even through her authorial voice, relatively cool-headed after one hundred and fifteen years, the reader can feel the strain her younger self is experiencing during her stay on-planet.4 As the time of departure approaches and the Linter issue becomes ever more pressing, Earth keeps shocking and outraging her with vistas of the horrors our species has visited upon everything alive, including itself, so that for Sma the decision to simply observe without actively interfering becomes nearly impossible to examine with a dispassionate eye (hence her refusal to visit Pretoria; 128).
It’s at this point, when the narrative risks turning excessively bleak, that the presence of the fourth voice becomes a useful agent of light-heartedness and, at the same time, another perspective on the morals of contact. There are always a certain number of people onboard a ship (or on an Orbital, or a planet) who, even by the Culture’s standards, can readily be described as odd. One such specimen is the character of Li’ndane—or simply Li—who is “just a weirdo, and forever conducting a running battle with the finer sensibilities of the ship” (87). Despite sharing the panhuman body type characteristic of most of the Culture’s citizens, Li’s appearance is far enough removed from Earth-normal (“imagine Quasimodo crossed with an ape”; 88) that he’s barred from going planetside, and his thought processes match the shape: he’s quirky, funny, and often manic. He tries to get the Arbitrary to drop him on the slopes of the Himalayas and let him make his way down—any locals taking a good look at him, he argues, would simply assume he was a Yeti (116)—and, while Sma is on Earth for her first talk with Linter, he forms the boredom society, which he later renames the Ennui League and of which he remains the only member (112).
That Banks is having a bit of fun with the character of Li’ndane is clear enough, and given the heft of the narrative in general his antics are a welcome break, strategically interspersed among the various conversations/confrontations among Sma, Linter, and the Ship. That’s not the only function those antics fulfill, however. In their increasing absurdity—nobody takes them seriously, beginning with Li himself—they become a Swiftian commentary both on the obscenities of life on Earth and on the wisdom of the Culture’s contact practices, which Li supports in reverse-logic terms by construing himself as a sort of dictator-in-waiting who, tired of the namby-pamby hesitancy of the Arbitrary, is ready to take control of the situation and doing what needs to be done. What needs to be done, it turns out, is to elect Li to the position of Captain of the Arbitrary, for which he starts campaigning one day by appearing in front of Sma dressed in James T. Kirk’s uniform from the original Star Trek series and launching himself into a tirade about honor, duty, and self-sacrifice that would have made Kim Kinnison weep with joy (126). Sma’s retort—basically, that the notion of a human taking command of a Mind-controlled GCU is as meaningless as the idea of a bacterium in a human’s saliva taking over the whole body—cuts no ice.
The next step on Li’s path to captaincy is an electoral dinner, during which he lists the numerous qualifications that make him the perfect candidate for a role nobody in millennia has needed to fulfill. After that, he proceeds to explain everything that’s wrong with Earth’s various economic systems and what needs to be done to fix the whole ghastly mess; this solution will find implementation as soon as the people onboard the Arbitrary elect him Captain. The entire scene (132–141), which Banks wrote with a consummate ear for comedic rhythm and a Monty Python-esque sense of the absurd, is essentially designed as a standup comedy evening: over two hundred people are sitting down and having dinner while Li harangues them from the head table—standing, of course. The proceedings are made even funnier by our knowledge that the Arbitrary has manufactured everything for the occasion, from the accommodations for the guests to the food and the props Li wears at the dinner. But there’s also a serious aspect to this situation: when the Ship told Sma that the Culture’s technological state of the art is one of the lynchpins of a utopian society that grants everyone the right to live according to their wishes, it was being perfectly serious. Li’s electoral dinner, ridiculous and extravagant as it is, represents just such an example of freedom guaranteed and helped along through technology. Li’ndane himself shows up with green skin and pointy ears, wearing one of the spacesuits from 2001: A Space Odyssey embellished with a silver Flash symbol and a Superman-style red cape. In the crook of one arm he holds the suit’s helmet, and in the other hand he holds a lightsaber. Of course, Li’s lightsaber actually works (132).
Sma wants a full-on intervention on Earth, while Dervley Linter wants the exact opposite. For their part, the Arbitrary and the quorum of Minds with whom it’s in constant contact are about to decide to observe without actively intervening. Li’ndane, on the other hand, has a tidier solution: write us all off as a total loss and wipe out the Earth through the displacement of a miniature black hole into its core (140). Humanity is too far gone, he tells his hugely entertained audience, and to see that one has only to look at Earth’s wealth-distribution setup, which he describes by comparing it to that of the Culture:
I am as rich and poor as anybody in the Culture…. Rich; trapped as I am on board this uncaptained, leaderless tub, my wealth … would seem immense to the average Earther. At home I have the run of a charming and beautiful Orbital which would seem very clean and uncrowded to somebody from Earth … I live in a wing of a family home of mansion proportions surrounded by hectares of gorgeous gardens. I have an aircraft, a launch … even the use of what would be called a spaceship by these people … and all for nothing; I don’t have to do anything for all this. But, at the same time, I am poor. I own nothing. Just as every atom in my body was once part of something else … and just as one day every atom of my being will be part of something else … so everything around me … is there when I am rather than because I am. These things may be arranged for me, but … they would be there for anybody else—should they desire them—too. I do not—emphatically not—own them [135–136].
The people of Earth, on the other hand, labor under a haphazardly globalized economic system within whose workings, Li explains, “all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel, and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least” (136). It takes him quite a bit of time and a couple of pages (136–138) to present to his audience a devastating indictment of capitalism as an engine for the constant generation of inequality, deprivation, suffering, and the untimely death of millions.5 Earthlings are, he tells everyone, an irreparably perverse mutation of the basic humanoid template, and there’s nothing the Culture can do for us. Better to be merciful to every other civilization in the galaxy and make sure none of them ever runs the risk of meeting us (140).
There are a lot of things going on here. Aside from the knowing send-up of classic space opera implicit in Li’s postmodern mishmash of Star Trek, Star Wars, 2001, and Superman comics, not to mention his comments on what would happen if the Culture really did contact Earth (we wouldn’t believe in a vaguely communistic utopia—we’d want empires; 137–138), the really rather deep socio-economic analysis he presents to his fellow contact operatives is as close as Banks comes to breaking the fourth wall and announcing himself to his readers. It’s clear that, in describing the functioning of the Culture’s utopian economics and in comparing them to the dystopian machine he sees lording over Earth, Banks is wearing his heart on his sleeve, and the voice he projects through Li’ndane is possessed of a ferocious clarity of vision; we are expected to understand that Banks means every word.
And yet the intensity does not skew the debate; the outrage does not tip the scales. One of the writers Banks had read widely during his early years had been Robert Heinlein, who, among many other things, remains famous to this day for writing many of his stories as rhetorical traps within whose workings anyone who didn’t subscribe to his own views found themselves cast as the villain. Stories like, for example, “The Roads Must Roll” (1940), Starship Troopers (1959), and—disastrously—Farnham’s Freehold (1964) are rule sets arranged like that of Azad, where the winners and the losers have already been decided through an agency external to the game’s context. But Banks wasn’t Heinlein, and his allegiance to the utopia of the Culture did not extend merely to self-congratulatory Mary Worth moments. He believed in the society he had imagined on the page with the same strength he believed in his politics here on Earth, and because he knew that utopia is an argument first and foremost, he made sure that this argument remained workable beyond the page—that is, he set up the debate in The State of the Art honestly and without awarding secret bonuses to any of the voices participating in it. If, ethically speaking, the Culture is a utopia because it awards everyone the right to (1) live and think exactly as they wish and (2) have these thoughts and actions respected and valued by all concerned, well then, its arguments had better reflect such a use of freedom with us readers as well.
Which they do. None of the three flesh-sentients participating in the debate is either wholly correct or wholly incorrect. One of the reasons why Li’ndane is the character he is stems from his position as carrier wave for Banks’ central beliefs. Banks wanted to make the point, but he also wanted to avoid privileging it by giving it to, say, the Arbitrary; so it’s Li who makes it, and he really is a weirdo whom nobody takes seriously—although, crucially, he does get to have his election (nobody votes for him, and few vote at all; 142).6 So we get to laugh at Li’ndane’s antics, but at the same time part of us is considering the implications for the here and now of the points he made, which is the key characteristic of the work of a great standup comedian, as he was designed to be. Laugh all you want; and then think.
Sma, for her part, has a way of taxing our patience. Her insights into life on Earth, circa 1977, are valuable, and there’s much kindness in her words. She’s a good chaperon throughout the story, honest and forthright even when things don’t go her way. However, her lack of confidence in humanity’s chances of progress and her coincident pride in the Culture’s highly developed civilizational ethics often makes even her older, more mature voice sound a little self-righteous, an attitude that at times forces her interlocutors to corral her outbursts—the Arbitrary first and foremost, but also Li7 and Dervley Linter himself,8 who wants to live on Earth because of the same rawness of existence Sma finds awful. But Sma seems to forget that the original civilizations that came together to form the first kernel of what would later become the Culture were themselves guilty of the same horrors the people of Earth have committed.9
And then there’s Dervley Linter, who tragically does get to spend the rest of his life on Earth: at the end of The State of the Art, as the Arbitrary is preparing to leave orbit, he invites Sma to see him in New York—one last moment together. He shows up looking emaciated and tired in her eyes, and as they walk he proceeds to tell her that he’s about to enter the Roman Catholic Church. Linter has found God (147).10 Halfway through a dark alley the two are attacked by a group of muggers. Sma dispatches them quickly, but not quickly enough to spare Linter a knife wound that he refuses to let her help heal—he prevents her from contacting the Arbitrary long enough to make any subsequent attempt at saving him useless. The ex–Culture man dies in the alley after committing a strange form of suicide, surrounded by Sma and a gaggle of onlookers (151–153).
From a reader-response perspective, Linter is a problematic character, as he was always meant to be. On the one hand, “it is certainly the case that his slow dismantling of his Culture-being reads with all the horrific melancholy of some account of the self-mutilation of a hermit” (Clute 1995d, 291–292), and it is indeed the case that we readers, Earthlings without Culture glued to the surface of a planet we may already have failed to husband, find it hard to be on his side in the face of what he has given up. The Arbitrary itself, while acknowledging him as sane in the face of Sma’s insistence that there’s something wrong with him (125), also points out the fallacy in his attitude toward humanity (a sort of reversed nurse’s complex; 129). And yet the Ship does acknowledge the validity of Linter’s point that there is an aspect to human life absent from Culture environments that can be described as beautiful precisely by virtue of—and despite—the raw, crude form of existence we have to labor under (129). Linter views this beauty in terms of the poetry of human struggle in the face of suffering and deprivation (he’s been to India, an experience that transfixed him; 104), and read in this light, his seeming suicide at the end of the story does come across to us more as an acknowledgement of the seriousness of his choice than as the behavior of a suicidal madman. We on Earth don’t have access to a General Contact Unit when our life is guttering, and Linter has chosen to live as one of us. His choice to also die as one of us, however tragic and seemingly pointless, possesses a warped nobility we can recognize if not necessarily applaud. In his way, he is as coherent to his system of belief as any of the Contact people onboard the departing Ship, and on the other side of the page, we readers can at the very least find respect in this strange character’s devotion to our, as it were, state of the art.
The one voice without apparent fallacies, the voice that, unlike the other three, never commits to a monolithic view of Earth and its inhabitants, is that of the Arbitrary. The Culture, John Clute writes, “is never so clearly defined as here [in The State of the Art] in its post-scarcity freedom, its Golden Rule equilibrium, its gaiety” (1995d, 292), and the primary facilitator of this lightness of being is the Mind residing inside the General Contact Unit. Upon reaching Earth, Sma tells Petrain, the Arbitrary begins to absorb every scrap of data on and about it, in every medium available and with absolute, perfect recall (86). The information the Ship shares with those onboard similar enough in body-type to go down and explore is only a microscopic portion of this total (81), and aside from Li, at no point in the story does Sma or anyone else even think of questioning the reality that it’s the Arbitrary who holds the most complete, most fully triangulated, most finely gauged and pervasively cross-referenced picture of Earth and humanity at that developmental stage. Sma may occasionally get angry at it, Li may try to exasperate it, and Linter may decide not to talk to it any longer, but these are nothing more than tiny tantrums in the face of the Mind’s all-encompassing intellect, its searing clarity tempered by a genuine concern for the suffering of others and lightened by frequent displays of—at times gallows—humor (114, 142). The measure of the Arbitrary’s commitment to doing the right thing by Earth also becomes the story’s most cogent statement of the Culture’s own dedication to doing the right thing by every civilization it encounters. At one point, a terminally frustrated Sma asks the Ship: “How certain do we have to be? How long must we wait? How long must we make them wait? Who elected us God?” (130). This is the Arbitrary’s reply:
Diziet … that question is being asked all the time, and put in as many different ways as we have the wit to devise (…) and that moral equation is being re-assessed every nanosecond of every day of every year, and every time we find some place like Earth—no matter what way the decision goes—we come closer to knowing the truth. But we can never be absolutely certain … I’m the smartest thing for a hundred light years’ radius, and by a factor of about a million (…) but even I can’t predict where a snooker ball’s going to end up after more than six collisions [131].
Nothing matters, and everything does. The snooker ball comment, small as its subject matter seems, is in fact the conceptual microcosm that contextualizes the calculations Contact undertakes at the macrocosmic level every time it encounters a civilization like Earth’s: the Arbitrary—and with it the Minds involved in the decision to contact or not—is looking at Earth as an immensely complex system of constantly colliding life trajectories, billions of them all at once, and while precedent, experience, and the enormous power of a quorum of posthuman AIs working away at the same problem do count for a lot, certainty doesn’t come into the equation. The beauty of Earth, which the Arbitrary construes as utility, “lies in being a living machine. It forces people to act and react. At that it is close to the theoretical limits of efficiency for a non-conscious system” (129). It takes a machine to recognize another, and the Arbitrary, when it looks at 1977 Earth, sees a sleeping titan, already powerful enough to wipe out everything on the planet if it stirs in the wrong direction, but already complex enough to give the Mind hope that, one day, the machinery will transcend into something possessed of awareness and, hopefully, of mercy. In the end, the Arbitrary is the kindest of all observers.
The State of the Art ends with the voice of another machine—Skaffen-Amtiskaw. Irritated at Sma’s attitude, the drone announces itself to Petrain and informs him that, since she wrote the whole document as a continuous chunk of text, it is the one who divided it into chapters and paragraphs and provided the titles for them. These titles, Skaffen-Amtiskaw writes, are also the names of General Contact Units manufactured by a factory complex called Infracaninophile (157). Loosely translated, the name means “Lover of the Underdog,” and it is far from the only metatextual commentary on the narrative we have just finished reading. Every other title/ship name constitutes an ironic foreshadowing of the contents of its chapter or paragraph—for example, the paragraph where Sma confronts the Arbitrary about the alterations it agreed to carry out on Linter is entitled God Told Me to Do It, the one in which Sma tours Cold-War Berlin is called Arrested Development, and the one where Linter first tells Sma about his decision to remain on Earth is Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality. Rather perversely, Skaffen-Amtiskaw titles Sma’s cover letter to Petrain Excuses And Accusations.
Also, the story is full of references to movies, songs, and literary works whose basic message serves as a running counterpoint to the narrative’s meaning-making machinery; for example, Sma reads both King Lear (86, 89) and Faust (125), two stories that address the issue of power from two diametrically opposite viewpoints—loss of power in Lear, acquisition of power in Faust—and both of which feature self-damaging, arguably not wholly sane characters. Moreover, when she talks with Linter in Paris, the television set is broadcasting a BBC adaptation of The Ambassadors, Henry James’ novel of the failed rescue of an American expatriate to France on the part of her sister’s fiancée. At the end of the novel, the would-be rescuer returns to the U.S., his mission unfulfilled. Other references involve the whole crew of the Arbitrary, who one night decide they’ll watch John Carpenter’s Dark Star (85), and the ship itself, who sends via postcard a request to the BBC’s World Service for David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (the request doesn’t get played, which completely cracks up the Arbitrary; 114–115). Then there’s Li, who one day suggests to Sma that she should take Linter to see The Man Who Fell to Earth (David Bowie again; 131), and after Li there’s Linter himself, who has grown so fond of Close Encounters of the Third Kind that, when Sma arrives in New York to meet him, she has to wait outside the theater where he’s finishing watching it for the seventh time (144–145).
In its concluding note, Skaffen-Amtiskaw also berates Sma for suggesting in her cover letter that its highly proactive regard for her safety is the result of a past act of excessive violence, in the wake of which Special Circumstances told the drone that safeguarding its human charge was the only thing between it and being “componented” (a Culture word for, as Use of Weapons will clarify, getting aggressively reduced to one’s component parts; 78). “My conscience is clear,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw writes at the end (157).
And then Use of Weapons begins right in medias res and from within the agonized rumblings of someone’s conscience (3–5). There’s a man, a mercenary, and he works for the Culture. He does their bidding if and when, in a Special Circumstances intervention in the life of another society, the time comes to do the things Culture people wouldn’t do, and he is very good at doing them. He calls himself Cheradenine Zakalwe, and inside he carries memories that won’t go away—terrible recollections of a great ship bristling with guns, a woman, a chair, and the maker of the chair, a man with two shadows. Throughout the novel, those images return over and over again to haunt his waking mind, their reoccurrence triggered by casual conjunctions of objects, people, and words out of which the same wounding pattern resurfaces with the insistence of something that hates (52, 70, 145–146, 283).
Initially convinced that the 1974 draft of Use of Weapons was unsalvageable, Banks reconsidered the fate of his prototypical non–Culture mercenary figure when Ken MacLeod, who had originally read that draft, asked to reread it ten years later:
So he came up with two suggestions … putting the climax of the book at the end—it had been in the middle. Because that’s where the structure said it had to be, and such is my blinkeredness this seemed totally radical when he suggested it. Though, of course, also completely impossible, because of the structure—but then he suggested this two-stream idea, with one strand going forward in time and the other going back, both leading to their own climax, so that you’d get the identity revelation at the end—where it always had been—and the whole thing with the besieged battleship and so on at the end as well, where it belonged [Melia 1994, 42].11
This two-stream structure constitutes the most fundamental trait of Use of Weapons. The plotline that goes forward in time, comprised of chapters numbered 1 through 14, tells what seems to be a relatively standard Special Circumstances story: Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw have to find Zakalwe, who after his latest job for the Culture has gone to ground, and bring him back to a star cluster called Voerenhutz. Forty years before, working with a man called Tsoldrin Beychae, Zakalwe had secured a peaceful political structure for the cluster, with Beychae as President. But Beychae is now retired, and those who inherited his position have pulled Voerenhutz back onto the brink of war. Sma needs to find Zakalwe, take him to Voerenhutz, and help him convince Beychae that he needs to get back into politics before the whole cluster erupts into total war (21–22). And Sma does find Zakalwe, who after several suitably kinetic adventures finds Beychae, who after a few more kinetics agrees, and the story ends in success. Voerenhutz is saved.
But right next to the forward-moving plotline is the backward-moving one, comprised of chapters numbered XIII to I. The two streams alternate with each other chapter by chapter, so that chapter 1 is followed by chapter XIII, 2 by XII, and so on. This plotline tells the story of What Happened to Cheradenine Zakalwe, and its regressive nature precludes the chance of betterment. Unlike Gurgeh in Player, Zakalwe doesn’t have the option to grow up and change. In fact, his predicament is similar in some aspects to Horza’s from Consider Phlebas: like his predecessor, Zakalwe is trapped without chance of escape into the flow of his own life, although Horza’s imprisonment is shaped by ignorance and miscalculation while Zakalwe’s is determined by a weight of incurable guilt. He has done something unbearable, and the only other person alive in the galaxy who knows about it is also the one whose forgiveness he insists on seeking, without hope. “Livueta, say you will forgive me,” he thinks at one point early on (52), but we don’t find out who Livueta is for another one hundred and fifty pages, and when we do it’s in the middle of yet another regressive iteration of Zakalwe’s struggle with his conscience, whose climax we approach helplessly. When we finally reach that climax, when we find out who he is and what he’s done, we’re left without the chance to either heal or curse him, because the story is over and the weight remains, forever. Livueta will not forgive.
But then again, it’s not for us—or even for Zakalwe—to learn the lesson “conveyed by the unerring dovetail shape of this book. It is Diziet—her infrequently monitored consciousness ultimately defines the very warp and woof of Use of Weapons—who must embrace the significance of the conundrum. The book stops … before she can come to a resolution; but premonitions and echoes of the angel-work she must face healingly restructure the entire text in the mind’s eye, make it the best tale of the Culture yet; and the most useful” (Clute 1995a, 232–233). Banks had vastly rewritten Use of Weapons before publishing it, but the original impulse that had prompted its creation in the first place remained. It is, first and foremost, a Culture novel—the original Culture novel, in fact, the one Banks had written to contextualize the moral opacity of his protagonist. “I wanted to have him fighting on the side of genuine good,” he said in 1994. “I thought, ‘What sort of society do we need?’ and out of that came the Culture. That gave me the chance to answer all the questions I had about the right-wing American space-opera I had been used to reading and which had been around since the 1930s” (Wilson 1994, n.p.).
We’re back to the problem Sma faced in The State of the Art, and it is again Sma who must return to it one hundred and fifteen years after asking that question—“Who elected us God?”—for the first time. She is in the hospital room where, at the end of Use of Weapons, Livueta tells her the truth about the man she knows as Cheradenine Zakalwe, whom Sma herself had originally recruited into SC (292–294). And because after that scene there are two codas in which we get to see what Sma has decided to do next—how she continues her angel-work, as Clute put it—the workings of her conscience become once again the filter through which we view the end result of the Culture’s good intentions. As Banks had pointed out in his 1989 interview with David Garnett, the Culture just doesn’t raise “maniacal Rambo types,” so when one is needed it has to outsource. But how does that change the morality of intervention? What difference does it make to those on the receiving end of the dirty work? What happens to utopia when it gets into the mud along with everyone else, if only with the societal equivalent of a fingertip?
Zakalwe himself, now hoping that working for SC will ensure he’ll be doing some good (261), asks Sma the same questions, and her reply is every bit as honest as he has a right to expect. We’ve heard it before, too—it’s a rewording of what the Arbitrary had told her when she’d been doing the asking: it’s impossible to know for sure. The Culture has been doing more thinking on the score than anyone else, and it does have data to back up its convictions, but ultimately there’s no such thing as certainty, and there are always ethical positions opposite its own (261–262). The role of Special Circumstances is, in this sense, prediction-opaque:
They dealt in the intrinsically untoward, where rules were forged as you went along and were never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things nothing could be known, or predicted, or even judged with any real certainty. It all sounded very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end it came down to people and problems [50].
And Zakalwe does engage with people during his orientation days onboard the General Systems Vehicle Size Isn’t Everything—which, despite wearing that name, is eighty kilometers long (250). Spurred by Sma to be on his own for a while and experience Culture life, he gets to know who makes up this society that calls itself the good guys and claims to only want to help. He also receives a technical introduction because, where Minds and drones are concerned, tech is people. Thus, Zakalwe hears about the force field-based technology that makes it possible for things the size of the GSV to hold together, about the exotic materials that go into the making of a ship’s faster-than-light engines, and about the nature of AIs, especially the Minds that control everything to the point where, to his disquiet, he finds out that there are no main bridges, control rooms, flight decks, or for that matter crew onboard the GSV. There are only passengers (250–251, 255–256).
There’s more. If the exotic physics and the essentially magical technology tax Zakalwe’s sense of the plausible, the social arrangement tests his moral boundaries. “Look; this table’s clean,” a man tells him at a restaurant. Most places he has seen are staffed by non-sentient machines that take care of everything, but every now and then one such place will have a human staff composed of people who “seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while” (251). The two men fall into a conversation, and Zakalwe learns that his interlocutor usually works on comparative studies of alien religions; however, because of the constant process of evaluation, contextualization, discovery of new samples, and reevaluation of the old samples in the light of the new, the work is never finished. “But … when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement,” the man tells him, and when Zakalwe comments that, in the grand scheme of things, cleaning a table counts for little, this is how the other responds:
But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give me pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway … people die; stars die; universes die. What is an achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure [251–252].
In the man’s comments lies an echo of Li’ndane’s point about things being there when he is rather than because he is, which implies a system of values that has retained a sense of what matters precisely because it has discovered that nothing does intrinsically. There’s no God in Banks’ universe, no objective network of meaning transcending the bondage of the moment, so the pain of sentience—which the Culture has managed to reduce to its maximum allowable extent—consists in the struggle to laboriously invest the moment with meaning, knowing that such investment remains only as long as we do. Most times, our lives fade out after what, in cosmic terms, is a vanishingly short timespan, and no one notices. If some do notice and carry our legacy along with them, one day their lives will fade out, and so on in perpetuity until perpetuity itself vanishes, and all is silence. So the people of the Culture enjoy the time they have when they have it, and take pleasure in the things they accomplish—from cleaning a table to helping whole civilizations along—because who will if they don’t? At another point, Zakalwe asks a woman working on the still skeletal hull of a brand new GCU in the General Systems Vehicle’s Mainbay if a machine wouldn’t be able to perform her function better and more efficiently:
“Why, of course!” she laughed.
“Then why do you do it?”
“It’s fun. You see one of those big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think; I helped build that. The fact that a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was you who did it” [254].
Zakalwe spends a few days in the company of these people who don’t seem to take anything too seriously and everything more seriously than they should. He walks through the vast spaces of the GSV, never seeing the same place twice and never returning to a previously trodden path. When he needs food and drink, he orders them at bars and restaurants, and when he needs to sleep he asks the nearest drone, who directs him to the closest free room (252). He can do whatever he wants, request whatever he wants, and receive it without the need to exchange goods, money, or services. Again, there are echoes of Li’ndane’s speech in the Arbitrary: from the point of view of both Earth and Zakalwe’s place of origin, everyone in the Culture is at once fabulously rich because they have access to everything and utterly poor because no one owns anything. The rooms Zakalwe sleeps in will be someone else’s the next night, and those in which other people slept before will be his to utilize for as long as he wants—in a post-scarcity economy, everything is available to everyone. He could desire a house of his own, just like Gurgeh’s Ikroh in The Player of Games, and one would be built for him without question or expectation of payment. If anyone else wanted that same house, another just like it would be built for them as well; space is no more at a premium than resources are. And should he wish, Zakalwe could participate in the building of his house, thus slowing down the process because machines would be able to do it more quickly and efficiently—but it’d be fun.
Zakalwe also takes part in dream-state virtual games with other people linked with him through machinery he doesn’t understand (252), and has plenty of excellent sex thanks to Culture genofixing (259–260). And all along, all through this neverending carousel of what should be innocent, guilt-free pleasures, the memories of the chair and the woman and the chairmaker press against the boundaries of his mind, never far away and never less than excruciating. Also, he doesn’t find himself quite at home inside the GSV; the mores of Culture people—or rather, the lack of same—bother him more than he’s prepared to admit (253, 255). In a way, Zakalwe does have something in common with Gurgeh: like Gurgeh, he is a fish-out-of-water character through whose eyes we get to look at a place so content with itself that describing it without some sort of behavioral reagent would be dull. Gurgeh acts as that behavioral reagent in Player because he starts out as a contrarian among his own people, while Zakalwe’s reagent role stems from the scarcity-system morals he brings with him as an alien.12 And indeed, it takes another alien to explain the Culture to him in a way he can functionally accept. When he meets her in a café he finds out that she is a fellow Special Circumstance agent, and when he asks her what the relation of SC to the Culture at large is, she tells him that “it is in layers…. A tiny core of Special Circumstances, a shell of Contact, and a vast chaotic sphere of everything else…. But in the end, you will never know them, because you will be like me, in Special Circumstances, and only ever know them as the great, irresistible force behind you; people like you and I are the edge; you will in time come to feel like a tooth on the biggest saw in the galaxy” (257). The alien, whose name is Chori (259), also gives Zakalwe a piece of advice he later fails to heed—he shouldn’t expect to be told everything about his assignments. Should he insist in being told the whole truth all the time, SC would acquiesce, but then they wouldn’t be able to utilize his services as often as they otherwise could. “Sometimes they need you not to know you are fighting on the wrong side,” Chori tells him (258).
In the end, introduced to the mainstream of Culture life and warned about his upcoming career as a tooth on the saw blade, Zakalwe returns to Sma and accepts her offer of employment. But that was decades ago and two hundred pages further into the novel; now, in the present-moving-toward-the-future plotline and eighty pages in, Sma is faced with her erstwhile charge’s mutiny. After decades of not being told the truth, and in the wake of an operation that ended in disaster, Zakalwe has had enough; he kills the knife missile tasked with keeping him under observation and, with the money he received for his previous jobs, sets up shop in an open cluster called Crastalier, where he decides it’s high time he “started trying to be a good guy in his own right” and creates his own private Contact section (86). The results are catastrophic, so that the Culture now finds itself trying to stop the onset of war on two star clusters instead of one (83–86).
The basic problem, as the narrative repeatedly makes clear, is that the Culture hired Zakalwe to be precisely the sort of man he’s trying to stop being, the one who did that awful thing with the girl and the chair and the chairmaker and Livueta who won’t forgive him. SC is using him for good, but not his own, and the calculations that go into the Culture’s ecumenical intervention policies are far enough above the heads of non–Culture people that his actions as—it often turns out in the aftermath—the one who was fighting on the wrong side keep wounding his conscience. “They teach you that sort of stuff in early school, in the Culture,” Sma tells Zakalwe when she addresses his botched attempt at improving Crastalier. “It was all thought through long ago; it’s part of our history, part of our upbringing. That’s why what you did would look insane to a school-kid…. You could have changed your life; you don’t have to live the way you do; you could have joined the Culture,” at which point he would have learned the same things Culture people have learned (131). But Zakalwe won’t join and won’t change who he is because he can’t—not before Livueta forgives him, this version of him, the one that can’t stand to look at chairs, and that she’ll never do. So, stuck in a loop out of which he can’t escape, forgetful of Chori’s warning, and frustrated in his attempts at doing some good of his own, he grows bitter at SC’s handling of his services:
You’ve also lied to me … sent me on damn fool missions where I was on the opposite side from the one I thought I was on, had me fight for incompetent aristos I’d gladly have strangled, in wars where I didn’t know you were backing both sides … very nearly got me killed a dozen times or more [132].
The Voerenhutz mission therefore begins under evil auspices, and Sma, whom Zakalwe at once horrifies and fascinates, spends the duration worrying about her charge, wondering whether he may not go off the rails like he’d done on that last debacle and calling him often to make sure he’s not planning to carry out his duties in an overly violent fashion.13 In this, Skaffen-Amtiskaw is of little help because Sma doesn’t fully trust it either. Early on in Use of Weapons, it transpires that, despite the drone’s prim assurance at the end of The Sate of the Art that “my conscience is clear,” Sma’s claim of past misdeeds on its part is accurate. About twenty years before Crastalier, Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw had been assigned to a fairly remote, barbarous world. One day, confronted by slavers who believed Sma’s skin color would fetch a high price, Skaffen-Amtiskaw reacted with overwhelming force, massacring the entire party of men in such a bloody fashion that two girls they had already captured ended up being more scared of the drone than of the slavers (39–42). Furious at the machine, disgusted at the pleasure it clearly felt in performing those actions, Sma told it that it would either use minimal force in the future or be reduced to slag (42). And indeed the drone has been using minimum force ever since, but for much the same reasons Zakalwe can’t forget the chair and everything that came with it, Sma can’t forget what happened on that planet (86). Somebody’s conscience has to ache over deeds of that kind, and when she realizes that Skaffen-Amtiskaw’s is uttering nary a peep, she takes on the burden the drone should be carrying.
Thus, Sma is caught between two sentients of the same basic nature. Zakalwe and Skaffen-Amtiskaw resemble each other more than either resembles her, and the machine does display a singularly cynical, abrasive attitude throughout the novel, not to mention a rather nasty sense of humor—in fact, there are various behavioral similarities between Skaffen-Amtiskaw and Mawhrin-Skel from Player, except that Mawhrin-Skel was a persona, a mask invented to perform a role; Skaffen-Amtiskaw is really there in all its discomfiting glee.14 It is also the first to find out the truth about the man when, toward the end of the novel, it and Sma carry a mortally wounded Zakalwe into the hospital where Livueta, now old, works as a nurse. Zakalwe has carried out his assignment and Voerenhutz is on the mend, but a side action in which SC involves him in the immediate wake of the original mission’s completion once again places him in fighting-for-the-wrong-side circumstances. Shattered at being the victim of yet another machination, Zakalwe walks out in the middle of a battle without carrying weapons or seeking concealment. Grievously wounded but refusing treatment, he has Sma and the drone take him to Livueta to once again beg her forgiveness before he dies of what is essentially a complicated form of suicide (another point of contact with The State of the Art: Dervley Linter, also wounded in battle, makes essentially the same decision).
On the way, Zakalwe tells the drone and the woman a story that the steady regression of chapters has already made clear to us—almost; there’s only one piece missing (169–176, 178–185, 338–350). It’s the story of four children: Cheradenine Zakalwe, his sisters Livueta and Darckense, and their cousin Elethiomel. They grow up together through the course of many years, playing and studying in a great summer estate owned by the Zakalwe family until the onset of war puts Cheradenine and Elethiomel on opposing sides—each is the supreme commander of one of the two armies. Toward the end of the war, when Cheradenine’s forces have all but won, Elethiomel kidnaps Darckense and carries her onboard a giant dreadnought-type battleship called Staberinde15 that he then proceeds to becalm in the very harbor of his enemy’s capital city. Elethiomel can’t escape, but Cheradenine doesn’t dare attack for fear of what might happen to his sister. It’s Elethiomel that breaks the deadlock by having his men send Cheradenine and Livueta a chair:
It was small and white, and as he [Cheradenine] took a couple of more paces forwards … he saw that it had been made out of the bones of Darckense Zakalwe…. They had tanned her skin and made a little cushion out of it [349–350].
The sight breaks Cheradenine. Unseeing, incapable of coherent thought, he withdraws into his stateroom and shoots himself, at which point “the besieged forces round the Staberinde broke out … while the surgeons were still fighting for his life” (350), and narrowly lose the ensuing battle.
This Zakalwe tells Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw, but he withholds the final piece of information. It’s Livueta who provides it, by which point the drone has already guessed. Angry with SC for intruding into her life, Livueta Zakalwe tells the two Culture agents that her brother Cheradenine had died that day; the surgeons had been unable to save him. The man they know as Zakalwe is in fact Elethiomel, who after the battle for the Staberinde had taken on his cousin’s name (363). Thus the main body of the novel ends, with Livueta leaving the room, Sma petrified by the revelation, and Skaffen-Amtiskaw trying to reduce a massive aneurysm in Zakalwe/Elethiomel’s brain, “engrossed in its struggle to do good” (363).16
Buried about a third of the way into Use of Weapons, there’s a passage that perfectly encapsulates both the novel’s title and the nature of Sma’s conundrum. The passage begins with Zakalwe staring out at a steady wall of rain, upon whose seemingly unbroken surface he projects the shapes that haunt his mind; he sees the ship, the chair, and the man with two shadows, and then, heralded by the sequence that preceded it, “that which cannot be seen”;
A concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end … the method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon [145–146].
Like The Player of Games, Use of Weapons is a polyvalent title.17 On the surface, Zakalwe/Elethiomel is the eponymous user of weapons: his philosophy of usage, perfected through the decades since the day he utilized the body of Darckense Zakalwe as one such implement in the war against his cousin, has made him supremely adept at the art of warfare. He is therefore of value to Special Circumstances, which, through two other weapons in its own employ—Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw—uses him; SC is another user of weapons, then, and to the extent that the Culture created SC to negotiate the moral fringe territories, the Culture is yet another user and SC yet another weapon. Everyone becomes a wargamer in this novel—wargamer is another name for weapons user—and everyone practices, with greater or lesser degrees of success, the art of utilizing everything and everyone at their disposal as an offensive implement. Thus, everyone and everything is also a weapon, from the plasma gun that Zakalwe takes to Voerenhutz to Zakalwe himself, from a knife missile to Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw, from SC to the Culture. Everyone uses, everyone is used, and the damages multiply as usage intensifies. Every user of weapons in this story has an ambivalent relationship with their tools: the Culture at large employs SC but doesn’t really want to talk about its existence—it behaves too much like one of the barbarians, even if it’s all in the name of doing good; Sma utilizes Skaffen-Amtiskaw but doesn’t always like doing so—she can’t forget the time the drone used its weapons; Sma and the drone use Zakalwe on behalf of SC but don’t much trust him—too volatile and driven by feelings he can’t control; and Zakalwe himself employs everything and everyone he finds whether they want to or not, which is why his life is made up of ashes—everything he touches burns up with usage.
The conundrum Sma has to face on behalf not only of herself, SC, Skaffen-Amtiskaw, or even Zakalwe, but also on the reader’s, consists in the reality that to use a weapon is to be used by it; every handle is also the barrel, every grip is also the blade, every detonator is also the bomb, and blood falls on everyone. “Who elected us God?” Sma had asked the Arbitrary one hundred and fifteen years before; the Mind had replied that there are no certainties, and that’s what she’d told Zakalwe when he’d asked if she could guarantee he’d be doing good works. But one day SC loses Zakalwe when he begins feeling that, within the larger picture of doing good, he’s always playing the part of the one doing bad—hence his abortive attempt at fixing things on Crastalier. There are shades of us on Earth here, of governments and espionage agencies using fundamentally uncontrollable assets who, years after they’ve ceased to be useful, resurface as enemies, criminals or terrorists who use the skills they were taught against others or against their former employers. Again, to use a weapon is to be used by it in turn.
So, once she finds out what kind of weapon she has brought into SC’s fold and what kind of ammunition that weapon had once used, what’s Sma’s response to the conundrum? In the face of Zakalwe/Elethiomel’s sins, how does she continue her angel-work, if at all?
The structure of Use of Weapons is possibly the most complex among the Culture novels. Aside from the twin-stream plotlines and their partitioning into three main sections (“The Good Soldier,” “An Outing,” and “Remembrance”), two sets of inserts frame the main body of the text, one before and one after it. The set before is comprised of an unpublished poem written by Sma and of a prologue. The poem, entitled “Slight Mechanical Destruction,” is about Zakalwe, and from textual evidence it’s retrospectively clear that Sma wrote it after the events in Use of Weapons:
Savage child; the throwback from wayback
Expedient because
Utopia spawns few warriors.
But you knew your figure cut a cipher
Through every crafted plan
And playing our game for real
Saw through our plumbing jobs
And wayward glands
To a meaning of your own, in bones [n.p.].
The meaning of the last line won’t become clear until we’re done reading the book, which means that Sma could only have written it after she herself discovered the secrets in Zakalwe’s past. Also, at the end of the poem there’s a bibliographical note indicating that Sma translated the poem into Earth English and gave the year of composition as 115 on the Khmer Calendar (n.p.). That she should connect Zakalwe’s life to Kampuchea and the Khmer Rouge is already a bad sign, but the other interesting part is the date itself—115, which is also the number of years that separate the events narrated in The State of the Art from those in Use of Weapons. Also, if we backtrack along the timeline of the Kingdom of Cambodia to the horrors of Pol Pot’s regime and the beginning of Year Zero, that gives us AD 1977, the time Sma was on Earth with Contact in The State of the Art. In the story, she refers with horror to the events of Year Zero (128),18 and it’s likely that, in the wake of her discovery of Zakalwe’s true identity, she has connected one set of trauma-laden recollections with another. As the Staberinde and the chair haunt Zakalwe’s waking hours, so Earth haunts Sma’s.
The second insert is the prologue in which we meet Zakalwe in the flesh for the first time, and for the first time glimpse in his mind the image of the chair (5). The events in the prologue—another SC mission—are unconnected to either of the sequences in the text, and from the overall tone it’s likely that they are taking place in the aftermath of what transpires in Use of Weapons. This probability is further strengthened once we get to the end of the story and read the second set of framing inserts, which begins with an epilogue (367–368) that continues where the prologue left off. Zakalwe and his associate, a man named Cullis, are still on mission, still working to place a nuke at a particular spot along a road where an army is supposed to be marching. At the end of the epilogue/prologue, the nuke goes off without a hitch.
There are two more inserts. The first is another poem, this time written by a poetess named Shias Engin with whom Zakalwe had had an intense liaison during one of his periods of “vacation” from SC (109–120). The poem, which the bibliographical information at the bottom indicates as belonging to the volume of “Juvenilia and Discarded Drafts” of Engin’s “Complete and Collected Works (Posthumous Edition),” is entitled “Zakalwe’s Song” (369–371), and the song is a melody of breakage and rift, of sundering between souls that cannot ultimately communicate to each other.
The third and final insert isn’t about Zakalwe at all—it’s about Sma. Banks writes here as if he were beginning the prologue to a brand-new novel entitled States of War, and accordingly the brief text resets the page numbering back to 1. In it, Sma walks up to a young, legless man in the gardens of a rest home for crippled veterans; the name and location of the planet aren’t specified. The man, whom Sma addresses as Mr. Escoerea, is a decorated war hero, and as is the case for many such heroes he is disillusioned and embittered by the conflict that cost him not only his legs (he’d tried to pull a comrade out of the way of an onrushing tank), but his whole family as well. “These I’d trade you,” Escoerea tells Sma, brandishing his medals; “all of them for a pair of shoes I could wear” (2). Her reply concludes the novel:
“The deal with the medals and the shoes; fair enough…. Except you can keep the medals.” She reached into the basket, took out the clippers and stuck them into the earth under the plants, then put her hands, clasped, on the front of the seat. “Now, Mr. Escoerea…. How would you like a proper job?” [3].
And the neverending struggle to try to do good never ends. After the hospital, after Zakalwe and Elethiomel and Livueta, after the poem she wrote in two languages but never showed anyone, Sma is acquiring another weapon for SC’s arsenal. She still believes that the Culture stands for better things, and still allows herself to be used as a weapon, knowing that, somewhere else, Zakalwe is also still being used. She knows the truth of the conundrum now, and she agonizes plenty over it, but that agonizing is part of a future-oriented decision-making process, not the aftermath guilt of someone who hadn’t thought things through before acting. She is of the Culture, yes, but she’s also a citizen of the fringe, the place where utopia meets its twin, where the morally correct choice reshapes itself after every iteration and rulebooks are largely nonexistent. To the list of her reflections on what happened in Use of Weapons we should also add The State of the Art, since she wrote her memoir after the events in the novel. Seen from this perspective, her thoughts on Earth circa 1977 acquire a whole other interpretive layer, as do those of Skaffen-Amtiskaw in its editorial interpolations.
Up to and including Use of Weapons—and, in truth, a couple of novels beyond it—Banks’ Culture works received little or no mention from literary critics (his non-genre novels, by contrast, had already begun attracting a certain amount of attention). There were plenty of reviews in the SF magazines of the time—in the United States, Locus reviewed all four stories, and in the UK both Interzone and White Dwarf did their part. John Clute took care of the Interzone reviews, which have already been referenced, quoted, leant on, used as excuses, or otherwise pilfered in this work. Of all the reviewers, Clute was the one most willing to take Banks up on his utopian project and seriously engage his sustained problematization of the morals of contact and intervention. Next to him was David Langford, who reviewed Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games in his monthly “Critical Mass” column in White Dwarf, which at the time was still primarily a magazine of role-playing, wargaming, and fantasy/SF rather than the house organ for Games Workshop’s products it later became. Langford, always with his tongue in his cheek, treated both novels primarily as fun, hugely destructive romps through the furniture of space opera, although he was, like Clute, irritated at Banks’ use of absurdly long, dictionary-in-a-blender names, and he did agree with Clute on the society that provided the model for the Empire in Player: Langford described Azad as “an intricate system of dog-eat-dog viciousness, surpassing even the legendary horrors of the City of London in the barbaric era of Thatcher” (2002, 264).
Besides these reviews, plus a number of interviews with fantasy/SF magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, nothing happened in the way of so-called serious criticism.19 There were only two exceptions: the first was an article by Lawrence Person in the same February 1990 issue of Science Fiction Eye where Michael Cobley interviewed Banks, and the second was a review of/essay on Use of Weapons that Colin Greenland penned for issue #50 of Foundation (Autumn 1990). Person’s article is at once a critical introduction to the universe of the Culture and a rundown of the three Culture stories published thus far—Use of Weapons was still a few months away at the time. Aside from mischaracterizing the relationship between Contact and Special Circumstances—Contact investigates other civilizations while SC “acts as CIA, FBI, and SS, all rolled into one” (33)—Person does a good job of succinctly describing the Culture’s basic shape. He also correctly seizes on one of Banks’ great writing strengths as a key factor in the differentiation of the Culture stories from the basic space-opera template: Person’s emphasis is on character development, which ensures that those characters, “both major and minor, are sharply drawn and well realized, their actions and attitudes entirely believable within the multi-textured webs of their outlook and motivation” (33). As examples, he picks Horza and the Free Company—Balveda and drone included—from Phlebas and Gurgeh from Player (33–34).
Person’s criticism of Banks’ first novel addresses the same concern with unnecessary verbiage Clute had expressed three years before, which is par for the course, but his other argument is more problematic: after describing the Culture as a “utopian state in the ‘third stage’ of communism (i.e., the one where Marx predicted the state would ‘wither away’),” Person goes on to explain that his issue with this notion is twofold:
Personally, I rank the plausibility of third stage communism right up there with the Tooth Fairy, but a more significant problem is that we are given very little idea of how The Culture actually works, a problem that will crop up more frequently in the later books [34].
The good thing about this passage is that, like Clute, Person takes Banks at his word—there would be no need to worry about plausibility if the arguments behind the descriptions weren’t serious. The bad thing is that Person’s complaint about the lack of an idea of how the Culture works in The Player of Games and The State of the Art is inaccurate: aside from the nearly one hundred pages Player spends on Chiark Orbital, and discounting for a moment the fact that the Arbitrary in State is as much a Culture habitat as it is a ship (it does spend months in deep space, keeping three hundred Contact people not just alive and functioning, but also happy and contented by the Culture’s standards of comfort), everyone in both stories keeps talking about the Culture’s shape, nature, and function. Gurgeh describes the Culture’s social setup to Azadian authorities, who are more than willing to compare it to Azad’s own (unfavorably, of course), and he has plenty of discussions with Flere-Imsaho and the Limiting Factor that address the reasons why Contact first and SC later took an interest in the Empire. Sma and Linter and Li and the Arbitrary, for their part, do nothing but discuss the Culture through the lens of Earth’s situation. Ultimately, every one of Banks’ stories is as much a probing of the Culture’s own definition of itself as it is an exposé of the dystopian systems it comes in to fix, and as we will see in the next chapter, this twin process of questioning can be described as the most fundamental trait of the Culture not so much as an actual social model, but rather as the argument for one, because in the end this is what utopia is first and foremost—an argument.
As for Person’s plausibility problem, two things need to be said about it: first, Marx’s formulation of the third stage in a communist system hadn’t taken into consideration either a post-scarcity economy or a posthuman level of technological advancement, both of which Banks considered indispensable for achieving a society that could aspire to utopian status (again, see the next chapter). Second, the issue of plausibility is, for Person, intimately bound with an issue of moral credibility, which connects his article to Colin Greenland’s review in Foundation. Person’s reading of The State of the Art was largely negative for a variety of reasons, but the most glaring in his eyes was the Culture’s shaky moral ground:
It’s not that what his characters are saying is wrong (Yes Iain, racism, war and genocide are bad. So what else is new?), it’s just that … even were I able to give The Culture any sort of credence, their participation in a war that killed roughly 851.4 billion sentient beings despite the fact that no portion of their territory was ever threatened, I find their condemnation of war and killing hypocritical at best. Having The Culture talk about the failings of our own world is like Luke Skywalker condemning racism, or Spider-man taking on the problem of the homeless: the medium is inherently unsuitable to the message [35].
Never mind the glibness of the authorial voice: why is Luke Skywalker an unsuitable medium for addressing racism, and why can’t Spider-Man take on the problem of the homeless? By the same token, the notion that the Culture’s treading of a morally ambiguous path makes it an unsuitable platform for discussing racism, war, and genocide is inaccurate. Even if Banks had truly meant to set up the Culture as a hypocritical, secretly imperialistic straw-man system to knock down—which he pointedly didn’t do—that setup would have been the perfect chance to discuss those problems precisely for that reason. Of equal validity is the idea of having the kind of discussion Banks actually did have in every one of his Culture novels: an earnest argument about the moral fringe territories and the ethics of intervention on the part of a society that retains its view of itself as a Good Place despite engaging with the Bad Ones.
On this score, Greenland in his Foundation piece echoes Person, although the two arguments don’t fully overlap. For one, Greenland mostly discusses Use of Weapons, which he likes and credits with being the M-Banks novel that finally figured out how to use the medium of space opera “to display proper moral and political complexity”—unlike the three previous stories, which he considers to be at least partly unsuccessful early tries (90). Secondly, he displays no difficulty in accepting the premise of Banks’ post-scarcity utopia as plausible, and thirdly he understands the relationship between the Culture, Contact, and SC better than Person (90). His review of Use of Weapons correctly reads The State of the Art as a preamble to the action in the novel, and makes it clear that we should read the two stories together (90–91, 92).
And yet, Greenland too misreads some fundamental aspects of Banks’ argument, partly out of an assumption that the really good bits of Use of Weapons are the ones that most closely resemble Banks’ no-M work (92–93) and that the space-opera bits are “merry, wobbly nonsense” (93).20 While discussing State, for example, he writes:
How the Culture came to be, and how it actually works, politically and economically, has not yet been examined. Use of Weapons establishes that it never should be. The intergalactic commune is not a place. It is a device, a pretext, a common property Banks has added to the science fiction conjuring set. Maps are not available [91].
This assertion is, once again, inaccurate, although it is not Greenland’s fault that most of the stories addressing the specifics of the Culture’s birth were still in the future at the time. What is his fault is the inability to see that the Culture is not just a device, and that it is anything but a pretext. We have already looked at the interviews, and we’ve read the novels thus far. We can accuse Banks of falling short of his objectives in making his arguments, although that would be unfair, but we cannot maintain that his allegiance as a writer did not really belong to the society he had been building in his mind since 1974. Banks means what he says and his argument is genuine, devoid of hidden deconstructive agendas. That the Culture’s behavior deserves to be subject to scrutiny isn’t under discussion, and the reason why it’s not under discussion is that Banks has the Culture itself do most of the scrutinizing. From Fal N’geestra to Sma to the Arbitrary to Gurgeh and so on, a fundamental part of doing angel-work is, for Culture personnel, to perform this work on themselves and their own society first. Greenland uses as proof of what he sees as Banks’ deconstructive attitude a passage about two-thirds of the way into Use of Weapons. In this passage, which has already been discussed above, Zakalwe, freshly returned from his exploration of Culture life onboard the Size Isn’t Everything, asks Sma whether she can guarantee he’d be doing good works. Greenland quotes her reply, with subsequent commentary:
“We deal in the moral equivalent of black holes,” explains one of its [the Culture’s] servitors, “where the normal laws—the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe—break down; beyond those metaphysical event horizons.” Anyone who does not recognize the jazzy metaphor as pernicious cant is probably reading the wrong author, and Use of Weapons proves it [90].
This does sound like pernicious cant, and one may be tempted to agree with Greenland unless one happened to read the whole two pages in which Zakalwe and Sma’s argument takes place (261–262), at which point the added context would go a long way toward redeeming her rhetorical flourish. Also, simply describing Sma as one of the Culture’s “servitors” robs her character of the role it actually plays in the story. But even if the words Greenland quoted had been the only pertinent ones on that page, why use them and not, for example, those on page 50 (quoted earlier in this chapter) in which Zakalwe remembers Sma’s words under a considerably richer light? Contrast this approach with Faren Miller’s in her Locus reviews of the four Culture novels: Miller awards Consider Phlebas a generous, flattering assessment as a “splendid, rip-roaring adventure by an author who’s clearly at home in the genre and well equipped to make the most of it” (1987, 13), and she’s not in the least bothered by the longueurs Clute and Person zeroed in on. As for The Player of Games, Miller praises the novel’s reconfiguring of “hoary sf concepts—the game for ultimate stakes, the barbaric space empire, eccentric machine minds—and com[ing] up with a novel of genuine depth and beauty … [whose] hints and glimpses are as seductively evocative as Hesse’s Glass Bead Game” (1988, 17). But it’s in her evaluation of The State of the Art and Use of Weapons that Miller displays the understanding of Banks’ intentions for the Culture series that escaped both Greenland and Person: her review of Use of Weapons correctly focuses on the series’ presentation of “a civilization which commands a vast extent of space and time without turning into a clichéd galactic empire. The Culture is not ponderously, decadently neo–Roman or neo–Chinese, not blandly utopian or blatantly imperialistic. It can interact with less sophisticated systems in a great number of ways, from diplomacy to conventional warfare to gamesmanship to subtle, sometimes sneaky, sometimes daffy manipulations.” The drama at the heart of Use of Weapons, Miller correctly writes, is the deployment of the Culture’s virtually infinite resources and intellectual power “to explore a realm where even its sophistication may falter: the depths of a man’s heart” (1990, 15–17).
And finally, there’s Miller’s review of The State of the Art, in which she assesses the Culture and its ecumenical good works in terms easily applicable to the other three novels:
This isn’t the Star Trek gang time-tripping back to San Francisco to save the whales. The explorers from the Arbitrary move unseen, go everywhere, absorb all the brutality and raw vigor of humanity, and are not harmed—unless they wish to be. The arch tone of the ‘Culture’ books, with their sassy drones, impertinent footnotes, and absurdly titled ships, should not be mistaken for escapism. In The State of the Art, Banks confronts the troubled Earth head-on. Rediscovering ourselves as the Culture discovers us … we find reason for both admiration and despair. Can the planet survive? We’ll have to live out our own sequels to begin to learn the answers [1989, 13].
Obviously, one does not have to agree with Miller or Clute and disagree with Greenland or Person. Wherever one’s evaluation of the merits of the Culture stories falls, the opinions recorded above—as well as the opinions presented in this very book—are arguments, no more or less. The problem is that, through no fault of Clute, Miller, Person, or Greenland’s, the reviews of SF novels in “popular” magazines did not have then and do not have now the same weight as a piece published in academically accredited literary journals like Foundation. All the voices mustered in this chapter should have fed into a community of discourse within which they would have had equal weight, but it didn’t happen that way. Like Person before him, Greenland took as a given that Banks’ deconstructive attitude toward the traditional form of space opera also extended to the Culture itself, and that at the end of the day he turned everything to ashes, the Culture along with everything else. This was simply untrue, but unfortunately, as we will see further along, this view gradually took root in academic circles.