At the beginning of her 2005 essay on Excession, Farah Mendlesohn comments on the rise of space opera from SF’s “most juvenile, immature canvas” to “the cutting edge of the genre” (556). Mendlesohn here channels a comment from a 2003 article by John Clute in which he argued that the advocacy for a specific future typical of classic science fiction was now gone, along with that same future—the onset of the information age had seen to that (65). If that is indeed true, Mendlesohn writes, then it makes sense that space opera, “the form that departs most enthusiastically from that rationalized future” (556), should have established for itself a position of preeminence starting at the end of the 1980s and continuing into the beginning of the 21st century. The SF of that decade had been characterized by a good deal of pessimism and ennui, one of the results of Cyberpunk’s position as the dominant voice within the genre, and space opera contributed to remedying them precisely by virtue of its perceived lightness:
Cyberpunk was in many ways a betrayal of science fiction: it was pessimistic (postnuclear novels assumed human resilience), it accepted the inevitable victory of the corporatist agenda for the world even when railing against it, and it turned away from the outward-bound project that was SF and into the mind…. Space opera had never pretended to be plausible … but it celebrated the human, and its very lack of concern for a realizable future offered a counterbalance to the all too predictable vision of global decay [556].
Since the end of the 1980s, and more precisely since the publication of Consider Phlebas itself, space opera has been smuggling large amounts of serious discourse under the guise of a romp through space, as harmless as it is implausible. In the case of writers like Banks and those who influenced him (M. John Harrison and Brian Aldiss in particular), this serious discourse is also concealed—and at the same time foregrounded—through the use of sophisticated language, intricate plots, and complex thematic layers. The emphasis is on space opera as a work of art, an aesthetic construct to be enjoyed precisely because it’s implausible, baroque, and surreal. Sure it’s nuts, but look at the colors, man.
Via the pyrotechnics, the infernally complicated gyrations of the plot, and the estranged voices of characters assembled out of a mélange of dream-visions, modern space opera tells us things that are arguably more important for our life today than the things classic SF told us were for our life back then. But what happens when, through a chance superimposition of publishing schedules and world events, the carnevalesque, indirect path by which we connect space opera to the world becomes one of those superhighways Hugo Gernsback kept dreaming about and William Gibson reviled, devil-straight and cruel-edged all the way to the heart of something so awful it gave wide-eyed birth to a whole millennium? “On the day that everything changed,” wrote Gerald Jonas, the New York Times’ long-standing SF critic, “I was reading the advance galleys of a novel by Iain M. Banks called Look to Windward” (2001, n.p.). Look to Windward, the new novel in the Culture series, had originally seen print in Great Britain in the summer of 2000, but the American edition did not come out until the next year, together with the British paperback. Jonas’ review was published on October 7, 2001.
The novel’s title warns of the haunting that awaits us. The words that comprise it come from the same section of Eliot’s The Waste Land as those that made up Consider Phlebas: “Gentile or Jew/O you who turn the wheel and look to windward/Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you” (16). The injunction, which Eliot utters to “[caution] those who look to windward in order to protect their charges from danger to remember those who have fallen” (Strahan 2000, 29), represents as programmatic a description of the novel’s thematic concerns as Consider Phlebas had been thirteen years before, and the territory is the same: war, first in the shape of the Idiran War and secondly in the shape of a recent civil war for whose onset the Culture is largely responsible. It’s an aftermath reality that Look to Windward occupies, and everyone in it is a survivor, a haunted veteran for whom life in a world at peace seems like something too good to deserve and too strange to process. The novel’s dedication—“For the Gulf War veterans”—helps signpost the road we know we must travel to get home at the end of the story.
The Culture has intervened once again, but this time its carefully gauged triangulations have failed. The result has been a civil war among the Chelgrians, a mammalian predator-evolved species that, for the past three thousand years, has been espousing a draconian caste system. In the interest of unraveling the iniquities of this social arrangement, the Culture bribed and dealt its way into the Chelgrian electoral process so as to put in power the most egalitarian of candidates, who turned against his own people as soon as he was elected. He wanted payback for himself and for those on the losing side of the caste system, and the civil war that ensued was horrifying (158–159). At its end, which the Culture managed to negotiate between the loyalists and the rebels, the Chelgrians received an immediate apology from their neighbors, together with a complete coming-clean protocol—the Culture has acknowledged and detailed every one of its actions, unequivocally pointing its collective finger at itself, and is asking for forgiveness even as its GSVs and ROUs remain within operationally meaningful distance of Chel, the Chelgrians’ home planet. There is a fair chance hostilities might start again (69–70, 132–135).
While most Chelgrians are angry at the Culture’s meddling and, with a degree of accuracy, blame it for the Caste War, one among them has a different perspective. In fact, he is no longer among his own people: a few years before the start of the war, he exiled himself on a Culture Orbital called Masaq’, and the discovery of the Culture’s involvement in the civil war has changed his feelings not one iota. His name is Mahrai Ziller, and he is a composer, famous for his work both on Chel and on Masaq’. In his view, the Culture was nothing more than a catalyst for a conflict that was always going to explode sooner or later; if it hadn’t been them, it would have been someone or something else (115). “The background to the war,” he tells Kabe Ischloear, the Homomdan Ambassador to Masaq’, “is three thousand years of ruthless oppression, cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, systematic torture, sexual tyranny, and the cult of greed ingrained almost to the point of genetic inheritability” (66). His feelings on the matter and his contempt for his people have kept Ziller steadfast in his determination never to go back to Chel, no matter how many requests the Chelgrian government makes to have him back.
And now it’s about to make another, in the form of an envoy to Masaq’. Major Tibilo Quilan, a former member of the loyalist forces, has been tasked with going to Masaq’ to try yet again to convince Ziller that his people need him, and while SC, in the person of a rather officious drone named E. H. Tersono, is trying to make sure its illustrious refugee and Quilan behave nicely to each other, there are voices on Masaq’ that try to make Ziller see the plight of his people under an at least slightly more objective light:
Symbols are important, symbols do work. And when the symbol is a person then the symbol becomes […] dirigible. A symbolic person can to some extent steer their own course, determine not just their own fate but that of their society. At any rate, [the Chelgrian envoy] will argue that your society, your whole civilisation, needs to make peace with its most famous dissident so that it can make peace with itself, and so rebuild [65].
The speaker is Kabe, the Homomdan ambassador. The Homomda, a civilization that’s been on the galactic scene for even longer than the Culture, have been at peace with it for eight hundred years now, since the end of the Idiran War,1 but that hadn’t always been the case. Originally, the Homomda had been the Idirans’ sponsors and patron civilization when their charges had made their entrance onto the galactic scene,2 and they had supported the Idirans in the war in a limited fashion—not because the Homomda were particularly sympathetic to the Idirans’ brand of religion-inspired sense of manifest destiny, but because the Culture had been, at the time hostilities started, on the verge of becoming too powerful, of bulking too large against the backdrop of galactic life. The Homomda had gone to war on the Idiran side to corral the Culture, not destroy it, and after a while, once their losses of materiel had become too high in the wake of the Culture’s enormous military growth, they had left the conflict and made peace with their erstwhile enemies (Consider Phlebas, 459–461).3
And it’s because of the Idiran War that Kabe is on Masaq’ as a representative of the Homomdan people. He is there to witness the commemoration of one of the last and worst encounters in the entire war—the Twin Novae battle, during which the stars Portisia and Junce “had been induced to explode…. Worlds had died, entire biospheres had been snuffed out and billions of sentient creatures had suffered—albeit briefly—and perished in these twin catastrophes.” And the Culture could have stopped it; it could have prevented the gigadeathcrimes. The Idirans, whose weapons had destroyed the stars, had been trying to sue for peace for a while by then, but the Culture’s insistence on unconditional surrender had hardened their resolve. The battle took place, trillions died, and a weight of guilt settled onto the Culture’s collective conscience (29–30).
One Culture citizen in particular feels this weight: the Mind that runs Masaq’. During the Idiran war, it had been one of a couple of twin Minds, each running a similarly titled GSV: the Lasting Damage I and the Lasting Damage II.4 One of the two died during the Twin Novae battle, and the other, which was close enough to it to be in Mind-to-Mind contact throughout the whole experience, felt everything—every microsecond of its sibling’s death, every agonized moment of doomed struggle to retain its grip on life, and every quantum of memory and identity burning away into the void.5 Masaq’s Mind remembers everything, and not just its twin’s death; it also remembers the three thousand, four hundred and ninety-two flesh sentients it killed when the destruction of three orbitals that were on the verge of falling to the Idirans became necessary. Several million other people left the Orbitals, but those relatively few souls6 that hadn’t had the choice or the desire to leave died, and the Lasting Damage’s Mind killed them when it destroyed the Orbitals (311–317). “I recorded every one of those deaths,” the avatar of Masaq’s Mind tells Ziller:
“I didn’t want them to be faceless, I didn’t want to be able to forget.”
“That was ghoulish, wasn’t it?”
“Call it what you want. It was something I felt I had to do. War can alter your perceptions, change your sense of values. I didn’t want to feel that what I was doing was anything other than momentous and horrific; even, in some first principles sense, barbaric” [313–314].
Minds don’t receive the admittedly mixed blessing of meat memory, which fades and distorts with time. Their recall is instant and permanent, their thought processes everlasting, the cogency and texture of their memories detailed beyond the comprehension of flesh sentients. “I am a Culture Mind,” the avatar says. “We are close to Gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too” (316). Ultimately, it is this quality of instant, utterly comprehensive recall that makes Masaq’s Mind the most haunted character in the novel, and it is this haunting that has prompted it to organize the commemoration of the Twin Novae battle at this specific time: after eight hundred years of crawling along the skein of space-time, the light from Junce and Portisia’s explosions has reached the Orbital. The nova flare of the first star opens the novel in an almost religious hush. Once the explosions settles, drowning out the light of others stars with its bluish radiance, the Mind’s avatar announces a period of mourning that will end when the light form the second explosion reaches Masaq’, a few days from the first (26–30); a symphony will greet its arrival, and Mahrai Ziller has been hard at work finishing it. “Tonight you dance by the light of ancient mistakes!” he’d said in an interview on the morning of the first nova’s blossoming (29).
Thus, the Culture faces two sets of mistakes in Look to Windward, and two kinds of haunting: the one from the past, the reminder of which has been traveling patiently for centuries, and the one in the present, whose living reminders have either been there all along (Ziller) or traveling fast across hyperspace on their way to the Orbital (Quilan). However, while the memory of the Idiran War and of the Twin Novae battle is an occasion for reflection and mourning, and a chance to salute the few veterans of it still hanging around after nearly a millennium, there are forces abroad that are scheming to turn the aftermath of the Chelgrian debacle into something deadlier by far. Tibilo Quilan is not on Masaq’ to persuade Ziller to come back to Chel—that’s just the cover story. He is on Masaq’ to destroy a sizeable portion of the Orbital with a device located inside his head, killing, along with himself, about ten percent of Masaq’s population—five billion people (319).
Uniquely among the more advanced species inhabiting the galaxy, the Chelgrians are in constant contact with the sections of their society that, for reasons that have remained unclear to those left behind, have Sublimed ahead of the main body of their civilization (162–167). Those Sublimed call themselves the Chelgrian-Puen, and they have informed their flesh-and-blood counterparts that the five billion who died during the Caste War won’t be allowed into heaven7 because, since they died in a war, “the old rules apply … they must be avenged” on a one-to-one basis: a soul for a soul (224–227). Therefore, a few high-ranking Chelgrians, led by the Estodien Visquile (“Estodien” is a Chelgrian term for priest), have concocted a conspiracy to murder the corresponding number of Culture people plus their famous dissident, Mahrai Ziller. Masaq’ Orbital is the target, and Major Quilan, accompanied by Admiral-General Sholan Hadesh Huyler, whose resurrected consciousness now resides in a storage unit inside Quilan’s head (36–43),8 is going to be the agent of retribution. Quilan himself does not particularly hate the Culture for its involvement in the Caste War; the reason why he’s the right candidate for this terrorist attack is that he doesn’t want to go on living—either in this universe or in the Sublime—since permanently losing his wife Worosei in the conflict.9 He wants to join her in oblivion (257–258).
Appropriately for a novel haunted by the aftermath of war, all the main characters in Look to Windward share the same sense of overwhelming loss, of memories brighter, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything in front of them in the present (see Strahan 2000, 29). Quilan exists within a death-in-life punctuated by recollections of the time spent with Worosei (43, 136, 213, 255–256, 328, 347–349), while Masaq’s Mind conducts an existence similarly marked by the memory of its twin’s death, as well as those it had to cause when it destroyed the three Orbitals—it had no choice but those people wouldn’t leave, so it did its duty (with their blessing) and kept the scars. Ziller, for all his devil-may-care attitude toward his people, has lost his home forever, and in this sense it matters little that the exile is self-imposed. Loss is loss, especially because in Ziller’s case it came after he’d suffered two assassination attempts for his anti-caste views; he’d emerged from the first unscathed, but the second had put him in a hospital for months (116). After that, Ziller publicly renounced Chelgrian citizenship, condemned his own society for the iniquities it insists on perpetrating, returned all the honors his music had garnered him over the years, and left for the Culture, declaring he’d never return (117). He is as much a casualty of war as everyone else, with the traumatic set of memories to prove it. Kabe, for his part, is on Masaq’ to represent the whole Homomdan people in the commemoration of the Twin Novae battle, and he therefore carries their burden of collective guilt with him. This burden is supplemented by personal heartache: one of the reasons why he accepted his ambassadorial post on Masaq’ was to get away from someone he loved deeply, but who could not or would not reciprocate. He now hopes that time spent far away from his people, in a place devoid of anyone else who remotely looks Homomdan, will lessen the force of the haunting (142–143).
Moreover, Masaq’ is an odd place for those who’d like to come to terms with death and loss. Built ten light-minutes away from Lacelere, a star with a potential instability resulting in a one-in-many-millions chance of a supernova event, the Orbital has gradually become a destination favored by those few in the Culture who enjoy potentially deadly pastimes such as wing-flying, rafting lava streams, and free-climbing; while the average back-up rate is, as a result, understandably higher than on other Culture habitats, a group of people who call themselves Disposables choose to face terminal danger without backing themselves up first; should they die, they’d be gone forever, and in fact this is what happens to one of them, a thirty-one-standard-year-old woman who gets crushed to death while glacier-caving (51–57, 103–114). Other forms of devolutionary behavior involve not the risk of life and limb, but a temporary return to primitive customs such as, for example, the use of money or the exchange of favors, which Masaq’s Mind finds in equal measure fascinating and funny:
Well, for tickets to Ziller’s concert, they practically are [reinventing money]. People who can’t stand other people are inviting them to dinner, booking deep-space cruises together—good grief—even agreeing to go camping with them…. People have traded sexual favors, they’ve agreed to pregnancies, they’ve altered their appearance to accommodate a partner’s desire, they’ve begun to change gender to please lovers; all just to get tickets…. How wonderfully, bizarrely, romantically barbaric of them! [352].
In short, many Culture citizens on Masaq’ repeatedly choose to endure pain, misery, and coercion; a very few even court death. To some of those who truly and without a say on the matter have experienced suffering and loss, this behavior is either incomprehensible or understandable only in terms of a form of madness. This is certainly the view of the three Chelgrians on the Orbital, but while Quilan and Huyler communicate those opinions in the silence of the Major’s mind and otherwise keep their counsel, Ziller is more than happy to provide feedback: he believes that there’s a perverse streak in the mentality of those Culture citizens who, after their society managed to finally eliminate all deprivations, illnesses, and violent accidents, turn right around and purposefully manufacture them again (114). To Ziller, sizeable amounts of people in the Culture are suffering from a terminal case of boredom that pushes them to waste their time (and occasionally throw their life away) just to be able to say that they have lived. It falls to another alien—Kabe—to counterpoint the Chelgrian’s harsh views:
They feel they have gained something from having pitted themselves against forces much greater than themselves…. These people control their terrors. They can choose to sample them, repeat them or avoid them. That is not the same as living beneath the volcano when you’ve just invented the wheel, or wondering whether your levee will break and drown your entire village. Again, this applies to all societies which have matured beyond the age of barbarism [112–114].
“At last, the Culture can be known in close detail, through the eyes of experienced, incisive foreign travellers,” Nick Gevers writes in his SF Site review of Look to Windward (2000, n.p.). This is another way of saying that the self-correcting machinery of the critical utopia is once again in motion, and that it’s arguably never been as necessary as it is now that the Culture has been shown making a mistake—however well-intentioned—that cost five billion lives. The criticism begins within the Culture itself, which makes no secret of the secrets it had previously kept and comes completely clean before the Chelgrians and their inevitable moral judgment—which matters to the Culture. And because he is officially on Masaq’ for a task intimately connected to the Caste War, it’s Quilan who becomes the interlocutor of choice for the Culture’s apologetic contrition, at the same time as he and Huyler represent, in their different responses to it, a sampling of the spectrum of Chelgrian feeling on the matter. Quilan listens and responds kindly to every proffered apology (154), all the while examining the honesty of his replies and finding it frustratingly difficult to pinpoint. On the other hand Huyler, invisible and unheard inside his carrier’s skull, screams abuse at everybody with a relish that would be funny if we didn’t know the actual reason for his presence on Masaq’.
The feelings of the rest of the Chelgrian conspirators are unproblematic in their homogeneous hostility, whereas Kabe’s—the ambassador is probably the most experienced among Gevers’ “incisive travelers”—are, like Quilan’s, in a constant state of flux. On the one hand, the Homomdan defends his hosts against Ziller’s contempt, but on the other he often finds himself at once puzzled and amused by fads and mores that his own people have long outgrown—like the penchant for life-threatening pastimes:
They lived or died by whim! A few of their more famous people announced they would live once and die forever, and billions did likewise; then a new trend would start amongst opinion-formers for people to back-up and … people would start doing that sort of thing by the billion, too, just because it had become fashionable. Was that the sort of behavior one ought to expect from a mature society? Mortality as a life-style choice? [12].
Kabe knows that his fellow Homomdans would decry the choice as childishness and madness, but as we have seen, he himself doesn’t necessarily feel that way, and there’s more than a hint that this empathy toward the Culture is one of the reasons he ended up on Masaq’ to begin with (13). Kabe is, in other words, not just a function of the Culture’s self-correcting critical utopian processes, but also a critical utopian commentator on his own society and in his own right. The sense Look to Windward conveys that the Homomdan civilization, if explored in detail, would likely prove to be a utopia provides the Culture with something like a shadow twin, which is entirely in keeping with the rest of the hauntings in the story. If the Culture has the Homomda as a nebulous mirror image10 and Kabe has an unrequited love interest he’s waking away from,11 Quilan has Worosei and Masaq’s Mind has its long-dead twin; Ziller has the whole of Chelgrian culture, and the whole of Chelgrian culture has itself—that is, the socially suppressed doppelganger that rose to devour its kin. The Caste War created the haunting, and the haunting facilitated the inception of the revenge plot against the Culture on the part of the Chelgrians’ other undead and unquiet twin, the Chelgrian-Puen. The twin, the doppelganger, the shadow, the revenant, and the made thing that looks just like us: they “digest the siblings who live in the light” (Clute 2011, 4). They return, just like the twin stars Portisia and Junce, to remind the veterans and the survivors and those who were born long after that the arrow of time can double back on itself and regurgitate the undead past onto the present, because the siblings who live in the light now live in the light of a star’s death, which they had a part in causing.
But there are those who would create a new haunting, because to commit an act of mass murder is to generate the premises necessary for it, and the Culture won’t abide them. Halfway through the novel (187–191), a creature forms on the ground on Chel out of “EDust (Everything Dust)” (397), taking on the appearance of a Chelgrian female. Preliminary calibrations complete, it/she begins the hunt for the Chelgrians who hatched the terrorist plot. The Culture knows.
Elsewhere, on Masaq’, the avatar of the Orbital’s Mind tells Ziller about a long-ago attempt to smuggle a bomb onboard a GCU; the attempt failed because “a standard Mind scan looks at something from hyperspace, from the fourth dimension. An impenetrable sphere looks like a circle. Locked rooms are fully accessible” (240–241). The Culture knows.
The Culture has known, in fact, since before Quilan’s arrival (381). Contact has been busy, as has Special Circumstances: Hadesh Huyler has been an SC operative all along. His job was to stop the attempt if Quilan had decided to make it, not go through with it if he had demurred, and Huyler pretended to go along with the whole scheme in the hope that the conspirators would betray their identity and location. Removed by Masaq’s Mind from his resting place inside Quilan’s head and then transmitted to a waiting GSV, the Chelgrian Admiral’s personality construct was, at the end of everything, reincorporated into a new body. He now resides mostly on Masaq’, he still works for SC, and he has become friends with both Kabe and Ziller; the latter is even considering an informal visit to Chel in the near future (402–403).
As for Quilan, he eventually gets his wish. Masaq’s Mind plucks him from the amphitheater where, under the light of both novae now, Mahrai Ziller is performing his symphony, which he has entitled Expiring Light. Quilan has already had severe qualms about going through with the destruction of the hub, even to the point of attempting to warn Kabe and Tersono (375),12 but all that becomes moot when, after a moment of dizziness, he finds himself alone with the avatar inside a VR recreation of Masaq’s hub. The Mind is ready to die, the avatar tells Quilan. The haunting won’t go away, and the memories have become something more than just that:
I am tired, Quilan. I have waited for these memories to lose their force over the years and decades and centuries, but they have not. There are places to go, but either I would not be me when I went there, or I would remain myself and so still have my memories. By waiting for them to drop away all this time I have grown into them, and they into me. We have become each other [383–384].
And so the avatar, whose memories have now become it, as they had really always been, takes Quilan’s hands, and the Chelgrian takes its. “Will you be my twin in this?” it asks him, and he replies: “If you will be my mate.” After that, it’s only an instant before their dance to expiring light begins and ends in an explosion that annihilates them both. The Orbital and its fifty billion people, given over to a series of AI cores capable of running things perfectly efficiently until a new hub Mind is found for it, suffer no damage at all (384).
The same cannot be said for those responsible for hatching the terrorist plot, however. The Culture EDust assassin finds and murders them all in spectacularly brutal fashion—an example to everyone else who might be considering doing something similar—before vanishing into the sky in the same manner it had arrived (395–399). As for the five billion Chelgrian dead, the blood of others won’t grease their passage into heaven, although the Culture will try to broker a deal with the Chelgrian-Puen. “It’s tricky territory for us, the Sublimed,” the Mind tells Quilan, “but we have contacts” (383). However, the relatively happy ending, if such a term can even apply, is tainted by a possibility almost too awful to contemplate: the Chelgrians had outside help in bringing their plot so close to fulfillment, and it’s remotely possible that those allies “are, or represent, some rogue group of Culture Minds.” Those Minds, if they do exist, may have done what they did “Because we might be growing too soft. Because of [our] complacency, [our] decadence. Because some of our minds might just think that we need a bit of timely blood and fire to remind us the universe is a perfectly uncaring place and that we have no more right to enjoy our agreeable ascendancy than any other empire long fallen and forgotten” (382–383). Nothing matters, and everything does; that is the reality of life in a “perfectly uncaring place,” and Masaq’s mind is suggesting that, in the eight hundred years since triumphing over the Idirans, the Culture may have started believing in a sort of karmic underpinning to the fabric of creation. Within such a belief system, Contact and SC’s good works in favor of the less fortunate should entitle them and their parent civilization to some kind of preferential treatment on the part of the universe, and that would be manifestly wrong-headed. The avatar’s whiff of a suggestion that these supposed conspirators may consider the Culture to be on the same moral plane as an empire, as the last sentence in the quote implies, further unsettles our sense that things will now be all right after all. Masaq’ is still there, and so are the Chelgrians and the Culture, but the five billion Chelgrians killed in the civil war the Culture helped trigger are still dead, and there is no magic wand to wave here. The light of ancient mistakes now shines on a new one.
“When I discovered that [Look to Windward] concerns a terrorist plot to murder billions of people,” Gerald Jonas wrote in his New York Times review,
I wanted to put the book down. I am glad I didn’t. What Banks has to say about idealism, fanaticism, revenge, blame and forgiveness made as much sense to me as the news and analysis that blared nonstop from my television set … as in all good fiction, what’s important in Banks’s work is the subtext, which I take to be the idea that freedom is both necessary and dangerous, and that only by imagining the unimaginable, both in ourselves and others, can we hope to remain free [2001, n.p.].
Hence Masaq’s Mind’s suggestion that a cadre of renegade Culture minds might have been behind the planning of the attack. The Culture is not the United States,13 the Chelgrian conspiracy to conduct a terrorist attack against Masaq’ Orbital is not Al-Qaeda, and the course of events on the Orbital clearly does not resemble that of the attacks of September 11—if only it did. But even so, the bare facts of the novel’s plot are enough to go on: Look to Windward is the story of a commonwealth of plenty intervening disastrously in the collective processes of a far less powerful, more socially backward neighbor. As a result, this neighbor strikes back the only way it can—with a terrorist attack, which the commonwealth foils before exacting pinpoint retribution on the conspirators. In the aftermath of the attempt, the suspicion arises that some secret force within the commonwealth might have schemed to allow it to succeed.
Texts are things of the world. They draw story from it, and give it back to the people living in it in a changed form that facilitates reflection, empathy, and perspective. Iain Banks had not intended to write Look to Windward as prophecy; he’d meant it as a reflection on the hauntings of the recent past. But in the course of events here on Earth, the novel also ended up prefiguring the rough shape of the present and of the immediate future, both sources of terrible hauntings of their own, and for us on this side of things, for those still shadowed by the revenants unleashed on that awful day, Look to Windward does feel, to an extent, prophetic.14 It even foreshadows the paranoias of the aftermath, many of which hold that 9/11 was an inside job or a punishment for the hubris of the industrialized West, and their patent absurdity is not the point. The point is that they are in us whether we want them or not because, deep inside, we know that the terrors they whisper hatched inside events that predated their birth. Just like the Culture has its critical utopian processes, we have our own (which we would have to describe as critical-dystopian; more’s the pity), and we have been wondering for a long time about the wisdom of our international policies. Wondering about them didn’t stop us, though, and Look to Windward, which does indeed look to windward to what was then the West’s latest military adventure abroad, also turns to look forward to where the wind is going. The landscape that opens up before our eyes, here on the farthest side from the eleventh of September, 2001, is a territory rich in hauntings. The first Gulf War, to whose veterans Banks dedicated Look to Windward, has now become the secret twin of the second, and the towers were twins as well. One collapsed before the other, and the light of their death still reaches us via the footage collected on that day of horror. It’s still as difficult to turn the eyes away from the images as it is to believe they actually happened.15
There’s still one more veteran to salute before we go. One of the subplots in Look to Windward does not at first blush seem designed to perform the same job as all the others: Uagen Zlepe is a Culture scholar, and he’s been away from the Culture for thirteen years now; his psychological makeup is not very different from that of other critical utopian exiles or discontents, except that the reason why he isn’t planning on coming back is scholarly: he’s too caught up in his studies (87–101). He lives in the airsphere Oskendari, and his field involves one of Oskendari’s most fascinating sentient species—the dirigible behemothaurs, titanic living balloons that swim in the airsphere’s oxygen/nitrogen medium like fish in water. Each behemothaur is to its species—and to the ecosphere within which it lives—what a GSV is to the Culture: a giant, sentient carrier of people and machinery of all sorts, except that dirigible behemothaurs don’t use technology. They give birth to organisms that perform the tasks that technological artifacts perform in a society like the Culture. Behemothaurs live for millions of years, and their thought processes match the pace of their biological ones—the behemothaur that is playing host to Uagen and a number of sentients from other species is called Yoleus, and for three years now it has been following another of its kind according to the species’ customary courtship rituals:
By dirigible behemothaur standards a three-year courtship indicated little more than an infatuation, arguably no more than a passing fancy, but Yoleus seemed committed to the pursuit and it was this attraction that had brought them so low in the Oskendari airsphere over the last fifty standard days; usually such mega-fauna preferred to stay higher up where the air was thinner [88].
During one of his study tours of the Yoleus (dirigible behemothaurs always use the article before their name), Uagen notices a gigantic shape far below, where the atmosphere is even thicker and less welcoming. Upon closer scrutiny, the shape reveals itself as another behemothaur, wounded and dying, and inside the behemothaur, disguised as one of the creatures born of it, is a Special Circumstances agent who, before dying as well, tells Uagen about the terrorist plot against Masaq’. Estodien Visquile and the rest of the conspirators have been using the behemothaur as a secret base, and ravaged it in order to cover their tracks (171–185). Spurred by the urgency of the intelligence he now possesses, Uagen races back to the Culture to warn it of what’s coming, unaware that the Culture already knows. Also unaware that the Culture knows is one of the Chelgrian conspirators who is waiting for Uagen in the ship he chartered to take him back to his people; the Chelgrian male murders Uagen, chucking his body out of an airlock in the aftermath.
When he wakes up again, Uagen is back inside the Yoleus; the behemothaur has evolved, and it now looks different, but it is still recognizably his strange home away from home. One of the Yoleus’ interpreters, a creature Uagen knows from before, tells him that his body was retrieved from the vacuum surrounding Oskendari once the airsphere returned to that volume of space after a full galactic revolution—about a hundred million years after the events in Look to Windward. Everyone is gone—the Culture, the Chelgrians, and the Homomda—and the only ones who remember them are creatures like the behemothaurs, who retain memories and identities for periods of time functionally indistinguishable from forever. Uagen, another casualty of war, is now the only human left in the galaxy (387–394).
The Zlepe subplot goes a long way toward helping us process the darker aspects of Look to Windward. Banks’ descriptions of the behemothaurs and the environment within which they live are wonderful and strange but also familiar—for example, the Yoleus’ pursuit of the other behemothaur, once translated into a more human-friendly timeline, comes across as positively quaint without losing any of its alienness. The airsphere’s depths feel like the bottom of the deepest oceans, and the sheer variety of the fauna they contain turn it into a beautiful blue-sky analogue of the galaxy outside, itself full of lifeforms of surpassing strangeness.
At the same time, there is a good deal of readily recognizable heartbreak inside the space of Oskendari airsphere. One hundred million years on, the behemothaurs still remember what the Chelgrians did to one of their own—for that, the whole civilization is remembered as the Lesser Reviled (391)—and their grief is as long-lasting as their memories; for his part, Uagen is now a castaway, forever without a country. It is often the case that those whom war removes from their home come back to it to find that, while it changed in its own way during their absence, they themselves have changed in another direction and often beyond recognition, usually because of occurrences they cannot explain or transmit to those who haven’t gone through them as well. Look to Windward’s most estranged plotline literalizes this internal reality by pushing it to its extreme, so that of all the entities that either took voluntary part in—or were unwillingly sucked into—the novel’s events, Uagen Zlepe, inoffensive but brave scholar, awkward Culture citizen with a tendency to say “umm” a lot when he’s nervous, ends up being the most irreparably wounded.
Between the publication of Inversions and the appearance of Look to Windward, a certain amount of critical scrutiny began accruing around Banks’ M-novels, continuing into the early 2000s and then on to the present time. Banks had already become the subject of a good deal of attention for his no-M work, but that hadn’t helped his science fiction much. In fact, as Christie March wrote in 2002, the majority of critics and reviewers had been making a sharp value-judgment distinction between the two sides of Banks’ opus from the very beginning:
While his work has become enormously popular, his position as a “serious” writer gives critics pause. “Novels lacking that crucial middle initial are regularly lauded by the literary critics, novels with it are either ignored outside the SF field or curtly reviewed with grudging sufferance,” Stan Nicholls laments [2002, 81].
So, while the early-to-mid nineties had seen Iain Banks’ novels receive their fair share of study from academics, very little had happened with Iain M. Banks’ work.16 The only exceptions were the M-Banks entry in the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993, 88) and an article by Carolyn Brown in a 1996 collection of essays. Drawing on Foucault’s thoughts on the heterotopic and Delany’s practice of them in his novel Triton, the article aims to “interrogate some of the workings of the ‘Culture’ novels by Iain M. Banks and the relationship between topoi and ‘character’” (1996, 58).
The first critic to engage with Banks’ work at the turn of the century, Christopher Palmer, wrote a piece for the March 1999 issue of Science Fiction Studies in which he examined Banks’ work along with Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos series (1989–1997). Palmer’s arguments, which do have a good degree of validity, are however vitiated by some crucially problematic assumptions. The first, which the inclusion of Simmons’ work prefigures, is that the Culture is an empire. The second is that the Culture’s timeline, which overlaps that of Earth from the 14th century to the 22nd, is an essentially meaningless juxtaposition:
The events of Iain M. Banks’s Consider Phlebas take place circa AD 1335 … but they also take place in the far future, as far as scientific and even social development is concerned. That is, to date them in relation to our time is pointless. There would certainly be no point in extrapolating back from our present to a vastly distant past which, as is often the case in this fiction, somehow combines hyper-modern technology with pre-modern social forms [Palmer 1999, n.p.].
Palmer here is overlooking the significance of having humanity sit out the formation of the Culture, a point that Banks himself had made in Consider Phlebas’ appendices and that Ken MacLeod further elucidates in “Phlebas Reconsidered” (see chapter 2). The third assumption paradoxically resides in Palmer’s acknowledgement of the role Banks’ writing techniques and complex intertextual negotiations fulfill. While Palmer recognizes them, he misconstrues their functions within the texts:
We have inclusiveness, which launches these novels in a procedure of critique by overload rather than by irony. We have hedonism, virtually unaccompanied by the utopian impulse, riven and twisted with sado-masochism. We have complicated relations with textuality and intertextuality…. We have decentered subjects, self-unknowing, overlapping, pastiched, or simply crowded in multitudes, but, on the other hand, a violent sense of the dark reaches of the personality. It seems plausible that this fiction is the result of the operations of a postmodern imaginary on the materials of traditional galactic-empire sf; this imaginary operates mainly by excess, overload, and exacerbation [Palmer 1999, n.p.].
We need to keep in mind at this point that Palmer is assessing the work of two writers at once, and this pairing is ill fitting. Banks and Simmons, although equally relevant practitioners of space opera (Banks knew and admired Simmons’ work), don’t really display quite the level of commonality in terms of style, narrative strategies, or themes Palmer suggests they do when he lumps them together,17 and the Hegemony of Man18 in the Hyperion Cantos is in no way comparable to the Culture—certainly not in the role AIs fulfill in their respective settings, for example, or in the part economics play. This awkward coupling may help explain Palmer’s puzzling statements, and especially the notion of hedonism unaccompanied by utopia, which works well for the Hyperion Cantos but not at all for the Culture. In fact, Banks’ work seems at times like an uneasy graft in this piece, more a later addition to a paper on the Cantos than an equal-status counterpart to Simmons’ construction of a space-opera setting.
In the same year Palmer’s article was published, issue 76 of Foundation featured four articles introducing and discussing Banks’ work. Two of them, Butler’s “Strange Case of Mr. Banks: Doubles and The Wasp Factory” and Guerrier’s “Culture Theory: Iain M. Banks’ ‘Culture’ as Utopia,” have already been addressed (chapters 1 and 5, respectively). Of the other two, Tim Middleton’s represents a critical overview of Banks’ science fictional production thus far, while William H. Hardesty’s makes an argument for Use of Weapons as a counter-utopian text. Middleton begins by placing both M and no-M novels within Banks’ Scottish context, utilizing as evidence of the space operas’ connection to the homeland their regular operating at the edge of the Culture’s moral and physical space:
This means that Banks engages with moral and social concerns which can, if the reader wishes, be related to Scottish culture and society in the late twentieth century. It might also be suggested that the stateless nation is a term that could be applied to the Culture [1999, 6].
The argument is relevant. Banks had never fully identified with the Scottish renaissance movement that Lanark had jump-started in the early ’80s, but he was very much in favor of Scotland’s independence, and his thinking on how to achieve it informed some of the parameters that gave birth to the Culture. As Middleton indicates, this passage in “A Few Notes on the Culture” is revealing of those connections:
The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there. The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here)…. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation … will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats [168].
It would be a mistake to consider the Culture a science fictional Scotland in Space, and that’s not Middleton’s argument either. The point is that the breakaway movement indicated in “Notes” as the birth of the Culture was probably rooted in a desire on Banks’ part that Scotland could do something similar. In the absence of such an event in everyday life, Banks created one in his imagination.
After the context, Middleton provides the synopses and the criticism. In chronological order, he goes from Consider Phlebas to Inversions, looking at each narrative in turn and drawing a set of conclusions from his overview of the whole. First, it seems fair to say that he regards Use of Weapons as the best individual work in the series, both for the inner depths into which it plunges in its exploration of Zakalwe/Elethiomel’s wounded, wounding psyche and for the innovative chapter structure (8–10). While it is easy to accept Middleton’s assessment of Use of Weapons, whether one agrees with it or not, there are aspects of his argument that are more difficult to process. First, he mistakenly includes Against a Dark Background into the culture series19; secondly, he considers Banks’ literary production after the early 1990s inferior to that of the decade’s early years,20 which is in and of itself a viable argument, but then he contradictorily praises Excession for constituting “a triumphant return to the gloriously ‘wide-screen’ space opera of the earlier Culture novels and a novel in which character was not subservient to action and set-piece scenes” (12). Third, Middleton seems to regard Banks as something of a spent force in SF, observing that while he “wrote his most inventive and literary sf in the 1980s,” in his more recent production “there seems to be a rather tired reliance upon invention which often cuts across the interests of characterization and narrative impetus” (14). The conclusion to which Middleton comes in the wake of those comments is that “although some of the 1990s sf has been successful it seems to me that there is little reason to dissent from the summation offered by John Clute in his entry on Banks for the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, namely that for ‘many readers and critics, IB/IMB was the major new UK sf writer of the 1980s’” (14). But Clute had written that assessment in the 1993 edition of the Encyclopedia, at a time when Banks was still a relatively new writer in SF, and it stretches the boundaries of the plausible to conclude that his words were already meant to indicate Banks’ obsolescence. Considering that Middleton was writing from the vantage point of 1999, using such a quote to reach such a conclusion—especially with works like A Song of Stone, Excession, and Inversions already on the shelf—feels unwarranted.
Hardesty’s article on Use of Weapons as an anti-utopia is more problematic. Hardesty begins by describing the Culture as “an odd utopia—not a dream or plan of a future its readers might work toward, but instead a fairy tale of a society which is (in John Clute’s words) ‘genuinely post-scarcity’” (39). Never mind that Banks’ intellectual preparation and creative practice, as well as his readers’ acceptance of the conceptual basis for the Culture as an actually feasible model of utopia, belie Hardesty’s fairy-tale assessment; and never mind that Guerrier’s article in the same issue of Foundation lays down the premises for the Culture as a critical utopia. Hardesty is also, like Middleton, using Clute’s words in the Encyclopedia out of context. If we take the trouble to actually read the entry for Banks, we’ll discover that Clute regards the post-scarcity aspect in the same light Banks did—that is to say, as a fundamental step toward the formation of a meaningful argument for a functionally utopian state (88). Misquoting him hardly looks like providing conclusive evidence. But Hardesty isn’t done:
Banks’s stories of the Culture … constitute portions of a master narrative of benevolent colonialism, showing the salutary effects of empire on both the rulers and, in theory at least, the ruled. At this level, they are the heirs of a tradition of Henty and other writers of adventure fiction glorifying the heyday of the British Empire [40].
As evidence to support his contention, Hardesty cites Colin Greenland’s already examined review of Use of Weapons in issue 50 of Foundation, which puts both articles in the group of essays that have misconstrued the function of the Culture stories. Hardesty sees as counterpoint to the ‘master narrative’ of benevolent empire “a counter-narrative that interrogates, problematises, and criticises the myths of good will and good deeds that the master narrative promotes” (40). The text that, in Hardesty’s view, is most representative of such a dialogue of narrative and counter-narrative is Use of Weapons, which he sees as posing a constant stream of questions concerning the dynamics of interference without ever reaching an answer to them, and the reason for this state of things is that “the Culture’s benevolent hegemony is imperialistic,” and all those civilizations that, like the Idirans in Phlebas, have encountered the Culture, “[know] peace and unimagined prosperity—but not the basic right to differ” (40–41).
This argument is as factually inaccurate as it is flawed. Reading the Culture stories in such a light, and especially the often-agonized soul-searching they perform through their characters (besides Use of Weapons we can recall Inversions, for example), requires a distortion of textual evidence that voids the argument entire. And Hardesty himself seems to have recognized that: in an article published one year later, he scales back the tone of his comments and instead focuses on Banks’ utopian reconfiguration of the space-opera mold.21 “Each [space opera] is a spirited adventure story,” he writes, “but each mocks the very adventures it presents; and each contributes to an ongoing commentary on the nature of utopia … the texts operate on two levels of naïve entertainment and informed commentary simultaneously, gaining some of their power and excitement because traditional storytelling and contemporary narrative fashions interact” (116). Together with these twin narrative levels, Hardesty points to stylistic complexity, metatextual referencing, and complex plotlines as the tools Banks uses for this purpose, and indicates that, besides functioning as a formal/rhetorical scaffold for setting up the commentary on utopia, they also enable the texts to organize “a complicitous critique of modern culture” (119). Specifically, the Culture novels utilize the SF upgrade of Slater’s Ethical Humanism from Walking on Glass to explore the nature of one’s obligations toward their society—“If … one can have anything one wants merely for the asking, what (if anything) does one owe in return, and to whom?” (120). Hardesty’s reasoning here is fully in line with the development of Banks’ thinking on the Culture from pretty early on, and it captures a number of the linguistic and stylistic features that constitute part of Banks’ critical utopian process.
Between 2003 and 2009, three different Companion-to-SF books came out: The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2003), Blackwell’s A Companion to Science Fiction (2005; paperback 2008), and The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009). The Culture series appears in all three, but under different guises and with different degrees of critical scrutiny. The Blackwell book, for example, affords it a whole chapter in the form of Mendlesohn’s beautiful analysis of Excession, but otherwise only mentions it in a one-line reference (244). The Routledge Companion, on the other hand, addresses Banks’ work as a key participant both in the history of SF from the late 1980s to today and in the rise of the so-called New Space Opera. Paul Kincaid, who composed the entry on science fiction from 1992 onwards, establishes Banks as one of the foundational voices of what he calls the British Renaissance, which others have called the British SF Boom (177).22 Kincaid also credits Banks with being one of the writers in the Renaissance to foreground a strong left-wing political agenda by grafting the features of his brainchild—the Culture—onto the classic space-opera scaffold, although he holds the opinion that “even at their best (Excession [1996], Look to Windward [2000]), they [the Culture novels] have been more notable for their humor and bravura invention than their politics” (179). Even if the Culture stories’ explicit political dimension had been limited exclusively to The State of the Art, it would still have been worth discussing; since it wasn’t, this feels like a missed chance.
The Culture’s place within the New Space Opera (also NSO), on the other hand, is clearly delineated. Michael Levy connects the rise of NSO with the British New Wave, and especially with writers like Brian Stableford and M. John Harrison, whose Centauri Device “is often cited by later British writers as a particular influence.” Because of the New Wave’s inner-space-oriented stance, space operas continued to see largely unheralded publication throughout the 1980s
until the appearance of a writer whom the critics genuinely could not ignore: Iain M. Banks…. As popularized by Banks, the new space opera featured high literary standards, significant political commentary, particularly from a left-wing perspective, along with a willingness to accept moral ambiguity rarely found in the work of American authors (except, perhaps, Simmons) in this subgenre [161].
Indeed, these are the commonly referred-to characteristics of the whole of NSO, with the proviso that there are certain differences in political orientation between writers on the two sides of the Atlantic that make the movement more variegated—and its collective discourse more intellectually stimulating—than an exclusively UK-centered view would suggest.23
Levy’s acknowledgement that the new space opera began with The Centauri Device and received a much-needed reboot when Consider Phlebas saw publication24 echoes Ken MacLeod’s comments in an article he composed for Locus Magazine’s 2003 forum on NSO. “The new space opera is 28 years old,” he wrote. “It began, and almost ended, in 1975, when M. John Harrison’s The Centauri Device (1974) took a British New Wave sensibility to the stars. For its author, it was intended to terminate space opera, not expand it” (41). But it didn’t because a number of young SF writers, MacLeod and Banks foremost among them, took Harrison’s deconstructionist stance as a programmatic statement pointing in the direction of space opera’s rebirth, which means that theirs was probably one of the most fruitful misprisions of another writer’s work in the history of SF. By the time Banks, MacLeod, Colin Greenland, and the others had realized what Harrison’s original intent had been, they were already having too much fun to stop. In the event, Harrison himself joined the movement when, between 2002 and 2012, he wrote the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy—Light (2002), Nova Swing (2006), and Empty Space (2012).25
A different feeling accompanies Gary Westfahl’s argument. In his article on space opera for the third companion book, the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, Westfahl utilizes the term “postmodern space opera” to describe NSO, but aside from the moniker the beast is the same, and so is Banks’ place in it. Westfahl acknowledges the Culture novels as the most frequently pointed to when the topic of postmodern space opera comes up, but because of what he sees as their heightened sense of the darkness of the universe and of humanity’s helplessness before the power of AIs, the conclusion he draws from their popularity and that of similar contemporary works displays a certain lack of optimism for the future of the form:
Novels such as these, rather than culminations of space opera’s glorious traditions, might be interpreted as harbingers of the sub-genre’s exhaustion…. For all the creativity poured into postmodern space operas, they may resultingly exude the aura of exercises, brilliantly accomplished but lacking the fervent conviction regarding humanity’s manifest destiny in the cosmos that distinguished classic space opera [207].
Given the gist of his argument, it is retrospectively easy to see why Westfahl utilized “postmodern space opera” instead of “New Space Opera,” a term of whose existence he must have been fully aware. A key tendency of postmodern narratives in any genre or medium is to reveal the absence of an epistemological center and to represent traditional moral categories as figures chalked against vacuum, so Westfahl probably found it more appropriate to his viewpoint to adopt the postmodern label, however vague its definitional boundaries. On the other hand, from our position more than ten years down the line, we can say that whatever the descriptive preceding “space opera,” the subgenre does not seem to be unraveling into itself. Aside from Banks’ own work, which has proven capable of absorbing its deconstructionist stances into a larger process of reconfiguration, the writers of NSO have continued to push the boundaries of the form with an enthusiasm very much at variance with the idea of space opera as a literature of exhaustion. Also, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, M. John Harrison, Vernor Vinge, and the many other writers of NSO have, over the course of the 2000s, been joined by new talent—Elizabeth Bear, for example, or Hannu Rajaniemi, whose Jean le Flambeur series—The Quantum Thief (2010), The Fractal Prince (2012), and The Causal Angel (2014)—takes the hard-edged tech talk and the posthuman perspective further into a future that seems to promise a continued flourishing of the space opera template.
As far as Banks’ place in utopian writing is concerned, the panorama is considerably flatter. The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (2010) makes no mention whatsoever of the Culture series despite featuring three articles that address science fictional portrayals of utopia and dystopia. Also, none of the SF companions address Banks’ work in any depth—in fact, the Blackwell and the Routledge don’t address it at all, while Edward James’ article on utopia and anti-utopia in the Cambridge volume limits himself to pointing out that “a few writers have written more than one text which could be considered utopian, including the Scottish writers Iain M. Banks (the Culture series) and Ken MacLeod (the Fall Revolution novels)” (226), and that in the middle of a paragraph dedicated to Kim Stanley Robinson’s work. Michael Kulbicki’s observation about the disparity in critical attention the two writers have received remains true.
But it’s John Clute who, as we might have expected, provides the clearest assessment of Banks’ impact not only on space opera, but also on SF as a whole. Clute, who has been following Banks’ work since the beginning and understands it well, moves from an acknowledgement of the influence that the American brand of space opera played in shaping the kinetics and the action of the Culture stories to a focus on the crucial difference between the space operas that had come before and the Culture series—post-scarcity economics:
The sf novels published as by Iain M. Banks … offer a radical commentary on some of the inherent assumptions about the plot-friendly entrepreneurial freedoms enjoyed by space-opera protagonists in galaxies governed by rigid oligarchies…. It has become a cliché in the analysis of Earth-bound systems of economic activity that they are based on one party’s gaining from the possession of scarce commodities, and that scarcity, when it does not occur naturally, will be enforced; Banks, and those he has inspired, make the iconoclastic suggestion that, somewhere, somewhen, energy will be sufficient to needs, and scarcity will not exist. It seems obvious that this sort of argument, which differs from current political and cultural sanctities, lies at the heart of a healthy sf [2003, 75].
Arguably, the many critical misapprehensions we have witnessed of the Culture series as a long, multiple-installment postmodern narrative of empire-in-disguise could stem from a misunderstanding of the importance of post-scarcity economics, politics, and ethics (the notion of plentiful resources impacts all three in the Culture stories). Empires are, by their very nature, power structures built upon the assumption of a world of consumables that the strongest players within a given civilizational context must hoard in order to (1) keep unruly neighbors at bay and (2) defend their grip on power from rivals inside the empire itself. Tellingly, every critic we have seen who has indicated that the culture is in fact an empire has either downplayed or ignored this fundamental underpinning of Banks’ creation, usually by making it part of the fable of space opera—the childish, garish aspect of the form that one can discount as toy-shop paraphernalia in order to get to the real story underneath.
But Banks meant what he wrote. Yes, the Culture stories are to an extent deconstructionist, but once again, the deconstruction stops at the point where the Culture performs the reconstruction, and the dilemmas of intervention and interference to which the various characters in the novels have been giving voice since 1987 are not designed to turn utopia to ash, nor do they do so by mistake. The Culture remains visible and meaningful throughout the critical utopian process Banks applies to it; it’s the argument itself that lends solidity to the “stateless nation” of the Culture, and the argument is made possible by the postulation of post-scarcity living conditions, without which the race to secure resources would start again and utopia truly would crumble.
To the critical voices that, beginning in the early 2000s, addressed the Culture series we should add a few that engaged it not from a literary viewpoint, but from a political-cultural stance; that is to say, some scholars approached the Culture as a viable argument for actual changes in the world we now inhabit, and presented their arguments as part of the ongoing intellectual enterprise in the fields of politics, sociology, and economics. Among these scholars’ pieces, Thomas Gramstad’s is perhaps the most surprising: writing in 2000 for the Laissez Faire City Times, Gramstad argues that the Culture “seems to embody all the essential virtues of Objectivist social theory, while at the same time suggesting how two widespread and major shortcomings of current Objectivist thought may be corrected” (n.p.). These two major shortcomings, in his view, are Ayn Rand’s assumption of “a second-wave, industrial civilization” based on scarcity economics, which her followers also seem to have taken as a given, and Objectivism’s lack of engagement with feminism and gender relationships as a whole. The first shortcoming, Gramstad writes, could be remedied by embracing the notion of post-scarcity economics as a concrete goal to work toward:
We live in an age in which there is a widespread fear of the future. The idea of progress is being questioned or attacked openly by pre-modernists and postmodernists. Defending the future, crusading for Progress, ought to be a primary concern and goal for Objectivists. But in order to do so effectively, Objectivists need to cast off their conservative clinging to second-wave ideals, concerns and mental habits … I would like to see Objectivists and Randians promote third-wave post-industrial abundance, rather than getting stuck in second-wave, industrial procedures for dealing with scarcity [2000, n.p.].
The second shortcoming, Objectivism’s antiquated and arguably morally reprehensible gender politics, depends on the advocacy on the part of many Objectivists of “unsupported and reactionary beliefs about an alleged naturalness of universal gender roles and Platonic ideals of gender identity and sexual preferences,” and in this area as well, the Culture provides an important perspective:
In “The Culture” people have been biogenetically altered and enhanced to such a degree that they can change and choose sex by will, surely the ultimate application of ‘social constructionism’ to sex relations. In ‘The Culture,’ there is no institutional prejudice on the basis of sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, class etc., and an individual expressing such prejudice would be seen as a primitive savage. I see no reason for Objectivists, Randians and libertarians (or indeed, anyone) not sharing this sentiment [Gramstad 2000, n.p.].
As odd as it seems at first blush to have someone who espouses Objectivism take as his conceptual model the society envisioned by an adamantly leftist Scottish science fiction writer, Gramstad’s argument is in perfect earnest: he takes Banks’ utopian project as seriously as its author did, using it to critique the flaws of Randian Objectivism from the perspective of a scholar who, while convinced that Objectivism has a lot of good things to offer, is also troubled by the amount of reactionary clinging to old, flawed notions of gender and power relations many of its followers display. There is a lot of enthusiasm in Gramstad for the Culture’s socio-economic model, probably because he understood that the kind of society the Culture has formed in Banks’ novels bears only the most tenuous of connections to anything we have on Earth right now, and it is therefore possible to imagine it arising from any economic theory, power structure, or commercial concern. It doesn’t have to come exclusively from (in Earth terms) left-wing movements.
A year after the appearance of Gramstad’s article, Chris Brown, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, published a piece on the Culture in Millennium—Journal for International Studies. Brown examines the Culture as a socio-political entity, drawing from it a number of trends that, in his opinion, can be used to reflect on contemporary matters in the field of internal and international relations within and between countries at the industrial or post-industrial developmental stage:
The Culture, Contact and SC cannot be read as though they are substitutes for the West, NATO and the CIA or SAS. On the other hand, Banks is a political writer who in interviews has always been keen to stress that the Culture is, in some sense, an expression of wish-fulfillment on his part … with the work of as politically-aware a novelist as Banks, authorial intent cannot simply be set aside, even though we might hope to discover things in his work that he did not deliberately leave there for us to find. And although the Culture is most definitely not the ‘West,’ it is a liberal utopia that represents to Banks the best of what, in the absence of scarcity, the West could become [2001, 630–631].
Through the prism of this interpretation of Banks’ authorial intentions, Brown conducts a reading of the Culture’s intervention policies designed to illustrate its roots in the western liberal tradition of political thought. For example, the Culture’s sheer technological and industrial power, which enables it to run operations that cost Contact or Special Circumstances nothing in terms of loss of life (Inversions is emblematic here), “takes to a higher level the kind of invulnerability currently enjoyed by, say, modern air forces when engaged against outdated conventional opposition” (631). This invulnerability, however, carries with it a stigma of dishonor because the price one country, commonwealth, or group of nations should expect to pay for stooping to violence to begin with—loss of life among their own ranks—never happens or happens in such tiny numbers as to make no functional difference (and in any case, the Culture is often capable of bringing their dead or nearly dead agents back to life). However, because Banks acknowledges the existence of forms of moral equalization that do not require physical annihilation or permanent damage, the Culture’s all-but-invulnerable personnel in his stories “have to live with the consequences of their mistakes, and, for that matter, their successes. They find ways of suffering when the more conventional outlets of death and mutilation are denied them” (632).26
The psychological safety valve of the moral agonies Contact and SC personnel go through in the Culture novels—aside from the fact that they provide the narratives’ critical utopian machinery with fuel to run—resides in the ultimately secure moral backdrop against which these people can always lean: in a post-scarcity utopia controlled by benign AIs of near-godlike powers, humans no longer have to worry about ultimately doing good because the choice isn’t theirs anymore—it’s the Minds’, and because the Minds are possessed of a clarity and pervasiveness of thought that flesh sentients cannot comprehend, let alone measure themselves against, those same flesh sentients are safe in the knowledge that their many foibles are thankfully no longer a factor in the decision-making process. In short, the kind of humans the Culture stories postulate can’t be allowed anywhere near a society’s levers of power if this society is to have any hope of becoming utopian; the job, Banks implicitly declared when he gave control of the Culture to the Minds, is and will always be beyond our grasp (632–633).
From a dramatic standpoint, Brown observes, the saving grace of this setup is that the Minds do get it wrong every once in a blue moon (Look to Windward) or occasionally fall prey to power-trips (the anti–Affront conspiracy in Excession). While the victims of those vagaries wouldn’t exactly describe them as a saving grace, Banks’ readers would: the reality that, however rarely, even Minds can make mistakes helps retain a sense of drama and tension throughout the narratives. Also, Brown concludes, this very aspect of potential murkiness in the Minds’ makeup represents Banks’ best chance to “take the Culture in an altogether new direction, restoring a degree of genuinely political evolution to its trajectory” (633). The example he utilizes to indicate this potential shakeup is the sickening moment at the end of Look to Windward when Masaq’s Mind reflects on the possibility that fellow Culture Minds may have been behind the terrorist attempt because “some of our Minds might just think that we need a bit of timely blood and fire to remind us the universe is a perfectly uncaring place and that we have no more right to enjoy our agreeable ascendancy than any other empire [italics mine] long fallen and forgotten.” From this statement, Brown moves to the conclusion that the Culture truly is, after all, an empire, which in his opinion would bring it from its a-temporal, beatific political stasis back into the flow of events. Aside from the usual consideration that describing the Culture as an empire is always a problematic choice, no matter the textual evidence adduced to justify it, there is a strong possibility here that Brown read the Mind’s speculations on a possible but improbable status quo as the acknowledgement of a fait accompli. We will see in the next chapter if Banks’ decisions concerning the future direction of the Culture stories bore out Brown’s assessment.
Next on the list is David Horwich, whose 2002 article for Strange Horizons essentially constitutes a layman’s version of Guerrier and Kulbicki’s arguments for the Culture as a critical utopia: Horwich provides a basic rundown of the Culture’s characteristics—the post-scarcity economics, the Minds, Contact and SC, and so on—and after that goes through the Culture stories published thus far, examining them in terms of the behavior of what he describes as “the ambiguous utopia.”27 His writing is eloquent and economical, efficiently parsed by a number of quotes extracted from all the narratives, and his analysis of the moral pitfalls and ethical dilemmas the Culture encounters in the process of Trying to Do the Right Thing is exhaustive, moving from the purely narrative level to that of the connections between story and the world whose constant reshaping it both mirrors and adumbrates. Horwich’s conclusions are predictably in line with the workings of the critical utopia, if somewhat too constraining:
The Culture is an ambiguous utopia. Although it enjoys a level of technology (in Clarke’s phrase) “virtually indistinguishable from magic,” a highly rational set of ethics, and an economy of abundance that saves it from becoming a dystopia … this quasi-paradise does not have universal appeal, either inside or outside the Culture. Within the Culture, there is an undoubted need for Contact and SC…. Many other civilizations find the Culture anywhere from off-putting to repugnant, for a variety of reasons: dependence on the Minds, decadence and hedonism, smug self-satisfaction, and more. Banks seems to suggest that even almost complete control over the physical world and an advanced morality would not be enough to answer all the needs of humanity and human societies or to eliminate all forms of social and political conflict. Utopia lies always out of reach, an ideal to be striven after, but never to be achieved [2002, n.p.].
Horwich is tightening the definition here, and it’s fair to say that his concept of utopia is a little too restrictive—the level of flawlessness he demands from a utopian model practically ensures that no such model will ever qualify, in which case why bother discussing the notion to begin with? We should also say however, that while his entire line of reasoning runs parallel to those of Guerrier and Kulbicki, Horwich is either not aware of the critical utopia or not interested in placing his writing within its context; his is essentially a reader’s-response overview of the dramatic premises lying at the heart of the Culture stories, and that makes his paper none the worse for it.28
In 2004, Banks got a fanzine—The Banksoniain, whose first issue came out in February. Unlike The Culture, which preceded it by seven years and ended publication four years before its appearance, The Banksoniain is still running. The latest issue came out in February 2014, eight months after Banks’ death, and on the opening page its editor announced that “Whilst there are news and events to report on The Banksoniain will continue to do so, most likely at yearly intervals unless there is a particular need. We can expect translations, adaptations, and there is the possibility of unpublished Banks works being made available, perhaps with the Iain Banks Archive now at the University of Stirling” (1). The fanzine is available for free at http://efanzines.com/Banksoniain/.
We have now come to the present time. Following Banks’ passing, two books dedicated to his work have come out. The first was The Transgressive Iain Banks, a collection of articles edited by Martyn Colebrook and Katharine Cox that saw publication in July 2013, about a month after the event. The book, composed before the April 3 announcement of Banks’ terminal illness, nevertheless managed to add an afterword by Cox that announced his passing and celebrated his life and work. The second book, Moira Martingale’s Gothic Dimensions: Iain Banks—Timelord, constitutes an ambitious project: published in September 2013, it’s the first study to encompass Banks’ whole literary production. The book had originally seen the light of day in 2007 as Martingale’s PhD dissertation in Gothic Studies at the University of Bristol—the original title was Iain Banks: The Renovation of the Gothic (Banksoniain 2014, 10)—and it indeed conducts a sustained reading of Banks’ opus through the lens of his employment of Gothic themes and narrative techniques. While Martingale’s book is not germane to the topic covered in this work, in general terms it represents an important step toward the development of a critical taxonomy for Banks’ whole opus, as well as being an interesting, illuminating read.
The Transgressive Iain Banks, on the other hand, has already had a great deal of impact on this book. Of its twelve articles, seven of which are exclusively dedicated to Banks’ No-M novels, several have appeared in previous chapters, from the introduction and David Pattie’s “The Lessons of Lanark” to Martyn Colebrook’s “Lanark and The Bridge” and Will Slocombe’s “Games Playing Roles in Banks’ Fiction.” The book is very well rounded and thoroughly researched, and it constitutes an indispensable starting point for any scholar wishing to tackle Banks from now on. Even so, however, the notion of the Culture as empire manages to appear in here too. In his reading of Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games, William Stephenson equates the Culture with “the contemporary West, with its refined expertise in violence and its rapacious desire to hold onto global dominance and material prosperity … the Culture is a disturbingly complacent symbiosis of war machine and state that offers an estranged metaphor for the British and American regimes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries” (166–167). Chris Brown had done the same in his essay for Millennium, but unlike Stephenson, he had known how far he could take the Culture-USA/UK correspondence.
It may never go away, this constant misreading of the Culture series, especially if postmodernist critics29 insist on applying their categories to Banks’ work without taking his approach to fiction writing and the history of space opera into consideration.30 Banks loved metafictional negotiations, complex plots, and deconstructionist approaches, but he also loved story; he tied up every little subplot, told the tale of every character, and made sure to repay our good faith in him in kind. His influences were Catch-22, The Tin Drum, The Centauri Device, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, sure, but they were also Alistair MacLean, Monty Python, the Marx Brothers, John Sladek, and Star Wars. He knew when to stop deconstructing. Much like Mel Brooks’ great parodies—Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles foremost among them—do for their respective genres, Banks’ novels subject the form of space opera to scrutiny and mockery, but without wrecking the story underneath. Once we’re done taking note of the send-ups, there’s still a tale to care about, characters to empathize with, and a place of origin that remains standing throughout and beyond the story told—which is why, as James Brown observes, “the Culture novels are also noted as a version of one of the most plot-heavy genres of sf: the space opera” (60). There’s little doubt that scholarship on Banks will continue, so on this score as well as on many others, we’ll see what the future holds.