1. Kelly shares this unenviable status with Kirsty Wark of the BBC, who interviewed Banks about three weeks before his passing.
2. “God, I’d nearly finished the book when I found out. It was bizarre,” Banks told Kelly. “Guy was always going to be dying of cancer; the book was always going to be predicated on that, and nothing really changed because of my own bad news. The initial story came about really quickly. Some books take a lot of teasing out and the coming together of previous ideas, but this one jumped in there fully formed in the course of a couple of days back in October 2012” (Kelly 2013 n.p.).
3. But see Guy’s anger at his fate in The Quarry. Banks emphatically indicated that Guy is not a literary doppelganger, especially given his character’s rage at the knowledge that life will go on without him (“I think that’s a stupid point of view,” Banks declared. “Apart from anything else, I mean, what did you expect?”). On the other hand, Banks himself admitted that, upon receiving the news of the cancer, “I wrote the bit where Guy says, ‘I shall not be disappointed to live all you bastards behind.’ It was an exaggeration of what I was feeling, but it was me thinking: ‘How can I use this to positive effect?’” (Kelly 2013 n.p.). As customary, there was always something else going on in Banks’ thought processes, and his viewpoints always encompassed many facets of a given situation, personal or otherwise.
4. A slight correction: by the time Against a Dark Background saw print, Banks had already published a few non–Culture SF short stories, for example “Scratch” (1987), “Road of Skulls” (1987), and “Odd Attachment” (1989). My choice to mark the “official” opening of the non–Culture strand of Banks’ science fiction rests on the contention that he was overwhelmingly a novel writer, and his short-fiction production remains extremely sparse. In fact, with the exception of “The Secret Courtyard” and “Spheres” (both 2010), two pieces dropped from the original manuscripts of—respectively—Matter (2008) and Transition, Banks wrote no short fiction after 1989. The total count only reaches up to seven (nine with the two excerpts), and two of those are Culture narratives. Without the four non–Culture SF novels Banks published between 1993 and 2009, it’s doubtful that those short stories could have constituted a separate entity on their own.
5. “I never had a guilt-making religious background,” he told The Independent’s Liz Hoggard in 2007. “I’m lucky to have escaped all that Calvinist nonsense. I think you can live a perfectly moral life as an atheist and a humanist” (n.p.).
6. See Colebrook, Cox, and Haddock 2013, 5.
7. Banks recalled another such incident in Raw Spirit (276–280).
8. Banks’ meeting with Annie, whom he would marry in 1992 and who would remain his wife until their separation in 2007, is another Mad Iain story. One late night in 1980 Banks walked into the London apartment he shared with some friends to tell them he’d met “this glorious blonde, round about my age” at work. One day he mustered up the courage to ask her out for a drink, and when they got to the pub she surprised him by matching both his choice and his volume of drink—Old Peculiar. “She drank me under the table,” he recalled, “and I had to borrow a fiver from her to get home.” For the rest of their life together, Banks and Annie went on a yearly trip to Masham, Yorkshire, where Old Peculiar is brewed. They’d have dinner there on the anniversary of their first date (Hughes 1999 n.p.). Sadly, Annie passed away in 2009, shortly after their divorce had been finalized (Cabell 2014, Kindle location 472).
9. Banks’ “petrolhead” days ended in February of 2007, when he sold his entire collection of super-cars (two Porsches, one Jaguar, one BMW, and one ramped-up Land Rover Defender) and bought a hybrid. He was trying to become environmentally more responsible (Jeffries 2007, n.p.).
10. Banks’ strongest asset when facing his detractors, however, was his sense of humor—which, in at least one occasion, rubbed off on those around him: In the wake of the initial outrage at the publication of The Wasp Factory, someone at Macmillan (Banks never knew who) collected the novel’s reviews, both positive and negative, and placed them as blurbs on the back cover of the reprints. To this day, if one picks up The Wasp Factory and looks at the back cover, one will find the following declaration from the Times Literary Supplement: “A literary equivalent of the nastiest brand of juvenile delinquency.” Nestled next to it are several other comments from the Mail on Sunday (“A mighty imagination has arrived on the scene”), the London Times (“Rubbish”), the Financial Times (“Macabre, bizarre, and impossible to put down”), The Scotsman (“There’s nothing to force you, having been warned, to read it; nor do I recommend it”), and the Daily Express (“Read it if you dare”). Unsurprisingly, the novel remains one of Banks’ most popular, and the critical acclaim surrounding it has only increased with time.
Throughout the rest of his career, Banks continued to treat his own work with self-effacing humor. When the BBC adaptation of The Crow Road was released on DVD, for example, the case carried a comment from him that described the four-part series as “annoyingly better than the book in far too many places,” and Complicity appeared in print with a review “by the author” that assessed the novel as being “a bit like The Wasp Factory, except without the happy ending and redeeming air of cheerfulness” (Chivers 2013b n.p.).
11. This argument does not assume that readers of Banks’ mainstream works and readers of his SF were two sharply separated groups. There were plenty of people who, being fond of his writing in every form, happily switched between genres. Precisely for this reason, however, such readers were usually not the ones to complain of immorality on Banks’ part.
1. See Garnett 1989, 52.
2. “I wanted to be a writer from the age of 11,” Banks told William Leith of The Telegraph. “I have proof of this. At school we were asked to draw, in crayon, what we wanted to be when we grew up. I didn’t know how to draw a writer, so I drew an actor. And I put ‘and writer’ in quite clear letters in the top left-hand corner” (2003, n.p.).
3. He would not have been if his sister, Martha Ann, had survived. She’d been born in 1952 with spina bifida, and had died after only six weeks. Later in life, in Raw Spirit, Banks speculated that Martha’s loss probably made his parents spoil him even more than would have been normal for an only child (42).
4. It is also possible to argue that a sense of the positive effects resulting from such large-scale, loosely connected family structures later informed his envisioning of the Culture’s basic social nucleus.
5. For a complete list of Banks’ influences, literary and otherwise, see Colebrook, Cox and Haddock 2013 (1–5), Pattie 2013, Wilson 1994, SFFWorld 1997, Rawlinson 2009, and Rundle 2010.
6. On this seemingly improbable influence, Banks commented: “Of course, I don’t think there is much of her work that is identifiable in mine. In fact, I doubt there is a critic out there reading one of my books who will say, ‘Oh I think I can see a little Jane Austen in there’ … But that’s the thing, you can admire someone, and take inspiration from them, without them actually having a big influence on your work. Although maybe as the writer I am the last person who should say that…” (SFX 2012, n.p.).
7. “I am, of course, talking about the same Leonard Cohen who makes music but not a lot of people know that he used to write novels as well. He did two: Beautiful Losers and The Favorite Game. And guess what? They are actually pretty good […] certainly an awful lot better than Tarantula by Bob Dylan! Now that was a so-called ‘experimental novel’ although to me it was just white noise. There was no plot, no filters […] Leonard Cohen, however, did some impressive work” (SFX 2012, n.p.).
8. Star Wars in particular played a key role in the development of Consider Phlebas: “All of the big action sequences that you see in my book Consider Phlebas are only there because I saw Star Wars back in 1977. The thing that was so great about Star Wars is that it allowed you to think, Oh wow, I could do that too. As an author my effects budget is limitless.’ All of the ideas that I thought seemed a bit too mad now didn’t seem mad at all. I had stuff in my mind that I put into the category of ‘lunatic ideas.’ Like writing about a fistfight under a giant hovercraft. Before Star Wars you would think about that and say to yourself, ‘You know, maybe that is a bit too James Bond, no one could possibly take that seriously.’ But after Star Wars all of that was okay. It became okay to do complete spectacle. So, yeah, Consider Phlebas only really exists because of Star Wars” (SFX 2012, n.p.).
9. Next to the determination, in fact, there also seems to have been a great deal of happiness to Banks’ approach to the struggle of becoming a successful writer. In 1990, he said this to Science Fiction Eye’s Michael Cobley: “I used to think, suppose that the heavens opened, the clouds parted, and this big hand comes down and a voice says, ‘BANKSIE!—READ THIS!’ And it’s a big stone tablet that says ‘Banksie, you will never, ever, ever publish a work of fiction of any sort in your entire life during the future course of the universe!’ The ultimate rejection slip, a rejection slip from the universe, from God! And I thought—no, I’ll still write. I might not write as often, but I’d still do it because I enjoy writing. And I enjoy giving it round to my friends. So even if I didn’t get published, I’d still do it. I enjoy getting my thoughts down on the page” (1990, 26).
10. Readers familiar with Stand on Zanzibar will recognize a few points of connection between Brunner’s novel and TTR—for example, the chaotic near-future scenario, the limited conflict between superpowers (in Brunner it’s between the U.S. and China), and the small nation caught between the large players on the world stage (in Brunner it’s Beninia, a fictional African state). On the other hand, Catch-22’s influence seems to have expressed itself more in the tone and the language than in the situation—the puns, the perversely arbitrary nature of the war’s conduct, and the reversals of meaning implicit in such notions as Mongoliana’s “Dependence Day” celebration. However, the reader should keep in mind that, since TTR has never appeared in print, the only information we have on it comes from Banks’ own synopsis. It is therefore difficult to make parallels with confidence, and those above should be treated as speculation rather than informed deduction.
11. “Say you’re describing a chandelier,” Banks reminisced with William Leith in 2003. “You would have a character who was drinking shandy and leered at somebody. It’s that bad, I’m afraid … I used to count up my pun-to-word ratio and the best I ever did, I managed to get it below 10. I got my pun ratio down to 9.8 to one. Less than every tenth word is a pun. It’s difficult” (n.p.). Ken MacLeod remembers this phase as the notable characteristic in his first experiences of his friend’s writing: “My first encounter with Iain’s writing was these collages that he produced, where he wrote these crackpot texts, rather obviously derived from Terry Gilliam films, illustrated with cuttings from Sunday supplements. They were quite funny, politically provocative, with tanks and guns and sex all juxtaposed in alarming ways but the stories were just ludicrous handwritten exercises in puns” (Hughes 1999, n.p.). The cuttings from Sunday supplements would be, in this case, a carry-over from Stand on Zanzibar). Evidently, they both agreed that neither The Hungarian Lift-Jet nor TTR deserved to be unleashed onto the reading public.
12. Later in life, Banks would also find inspiration in the work of the environmental activist George Monbiot and the political economist Will Hutton (MacLeod 2013, n.p.).
13. In 1990, in the Science Fiction Eye interview, Banks told Michael Cobley that, by the time he encountered New Worlds on a revolving stand at Gourock Station, the magazine was a quarterly paperback (1990, 28). NW’s switch from monthly to quarterly went into effect at the beginning of 1971, and the fact that Banks found his first issue at Gourock’s train station suggests that he was either on his way home from Stirling for a visit or going back to Stirling after a visit home—thus, the most probable date for Banks’ first encounter with the New Wave would be 1972 or 1973.
14. Banks’ actual political choices at the time of voting, however, were not as monolithic as this brief summary may lead one to believe. In 2007, for example, he told The Independent’s Liz Hoggard that, since he’d heard that the SNP “will guarantee the Catholic adoption agencies a get-out from the Sexual Orientation Regulations Act … ‘I’ll probably waste my vote on some extreme leftwing candidate as usual’” (Hoggard 2007, n.p.). That “as usual” at the end suggests that Banks often ended up making highly personalized choices when it came to supporting political figures.
15. The exception was the first draft of Against a Dark Background, a non–Culture SF novel Banks wrote in 1977. After substantial rewriting, it was eventually published in 1993. The sources utilized to establish the chronology of Banks’ early works are Garnett 1989, 51–69; Cobley 1990, 22–32; Colebrook, Cox, and Haddock 2013, 1–8.
16. In the United States, on the other hand, the novel fared quite differently. It was originally supposed to come out six months after the British edition in order to capitalize on whatever hype it would garner there, but “management changes at Harpers and Row meant that they [both editions] were issued at the same time.” The result was that the American edition “was marketed as a straight science fiction novel in the States and disappeared without a trace” (qtd. in Colebrook 2013, 30).
17. These symbolic meanings extend to Franks’ possessions. For instance, he has bestowed upon his trusty trowel, which he uses to dig the holes for the Sacrifice Poles, the name Stoutstroke (9), and he calls the miniature catapult he uses for hunting and self-defense the Black Destroyer (33). His bike is called Gravel (50).
18. In keeping with Frank’s penchant for bestowing symbolic monikers, each death-chamber has been given a name that, in his mind, resonates mystically with the chamber’s nature—for example, the Boiling Pool, the Spider’s Parlour, the Venus Cave, the Volt Chamber, and the Blade Corridor.
19. Banks is having fun here. Graham Park and Steven Grout are exaggerated exemplars of the two sides in the tubercular old argument pitting mimetic literature against fantastika. Graham is a rather conceited young man, constantly worried about how others—principally but not exclusively Sara—will judge him. He considers himself a “serious” artist, which he takes to mean someone who only draws from reality, and holds science fiction in a certain amount of contempt. Aside from his dismissive responses to Slater’s repeated requests for feedback on his ideas for SF stories, he does not want others to find him reading it—once, waiting for Sara in her apartment, he picks up a copy of Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and examines it for a while before “put[ting] the book back. Although it was funny, it was rather light reading; he wanted Sara to find him reading something more impressive” (266–267). Steven Grout, by contrast, lies at the far end on the other side of the spectrum—he’s the dysfunctional fan who takes SF to be exactly the case of the world (“Escapism, they called it,” he thinks at one point of his enemies’ anti–SF propaganda. “Oh, they were clever all right!”). Throughout most of the novel, Banks’ third-person narration paints Steven as socially inept and awkward, excessively suspicious of the unremarkable at the same time as he is astonishingly credulous about the strange. On the street he jumps from car to car, seeking shelter from vehicles on the road because he believes that every one of them carries lasers in their wheels’ axles, and the thought patterns he weaves to justify his reality frame are the quintessential example of a deluded psyche:
He wondered how many people in all the mental hospitals in the country—or the world, come to that—were really fallen Warriors who had either cracked up from the strain of trying to live in this hell-hole, or simply made the wrong choice and thought that the test was just seeing through the whole thing and then having the courage to stand out and make that challenge. Well, he wasn’t going to end up like one of those poor bastards [27].
It’s the third plotline, that of Quiss and Ajayi, which gives the first two another, entirely more serious dimension.
20. But look at the metatextual connections with Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971), a novel featuring a protagonist named James Orr whose dreams have the power to alter reality, and Catch-22, where Orr is the name of the pilot in Yossarian’s squadron who keeps getting shot down over the sea and who, one day, simply rows away beyond the horizon and is never seen again. At the end of the novel, Yossarian finds out that Orr has survived his long sea voyage and now resides in Sweden.
21. The circular bruise on Orr’s chest, we eventually discover, comes from the mark the car’s steering wheel left on the same area of Alex Lennox’s body.
22. The four chapters in Coma are grouped under “metaphormosis,” those in Triassic under “Metamorpheus,” and those in Eocene under “Metamorphosis.”
23. “Very well, you of the minced cortex; do what comes so naturally to you and let’s get on with it,” the familiar tells the Barbarian at one point. Without comprehending that he’s just been insulted, the Conan-doppelganger follows the advice and kills everyone in the room (101).
24. Frank mentions these novels as two of the rare presents Angus ever bought him, and which Frank had therefore “assiduously avoided reading” (51). Together, they represent a cruel joke on Angus’ part: The Tin Drum (one of Banks’ early influences) is the story of Oskar, a boy of great beauty who, upon reaching the age of three—the same age as Frank at the time of the false accident—decides he will not grow up any more. We hear the story from Oskar himself, now an old man confined in an asylum, and of course it is entirely possible that everything he’s telling us may be a hallucination or a lie. Myra Breckinridge, on the other hand, is written from the viewpoint of a man who, while he is still undergoing the process of sexual reassignment surgery, takes on the identity of a woman. Frank does not comment on whether he is aware of the general gist of the plot of either book, but whatever the case, we are confronted with two instances of metafictional doubling: The Tin Drum echoes the problematic nature of Frank’s hold on reality and comments on his arrested development, his butterfly impalement on the wheel of time, while Myra Breckinridge presents us with another tale of sexual alteration—albeit a willing one, in the case of the novel’s eponymous protagonist. Also, the possibility that, had Frank read both (or either) novels, he might have guessed his true identity earlier, feels like a particularly painful twist, all the more so because Frances never discovers the joke her father had perpetrated at her expense.
25. Perhaps the most relevant instance occurs at the beginning of chapter 4, when Frank significantly compares himself to a country (62–64).
26. And the only reason why John is a ward to begin with resides in the challenge his unknown provenance and his amnesia present to Dr. Joyce, his therapist. John Orr is, in other words, an interesting experimental subject.
1. A more personal reason also contributed to the choice of a split name:
I used the “M” occasionally, not always… but then some of my family were a bit upset that I’d dropped it. “Are you ashamed of being a Menzies?” … So I decided to keep my own name but put the “M” in, which seemed like a good idea at the time but was a terrible mistake, because I’ve been answering that question ever since, and it does give ammunition to the literary snobs who think I make the distinction because I’m “writing down” when I do science fiction [Wilson 1994, n.p.].
Irrespective of the reasons for the choice, there were now two Bankses: Iain Banks, the writer of edgy, challenging literature, and Iain M. Banks, writer of fun but ultimately dismissible escapist fiction. This dichotomy, irrelevant and in any case inaccurate from day one, still holds at the time of writing, although somewhat reduced in sharpness.
2. In his introduction to the 1964 Faber & Faber edition of Charles Harness’ The Paradox Men, which had originally been published in 1955 as part of an Ace Double. An excerpt from The Paradox Men also appears in the 1974 collection Aldiss edited.
3. On the resurgence of space opera in the late ’80s and early ’90s, see the time-lagged dialogue in the pages of Extrapolation between Patricia Monk (1992, 295–316) and Gary Westfahl (1994, 176–185).
4. As John Clute observes, the name “does sound awfully like moneylender” (1995b, 29).
5. In fact, the Culture does employ one lone Changer, but at the time of the incident on Schar’s World, we eventually find out, she is on an important task unconnected to the war on the other side of the galaxy (92).
6. Horza’s presence on Schar’s World was, in fact, the result of punishment. At the beginning of the war, he had discovered a plot on the part of some Changers to re-ignite their homeworld’s ancient engines and steer the asteroid back into neutral space, thus avoiding having to fight for the Idirans. After Horza killed two of the conspirators and violated the Changers’ golden rule that no Changer should take another’s life, the Academy of Military Arts packed him up to Schar’s World to get him out of public sight (102–103).
7. Fal ’Ngeestra’s hobby, and her insistence to practice it without oversight, actually lands her in the worst trouble she ever gets in the novel: when we meet her, she’s been wearing a splint for a week in the aftermath of a fall that left her alone in the cold for two days before she was rescued. Jase keeps reminding her of that (86).
8. Many years later, in a 2010 interview with SFX, Banks explained why the figure of the Culture Referer never appeared again in any other story: “I always thought that was one of my weaker inventions in Phlebas! After thousands of years of artificial intelligence, the idea that the AI couldn’t do all this themselves is silly. I did make the point that they were being studied for how they could be so intuitive, but I was uncomfortable with it though so they were never going to survive long! Basically: the AI Minds have got better at doing that stuff themselves so they’re no longer required” (Golder 2010).
9. The ultimate tragedy of Yalson’s death, and of the death of their child, is that the only reason why she and Horza could have offspring lies in her parentage, which is half Culture from her mother’s side. From her, Yalson had inherited the Culture’s genofixing, which allowed crossbreeding. Shortly before the final disaster, the final horrified witnessing of his lover’s death, Horza embraces Yalson and his would-be child, happily accepting the chance to have a family (and therefore an identity; 362–364).
10. The irony here is that Horza is killed by one of the biologicals he supported, who wielded as a weapon the helpless body of one of the machines he hated—a machine which, despite his contempt, had tried to help him.
11. In a 2000 article, William Hardesty pointed out that, besides the fundamental structural connection to Phlebas the Phoenician, Horza should also reminds us of another character from one of fantastika’s key turn-of-the-century texts. Horza’s death, Hardesty wrote, “recapitulates Kurtz’s in Heart of Darkness” (119).
1. They informed his life as well. Early in his career, Banks used to design games, although by his admission they were fiendishly complicated and therefore unmarketable (Garnett 1989, 65). His personal favorite among all the games he purchased and played was, unsurprisingly, Civilization (Slocombe 2013, 139).
2. In his article for Science Fiction Eye, Lawrence Person indicates a precedent for The Player of Games’ plotline: it’s a story by Charles V. De Vet and Katherine MacLean entitled “Second Game,” first published as a short story in 1958 and later expanded into a novel in 1962 (Person 1990, 35).
3. Damage in Consider Phlebas is a good example of a game that expands beyond its traditional envelope to literally affect the lives of others. In the novel (195–196), Damage is a card game whose workings are described in terms vaguely reminiscent of those of poker, except that the cards in each player’s hands are connected to electronic fields with which that player can influence any other player’s mind-state, thus inducing every sort of emotion in their target—love and hate, joy and despair, even powerful suicidal tendencies. Thus, all players of Damage gamble with their life. Also, all players have at their disposal a certain number of Lives, one of which they lose every time someone else wins a hand out of which they didn’t withdraw early enough. Those Lives are actual people, tied to chairs next to their player owner. When a player loses a Life, that Life loses his/hers.
4. This whole argument assumes, of course, that we can take Frank at his word, that Steven is not in fact a warrior from another dimension, and that the shadow-world of the bridge was a psychogenic fantasy. All these assumptions are problematic because, once again, the uncertainty of fantastika makes the results of any attempt at assessment nebulous at best. The only reason why they appear here is that, in the aftermath of Phlebas’ publication, a mode of writing opened up for Banks in comparison to which works like Factory, Glass, and The Bridge became relatively “realistic.”
5. For the sake of simplicity, I’m assuming that the narrator borrows the author’s gender.
6. In keeping with her name, Yay is possessed of a generally bubbly disposition and an optimistic outlook, both of which stand in sharp contrast to Gurgeh’s often purposefully bleak reflections.
7. Mawhrin-Skel tricks Gurgeh into making a mistake open to blackmail. Faced with the possibility of winning a game—interestingly called “Stricken”—by achieving a “Full Web,” something nobody in the Culture has been able to do before, Gurgeh accepts Mawhrin-Skel’s offer to scan the contents of certain pieces that should remain secret. After the game, which Gurgeh has won but not with the Full Web (46–54), the drone comes to him and reveals the recording of the moment they made the deal; either Gurgeh accepts SC’s offer and speaks in favor of Mawhrin-Skel’s reinstatement or the recording goes public, thus crippling his reputation—a considerable threat, since one’s good standing with others is the one form of currency the Culture supports in its day-to-day dealings (55–59).
8. We know the Lesser Cloud as the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
9. The first time occurs a very short while before, when Flere-Imsaho bluntly begins his explanation of the events taking place behind the curtains with this opening: “You’ve been used, Jernau Gurgeh” (295).
10. When at a reception Gurgeh asks a young woman whether it wouldn’t be possible for females to play each other in the first round, when the draw is supposed to be left to chance, she replies that things have never worked out that way in all the centuries since the creation of the game (137).
11. By far the worst of those scenes occur about two-thirds into the novel, when Flere-Imsaho helps Gurgeh out of a moment of loss of self-confidence in the wake of a bad day on the Azad boards—he is about to lose the current game to a Judge of the Supreme Court. The drone takes him on a tour of the Azadian capital’s real nightlife, the one the empire had been keen on hiding behind excesses of pageantry, and what Gurgeh sees and hears on the streets is so much for him that he has to ask Flere-Imsaho to stop the tour and take him back to the module they call home (202–207). Once there, Flere-Imsaho shows Gurgeh one last item of horror: an unscrambled live video feed from one of the prisons, in which so-called enemies of the states are subjected to the worst kinds of violation (209). Upon witnessing what the legal system of which his present opponent is one of the highest representatives visits on its own citizens, Gurgeh enters a state of preternaturally cold, unspeaking rage. He spends the night glaring at a holographic representation of the Azad board he’s playing on and, in the morning, he proceeds to dismantle the judge’s game as if the apex hadn’t even been there to play in the first place (211–215).
12. The definition quoted above is delivered on the occasion of Gurgeh’s visit to an opulent country estate where, to mitigate the embarrassment of his continuing victories on the Azad boards, he is offered free use of every one in the place—men, women, apices. He can commit whatever sexual crime he wants while there, in exchange for withdrawing from the competition. A particularly chilling moment occurs when, to prove the level of licence that Azadian elites enjoy when it comes to breaking their own rules, one of Gurgeh’s hosts points to the band playing in the background and tells him that most of the instruments are made of bone—Azadian bone, often extracted without anesthesia (222).
13. Like Flere-Imsaho, the Limiting Factor isn’t actually demilitarized. In fact, it’s pretty well cannoned-up and capable of single-handedly taking on the whole Azadian navy (297).
14. Thus, the narrator’s announcement at the beginning of Player that the story “ends with a game that is not a game” comes to fruition, and from many different points of view. First, Azad was never just a game to begin with—it was also the reality of the Empire. Secondly, the context of the game was utterly eclipsed by the context of a larger play that involved Azad (game and empire) as one of the playing pieces. Thirdly, that final match was never just a game to Nicosar, and once Gurgeh understood for what stakes the Azadian apex was playing, it stopped being just a game for him as well.
15. The dating of The Player of Games’ timeline comes in the form of a brief aside about the age of the Limiting Factor, which had been built “seven hundred and sixteen years earlier in the closing stages of the Idiran war, when the conflict in space was almost over” (104). That would place the events in Player around the year AD 2083 on Earth, if we work out the date from the Idiran war’s timeline in Consider Phlebas’ appendices.
1. Thus, from an Earth-relative perspective, we can place both the writing of the manuscript and the events in Use of Weapons around the year AD 2092.
2. But remember the pseudo-bibliographical information below the “Appendices” title at the end of Consider Phlebas—we have been contacted, at some point in our hopefully not too distant future.
3. Thus, Linter becomes the latest in an increasingly longer line of malcontents, which by now includes Yalson and Balveda from Phlebas, Gurgeh from Player, and the character of Wrobik from “A Gift from the Culture” (see chapter 5, note 2).
4. See for example her commentary on Cold-War Berlin, East and West (106–109), or her impressions while walking around New York City (144–145).
5. It must be noted, however, that Li’ndane has no kind words for communism either. The leftist utopia of the Culture resembles Earthside communist/socialist systems only in the acknowledgment of a preferable principle of wealth distribution, as evidenced by Sma’s reference to Leon Trotsky as the positive figure within that socio-economic philosophy. In every other respect, the Culture is literally and figuratively light-years away from any arrangement existing on our planet.
6. At the end of Li’s electoral speech, after the applause has died down, Sma and a few others carry him to the Ship’s rec area and throw him into the swimming pool, fusing the lightsaber (141). After the elections, he begins to refer to himself as the Arbitrary’s “captain in exile” and starts betting against the ship on everything from horse races to soccer games. The Arbitrary cheats in Li’s favor and ends up owing him a monstrous amount of money, and because Li insists on payment, the ship makes him “a flawless cut diamond the size of his fist. It was his, the ship told him. A gift; he could own it.” Naturally, Li loses interest in the diamond after that, and in the end persuades the Arbitrary to put the stone in orbit around Neptune on its way out of the solar system as a joke (142).
7. See for example pp. 110–113.
8. While the Arbitrary, Li, and Linter corral Sma’s attitude from within the memoir, it’s Skaffen-Amtiskaw that counters it from without. He appears in the memoir as its editor with a number of funny, dry, deprecating footnotes counterpointing her narrative flow.
9. We know this because Fal ’Ngeestra in Consider Phlebas reflects on just such a rowdy upbringing in one of the State of play interludes (332–333).
10. Given Banks’ atheism, and considering that the Culture universe is pointedly without gods, this is as close as the narrative ever comes to hinting that Linter may have made a terrible mistake.
11. This is why the dedication at the beginning of Use of Weapons reads: “I blame Ken MacLeod for the whole thing. It was his idea to argue the old warrior out of retirement, and he suggested the fitness program, too.”
12. By the same token, Horza performs this role in Phlebas, and Dervley Linter performs it in The State of the Art (one could also make a case for the whole of planet Earth also figuring in this process).
13. So, if he’s this unhinged, why did the Culture pick Zakalwe? The answer is that Zakalwe and Beychae know each other too well for anything but the genuine article to work—no stand-ins, no replacements (21–22).
14. On one occasion, in the aftermath of a mission in which Zakalwe’s body was crippled beyond repair and only his head could be saved, Skaffen-Amtiskaw sends him a present via Sma—it’s a hat (125–128).
15. The name of the ship is one of the memories comprising the set that haunts Zakalwe throughout the novel—and yet, perversely, or perhaps because he feels that he doesn’t deserve to forget, he himself purposefully uses the name in the Voerenhutz mission (154).
16. This last sentence, which refers to Skaffen-Amtiskaw’s effort to save Zakalwe, carries a hint that the drone too is trying to atone for its past.
17. Another important connection between the two titles is that Zakalwe is, in a very real sense, a player of games as well—wargames, to be specific. Gurgeh is a generalist, but Zakalwe specializes. Of course, this consideration would next lead us to a view of Sma, Skaffen-Amtiskaw, and the whole of SC as wargamers, each with a certain skill set and a certain operational envelope.
18. If this interpretation is valid, then there may be slight mistake in timing on Banks’ part. Properly speaking, Year Zero was AD 1975, not 1977.
19. It must be pointed out that, as far as classical academia is concerned, reviews aren’t serious critical work. John Clute himself wrote a beautifully scathing expose of this state of things in an article entitled “What I did on my Summer Vacation.” Originally published in 1998 the journal Paradoxa, the article was later reprinted twice in two successively revised versions—the first was for the book Scores: Reviews 1993–2003 (Beccon 2003), and the second for Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm (Beccon 2011).
20. A strange attitude from the author of a well-known space-opera series of the 1990s, whose first volume—Take Back Plenty—came out in the same year as Use of Weapons.
1. The two short stories, “A Gift from the Culture” and “Descendant,” both appeared in 1987, the first in Interzone #20 and the second in the anthology Tales from the Forbidden Planet, edited by Roz Kaveney. The case for “Descendant” belonging to the Culture universe is complicated by the absence of actual references to the Culture itself (although the story does feature a module, a drone, knife missiles, and an intelligent suit), and this uncertainty is actually welcome: the story is a disturbing yarn halfway between space opera and Gothicism in which a damaged, sentient suit and its equally wounded human operator are the only survivors of an attack on their module; after landing on a barren, dusty planet, they have to trudge through a seemingly endless landscape to reach the closest friendly outpost. During the walk, as both man and machine get weaker and their pain increases, it becomes progressively more difficult to tell the thoughts of one from the other. When, at the end of the story, only the suit reaches the outpost alive, we are left with the slightest hint that it may literally have cannibalized the human inside. We don’t get to find out what really happened; we can only suspect (29–49). “A Gift from the Culture,” on the other hand, presents us with a more familiar—albeit scarcely more cheerful—scenario: Wrobik used to be a Culture citizen, a Contact operative, and a woman. Now, after a sex change, he lives in the Vreccile Economic Community, a small, corrupt starfaring civilization that would have elicited a cautious nod of approval from the Empire of Azad (probably followed by a full-scale invasion). He has a boyfriend, Maust, and a lot of debts to settle with a group of scary people who, in return for wiping the ledger, give him a gun that can only be operated by a Culture human—his job is to destroy the spaceship carrying an important military figure back to the capital, Vreccile City. When Wrobik hears that a Culture ambassador is also on board, he tries to run away. The mobsters then capture Maust and use him as leverage, at which point Wrobik does what they want and, at the end of the story, blends into the crowd, running away along with everyone else (7–22).
2. The page numbers refer to the version of “A Few Notes on the Culture” that Night Shade press reprinted in their 2004 edition of The State of the Art. The essay appears at the end of the collection, but those who’d rather read it on its own can find it either at http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm or at http://nuwen.net/culture.html (content-wise, there is no difference between these two online versions and the printed one). The original version, whose wording differs slightly from that of the others, still exists at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/rec.arts.sf.written/a$20few$20notes$20on$20the$20Culture/rec.arts.sf.written/RMeezCFdROs/wuT-QSbjBSsJ, complete with MacLeod’s prefatory blurb.
3. At this point, one might object that such mild treatment of a murderer would be disrespectful toward his/her/its victim and their loved ones, not to mention unjust in first-principle terms. On this topic, it’s useful to consider this assessment of the Culture’s views on retribution—on the part of Zakalwe, of all people. Speaking to the Ethnarch Kerian, leader of another Azad-analogue society, Zakalwe explains that the way the Culture deals with people like him is to remove them from their seat of power and put them in places that don’t really look like prisons at all. There, those tyrants will spend the rest of their days in tranquility and safety, unable to leave but otherwise untroubled and free from danger:
And though some would say the nice people are too soft, the soft, nice people would say that the crimes committed by the bad people are usually so terrible there is no known way of making the bad people start to suffer even a millionth of the agony and despair they have produced, so what is the point in retribution? It would be just another obscenity to cap the tyrant’s life with his own death [Banks 1992 32].
Unfortunately for the Ethnarch, this is not the Zakalwe who still works for SC. “I’m freelance now,” he tells Kerian before gunning him down without batting an eyelid (34).
4. Banks writes: “Culture names act as an address if the person concerned stays where they were brought up. Let’s take an example: Balveda, from Consider Phlebas. Her full name is Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda dam T’seif. The first part tells you she was born/brought up on Rabaroan Plate, in the Juboal stellar system (where there is only one Orbital in a system, the first part of a name will often be the name of the Orbital rather than the star); Perosteck is her given name (almost invariably the choice of one’s mother), Alseyn is her chosen name … Balveda is her family name (usually one’s mother’s family name) and T’seif is the house/estate she was raised within. The ‘sa’ affix on the first part of her name would translate into ‘er’ in English (we might all start our names with ‘Sun-Earther’, in English, if we were to adopt the same nomenclature), and the ‘dam’ part is similar to the German ‘von’” (186). Just to make sure we know he means what he says, Banks signs off at the end of “A Few Notes” by using both his Earth name of Iain M. Banks and his Culture name of “Sun-Earther Iain El-Bonko Banks of North Queensferry” (188).
5. To this list we should also add Wrobik from “A Gift from the Culture.” Like Gurgeh in the early stages of Player, he was bored in the culture, and like Linter, he thought that the ethics of the Contact section of which he was part were nothing more than a thin smokescreen to justify doing the same bad things everyone else was doing—“I refused to live with such hypocrisy,” he says, “and chose instead this honestly selfish and avaricious society, which doesn’t pretend to be good, just ambitious” (13). After eight years of living in the VEC, however, Wrobik has started regretting his choice: “My great adventure, my renunciation of what seemed to me sterile and lifeless to plunge into a more vital society, my grand gesture […] well, now it seemed like an empty gesture, now it looked like a stupid, petulant thing to have done” (11). There are clear echoes of Linter’s own arguments in Wrobik’s thought processes, but it is anyone’s guess whether Linter, had he lived, would also have come to regret remaining on Earth like Sma and the Arbitrary thought.
6. In this, Banks came relatively close to Gene Roddenberry, who believed in a similar marriage of high tech and compassion as a way of ushering in a utopian society—and again, a moneyless one, although neither Roddenberry nor the writers who followed him on Star Trek’s various incarnations throughout the years did much to explain how such a setup could function.
7. Kulbicki also mentions the one key figure in utopian studies who did address Banks’ work, however fleetingly: “Darko Suvin, perhaps the most eminent of science fiction scholars, does, at least, mention Banks, but only to say that the ‘Culture’ series is ‘[a] lucid variant at [the] margin’ of what he calls the ‘fallible dystopia,’ but without any consideration of how this ‘variant’ might trouble the integrity of the category in question” (34).
8. For a brief account of Moylan’s activities within the political movements of those times, see his introduction to the 2014 Ralahine Classics edition of Demand the Impossible (x–xiii, note 3).
9. See Sargisson 2014, 231; Weeks 2014, 248–250; Kulbicki 2009, 36; and Levitas 2014, 257.
10. But note that, at the same time as he recognizes “the stubborn utopian quality of Robinson’s sf” (105), Moylan also indicates Robinson’s own Orange County trilogy, and Gold Coast (1988) in particular, as key examples of critical dystopias (203–221).
11. See Lyman Tower Sargent’s “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” in the January 1994 issue of Utopian Studies (1–37), and Moylan 2000, 183–199.
12. And what about critical dystopia? Does Banks have anything to say on that score as well? It would be interesting to conduct a systematized reading of the three non–Culture space operas—and particularly The Algebraist (2004)—as critical dystopias, since each begins under far from ideal circumstances and develops throughout the text a concerted set of responses aimed at altering the original dystopia for the better.
13. Also see Brown 1996, 57–73.
14. See also Darko Suvin’s formulation of the nature of utopia as a literary genre in chapter 3 of Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979; 37–62). Of particular relevance here is Suvin’s point that, because the literary utopia is “the verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community” (49), its operating principle is a constant process of argument, refinement, and response: “literary utopia—and every description of utopia is literary—is a heuristic device for perfectibility, an epistemological and not an ontological entity” (52). That is to say, the argument of utopia should not just precede (and survive) the potential realization of a locale for a more perfect social principle—it should actually build the locale itself, and keep it in good repair (so to speak) through constant reassessment and refinement.
15. Also see Lyman Tower Sargent’s argument for the existence of critical utopias that preceded those discussed in Demand (242–247), as well as Gyb Prettyman’s assessment of the usefulness of the ideas contained in Demand beyond their relatively narrow historical and geographic boundaries (251–256).
16. According to Ronnie Lippens, however, the Culture isn’t even a utopia in the proper sense of the term. In an article written for Utopian Studies in 2002, Lippens argues that “Banks’s aim in his series of Culture books has never been to paint a fully developed Utopia. However, the Culture, as it appears and develops throughout Banks’s series, certainly has some utopian dimensions about it” (135). This is difficult to accept, however, especially given the vantage point from which Lippens was writing—by 2002, all but three Culture books had seen print, and there were already plenty of details and views of the society from a plethora of perspectives. Lippens himself invites further complications by essentially abandoning his statement and moving on to the topic at hand, which consists in his intention “to use some striking features of Banks’s imaginary worlds and his imaginary technological utopia, the Culture in particular, to speculate on how one could possibly rethink peace—utopian peace—as the outcome or product of specific technological cultures” (135). The irony is that, during his discussion of those features, Lippens describes the Culture’s setup in precisely the kind of detail that would satisfy any reasonable requirement on that score.
1. Here Banks takes care to tell us that, even by the obsolete technological standards of those days (the Problem Child’s mind is described as an AI core, fully sentient but nowhere near the capabilities of the Minds of the present time; 66), Zreyn Tramow was more of a figurehead than an actual Captain (69).
2. Two points of reference are provided: the first is a comment made in passing by the GSV Wisdom Like Silence that mentions “the Azadian Matter” (117), and the second involves the history of one of the storage facilities inside which the Culture had decided, at the end of the Idiran War, to preserve a tiny part of its military fleet against the eventuality of future troubles. This storage facility, a huge conglomeration of rock and other matter called Pittance, was discovered a thousand years before the events in Excession, and its conversion to its current use took place five hundred years after that, at the end of hostilities (144).
3. In this sense, the name of the ship has a somewhat ambivalent meaning, potentially referring both to morally slippery territories and to the similarly colored expanse of a biological brain.
4. This helps explain, among other things, why the Culture didn’t know about Zakalwe’s true past in Use of Weapons, and why the Grey Area’s obsession with plundering the brains of biologicals is frowned upon with such vehemence in Excession.
5. Fourteen years after Excession’s appearance, the next-to-last Culture novel, Surface Detail, provided a precise quantification of the power of such a vessel: a single large GSV, one of the characters explains, would be capable of taking on a combined fleet of 230,000,000 low-tech warships, even if they came at it all at once (383).
6. See for example the sub-plot involving the GSV Yawning Angel (236–248), or that involving the AhForgetIt Tendency citizen named Leffid Ispanteli (186–192, 199–204, 291–292, 447).
7. See for instance the eventual fate of two Culture humans: Gestra Ishmethit, who lives inside the ship depot the Affront take over and dies at their hands (143–152, 220–227, 449–450), and Zreyn Tramow, the “captain” of the Problem Child to whom the Sleeper Service gives a new body when it reawakens her (449–450).
8. And to an extent he does, chiefly through the Grey Area’s presence in the story. Early on, the renegade GCU probes the mind of a retired commandant belonging to a civilization that managed to complete on their planet what the Nazis failed to finish here, and the fate of this flesh sentient—who had been a very good soldier indeed—when the Mind is done unearthing the truth fully bears out the other Culture Minds’ perception of the Grey Area as vengeful (45–52). Also, both Ulver Seich and Genar-Hofoen have strange, unsettling conversation with that Mind once the GCU picks them up on its way to the Sleeper Service (338–341, 346–347). In a narrative characterized by such a strangely dynamic sense of mercy and ultimate comedic happiness, the Grey Area serves as a localized reminder of the potential savagery of sentience, a reminder that is itself circumscribed by the social ostracism its own taboo-breaking behavior causes. To those instances of beyond-the-pale behavior we should also add the brief scenes featuring Affronters capturing small, undefended Culture vessels in the early hours of what they believe will be a glorious war (290–294), and the paragraph describing the self-termination of the Mind inside the module that, on the Affront’s home planet, had played home to Genar-Hofoen in his capacity as the Culture ambassador to Issorile (297–300). These brief passages do not turn Excession into a farce or a tragedy, but they do constitute a counterpoint arguably designed to remind us that, in fiction, comedy—like tragedy—is a choice of viewpoint, and that one can easily morph into the other at any moment and not necessarily with much of a warning.
9. A revealing statement, since Jane Austen was, as we have seen in the introduction, one of Banks’ main influences. Banks worried that, despite his love for Austen’s novels, there was nothing in his overall writing style to show that influence, but clearly something must have bled through.
10. Mary Branscombe also remarked on the changes in speed and tone. In the review she penned for SFX at the time of Excession’s publication, she wrote: “Excession is painted large on Banks’ usual mind-boggling vast canvas—genocide on a planetary scale is just a throwaway scene, an entire race subliming (just to get away from those annoying neighbours) a mere reference during a discussion about why the Culture is still determinedly corporeal … The Minds are quite at home with the covert military euphemisms, unintelligible tech-speak, info-babble and acronyms that spatter their messages” (Branscombe 1996a, 81).
11. Both the sizes and the types of font represent the best approximation to the actual sizes and types used in Excession.
12. Thus, the Sleeper Service’s decision to become a covert member of SC was also motivated by personal reasons—hence the narrative’s constant return to that forty-year timespan. The aftermath of the human lovers’ breakup was traumatic enough, in fact, that the GSV, which had until then been calling itself the Quietly Confident, renamed itself with its current moniker and started storing people in suspended animation—to whose numbers we should also add Dajeil herself (355).
13. The note finds another mention in the reprinted version of David Langford’s review that appeared in his collection Up Through an Empty House of Stars (2003). This new version carries a coda in which Langford writes: “Now that Inversions has been loose on the world for years, it seems safe to add that the significantly capitalized word near the beginning is ‘Culture’” (215).
14. For the sake of completeness, this book will address the original hardcover edition.
15. To my knowledge, neither ever addressed the deletion, although I am far from certain I have been able to hunt down every possible source.
16. Also see Langford 2003, 214.
17. DeWar’s stories of Lavishia bear a strong resemblance to the fairy-tale version of the Culture that Zakalwe gives the Ethnarch Kerian in Use of Weapons (26–34). Zakalwe’s story even includes the notion of SC agents becoming the trusted physicians of powerful rulers.
18. The relationship between DeWar and Perrund, already complex and full of secrets to begin with, is further complicated by an element of gaming Banks injects into the Tassasen storyline. The presence of a child like Lattens creates plenty of chances for both Perrund and DeWar—each of whom is, in some way, fulfilling a subset of their duties—to both play and game (for a definition of the two terms, see Huizinga 1955 and Slocombe 2013), and the few times they are left alone together they often engage in tabletop games. Both sets of entertainment contain aspects of performativity and gameplaying—for example, DeWar interprets the role of a cartoonishly evil Landescion Baron when he and Lattens play a wargame together (205–214)—but in the case of the games DeWar plays with Perrund, the performativity acquires elements of the truth that, in hindsight, do not come far from amounting to a confession on Perrund’s part. “You do too much to protect your Protector piece,” she tells DeWar during a bout of “Leader’s Dispute” (32), a game that, preexisting the new order, has been changed to fit it: the former Emperor piece—the most important in the game—has been renamed Protector, and the game itself has gone from “Monarch’s Dispute” to “Leader’s Dispute” (31). Perrund’s point is that DeWar translates his life into the game even if, in so doing, he disregards the game’s rules—in Dispute, if the Emperor/Protector piece is taken, one of the General pieces takes its place, which eventually happens in actuality: UrLeyn is replaced first by one of his cabinet members, ZeSpiole, and then by his own son, who in the present of old Oelph’s prologue/epilogue rules Tassasen as King. Perrund is trying to tell DeWar something, although it’s anyone’s guess whether she herself is aware of what that is exactly—but there’s a revealing line she gives at the end of the chapter: when DeWar comments that Perrund has “changed the nature of the game by informing me of my weakness,” she replies that “the game was always the same … I merely opened your eyes to it” (35). And Perrund doesn’t stop there: she makes many references to the reality of her function in Tassasen, always through the prism of games and gaming strategy (95, 186–188, 309–310), all of which do not in fact open DeWar’s eyes at all.
19. While many commentators have correctly seized on the knife-missile aspect, the drone aspect doesn’t seem to have registered. David Langford, for example, writes that “the ace in the hole which saves the Doctor in extremis appears to be a Culture ‘knife missile’—a semi-intelligent autonomous weapon—disguised as a jewel on her blunt old dagger, a point which isn’t elucidated within Inversions itself” (Langford 2003, 215). As far as his assessment goes, Langford is entirely correct, but knife missiles are very seldom seen alone (the one time we see a knife missile by itself is in Use of Weapons and Zakalwe kills it—so maybe Inversions takes place after UoW, and now the culture always sends drones with the missiles. It’s a theory). Also, the young girl who saw what her imagination construed as a dark bird or nightwing inside the room where Duke Walen was murdered must have seen a drone; knife missiles are really rather small—like tiny semiprecious gemstones, say—and they usually do not carry out intelligence-gathering missions. For these reasons, it’s actually likely that Vosill’s dagger was in fact a drone, which would also resonate well with the presence of its stylized form at the beginning of every chapter and with the cover of the first HC/SC editions of Inversions—A detailed image of the dagger appears in the foreground, as if someone were holding it up and looking through the guard at a dark figure silhouetted against the sky and framed by the archway of a great gate.
20. Certainly with Unoure, whom she defends in front of Adlain and a gaggle of doctors on the basis of sound forensic evidence (161–167), knowing full well that exculpating him could not possibly lead them to guess that a knife missile did the job. But Vosill is a woman and the other doctors feel challenged by her, so they refuse to listen. Unoure ends up in a cell, awaiting Ralinge’s questioning, so the most humane thing for her to do at that point is to have him killed as well, quickly and painlessly and in such a way that it will look like a suicide (171).
21. On that score, see Oelph’s comments, both in the prologue and in the epilogue, on the essentially unknowable nature of what we call the truth (3–5, 337–339).
1. Thus, by the timeline established in Consider Phlebas, the events in Look to Windward take place around AD 2170.
2. The Homomda and the Idirans have, in fact, a very similar physical appearance, both races being tripodal/reptilian in origin. One of the drawbacks of being the only Homomdan on Masaq,’ Kabe finds out, is that at parties a number of Culture people mistake him for a sculpture or for an article of furniture (16).
3. In fact, as the appendixes in Consider Phlebas inform us, even during the Homomdan involvement in the Idiran War they and the Culture had retained limited diplomatic and commercial ties.
4. Banks, of course, chose the name entirely on purpose; if Look to Windward is a story of haunted people, then the damage to the heart can’t be anything but lasting.
5. The Mind’s avatar tells Ziller that “it was II who was killed, I who lived” (311), and there may well be an element of obfuscation here. First off, the two sibling AIs had exchanged mind-states before the beginning of the battle, so to a large extent each one already was the other—thus, they both survived and died. Also, the numeral “II” is nothing other than “I” repeated twice. The words with which the avatar tells Ziller which twin survived and which died are therefore purposefully ambiguous—basically, the avatar tells the Chelgrian that it both died and survived.
6. But see the reply the Mind gives Ziller when he comments that the proportion of deaths is a tiny one compared to the lives saved (313).
7. For the Chelgrians, heaven and the Sublimed reality are one and the same thing. Upon Subliming, the Chelgrian-Puen retrofitted their transcendent realm to resemble exactly the heaven of the long-standing Chelgrian religion (224–225), thus making their gods real by turning themselves into those gods.
8. Besides helping Quilan, Huyler’s mission is to take over his carrier’s body in case Quilan falters and decides not to go through with the attack (338–339).
9. Every Chelgrian possesses a device called “Soulkeeper,” designed to record and store its carrier’s consciousness right before his/her death. The stored personality is then downloaded into a computer substrate prior to its journey to the Sublimed realms, where the Chelgrian-Puen await. Quilan’s wife and the rest of the people onboard her ship, however, were killed by a weapon that also disabled their Soulkeepers. She’s gone forever (21–31).
10. In this sense, the Homomda act as a mirror image both for the Culture’s apollonian/utopian tendencies and for its Dionysian/dystopian ones: both civilization partook of the ancient mistake of the Idiran War, and both found a way to grow out of it with the understanding that there would be no more such conflagrations, and that they could indeed coexist peacefully within the larger galactic community—and that’s why Kabe is on Masaq.’ The light of the novae must shine on the people of both races (118).
11. While Kabe’s loved one is not dead, the relationship is, and Kabe’s persistent feelings provide the haunting.
12. Ziller’s symphony, as we might expect, plays an important role in Quilan’s change of heart (377–380).
13. This was an issue that pained Banks somewhat—that in the early 1990s a number of fans were reading the Culture stories as thinly disguised representations of America between World War II (i.e. the Idiran War) and the present. This was, he once said, “an idea I find utterly bizarre. (I mean, haven’t these people been reading the books?) The culture thinks private property is a slightly puzzling, utterly immature and old-fashioned idea; it thinks money is a joke” (Melia 1994, 42). Over the years, as more Culture stories appeared—especially the last triad—this kind of speculation died out somewhat.
14. Two years after Look to Windward, Banks wrote Dead Air, a no–M novel beginning on 9/11. The plot follows the adventures of Ken Nott, an alcohol- and drug-fueled radio shock-jock who is also the first-person narrator of the story. Ken rants and raves about the terrorist attacks and pretty much everything else that attracts his attention, both on and off the air, while at the same time falling in love with a gangster’s wife, which gets him into a number of dangerous situations. Reviewers largely panned the novel, mostly because of what they saw as a messy plotline, an unnecessarily abrasive main character, and an absence of substance to the considerations on the September 11 attacks that should have provided the novel with its main thrust. Steven Poole, for example, wrote in The Guardian:
Looming over the whole book is the shadow of the al-Qaida attacks of last September: the opening party ends with the news of the World Trade Centre collapse; and the dustjacket portrays a clever visual analogue of the event, with a plane flying over two chimneys of Battersea power station. But the novel does nothing with it; it is merely set-dressing. One of the few direct references—when Ken refers to “the fundamentalist intensity of those who secretly guess they may well be wrong”—just seems spectacularly incorrect, the sort of comfortable liberal solipsism … that a more sophisticated novel might have tried to anatomise [2002, n.p.].
Interestingly, Poole begins his review of Dead Air by comparing it unfavorably to Look to Windward, which he describes as “a joyous return to the excellence of his Culture series, highly intelligent political space opera stuffed full of jokes and rapturous cosmic imaginings” (2002, n.p.).
15. On the connections between Look to Windward, Consider Phlebas, and the Gulf War, especially concerning the attitude toward radicalized religious stances, also see Duggan 2007.
16. Also see MacGillivray 1996.
17. Except in the sense that they share the very general label of postmodern SF writers and that, as authors of post-cyberpunk space opera, they display a highly developed sensitivity to the representation of moral ambiguity.
18. The name Hegemony of Man, in fact, is reminiscent of Cordwainer Smith’s Instrumentality of Mankind, whose rule over the human commonwealth of Smith’s stories cannot be described as utopian.
19. Confusingly, Middleton writes that the novel “is set on the margins of the Culture” (11) before stating, a few paragraphs later, that “the novel, whilst not set in the Culture universe, has some notable additions to Banks’ science fiction milieu” (12).
20. The cutoff point seems to be 1993, the year Against a Dark Background was published.
21. But then again, he may not have: the arguments in this second article do not fully overlap those of the first. Moreover, in a note at the end, Hardesty mentions his Foundation piece as a reference for an analysis of the political aspects of the Culture stories (121).
22. As Kincaid himself remarks, there is no consensus on the shape and timeline of the British Renaissance/Boom—“critics still dispute whether it continues or has run its course,” he writes (177). On this subject, another useful source is the November 2003 issue of Science Fiction Studies, entirely dedicated to the “British SF Boom.” Of particular relevance as far as this work is concerned is Andrew M. Butler’s essay “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom,” in which he cites three of Banks’ novels—The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glass, and The Bridge—as milestones in a rapid progression in estrangement until the publication of Phlebas in 1987, at which point Banks became an integral part of the Boom (378).
23. In this respect, the critical dialogue between Russell Letson and Gary K. Wolfe in the August 2003 issue of Locus is particularly useful. In it, Letson and Wolfe discuss the provenance of the new space opera—is it mainly a UK phenomenon?—as well as its context. As far as territory goes, they point out, the only relevant distinction between American and British NSO is a certain “in-your-face political playfulness” on the part of the British writers that American writers seem to find less natural to come by (40). This element owes, as Levy indicated, to the British authors’ inheritance of a New Wave sensibility that establishes a direct line of descent from Harrison and Aldiss to such contemporary practitioners as Banks, MacLeod, Charles Stross, and Alastair Reynolds. American writers of NSO, on the other hand, tend to rein in open political discourse in their novels while broadly—broadly—espousing a more libertarian (Walter Jon Williams, for example) or anarcho-capitalist view (Vernor Vinge). However, Peter F. Hamilton’s work, which is undoubtedly NSO, comes from a British Tory viewpoint instead of a left-wing one (40), so sharp distinctions don’t necessarily work that well even in this case.
As far as context is concerned, Letson and Wolfe immediately point out that “as a critical term, ‘space opera’ is petty nearly useless” because “it isn’t a genre in the taxonomic or logical-category sense. Instead it feels like a collection of motifs and traits—furniture—and historical (maybe nostalgic) associations on which we paste the label” (40). This decoupling from the necessity of recognizing both space opera and new space opera as genres or sub-genres, they argue, is an advantage because it focuses our attention on the aesthetic and emotional yearning they have been satisfying since the 1920s—the sense of wonder. Thus, seen under this light, NSO becomes a set of initially value-free stage props designed to be deployed to achieve the grand vista of the universe. The more mature approach that distinguishes NSO from SO applies when the time comes to pick a vantage point from which to examine the pyrotechnics:
One suggestion is that the New Space Opera retains many of those adolescent yearnings writ large, but that the NSOs themselves are written from outside that mindset rather than from within it, providing an edge of irony that critiques these attitudes while still taking advantage of their effects [41].
Letson and Wolfe’s arguments dovetail well with what we know of Banks’ intellectual process during his early years. Like every writer in the UK who had been heavily influenced by such works as The Centauri Device, Banks had indeed looked at the furniture of genre and decided that he didn’t have to pick it up wholesale or arrange it in one particular set-piece. Instead he had—to continue with the metaphor—created the room first and deployed the furniture to best showcase it, and others did the same. This, Wolfe points out, is also a good way of explaining how NSO could morph itself to fit Banks’ novels as well as the work of someone like Orson Scott Card (40). Different rooms.
24. See also Dozois and Strahan 2007, 4.
25. Harrison also wrote a piece for the same 2003 issue of Locus in which the MacLeod and Letson/Wolfe contributions appeared. In it, he explains that in his view the reason for the growth and existence of NSO, at least in the UK, lies in the “growing liquefaction of genre boundaries and concerns” and the concomitant “detection of a new universe to expand into, a new audience able and wiling to read across genre boundaries” (44). In this sense, Harrison’s point supports the connection between non-genre and genre work as complementary partners in communicating fields, something to which Harrison himself, author of both genre and non-genre stories, could readily testify (Banks’ experience was essentially the same, especially but not exclusively regarding his first three novels). Harrison also makes an important point concerning the political content of British NSO:
Adventure is a form of optimism in itself. It is a narrating of yourself, in trust, on to the narrative of the universe. “Show me what happens to me next.” Wrapped up in that metaphor you’ll always find politics. Imagination is political, whether it intends to be or not. In much UK space opera, the intention is quite clear. Novels like Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons, Ken MacLeod’s The Stone Canal, my own Light, and Justina Robson’s Natural History look forward to changed values. Their optimism is politically based [44].
Aside from the implications of this statement for the general stance of the Culture series as a whole, it’s interesting to note that Harrison attaches to Use of Weapons an essentially forward-looking, optimistic core meaning—seemingly contradictory in a novel whose nominal protagonist cannot but continue to regress ad infinitum to the unforgivable crime at the heart of his entire existence. But, as John Clute observed in his review of Weapons, this only seems contradictory if we fail to perceive the presence of Diziet Sma’s conscience—and of her moral compass—in between every page. She is the one who concludes the story, which means that despite everything we’ve read up until that point, it’s still angel work we’re witnessing.
26. On this subject, also see Brown 2004, 55–75.
27. Another “ambiguous utopia” article came out in the Summer 2009 issue of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society. Its author, Alan Jacobs, performs a very similar job to Horwich’s, although reaching quite different conclusions: “the closest analogue we have to the Culture’s foreign policy is that of the United States in the recent Bush administration: just as President Bush wanted to spread the good news of American democracy to the rest of the world, and was willing to put some force behind that benevolent imperative, so too the Culture. The Culture is neoconservatism on the greatest imaginable scale” (n.p.). The evidence Jacobs brings to the table to explain this assessment is the very same Horwich uses to come to his own conclusions: excerpts from the novels and from “A Few Notes on the Culture,” plus a reference from Raw Spirit, Banks’ only nonfiction book that, because it came out in 2003, hadn’t been available to Horwich:
I look at Dubya and just see a sad fuck with scared eyes; a grotesquely under-qualified-for-practically-anything daddy’s boy who’s had to be greased into every squalid position he’s ever held in his miserable existence who might finally be starting to wake up to the idea that if the most powerful nation on Earth—like, ever, dude—can put somebody like him in power, all may not be well with the world [94].
Moving from this statement, Jacobs confusingly declares that the United States at the time of the Bush administration is the closest analogue to the Culture because “President Bush … is not a Mind; and the American model of democracy is not that of the Culture” (2009, n.p.). “Doubtless Banks will love this point,” Jacobs also writes, which feels like something of a stretch. He may have, although that’s unlikely in the extreme, but “doubtless”?
28. On this topic, also see Steve Arnott’s article for Bella Caledonia. Arnott sees the Culture as neither utopian nor dystopian because, in his view, utopias from More onwards “assume that human nature is flawed either because of some form of original sin or because society is flawed. The Utopia cleanses humanity of these flaws and either allows their ‘true’ humanity to shine through or makes them into the New Man. Dystopias are the cynic’s/realist’s response where attempts to make the New Man fail with disastrous, frightening, totalitarian consequences. The Culture is neither Utopia nor Dystopia because human nature in Banks’ vision is not a blank slate or human putty to be perfected or damned … The lives of persons can be enormously enriched by a better society, but they do not become wholly New” (2011, n.p.).
29. In his article, Stephenson reads the Culture through the lens of Deleuze/Guattari and Derrida’s theories.
30. Ironically, the same factors that brought me to criticize Stephenson’s piece prompted Stephen Dougherty to praise it. In his review of Colebrook and Cox’s book for Science Fiction Studies, Dougherty finds the work as a whole “a poorly edited and uneven collection” because, while the bulk of the text is nominally dedicated to Banks’ No–M work, most of those articles foreground its hybrid, genre-slippery nature with the result that “more specifically sf concerns and issues [are] consistently insinuated into the analyses of purportedly mainstream literary works” (443). Indeed, Dougherty doesn’t find very much to like in the collection, but one of the very best pieces, in his opinion, is Stephenson’s—and for the very reasons I criticized it. “This sounds right on the money,” he writes of Stephenson’s opinion that the Culture is a space-opera analogue of predatory Western imperialism.
1. And the two short stories as well. Looking at the Culture series in this light, we might consider them dry runs for a potential volume of Culture-related short stories that in the event never materialized; had it seen publication, its narrative structure might have looked like, for example, that of Cordwainer Smith’s stories of the Instrumentality of Mankind.
2. The hour-long interview is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2vrypvdqWI, and the part quoted is between minutes 54:37 and 54:55.
3. Even those Shellworlds that did not fall prey to Iln weaponry are not necessarily safe. A number have self-destructed or annihilated every inhabitant inside when unguessed-at security systems suddenly turned themselves on and wiped out every living thing. Many of those conflagrations were bad enough that the Dra’Azon, the Sublimed species from Consider Phlebas, have preserved eighty-six of them as Planets of the Dead (67).
4. On the eighth and among the Sarl, that level of consequence is attached only to a man.
5. With the notable exception of Oramen. Unlike Ferbin and Holse, he never leaves Sursamen, and unlike Tyl Loesp and his lackeys, he does not attempt to step beyond the remit his society has established for him. Oramen therefore never has the chance—or the desire to create such a chance—to develop the perspective on Matter that the other characters receive. This does not necessarily make him a bad man or a poor figure (he is likeable and brave enough), but he certainly is the one among the novel’s major characters who grows the least.
6. Even so, Djan Seriy still feels compelled to ask Xuss if “this time there aren’t going to be any mistakes” when the army they have been shadowing arrives at the point in their progress where the Culture agents ambush it, slicing all their pole-weapons and banners with a knife missile (5–7). A bit like Skaffen-Amtiskaw, Djan Seriy’s drone companion shows a little less compunction about knocking barbarians around than she’d like it to.
7. It’s interesting to note the way Djan Seriy explains to herself the relationship between the Culture at large, Contact, and Special Circumstances: “The Culture represented the hospital, or perhaps a whole caring society, Contact was the physician and SC the anaesthetic and the medicine. Sometimes the scalpel” (169).
8. In this context, see the gaming-related studies Holse begins to carry out while he and Ferbin are traveling across the galaxy—“As Game, So Life. And indeed, As Game, So Entire History of Whole Universe, Bar Nothing And Nobody” (385–387).
9. Surface Detail is the furthest story along the Culture timeline. It takes place fifteen hundred years after the Idiran War (43) and six hundred years after “the Chelgrian debacle” (170). In Earth-calendar terms, therefore, the action in the novel takes place around the year AD 2970.
10. In a 2010 interview with Wired, Banks explained that the idea for the virtualities and the Hells had come to him some time after writing Look to Windward:
The idea of the hells came from thinking over the approach from one of the other novels, Look to Windward, in which there’s a mention of a civilisation that has a kind of Valhalla-ish virtual world for their fallen dead. At the time that was treated as something very special. Then I began to think, if that was possible then it’s the kind of thing that civilisations would do as a matter of course, and be an actual part of your civilisation’s development [Parsons 2010, n.p.].
The difference between the Chelgrian Heaven and the afterlives in Surface Detail is that, while the former is custom-built in the Sublime by the Chelgrian-Puen, the latter have nothing to do with Subliming—the substrates housing all afterlives, Hells and Heavens alike, are firmly anchored to the real (for any given value of “firmly anchored to the real” in a space-opera setting).
11. Level Eight is the highest rung on the galactic ladder of civilizational advancement; the Culture counts as being in the high reaches of Level Eight, and thus slightly above the others.
12. The closeness of Veppers’ first name to the word “jailer” is, it’s safe to say, purposeful.
13. The other two are Restoria and Numina. Restoria takes care of the so-called “hegemonising swarm outbreaks”—large numbers of aggressively self-replicating Von Neumann machines—whenever they arise (Yime refers to them as “pest control”; 177), whereas Numina’s turf are the Sublimed (211).
14. “You’d make a great teenage boy,” she tells Demeisen after he spouts a great deal of opaque technical terms at her with telling enjoyment (410).
15. But see Banks’ comment in the Wired interview: “I think [Yime] ends up working almost as a Greek chorus, commenting upon the action rather than taking part in it. At various stages in the book there was the idea that she would take more part in the action and there were various ways that could have been done, but they didn’t really work out. I think that point is brought into the book at the end in that she’s kind of been had, almost fooled” (Parsons 2010, n.p.). From this, it’s possible to conclude that Banks simply… let the character go, so to speak. He might have allowed the drift of the plot shape her into a figure whose function ends up being very similar to that played by Ulver Seich in Excession.
16. Joiler Veppers’ viewpoint provides an added moment of critical utopian perspective, however brief and however skewed by its belonging to the kind of personality the Culture prides itself on attempting to stop at every available opportunity. Veppers’ thoughts about the Culture are fully in line with what we expect a character like him to feel about a society like that:
There was nothing worse, Veppers thought, than a loser who’d made it. It was just part of the way things worked … that sometimes somebody who absolutely deserved nothing more than to be one of the downtrodden, the oppressed, the dregs of society, lucked out into a position of wealth, power, and admiration … Losers made everybody look bad. Worse, they made the whole thing—the great game that was life—appear arbitrary, almost meaningless … Veppers hated the Culture. He hated it for existing and he hated it for … setting the standard for what a decent society ought to look like [335–336].
Veppers is essentially a villain in the Azad mold, fully convinced and pointedly proud of the fundamental unfairness of life as well as openly supporting a view of social interactions as not only tolerating, but also requiring the existence of the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the dregs of society. Little wonder that he dislikes the Culture, and little wonder that the Culture ambassador on Sichult, a woman named Kreit Huen, does her best to rattle him every time they meet (336–340).
17. In Sonata, Banks provides as specific a location for the Sublime as it’s possible to get in a space-opera setting: in keeping with superstring theory, the Sublime, which is also known as the Enfolded, resides “in dimensions seven to eleven” (17).
18. The one that broke the pattern (if it is a pattern) was Stonemouth (2012), a no–M novel about a man, Stewart Gilmour, who returns to the fictional Scottish town of Stonemouth five years after he left it in the wake of a sexual scandal.
19. In a fashion reminiscent of the twin plotlines of Use of Weapons, each chapter in Sonata carries a number preceded by a capital “S” to indicate the countdown. Chapter 1 begins at S-24 (1), chapter 2 at S-23 (35), and so on. Chapter Twenty-Five, the epilogue, starts at S+1, one day after the Gzilt’s Subliming (513).
20. “Septame” is a Gzilt title that plays out as roughly equal to Senator.
21. The ITG is, in fact, expressly mentioned within the novel as a potential Incident Coordination Group, and that gives us the timeline of The Hydrogen Sonata. When the Limited Offensive Unit Caconym asks another member of the event committee if the ITG may not conceivably bounce them, the other ship—the Medium Systems Vehicle Pressure Drop—replies that nobody has heard of them for half a millennium. The events in Excession represented the ITG’s last hurrah (75). Thus, Sonata takes place around five hundred years after Excession, and in Earth-calendar terms around the mid–2500s.
22. The name itself indicates the joke. The universe is filled with noise coming from stars, quasars, gas-giant planets, and nebulas, but it’s just that—white noise produced by charged particles, most of which are hydrogen. This cacophony of signals carries no coherent content.