Yeah that got me as well. We barely hear anything in the book about how the Culture actually functions. Fucker’s not read it and just grabbed the first name off the list.
Much the same mistake I (and many others) made trying to get into the series! Although I have to say that I’m still one of the philistines that gerikson brings up who’s read Phlebas and Player of Games and not much else.
Everyone is entitled to their own readership of Banks. I’m not saying mine is the one and only. But the Culture is supposed to be a background character, even if Banks spends a lot of time in the later novels “explaining” it. But if the reader only focusses on the lore, they’ll miss the quite good characters and psychology that Banks was good at too.
My personal favorite is Use of Weapons, where the focus is on the people doing the Culture’s dirty work. In one scene, Zakalwe
spoiler
spends an inordinate time trying to protect a useless aristocracy from being wiped out by a revolution, only to find out his side was meant to lose for some inscrutable Mind-directed reason. This kind of shit happens all the time to him, and as he’s basically a deeply traumatized individual he’s able to keep doing it.
In Look to Windward
spoiler
Contact goes too far along the path of optimizing “help backwards civilization” and manages to create a genocidal civil war. The survivors decide to try to destroy a Mind (and the Orbital it’s managing), and you know, you kind of get why.
Yeah that got me as well. We barely hear anything in the book about how the Culture actually functions. Fucker’s not read it and just grabbed the first name off the list.
Much the same mistake I (and many others) made trying to get into the series! Although I have to say that I’m still one of the philistines that gerikson brings up who’s read Phlebas and Player of Games and not much else.
Everyone is entitled to their own readership of Banks. I’m not saying mine is the one and only. But the Culture is supposed to be a background character, even if Banks spends a lot of time in the later novels “explaining” it. But if the reader only focusses on the lore, they’ll miss the quite good characters and psychology that Banks was good at too.
My personal favorite is Use of Weapons, where the focus is on the people doing the Culture’s dirty work. In one scene, Zakalwe
spoiler
spends an inordinate time trying to protect a useless aristocracy from being wiped out by a revolution, only to find out his side was meant to lose for some inscrutable Mind-directed reason. This kind of shit happens all the time to him, and as he’s basically a deeply traumatized individual he’s able to keep doing it.
In Look to Windward
spoiler
Contact goes too far along the path of optimizing “help backwards civilization” and manages to create a genocidal civil war. The survivors decide to try to destroy a Mind (and the Orbital it’s managing), and you know, you kind of get why.