June 21, 2005
Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks
This is the second book in the Culture series (after "Consider Phlebas"). The Culture is Iain M. Banks' vision of an anarchist utopia with unlimited resources and administered by (mostly) benign sentient machines. The machines are often managers of teratonne starships each carrying about 28 million citizens of the Culture on no particular trajectory. There is no economy, no money and people can while away their considerable lifetimes doing what could have been done better and faster by their machines.
The huge ship was an enchanted ocean in which you could never drown, and he threw himself into it to try to understand if not it, then the people who had built it.
He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who'd taken a notion to help out for a while.
`Of course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. `But look; this table's clean.'
He agreed that the table was clean.
`Usually,' the man said. `I work on alien -- no offence -- alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that's my specialty ... like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But ... the job's never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled ... but,' he slapped the table, `when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you've done something. It's an achievement.'
`But in the end, it's still cleaning a table.'
`And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?' the man suggested.
He smiled in response to the man's grin, `Well, yes.'
`But then what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to this table, which gives
them pleasure.' ...`And,' the man said with a smile, `it's a good way of meeting people. So; where are you from anyway?'
While most of the Culture lives in this peaceable way, some spend their life fighting amongst more primitive civilizations. People like Cheradenine Zakalwe. He is a soldier (actually: A Good Soldier). Recruited by Diziet Sma and the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw into Special Circumstances -- a division that exists because even the Culture is not above tinkering with the outcome of history. And often this requires violence. Violence makes the Culture queasy, hence the use of recruits like Zakalwe.
He was still roaring when the knife missile flicked past him, field outstretched.
It separated his neck from his shoulders. The roar turned to a sound like the wind, bubbling thickly through the exposed wind-pipe as his body crashed to the dust.
The book is not about a plot, rather it is about Zakalwe. The book is about his life, and the plot as it unfolds includes within it several chapters about his previous exploits. Like most good fiction, we enter his thought processes. He is driven by his childhood experiences with his half-brother Elethiomel and his sisters, Darckense and Livueta. His past, as constructed by Banks during the course of the novel, is the most compelling reason to read this book.
Banks is aware that he is within the space opera genre and exploits the usual expectations to subvert the mind of the reader. You might expect a big space battle at some point, and Banks will set it up only to ultimately resolve it in a completely novel way. Good stuff.
Posted by anoop at June 21, 2005 11:46 AMHe saw a chair, and a ship that was not a ship; he saw a man with two shadows, and he saw that which cannot be seen; a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that one particular collection of cells can go on, can move onwards and decide, and keeping moving, and keeping deciding, knowing that -- if nothing else -- at least it lives.
And it had two shadows, it was two things; it was the need and it was the method. The need was obvious; to defeat what opposed its life. The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons.