Mon 14 Jan 2008
This is actually the first of Iain Banks’ novels set in the Culture, and according to the Wikipedia article, was heavily rewritten after its initial draft. After reading this for the second time, that makes sense, as there’s a great deal of continuity here with the ideas and devices of later Culture novels, and one has to imagine that this stuff didn’t spring from Banks’ subconscious in its final form. In many ways “Look to Windward” can be considered a loose sequel to this first novel.
This book is set during the Culture-Idiran war, and the event that drives the action of the book is that a nascent Mind, fleeing the destruction of its host ship, is marooned on Schar’s world, one of the so-called “Planets of the Dead”, access to which is heavily-restricted by the rather taciturn Dra’Azon, a “sublimed” species which has left behind guardians to keep unspoiled certain worlds whose inhabitants have completely annihilated themselves. The Idirans, who think all Culture AI is an abomination, task the mercenary Horza to retrieve the Mind in hopes of gaining a tactical advantage, and the Culture dispatch Special Circumstances agent Perosteck Balveda to stop him. This is a somewhat typical big space-opera war/chase/conflict kind of book, but it is a good introduction to the basic ideas of the Culture that Banks develops in later books.
The action starts somewhat slowly for the first third of the book (in retrospect maybe Banks is having the book play double-duty to the introduction of the larger Culture universe), but once the pieces are in place his plotting is tight and the conclusion is very satisfying. Horza is a great anti-hero, and through his eyes we are given a fairly objective assessment of the merits of the Idiran and Culture “sides” to the war. While the story takes place in the context of a larger conflict, the book focuses solely on the Schar’s World affair, and an explanation of the larger war and its outcome is relegated to short pair of appendices which contextualizes the conflict as a minor episode against the vast galactic milieu.
This is very smart sci-fi, and getting to know Banks’ books is very much worth the investment.