Second Breakfast

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.

Iain Banks I think is my favorite science fiction genre author writing today.  Ask me some other time and I’m sure I’ll change my mind, but Banks is very fine writer, and his books are in the set of fiction titles I’ll re-read with some regularity.

Much of Banks’ sci-fi stories and novels are set in the universe of the Culture, which is a future group-civilization which includes us humans, along with seven or eight other humanoid species.  The important features of the Culture include is rather utopian perspective and lifestyle, faster-than-light travel (in Excession, much faster than light in one instance), very large space vessels, and the rather significant presence (and perhaps dominance) of artificial intelligence.  The large capital ships of the Culture are operated by super-sentient computers termed Minds, and humans and other humanoids live mostly on Orbitals, very large ring-shaped space habitats.

Excession follows the events that occur after the discovery of a very powerful, impossibly ancient, and definitely anomalous artifact hinting at enormous power and technological ability.  This excites the interest of Special Circumstances, the Culture’s “MI-6″ organization, as well as the interest of the Affront, another space-faring species whose cheerful brutality appalls the sensibilities of the more refined Culture.  Eventually a race is on to determine who will control the artifact and undercover its meaning.

What works well about Excession is that its protagonists are mostly the sentient Minds, and there is a great sense of humor and irony throughout Banks’ writing.  We get a lot of insight into Banks’ ideas about humanity through his machines.

Look to Windward is a bit more of melancholy book, and focuses on the results of the Culture’s meddling in the affairs of other species (there is no Prime Directive in Banks’ universe), and the very personal costs of war.  The Chelgrians, after the Culture’s unsuccessful intervention in their affairs, descends in the caste and civil war, which only ends after five billion Chelgrians are killed.  Some time later, a faction plots revenge against the Culture and a Chelgrian composer now living in exile.

The book follows Major Qulian, who is intended to be the perpretator of this revenge, but who is unaware of exactly what his mission is, and the story unfolds as he recovers his memories of his wife’s death, his recovery from his own wounds suffered during the war, and his actual mission.  His story is paired with the Mind controlling the Masiq orbital where Quilan is trying to meet Ziller, the composer.  The Mind was once the Mind of the GSV Lasting Damage, whose involvement in the war the Culture fought with another species, the Idirans serves as the ultimate background for this book.

This is a complex and multi-layered novel, and I enjoyed Banks’ nuanced characters.

“Madouc” is the third and final installment in Vance’s “Lyonesse” trilogy, and serves as a fine conclusion to an impressive and quite enjoyable series.

The third book focuses on the eponymous title character, daughter of Casmir, king of Lyonesse, whose unrelenting and ruthless political aims drive much of the action in the story. It turns out that Madouc, who resembles Casmir’s first daughter Suldrun in temperment and defiance of Casmir’s desire to control everyone around him, was in fact switched at birth with Suldrun’s real child, and is rather the offspring of a fairy and an unknown human. Madouc passionately desires to find out her true parentage (her “pedigree” as she styles it), and eventually sets off to find out. The secret of the identify of Suldrun’s real child is of vital importance, due to a prophecy that Suldrun’s child will sit on the throne of a united Elder Isles, a position that Casmir has been scheming to obtain since his ascendancy. The doings of wizards, and the eventual fate of the Isles themselves are also at play in a complex chess game that eventually comes to a fairly satisfying close.

Again the typical tropes of fairy tale fiction are here: fairy princesses, kings and queens, quests, witches and wizards, monsters, and the like. But what is striking is how, through nuance, humor, and imagination Vance takes these cliché devices and turns them into a sophisticated and compelling narrative that is nicely-sustained through the entire three books (which really can be read as a single, if long-ish, story). Vance’s fairies, for example, are indeed silly and mischievous, but also terribly puissant, arbitrary, and perceptive, and feel as much like an alien force as something to be found in a pleasant bedtime story.

Vance employs a writing style that can confound rapid readers like myself at times — it is easy to miss the action embedded in his sometimes epic descriptions, and I found myself re-reading sections that I had skimmed to figure out that some important event had occurred literally under my nose.

Vance also doesn’t tie up all of his loose ends in neat packages. For example, why we know what endangers the Elder Isles, they are saved from imminent destruction in the course of the third book, and we do not know what ultimately happened to cause their demise (at least I can’t find them on any map of Western Europe that I have access to).

Vance is the author of a large body of fantastic fiction. I’m curious to see what some of his other work is like.

This is the second of Vance’s three-book Lyonesee series, which while published as three separate books, so far feels like a single novel telling a large tale through a number of smaller stories.

The structure, style, and tone of The Green Pearl are essentially identical to the previous book, and contain the same satisfying mix of ironic narration, fairy-tale like tone, and rather adult characters and themes.  Vance is, as my friend at Dawn Treader Books remarked, a master prose stylist, and I’d agree that the overall style of the book is what is so compelling — its mixture of language, tone, and place are unique and work quite well.

The focus here is mostly on Aillas, now king of Troicinet and an increasingly larger portion of the Elder Isles.  Aillas is almost the archetype of a just ruler, and his actions throw him into stark contrast with Casmir, his rival and father of Suldrun, with whom he fathered a child and later killed herself.  Aillas is increasing his power, and despite the theoretical truce agreed to by Casmir, it is clear that a major conflict is inevitable.  Meanwhile, Aillas plans are threatened by the Ska (Vance’s fictional ancestors to the Vikings), who have invaded the westernmost kingdoms of the Isles), and those he loves by Casmir’s machinations.

I find it tedious to summarize complex fictional plots so I won’t do so here.  But Green Pearl is as satisfying and pleasurable as Suldrun’s Garden, and I’m eager now to move on to Madouc.

This is the sequel to Grimsley’s “The Ordinary” which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I was excited to find this on the shelf at Shaman Drum a few weeks ago.  The first book had the same sense of “rightness” about it that I described in the review of the Jack Vance book — some people talk about it as that “flow” feeling you get when you’re reading a book and it is engrossing and the ideas work and the characters come alive, and you forget that you’re actually reading words on a page in a room somewhere.  I love that feeling, and I savored every minute of the first book.

The second one, not so much.  This book is much more heavily plotted and direct in terms of action, and thinner on ideas and character and internal development.  Its not a bad book, and it cleanly ties together many of the ideas and issues raised by the The Ordinary.  But I just didn’t find it as satisfying, as it felt like a very different kind of story.

Maybe that was Grimsley’s intention (I haven’t read Kirith Kirin, which is in theory the first book of this semi-trilogy, as it is out of print and hard to find), but I felt disappointed.  Maybe a re-read of all three together as a single work might make them fit better in my head.

Still, The Ordinary is such a good book.  I wish this were a little more like it.