1. So ends my first reads of Banks’ Culture Series novels. Here is probably his best dialogue, some structural experimentation, and perhaps the spiritual offspring of Excession and Look to Windward. It’s been some time since I’ve finished a book—a lot of writing and podcasts have filled my time—so let’s see if I can still take useful notes.
2. The two themes that struck me the most here were oughtness and responses to impending death, well, not quite death. I mean the subliming, enfolding, whatever, a state whose most boring grain of sand outshines the heights of our lives. And the real illuminating delight here is the variety of cultural responses to the subliming. It’s joyous for some, somber for others, something to avoid, liberating, or just another bit of reality to accept. The variety of responses allow him to tap into a cultural portrayal that feels true to life. And this is important, especially in such a different world as that which the Culture portrays: the best science fiction is that which portrays humans as human, aliens as alien, and manages to still communicate basic human responses and characteristics truly. The other theme that stuck out was oughtness, and this builds off the subliming theme: how ought one respond to this type of foreknown cultural shift? Through the examples given, Banks is able to give a variety of responses and put some plot to them. He doesn’t really judge any of them except one—those who attempt to preserve their power in the now through the status quo, instead of realizing the coming singularity makes the status quo irrelevant. Where Banks gets to is that one should re-examine life and culture in the new context and one needs to reintegrate into it. For instance, the partiers say that if actions don’t matter in the long term, pleasure is all there is to live for. In another instance, many people embrace a “life-task” or goal to complete before the deadline of subliming arrives. The four-armed main character does this, but ends up staying behind, not subliming with her culture, because she is still so fascinated with the Culture itself, and has really already left her culture behind to become a part of the Culture.
—Set against this oughtness is the man who lives forever when everybody else dies. This builds off a theme present in the rest of the novels: if eternal, corporeal existence is possible, why do Culture citizens choose to die? Banks typically proposes personal boredom, frustration with others, or curiosity as to what comes next as the majority causes, though he also includes a minority of thrill-seekers, people whose emotional lives are pain, or sacrificial lambs for the greater good. But what sets the eternal man apart is his resistance to change.
“So,” she said, “living all this time has been to no purpose, basically.”Is this Banks showing us what he has learned when nearing the end of his life? Yes, though I don’t know how much he knew about how soon his end would come at this point. The eternal man does say this as well:
“True, but that hardly distinguishes me from anybody else, does it?”
“But shouldn’t it, or there’s no point?”
“No. Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter. However, just having done more of it than another person doesn’t really make much difference.” The voice from the grey cube paused, then said, “Although … I think living so long might have persuaded me that I am not quite as pleasant a person as I once thought I was.”
Cossont, presented with two opportunities to be scathing just in these last few sentences, was aware she was choosing to take neither. She confined herself to, “Really?” said in a slightly sarcastic tone.
“Well,” the voice said, seemingly oblivious, “one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So? Does it really matter? Why really are you bothering with all this? Are these not just further doomed, asinine ways of attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion book-ending its utter triviality?”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Is this a rhetorical question?”
“It is a mistaken question. Meaning is everywhere. There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It’s just that there’s no final Meaning, with a capital M. Though the illusion that there might be is comforting for a certain class of mind.”
“The poor, deluded, fools.”
“I suspect, from your phrasing and your tone of voice, that, as a little earlier, you think you are being sarcastic. Well, no matter. However, there is another reaction to the never-ending plethora of unoriginal idiocies that life throws up with such erratic reliability, besides horror and despair.”
“What’s that?”
“A kind of glee. Once one survives the trough that comes with the understanding that people are going to go on being stupid and cruel to each other no matter what, probably for ever – if one survives; many people choose suicide at this point instead – then one starts to take the attitude, Oh well, never mind. It would be far preferable if things were better, but they’re not, so let’s make the most of it. Let’s see what fresh fuckwittery the dolts can contrive to torment themselves with this time.”
“Not necessarily the most compassionate response.”
“Indeed not. But my point is that it might be the only one that lets you cope with great age without becoming a devout hermit, and therefore represents a kind of filter favouring misanthropy. Nice people who are beginning to live to a great age – as it were – react with such revulsion to the burgeoning horrors that confront them, they generally prefer suicide. It’s only us slightly malevolent types who are able to survive that realisation and find a kind of pleasure – or at least satisfaction – in watching how the latest generation or most recently evolved species can re-discover and beat out afresh the paths to disaster, ignominy and shame we had naively assumed might have become hopelessly over-grown.”
“So basically you’re sticking around to watch us all fuck up?”
“Yes. It’s one of life’s few guaranteed constants.”
Cossont thought about this. “If that’s true, it’s a bit sad.”
“Tough. Life is sometimes.”
“And you’re right: it doesn’t exactly show you in the best light.”
“You’re supposed to admire me for my honesty.”
“Am I?” she said, and reached over and turned the grey cube off.
That was when she decided she’d give the cube to somebody else, who might want it, or at least agree to care for it.
“So, if you’re really so old, tell me what you’ve learned over the years, over the millennia. What are the fruits of your wisdom?”And that’s probably more indicative of Banks’ voice than any other passage I’ve quoted from him, in any of my other notes. He attempts wit and wisdom, formal and gutter, serious and sarcastic simultaneously both as a coping method for his characters, and as a way to keep his readers reading. It works well, whether I agree with his conclusions or not.
“They are remarkably few. I have managed to avoid learning too many lessons. That may be what keeps me alive.”
3. Structurally, this is much more an adventure novel than his usual ensemble structure: it’s pretty clear right off the bat how characters and events are related here, and rather than gathering disparate elements into a central location for the finale, he has them going and coming according to their own plots, all supporting that central theme, and all relating to each other. A point about subliming is that it leaves things in the Gzilt culture half-done, and hence the novel drops a couple of threads, or takes the Shakespearean kill everybody approach to avoid overtly dropping the threads. It works to support the theme, but also feels like some of the novel may have been unnecessary.
4. The plot relies on violence to move characters and situations, and that feels more lazy than Banks typically is as a writer. There’s one part where an interview is done, then the guards come in and kill the interviewer. This is off-screen, sure, but by being the usual tactic he uses throughout, it feels like he didn’t want to try and find ways around the corners he’d written his plot into. Skip the rest of the scene, then get back to somewhere else. If it happens once, then sure, it happens sometimes. But happening over and over again makes the novel feel more pulp than all but Consider Phlebas did in this series.
5. Also lazy is that some of the non-Culture and non-protagonist characters are two-dimensional, and this is a real negative for me. I’m one who thinks that bad people think they’re doing good, but here there is very little thinking on their part. I wanted to understand them more as people. This felt more like some of his short stories: rejecting other points of views outright rather than arguing against them.
6. In short, a good novel that might be one of his most readable for non-science fiction readers. But in embracing more typical structures and two-dimensional characters, he loses some of what makes his other novels so endearing to me. So it’s a good book, but not one I’ll be returning to quickly.
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