Iain Banks

Player of Games
Excession
Inversions
Look to Windward

Iain Banks is a special writer. He is a good writer, and that alone puts him in the minority in sci-fi (although this minority is bigger in sci-fi than it is in fantasy). But what makes him truly special is his imagination. This is, I think, underestimated in the sci-fi field - we usually assume the writer is imaginative. This is the realm of speculative, imagative fiction, and yet so few writers have the vision of Banks, as well as the skill to create an embodiment of the vision which makes good fiction.

Banks has written several novels in a setting called the Culture. The Culture is a society in which humans (and other beings) live in peaceful anarchy, watched over by AIs of tremendous power (the smartest of these are called Minds). These AIs usually take the physical form of enormous ships which roam the galaxy, carrying enormous populations of people and sentient machines. (Although I think half of Banks' purpose in creating these ships was to have an excuse to name them.)

Sounds vaguely intriguing, no? Yet a story in such a society would tend to be exceedingly dull wouldn't it? After all, everyone lives together peacefully, watched over by their benevolent super-brilliant and termendously powerful spaceship-Minds. Banks solves this problem by populating the universe by all manner of non-Culture critters. These critters have varying degrees of intelligence, power, and, often, perversion. Banks is, frankly, one mildly twisted dude, and he isn't afraid of creating some pretty horrifying things. And that is, finally, what creates a stage on which Banks can operate freely - watching the Culture interact with the rest of the universe.

A quick comment about Banks' other books. He has written many non-fiction books - I haven't read any. He also has written other sci-fi and Culture books. While the two I talk about here were, in my opinion, terrific, I found The Bridge and Feersum Endjinn so mind-numbingly boring I didn't get farther than page 15 in either. Maybe they got better. Maybe not.

The Player of Games

This is the story of Jernau Morat Gurgeh, a citizen of the Culture who is a Master game player. He plays all sorts of games with equal facility, having spent his life playing, and winning, games. Unbeknownest to Gurgeh, the Culture has encountered the cruel Empire of Azad, a society organized around a game. In fact, the game is so central to their society that it is itself the means by which the leaders - even the emperor - are selected.

Banks here tells a terrific tale, filled with suspense, excitement, and the unexpected. But the reason I really loved this book is that I also love games, and they so rarely appear in fiction. Here Banks not only uses games effectively in his story, he advances an interesting thesis on the role of games in shaping and reflecting the values and ideas of the players of the game. If you like games I recommend you read this book and then think about the ways games contain implicit value judgments and ideals, and the way repeated game play (much like repeated anything) shapes how we think.

Excession

This book is not as straightforward as The Player of Games. Excession shows us the Culture coping with the arrival in near space of the Excession - a true Out Of Context situation. What's an Out Of Context situation? Well, imagine being a resident of the Carribean, meeting a bunch of wierd guys who just got of the biggest boat you've ever seen, glinting from strange metallic clothes and wielding boom sticks capable of inflicting extraordinary pain from 100 yards away. Well, when you are a resident of an enormous, peaceful, and powerful civilization which spans half the galaxy, what is the comparable situation, and what do you do about it? This book wasn't as well liked by some of my friends, and I have a theory about why. The primary actors in this book are mostly ships - Minds - not people. I really enjoyed that, but I suspect it turns some people off. I don't really want to say anything else about this book - I really enjoyed it, and I think most of you will also enjoy reading Excession.

Inversions

Inversions is, unfortunately, a book which doesn't really seem to go anywhere. You get the feeling that Banks is making references to his Culture books, which is all well and good, but that of course assumes that you've read the culture books and that you take the vague references as given. Not much happens, and nothing is really resolved in any meaningful way. Still, Banks writes well, and his characters are interesting, even if the main characters are mysterious to the point of being opaque. I can't say that I disliked the book - I actually kind of enjoyed it - it just didn't have much of an impact on me