Ehhhhhh.I really expected to like this more than I did, and at times I did find myself enjoying it. I liked several of the characters quite a bit, but others never felt fully formed or even interesting. I think I mainly just found it...tedious, a lot of the time. Too much filler. And this is mayb...
Wow! This has taken me 23 hours of listening. It's a massive book, spanning the galaxy. The premise is that (1) The Culture is the most civilised of the advanced civilisations and generally gets what it wants done, (2) there is a series of "virtual hells" in which souls are tormented, but as t...
PrologueStars were barely visible through the tiny oval. The reader looked up from his novel, blinked. Checked his watch -- still hours to go. His wife sat slumped next to him, still asleep. Some people could sleep on planes. Some people couldn't."What are you reading?" asked the man on the reade...
This collection of stories is a small but significant contribution to Iain M. Banks’ inimitable Culture Series. I didn’t have much of a reaction one way or another to the smattering of Culture-based short stories, so this review will focus entirely on the book’s eponymous novella. “The State of t...
The following review ran in the Peterborough Examiner in December, 2004.A revised reprint appeared in the New York review of Science Fiction in September, 2006.The Algebraist by Iain M. BanksOrbit 2004 (Time Warner)534 pagesHC $42.00Iain M. Banks’s new novel The Algebraist is a charming, intellig...
My experience with Iain M. Banks has been lukewarm. I liked but didn't love the first book in this series, Consider Phlebas, and I absolutely hated The Algebraist. I read The Player of Games because I am an artificial intelligence, post-scarcity junkie, and Banks is the kind of author who serves ...
The 5th book in the culture series Excession is by far the most confusing book I have read so far.I think this book could have been split into two parts instead of compressing all the different plot lines in a single part.Although the book has a decent story but Banks starts a new plot in a middl...
Riting a revyoo as thoh I wuz Bascule seems 2 me the obveeyus cors. 1 mit even say the playd cors; the yoosd up an cleechayd cors. But a browz uv the revyoos postd on Goodreedz indicayts uderwize. I wood ½ thot bi now sumbudy wood ½ ritten a revyoo in the styl uv Bascule but it apeerz not 2 b ...
Look to windward I think is book in which Banks goes back to what he does best i.e. tell a engrossing story which has a lot of twists and turns. This time the story exclusively takes place on Masaq orbital and the descriptions of the orbital is another point which made this book really fascinatin...
Banks' Culture series so far has been, what I will refer to as, hard sci-fi. Gargantuan megaships which house billions of people, immensely advanced Artificial Intelligences independently managing entire worlds, tiny drones with the ability to kill several people in a matter of seconds, Orbitals ...
"Regret is for humans," it said.—p.4671993's Against a Dark Background is a good, fat book—possibly the longest single work in Banks' science-fictional oeuvre, and one of the earlier novels credited to Banks-with-the-M. The particular copy I read came to me much more recently, though, from a Litt...
This is my first experience with Ian Banks' famed "Culture" setting, whose books don't function the way a normal book series does, but rather, as simply a shared setting that many of his books take place in. Order is not important, as I understand it, as the universe he creates is so vast that a ...
I heard it first, then opened my eyes and saw it. It is a fine, clear day in late spring and the air smells of last night’s rain on new leaves. The bird was smaller than my hand, beak to tail; mostly a speckle of two-tone brown with a yellow beak, black legs and white flashes along the leading ed...