Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think Iain M. Banks is a good writer. (You can see it in this piece, which falls into the trap of using long words to sound clever.) His sci-fi has a serious flaw: it's static. Nothing changes, everything is inevitable, the baddies are predestined to lose. His characters and dialogue are bland.

The books do have a strength, which is the completeness of their picture of the world. The concept of the Culture is interesting. I think it has less to do with the third dimension of space, and more to do with the 1990s. The Culture looks a lot like confident liberal democracy, pitting its advanced tech and cultural openness against its various (doomed) rivals. That's why a lot of the books seem a bit colonial: travel to a small annoying planet, knock some sense into the primitive authorities holding sway. And it also has that 1990s vibe that one side is in the right, and that side is always going to win.

For a contrast, think of The Three Body Problem. It's set on an equally epic scale - but so much more happens!

Banks admits that the Culture itself is kind of boring because it is too perfect - so for most of its teeming trillions living their hedonistic lives on their orbitals life is nice and safe and a bit boring to write about.

So the stories have to deal with the edges of the Culture and the mission of Contact and Special Circumstances to try and make the galaxy that bit nicer by direct interference.

(I mean, by definition a "solved society" must be somewhat boring [read, difficult] to write about ...)

There are ways and angles to make that topic interesting, in my opinion. But it probably won't be a grand action-packed space opera.

You world build it one time and you are done...

I’m a veteran SF reader but I only read The Culture books for the first time recently, and I agree with you, albeit you have to acknowledge their massive influence on contemporary SF. The Three Body Problem, though, I struggled to finish the first book at all, because I found the prose excruciatingly bad (or more properly I guess, the translation).

The dialogue in the English translation of Three Body Problem is torturous. I couldn't finish it.

I've found all the Culture novels far better written.

As a counterpoint, I found 3 body problem terrible to read (how many pages of trudging through deserts do I have to endure?), and the Culture series delightful.

A fairly reductive dismissal.

Not completely wrong - except the bit about blandness. If I want bland characters and dialogue I'll just crack open Three Body Problem again.

Seriously though: Matter, Surface Detail, and Look to Windward are all fairly clear counterexamples to your template.

The first involves an explicit refusal by various advanced civs (including the Culture) to help a deposed leader of one such primitive society to reclaim his throne. The last one deals explicitly and at length with various Culture citizens reckoning with its actions both recent and long past, and the consequences thereof.

Meanwhile, Three Body Problem is an impressive series with interesting ideas which nonetheless left me unmoved. I didn't care about any of the characters, and as someone pointed out elsewhere, the dialogue is not great, which to be fair could just be an issue of translation.

I agree TBP's characters aren't great. It makes up for that by the bold concepts.

I don't think advanced civs not getting involved is a counterexample to the colonialist template. "Get involved or not" was a standard dilemma that e.g. the British Empire, or indeed the US, faced – think of the US after the 1990 Gulf War, for example, debating whether to enter Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. Empires don't always choose to interfere, and non-interference does not mean they exert no effect on their neighbours.

One way to check whether Banks' characters are bland: look through these posts. There's a bunch of fans posting here! Lots of them talking about their favourite books. Not one mention of a favourite character. Now, imagine talking about LOTR without Frodo and Sam, or The Left Hand Of Darkness without its hero.

In the Culture novels, the characters that stand out most to me were his Minds rather than any of the pan-human non-AI. What's most intriguing to me, something I rarely ever see in science fiction is how utterly "human" and warm his AI creations always were. Just read Look to Windward, Masaq Hub in particular, for the ultimate example.

You grant Liu his bold concepts but not Banks? As someone else pointed out, TBP would fit inside the greater Culture universe but not the other way around.

> I don't think advanced civs not getting involved is a counterexample to the colonialist template.

Your criticism was of a supposed simplistic pattern of plotting across the books, not that the Culture's behavior is generally colonialist. The "template" I understood you to be talking about is one of plot.

> One way to check whether Banks' characters are bland: look through these posts.

Yeah I'm not sure about that. What sci-fi novels claim fans with this enthusiasm about the characters? Especially non-serialized space operas?

Even if the characters aren't all-time greats, the personality he writes into even the bit players is commendable. The drone escaping the Peace Makes Plenty at the beginning of Excession comes to mind.

Sci-fi almost always succeeds because it manages to present interesting ideas. Often the writing can be quite poor, I remember some Asimov novels were characters were just defined by a single thing that they believed.

To me the culture series fails, as it has no interesting ideas. "What if we solved every problem", just isn't an interesting premise. There is no interesting conflict that can even exist in the setting, the only thing that the author could come up with were religious fanatics. But the "interesting question" answered there wasn't more interesting then a New Atheist debating some Christian.

> To me the culture series fails, as it has no interesting ideas.

Just one of the subplots of Surface Detail involves a war conducted in virtual reality to decide the continued existence of virtual "hells" which advanced-but-repressive societies use to keep their citizens in line.

> There is no interesting conflict that can even exist in the setting, the only thing that the author could come up with were religious fanatics

How many of the books did you read before reaching this conclusion?

>Just one of the subplots of Surface Detail involves a war conducted in virtual reality to decide the continued existence of virtual "hells" which advanced-but-repressive societies use to keep their citizens in line.

That is not an interesting idea.

>How many of the books did you read before reaching this conclusion?

Consider Phlebas, Player of games, use of weapons. Which definitely was enough for me.

> For a contrast, think of The Three Body Problem. It's set on an equally epic scale - but so much more happens!

I disagree. TBP is not nearly as epic. TBP could easily exist within the Culture series, but not the other way around.

I think galaxy-, indeed multiverse- and century-spanning is epic enough. (It's not a contest to be the most epic.)

could you give some examples of which words you found long?

if you prefer shorter words, and moral relativism, you might like Neal Asher's polity series.

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