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Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

I can understand your feelings, but i suspect you'll find The Hydrogen Sonata a fitting book to cap the series. There's a neat demonstration of what fairness really is worth at the end that's just ... I don't know, poetical. There's a sense of finality and closing that fits nicely.

But perhaps I just need to revisit the books again, if only to revisit Sleeper Service.

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That's cool, I've never seen anyone recommend The Hydrogen Sonata so left it to last, along with Inversions.

For all the fixation on his comment about American Libertarianism, Banks's politics seem fairly standard post-Thatcher Scottish to me. After what that PM did to Scottish communities many Scots apparently feel they have little in common with the direction English conservatives are taking the UK.

Banks was a supporter of Independence and famously cut up his British Passport and sent it to Downing Street in protest of the Iraq invasion.

IMO you can see his politics all over the Culture; from the entire tragedy of Look To Windward to the wee things.

Here is an interesting article by Ken MacLeod (another excellent Scottish SF author) and long time friend of Banks:

http://kenmacleod.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/use-of-calculators....

"what mattered was to keep the utopian possibility open by continuing technological progress, especially space development, and in the meantime to support whatever policies and politics in the real world were rational and humane"

Slightly off-topic, if someone is interested in works of MacLeod, what's a good starting spot?

Has to be The Star Fraction - which is the first book in two series!

Politically he was pretty close to Charlie Stross, I think (himself hardly a Thatcher fan). It's also apparent in his non-sci work.

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