Comment by chimprich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimprich | Hacker News Reader

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> IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge

I don't recognise this from the Culture novels. Plenty of Bad Stuff happens to people (and all manner of beings, drones, Minds, etc.), but that generally does happen in fiction. I can only think of one Culture novel that kind of has a "revenge plot" (Surface Detail, and it's probably not the main theme of the novel).

> it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se

I think it's possible that Banks thought writing purely about a utopia would be boring. Personally I would have read anything Banks wrote in the setting, even if it was just a story about everyday life.

If you haven't read it, his text (short story? Fictional article?) "A Few Notes On The Culture" is quite interesting and devoid of Bad Things Happening: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

Banks explicitly talked about utopia's being too boring to write about and that the friction on the edges of Culture and the rest of the universe provided the necessary drama for a novel.

I'm finding all the Consider Phlebas hate kinda weird. I found it electrifying at the time and 25 years on when I re-read it last year, Horza's weary bleakness was incredibly poignant.

I wish we knew more about the Changers!

> I'm finding all the Consider Phlebas hate kinda weird.

You're not alone. Most of it does not ring true for me at all.

Banks really did use sexual violence as a signifier of some character or faction being supremely evil. Off the top of my head [spoilers ahoy, naturally], there's the institutional rape for entertainment in the empire of Azad in The Player of Games, there's the Archimandrite Luseferous in The Algebraist, and there's a fairly explicit scene in Transition. I think there are more examples, but it's been a few years since I read the books so I can't remember the details.

I found that Banks wrote about every kind of sadism/violence in a big mix, plus when he really wanted to showcase someone truly nasty, he just used the good old suspense and banality-of-evil method.

Sure, the long listing of various bad and worse and even worse acts are complete clichés, but at least in Surface Detail it was an interesting plot device and setting. (The ending of Player of Games was a bit too much, but looking back, it's okay, it's not really a big part (if I remember that part is ~10 pages, from the moment the drone forces Morat's hand to the king's demise). Oh, and the comically villainous dude in The Algebraist seems like a gag. (With the sentient punchbag.)

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