Name: Against a dark background
ISBN: 9780316036375

Iain M. Banks

Against a dark background

Gavin

One of his darkest; darker than the one with a real hell. Stuffed full of plot, rammed full of details - a dozen cities on three planets, each with their own economic or cultural or religious setup. There's: a huge war over economic policy; a primitivist misotheist theocracy; a bunch of murderous millenarians; a group of solipsist mercenaries who each think they're the only person in the world; a World Tree ecology; a giant raft city; a talking deus ex machina; two world conspiracies; a man raised from birth to be the perfect revolutionary leader; the fall of a trillionaire dynasty; terrible, maximally vicious sibling rivalry; a beautiful android city full of likeable people being competent and deep. The protagonists pull off about a dozen missions in varied landscapes with various goals. But it's all just sketched, since the 12 worlds he builds are vying for the same 700 pages. 

  We are a race prone to monsters, and when we produce one we worship it. What kind of world, what translation of good could come from all that's happened here?


And I didn't like any of the protagonists; they're all a glib kind of hedonist. The leader, Sharrow, is tacitly remorseful about the many terrible things she does, but at no point does she stop doing them.

  People were always sorry... The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.



(view spoiler)[The dastardly ubermensch Big Bad only appears in the last 5% of the book. (hide spoiler)]
(view spoiler)[Killing Geis with a bullet she wouldn't have if she were more responsible is one way to justify her attitude I guess. (hide spoiler)]
(view spoiler)[In killing Geis, Sharrow saves the World Court, or anyway the Court/Rebel States status quo. The ending doesn't resolve anything, fine, but I was amazed that we didn't have her recovering the Gun. It's one thing to leave ambiguity about what's next, but it's not really clear what Sharrow's options are. She lost her crew, killed her family (including the son), is no longer hunted by the Huhsz, gets Feril boxed for a century, has a prosecution coming, and doesn't give a fuck about anything. But she has a cool motorbike. (hide spoiler)]
(view spoiler)[Bank's scifi is unusually emotionally fraught, focussed on inner life. Sharrow vs Breyguhn is very tragic and quite believable, for all that it makes me dismiss Sharrow as an impulsive heartless fool. (hide spoiler)]

* The Huhsz, the millenarians, are actually quite marginal, despite the first 200 pages setting them up to be central.
* Odd portrait of a very advanced (10000 year old), fairly stable capitalism. They manage to ban things (like bioweapons), and manage to prosecute trillionaires.
* Feril goes straight in the all-time gallery of Wise Cinnamon-bun AIs we don't deserve. (Along with Lt Cmd Data, Constable Dorfl, TARS, Iron Giant, GCU Grey Area, Wall-E).
* I didn't buy the superior ancient tech thing, here. Golter has a mostly-functional academic and state apparatus, and is able to do many things we can't; it's implausible that they wouldn't manage to reverse-engineer things over thousands of years
* Nice echoing of the Solipsists in Sharrow at the end:

  The blood pumped and coursed within her, and with each beat the whole edifice seemed to quake and pulse and shiver, as though for all its mountainous solidity the Sea House was merely a projection, something held in the power of her blood-quickened eyes.
  


* The Lazy Guns sound exactly like Culture tech, quasi-sentient to boot. But their presence in this remote "orphan" system is odd, and it doesn't fit to have the Culture either dump or lose such weapons.

Banks is less subtle than I thought he was, as a teen. Good if you prefer worlds to characters.