8/9/07

Iain Banks' "Matter" Cover Art Surfaces, Looks Pretty Bad Ass

This is the cover art for Iain M. Banks' new sci-fi title that's coming out in February. Check out a potential back cover blurb here.

This will be Banks' first Culture novel in 8 years and it has mouth-breathing sci-fi fans like yours truly salivating. If you have a few minutes, skim this short essay Banks wrote about the Culture. It's an excellent primer on the fascinating fictional setting he's devised and I imagine you might come away from it somewhat intrigued in concepts such as post-scarcity utopia and advanced genetic manipulation. Here's a passage discussing a particularly unique (and odd) aspect of life in the Culture that indicates what the society is all about:

To us, perhaps, the idea of being able to find out what sex is like for our complimentary gender, or being able to get drunk/stoned/tripped-out or whatever just by thinking about it (and of course the Culture's drug-glands produce no unpleasant side-effects or physiological addiction) may seem like mere wish-fulfilment. And indeed it is partly wish-fulfilment, but then the fulfilment of wishes is both one of civilisation's most powerful drives and arguably one of its highest functions; we wish to live longer, we wish to live more comfortably, we wish to live with less anxiety and more enjoyment, less ignorance and more knowledge than our ancestors did... but the abilities to change sex and to alter one's brain-chemistry - without resort to external technology or any form of payment - both have more serious functions within the Culture. A society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other; within the population, over time, there will gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding to be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the individuals - will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity is established. In a similar fashion, a society in which everybody is free to, and does, choose to spend the majority of their time zonked out of their brains will know that there is something significantly wrong with reality, and (one would hope) do what it can to make that reality more appealing and less - in the pejorative sense - mundane.

If that didn't get you revved up check out Banks' concept of politics in space!:

Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats. The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.


So hopefully these two passages show that, at the very least, Banks has a vivid imagination. I'm not sure they do the best job selling his brilliance, but I hope I've piqued your interest. If you're looking for a good place to start, check out his first Culture novel Consider Phlebas or my personal favorite Use of Weapons.


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