9 February 2008
Matter
by Iain M Banks (Orbit)
The Culture is an anarcho-communist, galaxy-spanning civilisation of post-humans and machines that has been the playground of some of Iain Banks’s best novels, published with or without his middle initial. The Culture is vastly curious and tolerant: just about the only thing it won’t accept is being attacked. Thus its war with the Idirans, the backdrop of Banks’s first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas (1987), was a battle forced upon it by a fundamentalist enemy that refused to negotiate.
If that sounds vaguely similar to some contemporary geopolitical narratives, Banks is now out to extend the analogies further in Matter, his first Culture novel for eight years. In it, representatives of various advanced civilisations debate the ethics of intervention in other people’s affairs, even if it’s for their own good. Luckily for a writer who is so skilled at scenes of violent action, the Culture has a secretive arm called Special Circumstances that specialises exactly in deniable intervention. Its armed officers constitute a kind of interstellar equivalent of CIA Black Ops. Continued →

© 1996-2008 Steven Poole v3.5
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