So recently I discovered Iain Banks by picking up The Wasp Factory…now I have always seen Iain M Banks among the SciFi books but never made the connection - call me blond.
Are his ‘Culture’ novels any good? Which one should I start with?
Thx
Are they good? Yes. But the sci-fi stuff is quite different from his other writing. Still high quality though.
I’ll leave it to other, more knowledgeable people, to suggest a reading order, however I started with Consider Phlebas and then read all the others in any order I found them and it didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of any of them.
I could pretty much say exactly the same as Isamu did - Consider Phlebas is a good start, but the order doesn’t matter very much.
There are a lot of very imaginative ideas about the technology, which is very high-level (such as AI, travel, etc) but Banks mostly describes things in an incidental way to the main plot - which I like.
A recurring theme/plot device is to have a Culture Agent sent to a more backward planet to influence a society’s development. This is always done according to very strict rules regarding keeping such influence subtle, low-key and allowing others to make their own choices.
‘The Player of Games’ might be a good second choice, but I’ve not had a bad experience from Banks yet in either genre. If you don’t like reading text written as if in a broad accent (“Ahm gunnae keel ye”) then both ‘The Bridge’ (non-SF) and ‘Feersum Enjinn’ (SF) contain characters who narrate their own stories within the book and are written that way. Can be annoying to some, I reckon.
Other than that, I reckon you should enjoy a lot of his work. And if you haven’t got to it yet, ‘The Crow Road’ is my favourite.
Have fun!
Thanks for the advice guys…I just ordered ‘The Crow Road’ as well as ‘Espedair Street’ and ‘Complicity’
If you like ‘Espedair Street’ you’ll probably like ‘The Business’ too.
The first one I read was The Player of Games which I enjoyed immensely. I think it’s a little easier going as an intro to the Culture than Consider Phlebas.
Look to Windward and Excession are good as well. Matter and Use of Weapons are OK. I haven’t read Inversions but I get the impression it’s not the best-liked of the series.
Hey! Wait just a doggone minute here…
I’ve read Consider, Matter, and Use of Weapons and consider the latter to be the best by far.
Consider Phlebas is worth reading first just as I found it to detail a bit more about the Culture, and other background info that sheds more light on the other books.
Zakalwe…thats a nice chair you’re sitting on…ivory?
I’ve read them all. I recommend Player of Games as a good start. Then Excession, because it is very, very good as a Culture overview compared to the more single-issue-focused other books (Phlebas, Windward, Weapons,Matter.)
Feersum Endjin, Against A Dark Background and The Algebraist are not Culture novels.
Don’t forget State of the Art, which is a short story collection. Quite good.
*Inversions *is…a special case.
Thanks for all the advice guys…I think some/all of the Iain M Banks are on the 3-for-2 sale at Waterstone’s so I’ll stop by this weekend and see what I can get
Excession is IMHO his best book to date, mainly because as well as having an excellent plot it also has some extremely funny (to me) moments.
Of the others Consider Phelbas and Use of Weapons are also good.
I didn’t like Matter, it felt like a poor mixture of ideas and to be honest was a depressing read.
I seem to be one of the few who thinks that Inversions was a good book.
As far as other work goes, I would suggest that you read Walking on Glass, although it was written as Iain Banks it has a definite SF theme.
I liked it a lot - enough to re-read every other year or so.
Consider Phlebas, Use Of Weapons and The Player Of Games are all excellent places to start. I think Use of Weapons is the best of the Culture novels.
I used to be a huge fan of all his books, but I gave up reading the Iain Banks stuff after A Song Of Stone and gave up on the Iain M Banks after Excession which I found a bit dull - but I’ve heard good things about his more recent work so I may have to give him another chance.