Saturday, August 15, 2009
Matter
I'm trying to fit in as much science fiction reading as I can before ICWG gets underway: I'm halfway through Iain M. Bank's Matter right now. Reading his prose reminds me of a time I recommended Charles Stross's Accelerando to a poetry colleague. His response was that he enjoyed it, but, he wrote, "I can only handle so many consecutive sentences in the direct assertion form in which someone does something."
Banks is solidly in this mode, and while I don't have a problem with straight ahead prose (event after event, coherently stacked, but still hard to "angle"--that's part of why I love science fiction), Bank's early SF, especially Consider Phlebas, wore me out with its grinding plot machinations. This style may be a natural, or rather default, aspect of writing about anything as large as Bank's ongoing Culture, which, after all, is a vast utopic civilization spanning an entire galaxy and several millennia, in which lots of things happen. Much simpler to bend the limits of prose when writing about something more specific: one June day in Dublin, 1904, for instance. And that was only done interestingly once. So Banks has his work cut out for him: you could say the same of anyone with a utopic vision, however vast and strange.
Still, in his latest novels, Banks seems to have figured out how to explain the Culture without wearing the reader down. He's thankfully taken his cipher-like shapeshifters and really weird aliens out of the narrative driver's seat. A sympathy with heterogeneity should not be confused with the desire to see ourselves (or our avatars) totally obliterated by weirdness. Bank's sympathies flit around from chapter to chapter, as expected, but gravitate toward characters constrained by limited worldviews and Earthling desires. Which serves to make the tiered, billion-year-old Shellworld they reside in -- described in the book as "a concentric succession of spherical shells, supported by over a million massive, gently tapering towers never less than fourteen hundred meters in diameter, layered out to the final surface" -- all the more frightening:
The characters who reside in this Shellworld are aware of the danger they face -- a danger, like ours, as remote as "centuries, millenia, and decieons" -- and are aware, too, of the vast bureaucracy that forms the galactic Culture, yet live their lives according to their custom anyway.
But! I have to set it down in order to start Jim Krusoe's latest, Erased, in time for Thursday's reading. ¶ 10:20 AM
Banks is solidly in this mode, and while I don't have a problem with straight ahead prose (event after event, coherently stacked, but still hard to "angle"--that's part of why I love science fiction), Bank's early SF, especially Consider Phlebas, wore me out with its grinding plot machinations. This style may be a natural, or rather default, aspect of writing about anything as large as Bank's ongoing Culture, which, after all, is a vast utopic civilization spanning an entire galaxy and several millennia, in which lots of things happen. Much simpler to bend the limits of prose when writing about something more specific: one June day in Dublin, 1904, for instance. And that was only done interestingly once. So Banks has his work cut out for him: you could say the same of anyone with a utopic vision, however vast and strange.
Still, in his latest novels, Banks seems to have figured out how to explain the Culture without wearing the reader down. He's thankfully taken his cipher-like shapeshifters and really weird aliens out of the narrative driver's seat. A sympathy with heterogeneity should not be confused with the desire to see ourselves (or our avatars) totally obliterated by weirdness. Bank's sympathies flit around from chapter to chapter, as expected, but gravitate toward characters constrained by limited worldviews and Earthling desires. Which serves to make the tiered, billion-year-old Shellworld they reside in -- described in the book as "a concentric succession of spherical shells, supported by over a million massive, gently tapering towers never less than fourteen hundred meters in diameter, layered out to the final surface" -- all the more frightening:
...long after a given Shellworld had been apparently de-weaponized and made safe, hidden defense systems could wake up centuries, millenia, and decieons later resulting in gigadeaths, teradeaths, effective civicides and near extinctions as interior stars fell, levels were flooded from above or drained -- often with the result that oceans met interior stars, resulting in clouds of plasma and superheated steam.
The characters who reside in this Shellworld are aware of the danger they face -- a danger, like ours, as remote as "centuries, millenia, and decieons" -- and are aware, too, of the vast bureaucracy that forms the galactic Culture, yet live their lives according to their custom anyway.
But! I have to set it down in order to start Jim Krusoe's latest, Erased, in time for Thursday's reading. ¶ 10:20 AM
