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0 pointsglangdale5y ago0 comments

Maybe Banks had enough imagination to think up the Culture, but not enough of an imagination to think up any interesting stories that would be internal to the Culture... I suppose Wodehousian or Jane Austen-style comedies of manners set on Shipboard probably weren't really his forte.

Plus, presumably an all-seeing Ship AI probably wouldn't permit the atrocities required to drive most Iain M Banks (or, for that matter, Iain Banks) plots. A would-be molester or rapist on Shipboard would presumably get his brainstem lightly zorched by the ship's effector before he got too close a victim, depriving Banks the opportunity to write a vivid description of the act, and the subsequent opportunity to write about the Bad Person getting incinerated, shot, torn apart by hundreds of tiny drones, etc. etc.

I enjoyed that vignette where everyone on board some ship are getting the common cold for fun.

I didn't particularly find the writing in Colin Greenlund's "Take Back Plenty" that interesting, but it was fascinating reading space opera in that general genre that wasn't violence-driven.

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brmgb5y ago

> Maybe Banks had enough imagination to think up the Culture, but not enough of an imagination to think up any interesting stories that would be internal to the Culture... I suppose Wodehousian or Jane Austen-style comedies of manners set on Shipboard probably weren't really his forte.

It's more than the Culture is a gimmick Banks use both as a light way to explore the limit of a somewhat ruleless utopia where mankind surrendered most of its power to an a benevolent deity and to write entertaining pieces of fiction.

He didn't use the setting and published as Iain Banks rather than Iain M. Banks when he wanted to write some other kind of story.

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