My favorite Culture book, I think, (but one that only works as a Culture book if you've read others first) is Inversions, which is more about women and more about caretaking than any of the others. It's still very straight, but pretends less that it isn't, and you might enjoy the way it plays off the others.
Some of my best friends are straight people, really. I'll look into that!
It's definitely about women surrounded by, and even narrated by!, men, I should say--but it's about that, and to me at least the book very much belongs to the women. I like it.
Gender change and childbearing is also a subplot in Excession, though I don't remember if it addresses anything you raise. Also the non-SF The Wasp Factory is a thought experiment about gender-essentialism, among other things.
UGH DO NOT READ THE WASP FACTORY if you don't want to sign up for (a) plenty more of those torture scenes, (b) problematic sure let us say thought experiments about gender essentialism, (c) feeling gross.
I've mostly been avoiding it because I tend to skip novels about dramatic mental illness, but maybe I've misunderstood and it isn't that. I'll probably lean toward more Culture novels first, at least.
setting the origins of the severe mental illness aside, it is front and center, along with some torture scenes/general creepiness you will legit remember forever. 8/10, would not read again. read culture novels. I've read all his iain banks novels; they're interesting but don't compare.
In Banks's frame, improving sex seems to center on improving orgasms specifically. That seems limiting.
Because I'm not a pervert conscientious like Thorn I didn't keep track of simultaneous orgasms, but maybe this is the thread to talk about Banks's incest thing. (AFAICR UoW, Walking on Glass, The Steep Approach to Garbadale.)
1. "Inversions was an attempt to write a Culture novel that wasn't."- Banks
And he did so very successfully. I loved it, but I'm not clear how much it is a Culture novel in fact, except that if you were given it with no cover on and you were familiar with the Culture you would occasionally think, "I wonder if this character is actually associated with the Culture."
My point is that I'm not sure Inversions can be used in evidence for any claim about the Culture.
3. The Doctor is really a great character.
8. The Wasp Factor is definitely tough going and was greeted with gasps of horror when it first came out. On the other hand it made Banks' name as a mainstream author. His later non-SF novels are much tamer in most respects but there is still a lot of weirdness. (Possibly it's not actually weird if you are from Scotland.)
11. When I first read Inversions my take was the same as yours, but I reread it as part of my massive Banks reread* associated with this series of threads, and it was obvious nearly from the start that one character was from the Culture and it became obvious later that another was.
* The non SF books were partly included but I bogged down on Espedair Street, IIRC. Some of his non-SF is excellent, but others are pretty meh. I'll get back to them after I finish "The Will to Battle."
the origins of the severe mental illness
...really ruin the book for me, in an OH, COME ON way.
The cordite made it all worth it.
I've seen similar underwhelmed reactions to the handling of the whole switching sexes thing by Banks. I think it might be because when people hear about it, it leads them to expect something like The Left Hand of Darkness, where exploring what a society with a radically different take on gender might look like was a major part of the book. In the Culture novels, it's mainly just a bit of background color.
I think it fits with the whole idea that Banks isn't all that interested in the details of what daily life in socialist AI utopia might be like*, which is why he writes mostly about people t the margins who deal with other civilizations.
*Although Look to Windward, one of my favorite Culture novels, comes closest to that.
13: While we're on that, did anyone have the same "Oh come ON' reaction to the big reveal in Use of Weapons? Our sympathetically flawed protagonist, who has throughout been working through the trauma of the tragic murder of his sister when he was young, actually turns out to have [We're allowed to spoil the plots here, right? I think we are.]
What on earth was the point of all that, and the chair thing?
I'm not wild about Left Hand Of Darkness on a "let's talk about gender" level either, actually, even though I like quite a lot of other things about it. It seems to pull back and forth between "you can read these characters as totally heterosexual, don't be discomfited" and "one of the main characters has to DIE in a kind of forced way because otherwise we'd be left with a KINDA GAY relationship".
At least in the early books, I find the way that Banks deals with gender and sexuality to be really rapey and unintentionally homophobic. It's obvious from his personal writing (and if you remember, like, the 90s, from the actual books) that he himself is coming from a left, gender-egalitarian standpoint but this really illuminates the limits of 90s gender-egalitarianism.
PoG is well-constructed and exciting, but the "how do we know this society is bad? Lots of explicit murder-rape witnessed by the main character!" thing makes it difficult to recommend, and the whole plot about Yay, which ends with her fully restored to femininity and sleeping with Gurgeh - that's pretty gross. It's like his reward for his personal growthy changey stuff is to have it off with her, and I find it really weird and sad that we don't get to see Yay when she's a guy, and that she's constructed as a character like her guy-dom is just some quirky manic-pixie-Yay wacky thing that she does.
I had the "Oh come ON" reaction to Wasp Factory, but not UoW. I guess it was a matter of expectations. I expect a literary novel to be making a Very Important Point, and then I care about the point. I expect a sci-fi novel to be "A bunch of stuff happens. The End," so I don't put as much weight on the actual stuff.
The point of the chair is that it's a supreme use of weapons; to destroy one unique target at exactly the right time.
Given that spoiling the plots here, when do you mean? When the protagonist (originally Elethiomel, later having assumed the identity of Zakalwe) sends the chair made from original-Zakalwe's sister's bones to him? Because that's an awfully Rube-Goldberg way of destroying someone -- sometimes, killing someone's relatives and sending them desecrated body parts just makes them mad.
Or whenever it was later when Elethiomel/Zakalwe has a freakout reaction to a chair?
Overall, it just seemed peculiar to have spent the whole book reading along with E/Z as a possibly-damaged-by-war-but-generally-sympathetic-protagonist, and then find out at the end that psych! he murdered his foster-sister/first-love and sent her desecrated corpse to his foster brother as an act of political revenge. Which makes him an unusual personality in a way that I really didn't think was earned by the rest of the book.
(Focusing too much on the details of chair design is probably a mistake, but I'd think you'd need more than one human skeleton to make much of anything functional, unless you were cheating with additional non-bone structural members.)
In honor of Banks, Ikea should name their next chair design "Sister".
20: When Elethiomel/Zakalwe sends the chair. He isn't sending "someone" "body-parts". He's sending his foster-brother and former comrade the bones of Darckense (bones recognizable only to their immediate family) made into an object guaranteed to evoke a memory (a memory known only to E/Z, Zakalwe and Darckense) of the theft from the Zakalwes of their perfect childhood. He knows Zakalwe will react by breaking down; he knows that Zakalwe will have suppressed dissenters in his staff, so leaving them relatively leaderless after his breakdown. And it wasn't in any way revenge: it was a decapitation strike closely synchronized with a wider operation. And yes, it is Rube Goldberg, but E/Z's forces were materially inferior: he used what he had to hand.
And yes, it was a very small chair, and this was entirely functional: it mimicked a child-size chair the child Livueta made in carpentry class.
He knows Zakalwe will react by breaking down;
As a matter of human psychology, no he doesn't -- you can't predict how someone's going to react to something like that. I mean, I get that Banks was going for that, but that's part of where my 'Oh come ON' reaction comes from.
And it wasn't in any way revenge: it was a decapitation strike closely synchronized with a wider operation.
Again, I think you're describing Banks' intention, kind of. But that sort of 'decapitation strike' doesn't happen in the real world because it's nonsense -- someone doing elaborate craft projects with human body parts isn't an incredibly subtle political plotter, they're just mentally ill.
I mean, I'm crabbing about plausibility in a story with FTL and knife-missiles, sure. But if there's not some level of psychological plausibility, it gets really hard to stay engaged.
Banks has this problem a lot for me -- he likes his horror set-pieces (the Eaters, the chair, drowning in sewage), and he's not successful in maintaining my suspension of disbelief through them. I get thrown out of the book thinking "Really?"
27.2 gets it right. That chair thing did not work. First the reader is amused at how the guy is mysteriously freaking out about, of all things in the Culture universe, a chair, and then we get the back story of the chair and the reader shifts to thinking "so he was freaking out about a TINY chair?"
And not even the chair thing by itself -- the identity-switching thing? Like, was Banks going for "Don't you feel dumb for having found this guy sympathetic throughout? He wasn't just a mercenary, he MURDERED his FOSTER-SISTER and made a CHAIR out of her BONES to fuck with her BROTHER's head? Just sit with your complicity in his horribleness now, why don't you."
And I'm just not really seeing that. It's like reading a Harry Potter book and then on the last page is "Also, the reason why the Durselys kept Harry locked in a closet is because he was torturing all the neighbors' pets to death. Where's your sympathetic hero now, smart guy?"
2nd 27.2.
26.1: He doesn't know for certain, but he can make reasonable inferences. He's known Zakalwe literally his entire life, and has seen his reaction to, at minimum, the near-death of Darckense.
26.2: The chair is an exaggeration of things that absolutely do happen in real life. The Vietcong sometimes flayed Americans they captured because they knew the Americans would retaliate against locals, thus alienating them from the government; Sunzi cite approvingly a besieged general who sent his opponent pots of urine, knowing the insult would provoke him into a failed assault.
29.2: I'm glad somebody reads my fan fiction.
I might have to reread Harry Potter with the assumption that Hogwarts is a closed psych ward.
Speaking of the handling of relationships in the Culture novels, I found the Diziet Sma Skaffen-Amtiskaw relationship one of the more interesting ones. They act like a long term, somewhat quarrelsome couple, which is interesting since they presumably could have gotten new partners any time they wanted.
The chair is an exaggeration of things that absolutely do happen in real life. The Vietcong sometimes flayed Americans they captured because they knew the Americans would retaliate against locals,
Sure, committing atrocities to incite retaliation is a thing. But committing specific atrocities to have an individually calculated effect on a particular leader of the other army -- a decapitation strike? That's not an exaggeration, that's a fantasy. Atrocities like that are committed out of sadism, not because they can be made into any kind of reliable weapon.
29: I don't think that's what he's going for. In part the the double-helix structure is just his conceit, and an end in itself (and it's really masterfully crafted, when you notice all the details). The original draft was much longer, and had the reveal in the middle, not the end. It would be interesting to read that version. The last chapter, STATES OF WAR, is subtitled "Prologue", suggesting it's actually the start of a whole other novel.
Practically, it would be much harder to keep the reader along for the ride with the fun-loving space hippies if we know all along that he's a monster.
Aesthetically, I read the chapters in order of internal chronology this time, and the dramatic effect is greatly reduced. Its my third reading, so not a clean comparison, but it indicates the cleverness does produce effects.
34: The entire thing is a fantasy, as you noted yourself. Atrocities aren't reliable weapons, they're probabilistic weapons; and this is a difference of degree, not kind. Some bullets will always be duds: quality control will reduce the failures but not eliminate them. Similarly greater or lesser knowledge of one's opponent will make atrocities more or less likely to succeed.
36: Sure, but the plausible level of reliability is important to what you're supposed to think about the character. In the world we live in, someone who came up with that idea wouldn't be a ruthlessly effective military leader, willing to use any tool, no matter how horrifying, to win, he'd be Warren Zevon's excitable boy. That level of mental illness isn't really compatible with E/Z's described level of competence elsewhere, and it kind of breaks the book for me.
Thinking up horrors and committing them are very different things, witness Banks himself, an apparently well-adjusted and competent individual. And E/Z doesn't do the butchering himself:
the boy who'd played in the garden who, in the depths of one terrible night, had caused the thing to be done which led to him being called the Chairmaker
"You can't conceive horrible atrocities and still be an effective military commander because you would be too insane to command" is a theory that isn't really borne out by recent history. Also, as 38 says, Banks conceived of it and he wasn't insane.
17: "At least in the early books, I find the way that Banks deals with gender and sexuality to be really rapey and unintentionally homophobic" - could you maybe expand on this a bit?
Thinking up horrors and committing them are pretty distinct -- I'd let Stephen King babysit for kids. Ordering horrors to be committed, even if you don't get your own hands physically dirty, is pretty close to committing them yourself. And remember, this isn't a faceless dehumanized person for E/Z, it's the 'sister' he was brought up with, and who was his first lover. I'm sticking with there being no way to make the character work -- he has to be well outside the boundaries of normal human behavior for the initial atrocity, and he's not presented that way at all in the rest of the book.
Slightly different topic, griping about Banks' presentation of sexual violence.
The setpiece where E/Z is escaping from some unfortunate military situation (I've forgotten the details), and he's got a prisoner -- a woman who he has tied to a (yes, again) chair. The whole bit is kind of mocking her for thinking he's likely to hurt, and possibly rape her -- we're in his head, we know he has no such intention, her fears are unwarranted and written as a little silly and self-important. What was Banks trying to do there? Obviously, if you empathize with her at all, her fears are perfectly reasonable. I found myself again thrown out of the book and staring at it with my head cocked on one side, trying to figure out what Banks meant to be doing.
42 to 39: There's a sliding scale of what's a horrible atrocity, and ordering your childhood friend/sister/first-lover to be killed and made into a chair is pretty far toward the bizarrely unusual end of it. And there's also a sliding scale of what it means to do something rather than just think it up, and actually bringing it about is pretty close to doing it with your own hands.
"You can't conceive horrible atrocities and still be an effective military commander because you would be too insane to command" is a theory that isn't really borne out by recent history Genghis Khan, 800 years ago.
Again, we're not talking about slaughtering thousands, we're talking about making his childhood friend/so on into a chair. And when I said 'described level of competence', I should have said 'and personality generally'. The transition between 'murders his [whatever you want to call her] and makes furniture out of her' and 'has a warmly sensitive relationship with a poetess he picks up gracefully and consensually in a bar' is something that's a little harder to justify by pointing to Genghis Khan, right? There's a real weird psychological disconnect there.
44 last: that's true in terms of culpability, but not true at all in terms of individual psychology. It's easily possible that E/Z was psychologically too repulsed to do the deed himself, and the guilt of it consumes his entire life. He condemns himself to possibly eternal Culture service to expiate the guilt.
4&: I now give up. Maybe my sense of what a plausible human character is, is overly circumscribed. My willing suspension of disbelieve snapped completely at the reveal, but could be it's just me, and that kind of thing is compatible with someone who goes on for the rest of his life to be reasonable and not prone to murdering loved ones and desecrating their corpses.
46: To be fair, we don't know for sure that Genghis Khan never gracefully picked up a poetess in a bar.
48: He didn't do it on fucking whim. He did it because it was the only stratagem available.
We've all been backed into that corner.
The *best* stratagem available.
the only stratagem available.
If that makes sense to you, it makes sense to you. Made no sense at all to me, but maybe I'm underrating the plausibility of the scenario.
I mean, possibly what's going on here for you is something like the 'even in hard SF where you expect discussion of the science underlying things, spot the author a couple of freebies like FTL'. That is, you're treating this as 'For the sake of argument, take it as given that the whole murdering-loved-one-and-desecrating-her-corpse-to-break-her-brother's-mind thing was cold-bloodedly rational rather than reflecting bizarre sadism -- even if it's implausible, you need it to make the book work'? I certainly do that sort of thing for other implausibilities, this one just broke the book for me.
I'm one of the few here who was blown away by the ending, which I think I saw coming a few pages before the reveal. But I read the book in one sitting, and was more enraptured by it than most.
I think some people are more than willing to do reprehensible, horrific things to close love ones strategically. While this significantly differs in kind and degree, think of how Jared Kushner's father tried to wreck his sister's marriage to prevent his brother-in-law from testifying against him.
And of course, people who do reprehensible things to bodies can be charming and appear caring. Picking up someone in a bar isn't a good counterexample, since so many serial killers were so skilled at that. Not really the same as the (oooh ooh) excitable boy.
So, enh, it made sense to me. I forget to what degree his guilt over it was expressed in the book, but I could see a character who's both broken by it (and thus becomes a lost mercenary) or who just never truly cared in the first place.
If it was cold-bloodedly rational rather than sadistic, why not use some other corpse and make him THINK it was his sister? This would also be easier.
Maybe when somebody says "She has good bone structure," they mean for use in furniture?
53: No, I'm not spotting it as an acceptable implausibility. I think it is plausible both strategically and in terms of E/Z's character. If you can only explain his actions as sadism, I think that indicates the narrowness of your imagination.
56: The sister's bones were uniquely recognizable due to childhood injuries. Using the real bones was significantly more likely to work, and to work very quickly, at the time E/Z chose.
When my dad got a hip replacement, the surgeon complimented him by telling him he had bones like a baby elephant. Surgeons are weird people.
Why did he go to a veterinary surgeon?
Putting the disagreement about the implausibility of the reveal to one side, did anyone else notice or have a reaction to the moment I brought up in 42?
I too was blown away by the ending (the reveal of the chair, more than the identity twist). Subsequent readings have only deepened my appreciation. Banks builds in a tremendous amount of detail and it all hangs together. For my money it's his masterpiece by a very wide margin, and a masterpiece by any standard.
This should probably go in the other thread but bring back the Golden Horde. There's been Muslims in Central Europe for +500 years now.
62:
1.The chapter (like the book) isn't about the prisoner, it's about Zakalwe. She is written as silly and self-important, but she's just a prop for Z's brooding.
2. She is a representative of a silly, self-important people; she recites some cod-fascist propaganda. When she breaks down it shows her to be in fact a scared kid abused by her society.
3. Inasmuch as there is a specific theme to that chapter, it's luck: Z's army is being wiped out, not by the enemy but by unprecedented rainfall; similarly, this random snivelling kid nearly killed the enemy commander and did leave him cut off from his command. This is explicit in the text.
Also seconding the love for Diziet Sma and the Mawhrin'-Skel.
She is written as silly and self-important, but she's just a prop for Z's brooding.
Right, that's what bothered me. She is a human being who has been taken prisoner by enemy forces in a war -- drawing her as silly and self-important because she's frightened of being raped or killed is, to put it mildly, super fucked up.
67: So, what? Banks is required to stop his very elegant psychological novel about a military professional (whose disregard for his prisoner's fears is drawn entirely plausibly) to give a sympathetic portrait of an extra we'll never see again?
68: Banks didn't have to write that scene. Or perhaps he could have had Z muse on what she can and can't know, and how it's reasonable for her to feel fear even if it's ultimately unfounded. That could inform Z's willingness to use any tactic, no matter how cruel.
68: Pre-emptively to clarify: the legitimate concerns of the weak can and must be sympathetically portrayed in fiction; but this cannot be done in all times and all places, nor should it be. There are other things in the world.
69: Yes, he could have, but he didn't have to. Describing the scene as written as "super fucked up" is ludicrous.
the legitimate concerns of the weak can and must be sympathetically portrayed in fiction
This seems like odd and troubling phrasing (in that, as described, the fears of the women aren't based on or indicative of being weak even if other parts of the scene do represent her as such).
[I have not read the book so I'm just going off the descriptions in this thread.]
72: She is a bound prisoner in a war zone. She is weak in that particular situation, and her (legitimate) fears arise from it.
Last thing I'll say on this subthread: if the claim is, "this scene doesn't meet 2018 standards for wokeness", fine, comity. The book is 28 years old, of course it doesn't.
What strikes me as fucked up isn't that E/Z is unsympathetic to her worries, but that the authorial voice is also unsympathetically dismissive. She's a minor comic aside, scared for no good reason -- we know she's safe because we're in E/Z's head and he wouldn't hurt her. Setting up a character whose reasonable fears of rape and murder are poked fun at seems like a strange thing for Banks to have done, doesn't it?
72: She is a bound prisoner in a war zone. She is weak in that particular situation, and her (legitimate) fears arise from it.
Got it. You're using "weak" to refer to "in a bad situation" not as a character trait (like "silly and self-important").
We should lobby whatever runs the English language for two forms of "to be", like ser and estar in Spanish.
Ebonics BEEN having that covered, Eggplant.
75: Ok, really for the last time.
The chapter is all Z's POV: the authorial voice is his voice. He mostly doesn't notice the prisoner at all, being trapped in his own thoughts. He is contemptuous of her for her contemptible politics; and for being an amateur. All this is perfectly consistent with Z's character:
He wished he had the strength and the inclination to go over and hit her, but he was too tired, and too conscious that he would be taking out on her the defeat of an entire army. Belting any one individual - let alone a helpless, cross-eyed woman - would be so pathetically petty a way of trying to find recompense for a downfall of that magnitude that even if he did live, he would be ashamed forever that he had done such a thing.He is a professional, and as such he doesn't abuse prisoners. She is the antithesis of professional.
Sometimes, heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination; the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn't win medals but wars.The prisoner is:
'Please don't. Oh please don't, oh please please don't,' she sobbed again, dryly. Then her back seemed to break, and her imploring face bowed almost to her knees as she drooped again.And then immediately to dehumanize Zakalwe as well:
'Do what?' He was mystified.*The length of that list is an indication btw of just how good this book is.
She didn't appear to hear him; she just hung there, her slack body jerked by her sobs.
It was at moments like this he stopped understanding people; he just had no comprehension of what was going on in their minds; they were denied, unfathomable.
He is a professional, and as such he doesn't abuse prisoners.
Right. This is definitely how the scene is written -- that her fear of him marks her as an unprofessional ninny. He has no reason to hurt her, he's professional, she's safe. Breaking down makes it clear that she's a fool and a coward.
But... (a) that's an odd thing to say about professional soldiers in general, isn't it? That is, someone who's a prisoner particularly under informal circumstances like this, would be at risk from a reasonably large percentage (across countries and eras) of professional soldiers, no? and (b) E/Z specifically murders prisoners and makes furniture out of them if he's got a reason to. That transition from this kind of scene, where you're supposed to read him as sanely professional and abiding by codes of civilized behavior, to the chair thing, is kind of what threw me.
He is a professional, and as such he doesn't abuse prisoners.
What? Does he need a memo?
37. I am disappointed that LB beat me to mentioning Excitable Boy. Meetings! Curse of keeping up with the thread.
This isn't Banks' only use of the bones of innocents; since you all read PoG, you will recall the band/orchestra whose instruments were all made from the bones of a single family who one seriously doubts volunteered for the honor.
"since you all read PoG, you will recall the band/orchestra whose instruments were all made from the bones of a single family who one seriously doubts volunteered for the honor."
Don't think you've got that quite right.
I never thought about it too closely, but LB is self-evidently right here about the chair, and has ruined the book for me. Mossy should be jailed as a precaution.
Mossy should be given a small army work with, or maybe a suitable role playing game. Mossy, how do you feel about Half-Life 2?
Watching my gf's nephews play GTA is also pretty satisfying-- I've considered getting the right kind of console to be able to play. Subnautica also looks really good.
LB should be given both of these as well of course, optionally a squad of litigator/researchers and perhaps an unambiguous large wrongdoer with indifferent discretion/competence for a target.
84. Distinctly possible. I didn't have a copy on hand to check.
I just checked, and I wasn't that far off. In fact, reading between the lines of the description of the "family" (what they call the group of instruments), it was made of human parts and at least some, maybe most of them were acquired in very medieval-torture-ish ways. ("There must be a lot of one-legged music critics," suggests Gurgeh.)
81.2: It's E/Z's image of himself, not necessarily of all soldiers.
81 last: professionalism means doing one's job well. A soldier's job, as E/Z sees it, is winning; under that definition, military professionalism can conflict with "codes of civilized behavior". And that definition is baked into E/Z's internal monologue throughout; this too makes the chairmaking entirely in character.
I never read Zakalwe as sympathetic or a good guy exactly. At minimum, he was into killing people and was stalking a woman who'd made it clear she didn't want to see him regardless of whatever romantic veneer was implied to his goal there. I figured out the twist before the ending, though I'm not sure how exactly. There was just obviously SOMETHING going on and the focus seemed off in the backstory in ways that got my antennae up. That both he and Gurgeh get narrative street cred by not raping women or trying to keep them from being raped by others is never going to be a particular moral positive for me, but mostly just in a way of reminding me I'm not the imagined reader.
IS ONE LOUSY COOKIE SO MUCH TO ASK FOR?
If you give a space-based AI-run culture a cookie....
93: I don't recall that book, but the art is instantly recognizable because of the pigeon.
I prefer the movie versions of those books.
A soldier's job, as E/Z sees it, is winning; under that definition, military professionalism can conflict with "codes of civilized behavior".
I remember reading Von Clausewitz in college and thinking that there's an interesting dilemma in that, from that perspective it doesn't make sense to put "ethical" limitation on warfare because using techniques like assassinations, terror, or chemical weapons could be a net gain in humanitarian terms if it can end a destructive war more quickly.
On the other hand empirically (1) there's the disadvantage of setting a precedent which can make future conflicts more destructive and (2) even if one isn't worried about precedent the errors of misjudging the situation aren't symmetrical -- escalating the level of violence and destructiveness and failing to end the war is far more costly than missing out on a (likely low-probability) chance of an earlier ending.
That said, I'm not prepared to say that the use of nuclear weapons (or incendiary weapons) in WWII was necessarily wrong. I understand the argument in favor and I don't think it's an easy debate.
But I would be concerned that constructing scenarios in which E/Z feels like he has confidence in the probabilities involved is not reflective of most historical situations.
96: I saw a live theater version of it.
I should add, if UoW is stacking the deck in favor of a certain sort of tactical genius that deck stacking is more common than not in science fiction. I'm not objecting necessarily, just responding to that comment from MC.
97: Interestingly, from CP:
The Idiran-Culture War Conduct Agreement was ratified in 1327.So the Culture appears not to have fixed laws of war.
[...]
It was made clear to the Culture that if the humans attacked Homomdan home planets, only then would the war become total
It's definitely a false note that Zakalwe is "mystified" at what his prisoner is terrified of. With his battlefield experience, he should be perfectly able to foresee what a female prisoner might fear. Feels like IMB wanting him to be, in this little way, virtuous but unaware that that is virtue.
Zakalwe is unaware it's virtue? I'm not sure I'm reading you right, not disagreeing.
Maybe that a possible reading is that he is so far from considering the possibility of hurting her in any way that he doesn't even understand what she's afraid of or why? That his confusion is a measure of his harmless intentions toward her?
103: That he sees sexual abuse as so far out of the question that the fear of it doesn't even register with him - and it should indeed be so, but I think IMB still sort of wants to give him a cookie for having that mindset.
104: Maybe, but given they're in a war and on opposing sides, that mindset would be him failing to mirror on a pretty fundamental level.
105: Yeah, this is pretty much my concern with the scene. It seems as if we're supposed to take his failure to empathize with her concerns as proof of the purity of his intentions, and her fear as proof of her self-importance (i.e., silly woman thought she was important enough for someone to want to hurt). To the extent that's Banks' intent, it's kind of disturbing.
I disagree. I think Mossy is right: Zakalwe isn't so virtuous that he can't even imagine rape, he's so self centred (sociopathic) that he can't imagine anyone having their own independent personality. He doesn't believe anyone can think or feel anything that he hasn't intended them to think or feel.
I mean, obviously he knows captives are at risk of rape. It's happened to him!
It depends on how the scene comes across, I suppose, and I was unsure. The treatment of the prisoner just read like comedy, not horror, to me.
I guess what's throwing me overall, maybe, is that the people E/Z interacts with don't seem to perceive him as a sociopathic monster? Diziet Sma seems to think he'd be an acceptable citizen of the Culture, whatsername the poet he's involved with treats him as able to relate to other humans on a roughly normal level -- it's hard not to take those reactions as authorial endorsements of him as functioning in a manner that's recognizably within normal parameters. And then you get a scene like this, and it's hard to figure if Banks is meaning here to signal that the people who are treating him as an emotionally normal person are desperately wrong, and he's a monster, or whether Banks doesn't think his reaction to the prisoner is monstrous.
Same with the chair, kind of -- is that supposed to be a signal that the people who interact with him can't spot monsters, or that the chairmaking wasn't a monstrous thing to do?
Monster, crazy, normal -- not really sure what words are appropriate here. But whatever line you'd draw between 'functioning in a way that would plausibly get you involuntarily committed, either as a criminal or for mental health treatment, in a present-day developed country' and not (while recognizing that being a military leader is distinguishable as different from that sort of personal dysfunction, even if it involves ordering some people to kill other people.)
107 sounds right to me and also sums up why I wouldn't have been sympathetic to him.
So, are we supposed to be reading him as an indictment of the Culture for using a monster/sociopath as a tool, or for being unable to identify him as such, or are we supposed to think that they've identified him for what he is but that intentionally using him isn't a problem? I brought up that scene because I really couldn't figure out what Banks was doing with it.
The Culture seems to outsource a lot of their pointy-end-of-the-stick dirty work to non-Culture types, some of them pretty sociopathic. The Culture types in SC are also selected for being somewhat non-Culturish as well. (I think Banks says that somewhere in the "Notes" and intimates it in several of the books.) So, just as an example, the fact that Diziet Sma manages to get along with Zalakwe may not be how a more normal Culture citizen would react to him. The Poet? Who knows? Poets is poets, after all. Also, he's a sociopath, but he can perform being normal, a skill many sociopaths are said to have, especially in fiction.
That being said, I agree that the segment where he has the prisoner, and is mostly just irritated by her because she obviously doesn't get it, indicates a remarkable lack of empathy on his part. Yes, she tried to kill him, but a commander of his exalted skills should understand people well enough to see why she is so scared.
Banks indicts the Culture for many sins, and employing Zakalwe is par for the course. They have identified him, and intentionally using him is a problem, but they (SC humans and Minds) don't terribly care: a utilitarian calculus at odds with normal Culture mores. Remember how they assigned him to lead a war but didn't tell him he was supposed to lose? That's pretty nasty.
Honestly, I usually pick a lane and stick with it until it exits the road or I do.
Wrong thread. I knew tabbed browsing would cause nothing but problems.
I guess there's some turtly parallelism - he has (purportedly) a mastery of the use of weapons, and it is that mastery that the Culture uses, also as a weapon, manipulating him based on his own miscellaneous desires.