I guess the fold isn't a thing any more.
Philosophically, the Culture accepts, generally, that questions such as 'What is the meaning of life?' are themselves meaningless. The question implies - indeed an answer to it would demand - a moral framework beyond the only moral framework we can comprehend without resorting to superstition [...]
Yes, exactly. I suspect Douglas Adams would also have agreed.
One thing I like about science fiction is that it is rarely explicitly allegorical. Story elements are inspired by the real world, but they can be mashed up in new ways.
Yes, all of these have been great. I'm going to not read any books until I've first ruled-out the idea that somebody here might read it for me.
Passages throughout the series suggest that the Idiran War was the Culture's great crisis of conscience (which makes the WWII parallels of that war especially interesting).
This is backed up, I think, by the tone of we-were-right sanctimony in which they memorialize the Idiran War in Look to Windward.
Does that make the Chelgrians the Japanese, and the Culture's massive destruction of them Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
I don't think the Chelgrian civil war was related to the Idiran War. Timelines don't match; LTW is set six hundred years after the Idiran War, and the Chelgrian civil war is still in living memory.
6: Thanks.
Ajay is right on the timelines. The Chelgrians aren't destroyed by the Culture, they destroy themselves, partly in consequence of a misjudged Contact intervention. AFAICR the Chelgrian War most resembles the Rwandan genocide; the intervention component does't really resemble anything I know of. Maybe the Shah and the Iranian revolution, but that's a very long stretch.
It could be Burma, given the amount of pressure we put on the generals to put Aung San Suu Kyi in charge.
Banks's rejection of metaphysics possibly also is mirrored in Look to Windward in that the plot is driven by the demands of the Ascended Chelgrians for revenge; the same more straightforwardly in Surface Detail in opposition to the Hells.
I'm okay seeing parallels to WWII because it looms so large for ooks and oosians alike, but I suspect it's a wild goose chase looking for parallels elsewhere.
Great article. I agree with Walt; Banks is free enough with picking bits and pieces of historical events that his works are of limited allegorical potential.
10 & 11. Ah, well, I've got to learn to read more slowly, I guess.
No doubt 14 and 15 are basically right, but OTOH these are definitely political books. In Excession we're told that there was a faction that wanted to destroy the Affront immediately after the Idiran War; similarly there were a few westerners who wanted to destroy the USSR immediately after WWII (and indeed WWI), and many more who wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1991. Look to Windward* was written shortly after the Rwandan and Yugoslav genocides, Excession around the same time as the British interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo. I seriously doubt those are mere coincidences.
*Dedicated, wiki reminds me, to "the Gulf War veterans".
All of them or just the not-Saddam side?
Is the book dedicated to Iraqi soldiers as well?
It was more of a joke than a serious question, but now it just seems pointless.
Oh. No idea, I don't have a copy.
It can be heavily political and referential without being a mappable allegory.
In summary, we make our own meanings, whether we like it or not.
This is how I think about things generally and in some ways a good summation of the reading group. Thanks for writing all of these!
A twitter account for Culture ship names.
Let me be the first to say thanks to all who wrote these. Sincerely, not like when I usually say "thanks."
26: That's a good follow. When I first signed up on Steam, I realized that the character count limit was very long, so I've been using a Ship name there for the last decade. Very Little Gravitas Indeed, to be specific.
|| This true story is somewhere between a Coen brothers movie and The Onion. Just a bit on the nose.|>
Please look in the "Medicine" thread.
Ah, I should have known. I usually don't bother checking threads that have scrolled off the front page.
It's really an irresistible story, unless you like having any respect for humanity.
These pieces happened to click today. Zakalwe's last war, the Empire/Hegemonarchy conflict on Murssay, is yet another Banks fractal, a scaled-up version of the Ogaden War in 1977-78:
A major rebellion staged by the WSLF in January 1977 coincided with a renewed crisis in Ethiopia, where in February Colonel Mengistu seized power. Simultaneously, the ongoing conflict in the Ethiopian province of Eritrea was becoming critical. The 3,000- 4,000-strong WSLF rapidly routed the isolated Ethiopian forces, who fell back to a line near the strategically important Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway. Despite this the WSLF succeeded in cutting the line (July 1977), whereupon Somalia moved to consolidate these gains, its forces openly entering Ogaden.A futile war between two equally reprehensible states, backward in everything but foreign weaponry, one (a disintegrating autocracy with an established church) retreating toward its capital in the mountains. Earth becomes Murssay, Somalia the Empire, Ethiopia the Hegemonarchy; small proxy states become large ones, the superpowers become interplanetary; the Soviet switch to Ethiopia becomes the Culture's abandonment of the Hegemonarchy (imprecise parallel) . The Culture is present for both in the person of Sma, who goes from passive observer on Earth (in The State of the Art) to covert influencer on Murssay. I doubt seriously this is coincidence, considering we have the same Contact agent, in books published a year apart; in TSotA Sma's tour on Earth brackets the war almost perfectly, Nov 1976 - Jan 1978; Somalia isn't mentioned, but the Horn of Africa is.
Somalia was able to mount its invasion with the benefit of military aid provided by its ally, the Soviet Union. There were 1,000 Soviet advisers in Somalia and 2,400 Somalis had trained in the Soviet Union. However, the Soviet Union was also now supplying the new, left-oriented Ethiopian government of Mengistu [which had replaced the US-aligned Selassie]. In November Somali anger at this dual Soviet role led to the abrogation of its treaty with the Soviet Union, the expulsion of Soviet advisers and the termination of Soviet use of the important naval base at Berbera. Soviet aid now flowed into Ethiopia along with 11,000-16,000 Cuban soldiers and 1,500 Soviet advisers. With the help of this backing the Ethiopians proceeded to push back the Somalis, and in the climactic battle of Diredawa-Jigiga (2-5 March 1978) the Somali forces were defeated.
Lanyares Sodel, who was off fighting with the Eritreans. [...] Anyway, Lanyares told the ship he wanted to take part in some real fighting. The ship tried to talk him out of it, but failed, so sent him down to Ethiopia.
32: I remember the story from before, but I forgot he really does say "I've been preparing my whole life for something like this."