Simone Caroti

An excellent overview of Iain (M.) Banks's Culture fiction, with detailed commentary on each book. (There's also a bit of material about some of Banks's "mainstream" fiction and non-Culture SF, but it's really all about the Culture.)

Warning: The book is, essentially, nothing but spoilers about the books; if you haven't already read them, you'll find discussion of subtle events that turn out to be Very Important, as well as extensive plot summaries.

Even though I've read the Culture books (and everything else except _The Quarry_ (which I'm saving?), some multiple times, I learned a few things I hadn't picked up on myself, both from Caroti's commentary and insights he includes from Banks, Ken Macleod, various interviews, and other academic reviews. [Note that an important takeaway may be that academic critics are bad at reading or understanding science fiction, as nearly every example he discusses includes wild misunderstandings or misconstruings, possibly deliberate. One of Caroti's concerns seems to be that the Culture books are misunderstood by these accredited academic critics, but, honestly, I've never heard of any of them (unlike the genre-savvy critics who publish in SF community venues), and based on their apparent insistence on reinterpreting the stories to make them fit into their own schemas and flat-out ignoring the words on the page, I can't say I'm likely to waste time with them or the journals they publish in.]

If you're a fan of Banks's Culture, or maybe even if you're not, for some reason, Caroti's book is worth a read. It might have been interesting for him to write about some of the more recent and contemporary SF-nal utopias and modern "space opera" fiction (especially what I like to call "SJW space opera"), but you can't have everything. He does mention Ken Macleod, Elizabeth Bear, and Kim Stanley Robinson in passing; I'd add Becky Chambers, Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, and Tim Pratt to that list. Charlie Stross, Walter Jon Williams, and Suzanne Palmer hew more closely to the dystopian space opera model, but are also good reads; Stan Robinson has long tended towards a pessimistic view of humanity's future prospects in space (e.g., the Mars trilogy), and his _Aurora_ essentially condemns humans to Earth (and, at best, maybe some mining operations and unsustainable attempts at lunar or Martian colonies).

Sadly, while I love the idea of the Culture, my own pessimism has grown over the years, as, in fact, did Banks's. There could be a Culture somewhere, but it's unlikely that we Earth humans would (or could) ever be part of such a civilization, not least because it seems likely that we'll kill ourselves off well before people stop being horrible to each other. (I grew in the Reagan years, when it seemed like nuclear war was always a possibility; now, not only is that threat back, with less stable actors than the US and USSR, but we've managed to set the planet on a course for ecological disaster, and apparently have no interest in doing anything to slow the approach of that catastrophe.

Luckily we have science fiction to help us imagine a better world while we wait to burn, drown, starve, or die from heat exhaustion!… (altro)

The movie Wall-E recently brought the concept of a generation starship to a large popular audience. Like most ideas we see in the movies, science fiction literature has been throwing that concept around for a lot of years. In the September 1934 issue of Wonder Stories appeared Laurence Manning's "The Living Galaxy", the "first fully fledged generation starship narrative". From this starting point, Simone Caroti takes us on a tour of what science fiction has had to say on the subject of generation starships.

The book covers a lot of territory. Caroti does not have the laser focus that the title suggests, but instead, in true "in order to tell you this, I need to make sure you are aware of this" fashion, he digresses into other aspects of the history of science fiction, like editors, the magazines they edited, the popular authors of the period, and a bit about the world's political situation. Each section of the book covers a period of history, and each section is introduced with a description of that period apart from the concept at hand.

1. Fathers
2. The Gernsback Era, 1926-1940
3. The Campbell Era, 1937-1949
4. The Birth of the Space Age, 1946-1957
5. The New Wave and Beyond, 1957-1979
6. The Information Age, 1980-2001

After that introductory material, Caroti discusses stories in great detail, comparing and contrasting the growing scientific knowledge and changing attitudes of the stories with those that came before.

Overall, a very good book for those interested in the history of science fiction and the development of concepts in the genre.… (altro)

"Banks loved metafictional negotiations, complex plots, and deconstructionist approaches, but he also loved story; he tied every subplot, told the tale of every character, and made sure to repay out good faith in him in kind.”

In “The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks - A Critical Introduction” by Simone Caroti

As a wildly innovative, imaginative, popular and subversive novelist, his works are infused with darker elements that give them a forbidden, cultish, underground status, but the fictions that are perceived as being in his more conventional and less evidently speculative mode fail to. It's entirely possible that readers expect SF to be simpler and less demanding based on their previous experience of reading SF, rather than on mere prejudice. After all, you don't have to eat all that much crap before you become unable or unwilling to distinguish it from fudge brownies.

Well I've done a systems check this morning and it appears that, yes, the anal probe has caused some slight damage to the self-censorship circuit boards, which may also have caused the nuance software to be over-ridden. This meant that the remains of the message was diverted to the spamsac. I include it here under the Full Disclosure subroutine:

"Of course, this logic doesn't just apply to SF. If, for example, someone gave me “Amsterdam”, “Freedom” and "My Brilliant Friend” to read, telling me that it was the best of contemporary fiction, then I would legitimately be led to expect that there was no such thing as a fudge brownie, and that the main requirement for reading contemporary fiction would be to install the Brainfuck 2.0 virus whilst sticking hot knitting needles in one’s ocular sensors." (although in italics, they're my own words)

If Iain (M) Banks hadn't written non-genre fiction, lit critics wouldn't have given him the time of day. A damn shame, because, as he said "My best writing is my Skiffy stuff". Good and bad literature can be found in any form, since Sturgeon's Law applies. Some of the best written, most thought provoking things I have read are SF; some of the worst drivel, non-genre. Banks revealed in one of his last interviews that his SF never sold as well as the ‘literary’ novels. Which surprised me at least. The Culture was his true love. It's a damn shame. Most of his best writing about ethics, morality and the consequences of technological change - plus a lot of very funny observational stuff - are in the Culture novels. Mind you, “The Quarry” was a masterpiece of non-genre fiction.

The sheer dullness of the biases in favour of mundane fiction, which is usually about middle class people having divorces and is thus correspondingly dull. If some people would shaved their heads, stuck electrodes all over them, put them in perspex capsules and given them orders via an octopus in a crash helmet they'd have approached the experiment in a much more SF frame of mind. And I do read mundane fiction. Sometimes all that divorcing is livened up with a bit of satire.

Caroti’s take on the Banks’ works comes from a fan, and that’s the best kind of literary criticism to read. I’ve read the culture novels several times and I’ve also written several posts about those journeys. And I was still was able to find something worth reading.

My takes on some of the Culture Books:

1. Use of Weapons
So much going on in this one. With Sma, we see the Culture in all its high-minded liberal splendour. Then through Zakalwe we see the gritty, grubby reality of what the Culture's interventionist ideals really demand. Add to that one of the more charismatic drones, a dual narrative and one of the most gut-wrenching twists I've ever experienced and you've got yourself a Big Book.

2. Consider Phlebas
A close contender for number one. The scope and scale of this story and its locations are simply incredible, and Horza is a protagonist (?) who really gets under your skin. Many of his objections to the Culture are not unfounded and reflect the tendency of the progressive left to almost become a monoculture in its quest for diversity and inclusiveness. What I remember most of all from this one though, is Banks' shocking brutality (the train crash, most of all) and the miserable futility of it all, capped by Balveda's section of the epilogue.

3. Inversions
One of my favourites, though I gather not so popular with many fans of the series. I think it just chimes with my interest in interventionism, combining it with more show-don't-tell (another weakness of mine) than we're used to from the Culture books. I found both Vossil and DeWar to be very relatable, even though they're so different, and I enjoyed trying to piece together the snatches we're given of their past relationship. The two nations are presented in an interesting manner - with the royalists and their charismatic king facing up against a republican nation who are perhaps more meritocratic, but also clearly more authoritarian. Once again, Banks treats us to a shocking climax, this time one that underlines the price of winning power.

4. The Player of Games
In which we are treated to Gergeh, something of a black sheep in a culture that's supposed to have none, being manipulated into subversively diverting the course of a less enlightened species. Though it doesn't have the big, smack-me-in-the-face moments of Use of Weapons and Consider Phlebas, this is probably the most tightly-written and pleasing book in the series.

5. Matter
Once again, one that I enjoyed a lot but many fans didn't. It's basically a more refined version of Use of Weapons, but with themes of family and coming of age taking centre stage. I also enjoyed the exploration of galactic politics as they are at this stage of the series, where the Culture is no longer the biggest dog in the fight.

6. Excession
A big favourite of many readers, and was amongst mine for a long time. Then I re-read it and realised that although the antics of the Minds and ships and the Affront are all great fun, the humans involved rather let the side down. It seemed implausible that Byr and Dajeil would want anything more to do with one another.

7. The Hydrogen Sonata
Great humans, great locations, great ships, great drones, and a fitting send off for the series, dealing as it does with events dating back to the birth of the Culture and the sublimation of a major galactic player. However, I didn't feel it was quite firing on all cylinders. The book's central McGuffin didn't seem big enough to justify all the fuss made over it. Most of all, I felt the process of subliming lost something in being translated from the abstract to the specific.

8. Look to Windward
I never thought this one was more than okay. I remember reviewers at the time speculating that Banks may have run out of steam and that this book, with its throwback to the Idiran War, might represent a bookend for the series. Although Quilan and Masaq Hub's are very moving, and we're treated to another example of what happens when the Culture's arrogance gets people killed, the rest of the goings on on Masaq just felt a bit tacked-on.

9. Surface Detail
This one just seemed a bit too 'cookie cutter' to me - a revenge fantasy protagonist goes after perhaps the most clichéd of Banks' villains. The best bit of the book are the Hells and the politics and conflict surrounding them. It's thought-provoking stuff, as you can sort of imagine a time when we might be able to digitise consciousness and there are probably already people on Earth who would advocate the use of virtual Hells. The Quietudinal Service was an interesting idea, but it seems unlikely we wouldn't have heard of them before now. It felt like Banks was kicking ideas around.

10. The State of the Art
One for the completists, really. The main draw here is the titular story, which is okay but only really serves to shock the reader that Earth is not, as we'd probably assumed, the birthplace of the species that eventually became the Culture. We get to see a little more of Sma and Skaffen Amtiskaw, but we don't really learn anything new about them.

NB: As you can see, I’m not exactly fanboying here. But I still think Banks fiction was one of the best things that happened to SF. If you do read genre fiction, or watch opera and ballet (typical plot: boy meets girl, girl meets wizard, wizard turns girl into waterfowl) or even read the classics - in short regularly take your brain outside of literary realism, which may as well be bloody soap operas, you’re going to have a whole extra bunch of mental levers available to get the most out of “other art”. Plus it’s not bloody soap operas.

SF = Speculative Fiction.… (altro)

It is a poor review that criticizes a book for doing something other than what it sets out to do, rather than discussing the book on its own merits. However, I would really have liked to have seen the works discussed in this book placed into a larger context. The author has set out to analyze a truly narrow subset of science fiction works, and that's generally fine, as works focusing on life aboard generation starships certainly do share many common traits and tropes, but they also share a number of characteristics with other science fiction works that focus on life and societies in both space stations as well as those works looking at human colonies on other worlds, among many other sub-genres. This book sets out to provide a literary criticism of representative works of science fiction written from 1934-2001 detailing life aboard generation starships, and it certainly achieves that objective. In some ways, the book also functions as a kind of literary history of science fiction literature as a genre, adding to its appeal.

Caroti originally wrote this work as his doctoral dissertation (which is available electronically in the ProQuest dissertations and theses database). The book is organized around an introduction, which provides a brief overview of the genre, and six substantive chapters, plus a short conclusion. The first chapter briefly examines the influences of three men who might be termed "godfathers" of generation starship fiction: the scientists Robert Goddard, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and J. D. Bernal. While there potted biographies are interesting in their own right, at times I would actually like to seen these men connected a little more closely with the concept of the generation starship. The remaining chapters take a chronological approach, examining roughly a decade or two worth of relevant fiction per chapter it also lives a chronological bibliography of, essentially, all the major short stories and novels concerning generation starships.

The second chapter covers the 1920s and 30s, initially focusing on editor Hugo Gernsback, who, for better or for worse, more or less created science fiction as a coherent genre. Gernsback's vision of what "proper" science fiction stories would be influenced the genre for decades. Literature-wise, Caroti focuses on two short stories: Laurence Manning’s "The Living Galaxy" (1934) and John Wilcox is "The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years" (1940).

The third chapter covers the late 1930s and 1940s, characterizing this as the “Campbell Era,” after renowned editor John W. Campbell, who is largely credited with popularizing science fiction as a genre, emphasizing "hard" science fiction. Literature-wise, Caroti primarily discusses two linked generation ship short stories by Robert Heinlein: "Universe" and "Common Sense."

The fourth chapter covers the "birth of the space age," which Caroti describes as the second half of the 1940s and most of the 1950s. This is a short chapter and, to be honest, doesn't really say much about new generation starship fiction, mainly adding to the discussion about Heinlein and a few other authors.

The fifth chapter covers the “New Wave and Beyond,” 1957-79, seemingly a long, disparate period of time to squeeze into a single chapter. The generation starship stories discussed in detail include John Brunner’s “Lungfish,” Chad Oliver’s “The Wind Blows Free,” J. G. Ballard’s “Thirteen to Centaurus,” and Brian Aldiss’ Non-Stop (published in the U.S. as Starship).

Caroti’s final chapter covers the Information Age from 1980 to 2001, emphasizing Frank M. Robinson’s The Dark Beyond the Stars, Bruce Sterling’s Taklamakan, and Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun.

While I had read, or was otherwise familiar with, some of the stories and novels discussed in this book, there were still many I hadn’t read. That wasn't a problem though, as Caroti describes each of the works that he discussed in detail well enough that a reader's lack of familiarity with the work in question isn't a problem, as long as one doesn't mind being spoilered.

I give this book 3.5 stars out of five. At times I would've liked to seen Caroti place generation starship fiction into a broader context, and at other times, the text was a bit dry and I wanted to see him talk more specifically about individual works and do a deeper analysis of them. The book does exactly what it says it will, and no more. I’d also have liked to see Caroti include one final chapter that discusses the generation ship literature of the last decade – as he says in his brief conclusion, the first decade of the twenty-first century has produced a large number of new, relevant works. So why not tell us about those? I would recommend it for those interested in serious, literary criticism of science fiction works, as well as those science fiction fans who find themselves fascinated by the concept of a generation starship. If you just happen to be a science fiction fan who's looking for some fun, interesting commentary on one type of science fiction, I'd probably recommend a different work, as this will tends toward the academic and lit crit side of things.

Review copyright 2011 J. Andrew Byers… (altro)