Thursday, April 4, 2013

Death and Gravity

One of the finest voices in fiction, Iain M. Banks is dying. I just saw this yesterday evening and was deeply upset. Introduced to me by my friend, the Theoretical Computer Scientist, his is the voice that provided me with blisteringly good and thoughtful stories in and about the Culture, the far-future mongrel civilization he invented to tell stories about how perfect and how gruesome humanity can be.

Condemned by a terminal and widespread cancer discovered just a short while ago, his probable farewell is a remarkably stoic and composed affair.

I've had a blog-entry lying around in drafts on this blog for years, trying to explain what Banks does, but somehow I felt that my writing fell short of distinguishing it from hordes of mediocre sci-fi pulp. Partly it's because he is just a damned fine writer.

The basic idea is: Imagine you are part of a civilization that plain and simply made it. Your technological level is such that there is no lack of anything, that everybody can fulfill whatever destiny they please.You are part of a culture, consisting of a number of friendly biological species picked up over the eons, whose benevolent influence dominates the galaxy.

You have created AI's, the Minds, so intelligent that they have been been delegated the responsibility of running the whole damn complicated operation. These eccentric, but benign Minds are your caretakers while you and your fellow Culture-citizens wallow in pleasures akin to demi-gods in a true Utopia.

This is the world that novelist Banks describes in his novels revolving around the Culture. Sounds boring? I thought so, until I realised that the stories Banks tell are about how the Culture behaves when it bumps into neighbours not like itself. Mostly these are stories of how the Culture tries to subtly influence other less advanced cultures (with not entirely planned effects), or how such less advanced cultures view the benevolent-to-the-point-of-nausea Culture.

And then the stories are also about the quirkiness of the true demi-gods of the stories, the Minds, with names subtly pointing to their roles in the stories - such as I Thought He Was With You; Ultimate Ship The Second; So Much For Subtlety; Very Little Gravitas Indeed; A Series Of Unlikely Explanations; Funny, It Worked Last Time, etc.

His voice will be sorely missed.

No music this time. Silence befits the dying light.