aesmael

So. So is a sound I make when about to speak. Think of it as a cough, a clearing of the throat.

So. Being disconnected as I have been the past few days and not in any mood for writing I have burned through the ~700 pages of Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games. I have seen it said more than once that Consider Phlebas is his worst (it was his first published work of science fiction), that it has no plot, and reading the Culture novels should be started with The Player of Games (even Borders does this, highlighting the latter as a cult classic in the stores I have visited). It still made me tear up at the end and does now too, just glancing at the appendix. I think that is good enough.

I do think The Player of Games is much more strongly written, despite being published only a year after, so I wonder if Consider Phlebas was perhaps written much earlier and only published after he achieved success as a non-genre writer? That is something like what happened with Steven Erikson; the first, weakest novel being written many years before publication.

Well (another throat-clearing sound). I say The Player of Games is more strongly written but it did not produce the same degree of emotional response in me. Both from their intensity were exhausting to finish. I think – I hope – I have learned a little by way of technique from reading it.

There were parts I read as rather definite condemnations of the barbaric, repressed natue of our society, as well as of capitalism (the Culture is an atheistic socialist utopia and rather exemplifies what I mean when I say 'people should be free'). Some might be interested to know there is a fair amount of sex-changing in the novel (mostly off-screen). At one point it is explicitly linked to the changing of hairstyles and embarking on cruises to illustrate the degree of 'just something people do' it is regarded with. Despite this the actual perspective of the novel is mostly conventional (heterosexual male, albeit a non-white one, which matters). Conventional is not a bad thing and attention is drawn to the fact this character isan oddity in this society.

From beginning, as often happens (as happened, for example, with Gardens of the Moon), the story feels intensely familiar, as if I have read it before. Banks, if I am not being hasty by drawing conclusions from a sample of two, seems to have a habit of writing (not drawing out) climactic sequences which cover just as many pages as the build up to same, followed by a very brief and hollowing denoument over just a few pages. I am wondering if he would see a story in which characters are not shaken out of their ability to live their old lives worth writing.

At some point, around the just-after middle, there is a change. Afterward the perspective feels distanced, as if we have been locked out of Gurgeh's head. Later this fades somewhat. Most apt, I think. Although...

It seemed almost-clear, at the time. Things fade out of trance.