Against A Dark Background: Iain M. Banks

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After they are taken captive Sharrow and Feril cause the Lazy Gun to begin firing uncontrollably and the Seahouse is destroyed, with Feril still inside it. That stated, this is a hard novel to really get into and in fact, I can see why some may dnf it as I was tempted to do about 100 pages in. Solipsism is the view that only I exist (or you, and then I and this review are part of your imagination). Sharrow stops using her brain and just opens up the vault to the Lazy Gun, despite this obviously playing right into the hands of her enemies. She knelt on the seat of the cable car with her nose pressed against the glass, looking down at the quiet grey buildings and the broad, steep boulevards and the small parks passing beneath.

Aside from the Lazy Gun, Sharrow always carries her HandCannon with a round in the breech (against the manufacturer's recommendation), which we're told within the first few pages, becomes important much later on. She lay in the shrubbery, cradled on her back by the creaking branches and surrounded by gently glowing leaves.His Culture novels, and indeed, his other SF books, take the same dizzying scales and ideas but the writing is so much better. Banks fires off hundreds of great ideas, sometimes needing only sentences to convincingly illustrate concepts that lesser authors would need entire novellas to explore. Banks takes a literary turn here, breaking up the narrative with numerous flashbacks of Sharrow's life as the story progresses. She was nearly home, and she hated going into the house with the hiccups; Dloan always made fun of her.

Longtime readers of this blog (or anyone who talks to me about science fiction for five minutes) may remember that I'm a huge fan of Iain M.I don’t know if I was blown away, but it was a lot of fun and very different from anything else I was looking at. She’ll be released if Sharrow can bring a mythical book known as The Universal Principles to the Brothers of the House. I suppose it feels closest to something like Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons (his early Culture works) in tone. So, for example, if you are the sole conscious being, this review was actually written by you, or some part of your mind. A rambling tour of fractured culture closer to Gibson and Sterling cyberpunk and Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius adventures than Banks’s usual milieu.

What does Peter Kenny bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you had only read the book? The Culture: The Drawings– an extraordinary collection of original illustrations faithfully reproduced from sketchbooks Banks kept in the 1970s and 80s, depicting the ships, habitats, geography, weapons and language of Banks’ Culture series of novels in incredible detail.The biggest problem with this book, as in other early Banks novels, is that the author has more cool ideas than what fits in the page, so we got more a series of cool locales where something cool happens, before coolly moving to another weird event.

Following vague clues about the location of The Universal Principles, her gang already planning other jobs, and there is of course, the Lazy Gun.

This one was worse, because I didn’t realise it was the end until I turned the page and there wasn’t anything else to read. It is a marvelously interesting read, with strangely dark humor and filled with wonders from Banks’ vivid imagination. Then, about halfway through, the 'meta' picture starts to form, especially with all of Sharrow's flashbacks starting to form a coherent whole. It is just so busy and at times rather silly, with strange tech and events right and left, so much so that I was just scratching my head, trying to figure out where this was going. Not a Culture novel, Against a Dark Background is stand alone, which means that if you’ve never read Banks, this is probably a safe place to start.