Or, 'The One About the War-Guilt'. So, here's a thing. The novel's dedication—to 'The Gulf War Veterans'—speaks to a pre-9/11 historical moment of relative innocency, when there was no need to specify which Gulf War was being referred to. And actually, re-reading Look To Windward I was struck by how largely my sense of it was awkwardly pranged across the 9/11 hinge. Put it this way—had Banks published this novel in 2002 instead of 2000 it would have been universally received as a metaphorical intervention into the fall of the Twin Towers. The Culture (that is, 'The West', otherwise known as us) had, with the best intentions, been meddling in the local politics of Chelgrian Space (that is, The Middle East). Despite the self-proclaimed virtue of their intentions, events in the region went tits-up; a civil war killed billions. The Chelgrians are descended from a predator species, and characterised by such Orientalised characteristics as a rigid Caste system (like in The East!), a proneness to violent action (like Orientals!) and an unshakeable belief that they have a direct-line to Heaven for those who die, although only those who die the right way (no cowardly suicides permitted past the pearly gates; but those who die gloriously in battle are a shoe-in). The Culture admit their culpability in the disaster, mumbling something about how 99% of their interventions go well, but that they had underestimated the innate belligerence of the predator-evolved Chelgrians. Yeah, right. The Chelgrians are not mollified. And we can't blame them: they have had a direct communication from Heaven telling them that their war-dead will only be admitted once an equivalent number of Culture citizens have been slain in vengeance. This leads to the novel's main plot strand: a Chelgrian called Major Quilan is dispatched to a large Culture Orbital called Masaq' with the mission to, effectively, fly a big plane into it (actually to import wormholes connected to huge weapons caches, in order to destroy the Hub's governing Mind and this kill a significant portion of the Culture folk this Mind tends). Such tension as the novel generates—and Look To Windward is an inventive, readable and only slightly diffuse 350-pages—depends from this narrative hook: will Quilan succeed? His memory has been occluded in case the Culture try to read his mind (that is: he has literally been brain-washed! Mohamed Atta's staring eyes!); and the novel threads out nuggets as he recalls them that fill us, the reader, in on his motivation (he lost the love of his life in the war), his training, his society and so on. But, wait: Banks published this novel in 2000. The [SPOILERS!] denouement, in which the Hub is spared, combined with revelations about the involvement of the Culture Minds known as 'The Interesting Times Gang', doesn't put the 2000 reader out, although it would have felt sentimentally evasive in a 2002 novel. Another way of putting this would be to say: Look To Windward is a novel overtaken by history. But that's the fate of all novels.
Still, Banks's studiedly general 'to The Gulf War Veterans' must mean that this is the only science fiction novel deliberately dedicated to, amongst others, Norman Schwarzkopf, Andy McNab, and Saddam Hussein. So that's something.
This, as you have probably guessed, is my roundabout way of saying that I found something heavyhanded in the implied parallels the novel suggests. On the one hand, the wars the Culture fought against rigid religious fundamentalist caste-based societies like the Idirans (also a component of this novel) and the Chelgrians. On the other, in our world, the West, the East, and the twain meeting with much bloodshed. The novel's first chapter, 'The Light of Ancient Mistakes', involves the rather nice conceit that the Masaq' Oribtal is positioned exactly 800 light years away from the site of the mass-death of Idirans.
Conceivably my annoyance was compounded of the fact that I didn't notice any Orientalism at all when I first read it, back in those pre-9/11 days. I was blanker-minded then; and though racism repelled me, then as now, I was much less conscious of the ways that ignorance can, in itself, not only be racist but dangerously racist. Ignorance shapes our world-views and attitudes in ways of which we are not even aware, which makes it, and those views, harder to amend. My reaction to Look to Windward also records a sense that, in lots of other ways, this is a deeply enjoyable, absorbing read. A secondary plotline, set aboard a huge 'airspace' artificial environment with sentient dirigibles, people falling and flying, all lit by moon-sized floating spotlights ('eyeballs the size of small moons whose annihilatory furnaces switched on and off according to a pattern dictated by their slow dance around this vast world', 158) was very nifty. I would concede that the nift involved was more of a 'oh! cool worldbuilding!' sort than anything to do with character, plotting or writing; but that's OK.
My reaction to Quilan himself was more mixed. The early stages of his grief are well-drawn, I think; the blanknesss and lack of affect followed by a raw pain, threaded with anger, and longer periods of depression and misery. It’s a human pain, despite the fact that Quilan is supposed to be descended not from a hominid but a five-legged tiger or whatever—I genuinely found the specifics of the Chelgrians physique hard to keep straight in my head: occasional descriptions of extra arms and fur simply didn’t do enough to counterbalance the extremely-very-much human-flavour of their speech patterns, emotional habits, frames of reference and so on. So, yes: it’s a human pain, but a believable and even a moving one. Or at least in the early stages it is: because it sticks there. Quilan’s grief never goes past its suicidal stage because Banks needs a suicide-bomber (tooled-up by Space Bombs and Bigger Bangs) for his plot. Perhaps that’s not fair—perhaps Quilan’s grief never goes past its suicidal stage because, for some people, that’s how bereavement is. But I couldn’t shake the sense that an emotional portrait that actually touched me in the first half of the novel stopped doing so in the second. 'There can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered’ one of his superiors tells him at one point, and there's something in that.
There is a great deal of jaw-jaw in this novel about the rights and wrongs of Culture interference, and I've been trying to get it straight in my head whether this is a feature or a bug. It's clearly one of the main things Banks is using his novel for: the Chelgrian caste-system is very nasty indeed for those at the lower ends of it, and (as with the Hells in Surface Detail) the novel pays only the merest lip-service to the arguments of the higher caste wallahs that it also provides benefits in terms of social stability and tradition and life-structure. We, the readers, never doubt for a moment that life in the Culture is better, something reinforced at the end when [SPOLER! AGAIN!] the die-hard traditionalist Chelgrian general Sholan Hadesh Huyler, who has spent the novel egging Quilan on in his Mohamed Atta-ish mission, reveals that he's been working for the Culture all along. 'They showed me all there was to be shown about my society and theirs and, in the end, I preferred theirs' [356] he says, deflatingly. That this epilogue comes immediately after a scene in which the Culture send a Magic Djinn (well, an 'E-Dust Assassin') to kill the Chelgrians responsible for the attack on the Hub may be intended as irony. Hard to say. Remember: this is a pre-9/11 novel. Remember above all that the Culture doesn't believe in torture. It is too civilized for such barbarities.
Estodien Visquile opened his mouth to scream for mercy. She became insects—they represented something of a phobia for the Estodien—and poured into his throat, choking him and forcing open the route to his lungs and to his stomach. The insects packed each tiny air-sac in his lungs tight; others bulked out the Estodien's stomach to the point of bursting and beyond, then invaded his body cavity, while others rammed down into the rest of his digestive system, forcing an explosion of faecal matter from his anus. [LTW, 352-3]Take that, Osama! Sorry, no, wait: it's 2000. And anyway: we're civilised. We don't approve of torture. In The Hydrogen Sonata, Cossont asks one of the Minds ‘You’re not allowed to torture people, are you?’ and the ship replies ‘I believe the consensus is it remains one of the few temptations we don’t indulge in.’[HS 182]. So—
She pulled the canopy open. The white-furred male lashed out with an antique knife; it penetrated her chest and she let it hang there while she took him by the throat and lifted him bodily out of the machine. He kicked and spat and gurgled. The knife in her chest was swallowed inside her as she walked to the edge of the terrace. He hung easily in her grip, as though he weighed nothing; his kicks seemed to have no appreciable effect on her whatsoever. At the terrace edge she held him over the balustrade. The drop to the sea was about two hundred metres. The knife he had tried to harm her with appeared smoothly out of the palm of her hand, like magic. She used it to skin him. She was ferociously quick; it took a minute or so. His screams wheezed out through his partially crushed windpipe ...she threw the knife away and used her own claws to rip him open from midlimb to groin, and then reached inside pulling and twisting at the same time as she let go of his neck. He tumbled away, finally screaming in a high hoarse voice. She was still holding his stomach in her hand. His intestines unravelled, whipping out of his body in a long,quivering line as he fell. Skinned and disembowelled he was light enough—and his entrails sufficiently elastic as well as firmly anchored—for him to bounce up and down on the end of his own guts for a while, jerking and quivering and shrieking, before she let him fall into the salty waves. [LTW, 354]Itchy, meet Scratchy.
GENERAL THOUGHTS ON THE CULTURE 4
Another repeated theme of Look to Windward is Subliming. The Chelgrian's access to Heaven comes about via a group of Sublimed Chelgrians who, unusually, are still kind-of hanging about in our untranscendental space. I take it that in this novel Banks uses the Sublime as a way of highlighting the imperfection of The Culture. 'To flourish, make contact, develop, expand, reach a steady state and then eventually Sublime,' we're told, 'was more or less the equivalent of the stellar Main Sequence for civilisations, though there was an equally honourable and venerable tradition for just quietly keeping on going, minding your own business' [LTW, 145]. The galaxy regards the refusal of the Culture to Sublime as a puzzle ('behaving like an idealistic adolescent'). One of the things we learn in this novel is that perfect AIs always Sublime [LTW, 110]. What is a perfect AI?:
AIs tended to reflect the civilisational demeanour of their source species ... a detectable flavour of the intellectual character and basic morality of that precursor species.... What various Involved, including the Culture had also tried to do, often out of sheer curiosity once AI had become a settled and even routine technology, was to devise a consciousness with no flavour; one with no metalogical baggage whatsoever.Hence, perfect AI. And what was discovered was that without said baggage, or flavour, the AI immediately bailed on reality and upgraded to the Enfold.
Alrighty-tighty: the Culture Minds are, we are repeatedly told, bogglingly advanced and intellectual and omnicompetent; but they are not perfect. Look to Windward is, centrally, about that imperfection -- about the grit in the Culture-Mind shell that holds them back from Subliming. My worry is that it doesn't add up. The mistake, intervening in Chelgrian affairs, did not happen because the Minds were too attached to reality. It happened because the Culture Minds didn't foresee that taking a low-caste individual and making him emperor of everybody in a warlike predator society that has been stuck in its caste-hierarchy for unimaginable lengths of time might have negative consequences. Towards the end of the novel one character, pondering the desire of one Culture mind to die, ponders: "I find it hard to understand how something as fabulously complicated and comprehensively able intellectually as a Mind might also want to destroy itself.' But the Chelgrian fuck-up is not the consequence of fabulously complicated and comprehensively intellectually-able strategist examining the situation and acting. It is the consequence of a George-W-Bush-level of short-sighted stupidity. We have to take it on trust that Banks' Minds are as godlike as he keeps saying they are. In this novel they certainly don't seem to be.
This, then, seems to me the place where the novel doesn't add-up. The 'imperfection' of the Culture Minds is supposed to be about the flavour of the civilisation and mental attitudes of the people (broadly: higher-tech us) who created them. So, the Minds are superrapid computational marvels and omnicompetent thinkers, but with a penchant for Richard Clayderman or a preference for green over other colours, or whatever. But this is not the sort of imperfection Look to Windward depends upon. The plot hinges upon a strategic intervention into an alien species of genuine, bald-faced idiocy: not aesthetic-bias idiocy, but basic computational prediction and assessment idiocy.
Generally agree with this review but would like to correct a small point - the book happens 800 years after the Idirian war (i.e. the events of 'Consider Phlebas') while the Chelgrian War is much more recent - just a few years previously. The Twin Novae battle, the light of which opens and closes the novel, was part of the Idirian war and the Masaq' Hub Mind took part in it as a GSV warship.
ReplyDeletePossibly one could extend the parallels with the Gulf War backwards - the Idirian War was the Culture's World War II, fought against an ideologically oppressive and expansive enemy, with all means fully justified in defeating them.
I concur with the commenter above re the novae. Early in the book:
ReplyDelete"Eight-hundred-and-three-year-old light shone steadily down.
"The light of ancient mistakes, he thought. That was what Ziller had called it, on the interview Kabe had heard just that morning. ‘Tonight you dance by the light of ancient mistakes!’ Except that no one was dancing.
"It had been one of the last great battles of the Idiran war."
*
Banks' inconsistent depiction of the Culture Minds is something that causes difficulty for many readers. On the one hand, we're often told how vastly intelligent the Minds are, for example from Consider Phlebas: "The Minds that the Culture [was] now producing were some of the most sophisticated collections of matter in the galaxy. They were so intelligent that no human was capable of understanding just how smart they were (and the machines themselves were incapable of describing it to such a limited form of life)."
But when we have to be shown them doing something more complicated than computing the trajectory of a spaceship, or being involved in a million conversations at once, the illusion falls flat. If you thought the Minds' actions in Look to Windward are dumb, wait until you see their allegedly subtle plots and maneouverings in Excession, the witlessness of which only being partly disguised by the story being told out of order.
Of course this is a human limitation: Banks can imagine the existence of superhuman intelligences, but being only human, he can't think superhuman thoughts. The illusion of superhuman intelligence can be kept up as long as the Minds are mostly offstage dei in machina, as they are in The Player of Games and Use of Weapons, but once Banks has to show the Minds actually talking and scheming, as he starts to do from Excession onwards, he's not remotely up to the task.
But how as readers do we take this inconsistency? If we take the claims about the Minds at face value, then their bumbling actions are not credible: at best we might acknowledge the limitations of human authorship and say to ourselves, well, sadly Banks was unable to portray a plot of superhuman subtlety, but let us suppose for the moment that he succeeded, and read on. But if the Minds are really idiots (as indicated by their actions and words), the narration must be utterly and systematically unreliable in its claims about them. But unreliable narration is desperately unsatisfactory in science fiction: if the narrator can be unreliable about the Minds, he could be unreliable about everything else in the books.
Part of the problem is the changing rôle of the Culture in the series. In the early books, and especially in "State of the Art" and The Player of Games, the function of the Culture was to appear utopian, a straightforwardly good society to act as a lens through which to criticise contemporary human society (directly, in "State of the Art", and in displaced form via the Azadians in The Player of Games). But in the later books Banks turned the satirical lens around so that now the Culture stands for us, a bunch of well-meaning but destructive liberal interventionists and neocolonialists.
But this change of direction leaves some of the narrative claims in the earlier books looking very shaky. In Consider Phlebas Banks wrote: "With a sort of apologetic smugness, Contact - and therefore the Culture - could prove statistically that such careful and benign use of ‘the technology of compassion’ (to use a phrase in vogue at the time) did work, in the sense that the techniques it had developed to influence a civilisation’s progress did significantly improve the quality of life of its members, without harming that society as a whole by its very contact with a more advanced culture." Was this claim sincerely intended? It certainly seems darkly ironic now in the light of what the Culture does to the Affront, the Chelgrians, and others.
+1 regarding the Chelgrian civil war being fairly recent.
ReplyDelete"Banks' inconsistent depiction of the Culture Minds is something that causes difficulty for many readers."
Yes. This reminds me of a bit in Terry Pratchett's "The Dark Side of the Sun" where the Bank (something very similar to a Culture mind) comments:
"ALAS, I AM NO MORE INTELLIGENT THAN THE AVERAGE CREAP, OR HUMAN GENIUS. MY BULK ALLOWS, SHALL WE SAY, FOR BREADTH OF INTELLIGENCE RATHER THAN HEIGHT."
I feel this gestures at a more satisfying way of discussing Minds. There is more than one dimension to intelligence, and Banks often conflates intelligence with processing power. He also has a habit of assuming that moral behaviour is a linear function of intelligence (a claim which crops up in "The Hydrogen Sonata"), which strikes me as bizarre. Psychopaths can be intelligent. So in discussing Minds Banks conflates intelligence, virtue, processing power, and who knows what else, all of which can be a little unsatisfying.
For my part, I picture the Minds as being roughly equivalent to multi-spectrum human geniuses in "height", but possessed of massively parallel processing power. The Minds are 'weakly godlike' - to borrow a phrase from Charlie Stross - rather than being possessed of genuinely different styles of thinking (something that might correspond to Sublimation, in Banks' oeuvre).
Thanks for the correction, guys: I've amended the post.
ReplyDeleteWhat struck me about the Culture's failed intervention in Chel was how unnecessary the excuse of the Chelgrians' carnivore nature was to justify their war. By that reasoning, Robespierre was a carnivore. As you say, it was an entirely foreseeable outcome, and especially given how hamfisted the Culture's approach - engineer the election of a low-caste president - is. I'm not sure that's a flaw in the novel, though, since it's something the characters comment on: Huyler suggests that the Culture has reached a stage where it's so proficient at molding societies into a desired form that it's trying to achieve that effect elegantly, like trying to win a chess match in a minimum of moves.
ReplyDeleteWhich is why I still do think that Look to Windward is ultimately about the rightness of the Culture's interference, and why I don't think it's dated by history - or at least, not any more than any other Culture novels. The question of whether benign interference is a net good strikes me as a very Cold War question, when the West felt the need to prove its moral superiority by exporting its (freer, more egalitarian, all around better - remind you of anything?) culture. (See also Star Trek: The Next Generation, which took a very Cold War approach to the Federation's obvious moral superiority to totalitarian cultures like the Romulans.) In the post-9/11 world, we assume moral superiority and then take a perverse pride in doing the most depraved things in defense of it, which feels very different to the concerns of this book - except, as you very correctly point out, in the scene in which the conspirators are assassinated, which stands out like a sore thumb.
As I wrote in my own review a few weeks ago, Look to Windward feels to me like a novel about the Culture's Minds - the ones whose Culture baggage keeps them from subliming - and about the toll that it takes on them to enact their society's desire to do good. Hence, I now realize, the dedication to the Gulf War veterans, which feels as apt today as it would have in 2000.
Just to follow-up on the behaviour of the assassination-bot - which I also think was out of character for Culture Minds (though maybe not for Special Circumstances, who are the ones that employ Zakalwe in "Use of Weapons', after all) - in 'Surface Detail' there is (I think) a hint that it might not have been the Culture at all, but Culture fanboys the GFCF:
ReplyDeleteVatueil paused, looked grim. “I think we all know the saying: ‘Don’t fuck with the Culture.’”
Bettlescroy smiled, blushing once again. “Sir,” it said, “some of the incidents to which I suspect you are referring, the ones which have reinforced that famous saying which I shall not repeat … ?”
“Yes?” Vatueil said, realising it was expected.
Bettlescroy paused, as though wondering to say what it was about to say or not. Eventually the little alien said, “Those were us, not them.”
* * *
But that is probably retconning by the author (or me, or both).
The behaviour of the assassination-bot is hardly out of character. In fact, it's a trope that Banks keeps returning to, that drones and Minds take a guilty pleasure in killing in baroque and bloody ways.
ReplyDeleteThere's Mawhrin-Skel in The Player of Games, the ROU Killing Time in Excesssion: ("The Killing Time felt a modicum of guilt, even self-disgust at what it had forced upon what was still, in a sense, a sister ship, even while another part of its selfhood relished and gloried in the dying craft's agonies"), there's Skaffen-Amtiskaw in "The State of the Art" ("SC finds drones whose robust pugnacity has led them to some overly-violent act in the past and then tells these pathological devices to guard their human Special Circumstancer successfully, or be componented") and in Use of Weapons ("Seven of the riders - five standing, two still mounted - collapsed into the dust, in fourteen separate pieces. Sma tried to scream at the drone, to make the missile stop, but she was still choking, and now starting to retch. The drone patted her back. 'There, there,' it said, concernedly. In the square, both of the inn-keeper's daughters slipped to the ground from the mounts they had been tied to, their bonds slashed in the same cut that had killed all seven men. The drone gave a little shudder of satisfaction"), there's Turminder Xuss in Matter ("You ought to have let me do a proper decapitation") and lots of others.
Of course, this kind of violence is perfectly normal in science fiction. What's puzzling and interesting about it is that it goes so strongly against the moral principles that the Culture supposedly stands for.