Reversing Through The Culture

I set out to read Iain M. Banks 'Culture' novels in reverse order of publication. This, I did. Here are links to the posts I wrote as I was going along:

The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)

Surface Detail (2010)

Matter (2008)

Look to Windward (2000)

Inversions (1998)

Excession (1996)

Use of Weapons (1990)

The Player of Games (1987)

Consider Phlebas (1987)

I finish with an even higher sense of the series' merit than, perhaps, I had going in. This is a marvellous body of work; and we (for various values of 'we') have tended to under-value Banks' huge, imaginative contribution to genre. That said, I think it is the case, particularly with the later novels, that Banks's imaginative duracell shows signs of running low, not because his mind is any less ingenious than it was last century, but only because the idea of the Culture is one that dissolves away Dramatic Tension and Story Momentum by its very nature, as salt does a slug. This is the old, old problem of Utopia: if everybody's happy and everything in the garden is rosy, what is there to write about? Unhappiness and vulnerability are what make stories happen, after all.

I say so both to name the technical necessities of constructing a story (no unhappiness or vulnerability, no conflict; no conflict, no drama; no drama, no story) but also to make a larger point. We may think we read stories to feed our fantasies of power and competence. If 'we' are SFF fans, we may believe this more than most. But it's not true. What's interesting about Iron Man is not that his suit gives him superhuman powers, but that his suit fails. Failure grounds art in a way success never can.

The crude way of articulating this, narratively, is to throw a cackling Loki in the path of your Thor; to make sure to write-in an adversary (his/her motivation for wickedness hardly matters!) who has enough of a supply of kryptonite to render your Superman vulnerable. In the early Culture novels, Banks is far from crude; and that's good. Because writing about the unhappiness or vulnerability of your main characters makes for much more interesting storytelling than artificially inducing temporary vulnerability in your wish-fulfilment perfect protag., or in substituting cartoon villainy for actual unhappiness.

Consider Phlebas cannily puts the Culture into the background, positing in the Idiran a collective adversary not only strong enough (effectively immortal, technically advanced, highly motivated warrior giants) but appealing enough to suggest that the Culture could be beaten -- and that there might be reasons a reasonable person (like Horza) might hope for such a defeat. Player of Games flips this about, and we see things from the Culture perspective. It's early in the series, but the idea of the Culture's vulnerability has already fallen away; so Banks finds a story instead in the unhappiness of his protagonist, a kind of existential anomie in which the very expertise at game-playing that defines Gurgeh (and which symbolically represents the Very Extremely Clever Minds that Play The Game of Life So Well) is also thing that seems to leach deeper satisfaction from life. As Blake put it: Eternity is in love with the productions of time. Eternity is the idiom of paradise (for our purposes here, that's the Culture). Of course it has a hard-on for not only mortality, but more broadly: failure. The early Culture novels are very good on that.

As the series proceeds, though, Vulnerability and Unhappiness retreat into the novels' shadowy background. There is an increased focus on Cool Kit and Stuff, on Huge Structures (Banks really likes his Huge Structures--Castles in which individual rooms turn humans into mouse-sized figures; Vast Bridges; Worlds of Huge Tiers and so on) and on the godlike Minds themselves. This results in an increasing fall-back on the Comic Book Crude I mentioned above. Use of Weapons is about a main character whose existential unhappiness is slowly revealed (via a rich array of incidental episodes and inventive worldbuildings) to be about Guilt. That's fine, although less interesting aesthetically I think than Gurgeh's anomie, not least because the occasion for the guilt is so bizarrely grand guignol.  Excession seems to want to position the Culture as vulnerable again, but if so the conception lacks force. The reader never really thinks this might be the Full Stop at the end of the Culture sentence, because Banks has got too much of a crush on his clever creation. They are invulnerable. This is one of the reasons Inversions, which I didn't much like the first time around, stood out for me on re-read as one of the strongest Culture novels, because it actually dramatised the sort of shape the love of Eternity might take for the productions of time.

Looking over the whole run, though, I wonder if Inversions isn't actually the last fully accomplished Culture novel. The problem with Matter is not that it is too long and too slack (it is, really; but it also generates some actual momentum towards the end). The problem, I think, is that all the unhappiness has been syphoned off into the straw-man old-fashioned society of the Sarl. In later books this tendency becomes more pronounced. All the non-Happy in Banks imagined cosmos (and thus all his story motivation) is transferred onto the barbaric non-Culture civilisations; the motor for drama becomes a should-we-shouldn't-we Interventionist dilemma, which reads as awkwardly Blairite. The problem is that, in the later books, life in the Culture just is so much better than extracultural life: in Look to Windward the die-hard traditionalist Chelgrian general Sholan Hadesh Huyler, who has spent the novel egging Quilan in his hatred of Culture decadence, is twist-ending revealed to have 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. In Surface Detail the extracultural types are systematic horrible sadists who have invented virtual hells in which to torment people. The Hells are presented as so ghastly and disproportionate nobody could possibly endorse them, which denatures the moral drama and replaces actual narrative momentum with a series of grisly-ingenious set-pieces. The Gzilt in Hydrogen Sonata are not so horrid as this, but they are extracultural, and so they have to carry the being-shame of nastiness and violent-tendencies and so on, even though they're supposed to be on the very edge of Subliming into transcendental perfection.  So it goes.

***

Banks published his 'A Few Notes on the Culture' essay as early as 1994. It's an interesting piece in many ways, although it also embodies one of the problematics of late 20th-/early 21st-century fantasy and SF. It's all content and detail. It feeds that appetite that believes, on some level, that the Appendices to Lord of the Rings actually trump The Lord of the Rings. Story is open-ended and unsettling (on a first reading, at any rate). The appeal of overviews, fan-guides, encyclopedias, Complete Handbook to the Star Wars Universe, Inside Westeros, all these sorts of books -- the appeal is Control, of certainty and settlement, of disposing the particularity of an imagined world into various pigeonholes marked 'types of weapons', 'aliens species', 'names of Ships' and so on. There is, of course, a Culture Wiki; and the internet is littered with 'Top Ten Gadgets From Iain M. Banks' Culture!' lists. That's fine; except that this kind of text has the tendency, phagocytically, to swallow up the original mode of text. The later Culture novels are as much in the business of fleshing-out aspects of the Culture itself -- in effect, adding more notes to the Few Notes On The Culture work -- as they are anything else. Perhaps they are predominantly about that. I worry that this speaks to a loss of faith in the ability actually to tell stories about The Culture.  Because, really, what's to tell? Everyone's happy. The Culture is invulnerable, all watched over by nearly-infallible godlike machines of loving grace. (Imagine a Culture novel in which the Minds en masse decide that humanoid species are vermin and are to be exterminated! Imagine a Culture novel in which the all Minds go mad. Ah, but you can't ...). There is no story here. So the story migrates to the margins, not to highlight the in-the-grain difficulty of existence, or the beautiful intensities attendent on mortality and suffering, but only to condescend to the clumsily violent ways of the unenlightened.