Look To Windward | ||||||||||||
Iain M. Banks | ||||||||||||
Orbit Books, 357 pages | ||||||||||||
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A review by Nick Gevers
Consider Phlebas and its immediate
successors -- The Player of Games (1988), The State of the Art (1989), and Use of Weapons (1990) -- offered
ambiguous answers, asserting both the necessity of the Culture's existence and the occasional iniquity of its methods. But
Banks has left his truly cogent and systematic assessment of the issues to his later Culture volumes:
together, they judge the Culture completely, from above, below, and straight on, painting a fascinating multi-faceted
portrait of this most benign of Galactic Empires.
Perspective is the key in these novels. Excession (1996) is the view from above: Banks affords the reader some
comprehension (insofar as that is possible) of how the Culture seems to those elevated far above it; in their
responses to a visitation from higher realms, the vast Artificial Intelligences that guide the Culture's
destiny -- the so-called "Minds" -- do not come off altogether well. But the Cultural fabric holds. Inversions (1998)
is the view from below: when two human agents of the Culture find themselves functioning incognito as counsellors
to the rulers of a medieval-level planet, their struggles to apply Cultural ethics are highly revealing, even
though the primitive narrators of their careers have little notion of what they truly represent. And now, in
Look To Windward -- the direct, horizontal view -- Banks anatomizes the Culture from the purview of its
equals. At last, the Culture can be known in close detail, through the eyes of experienced, incisive foreign travellers.
In Look To Windward, only one of eight viewpoint characters is a Culture citizen, and he is in alien guise far,
far from home. The primary setting of the novel is one of the Culture's most noted Orbitals, the gigantic artificial
ring-in-space known as Masaq. A cultural centre of some significance, it attracts alien luminaries in fair
numbers. One is Mahrai Ziller, a universally famous composer from the militaristic and caste-based society of Chel.
This irascible exile, fiercely critical of the oppressive practices of his home, is the focus of intrigue, drawing
(apparently) an emissary from Chel requesting his return. The Culture's intelligence agency, the Contact Section,
is greatly interested in the matter, conscious that the recent Civil War that devastated Chel was a conflict provoked
by the Culture's well-meaning interference. Perhaps the Chelgrian envoy -- Quilan, a tragically bereaved soldier-monk -- is
in fact an assassin, a terrorist, or something worse; he and Ziller are constantly monitored by Contact agents and
Masaq Orbital's Hub Mind, assisted by a resident member of the alien Homomdan species, Kabe. As the contending
individuals circle each other with a slow decorous persistence, the society of Masaq emerges in great and telling detail,
as understood by Ziller, Quilan, and Kabe.
There is a deadly conspiracy afoot, but it is adumbrated slowly, affording Banks leisure to describe Masaq with probing
analytical wit. The human citizens of Masaq are a pampered lot, spending their time on a seemingly endless succession
of soirées, revels, drug trips, luxurious trans-Orbital tourism, and ridiculously dangerous extreme sports (such as
lava rafting). They can be judged rather harshly as fops and intellectual dabblers, whose seemingly infinite freedom
of choice is in fact a decadent absence of any personal moral responsibility. But it also is evident that theirs is an
authentic happiness, that their liberty to die when they choose (or not at all) compares rather favourably with the
fate of those subject to the hierarchies of Chel -- which sends blindly loyal cannon-fodder to their deaths -- and
of the ancient "airspheres" of the Galactic fringe, where the powerful mould and control hosts of slaves. Rather
silly than a serf, rather a killer through benevolent error than a murderer out of considered malignity. Homomdan
and Chelgrian observers learn at fundamental levels even as they critically assess the Culture.
Meanwhile, a scholar from the Culture is engaged in the more orthodoxly Banksian activity of observing an alien species
in its native habitat. Uagen Zlepe is a guest in an airsphere, studying the bizarre routines of the massive floating
behemothaurs that glide through its cerulean wilderness. But his discovery of the novel's underlying conspiracy,
achieved in sequences of astonishing narrative brio, leads him away from passive academicism, and his
departure -- sinister and sudden -- signals a shift to a behemothaur's viewpoint, by which the Culture once
again is judged, from the cool distance of immortality. This is one of Banks' remarkable Stapledonian moments, a chill
Olympian interlude echoing the famous conclusion of Excession. In the end, the Culture is only another civilization,
another step in an infinite social evolution -- with guilt it must expiate alongside its fleeting utopian glory.
Look To Windward may be the final Culture novel; it certainly reads like the end of the current sequence, the
last piece of Banks' perspectival puzzle. In any event, it is one of Banks' finest novels, mature, considered,
horrifying and hilarious by turns. Its episodes of social comedy are brilliantly observed, like Wodehouse on
interstellar overdrive; its sequences of action and intrigue are as intense and polished as those in the
magnificent Inversions; and its conclusion is perfectly paced, a keen indictment and sweeping celebration
of the Culture all at once. This fine rhetorical balance marks Look To Windward as one of the most
significant SF novels of the year.
Since completing a Ph.D. on uses of history in SF, Nick Gevers has become a moderately prolific reviewer and interviewer in the field of speculative fiction. He has published in INTERZONE, NOVA EXPRESS, the NEW YORK REVIEW OF SF, and GALAXIES; much of his work is available at INFINITY PLUS, of which he is Associate Editor. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa. |
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