Simone Caroti - The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction

Also by SIMONE CAROTI

The Generation Starship in Science Fiction:
A Critical History, 19342001 (McFarland, 2011)

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Jefferson, North Carolina

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e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2040-4

2015 Simone Caroti. All rights reserved

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To the memory of
Iain Menzies Banks
(19542013).
Thank you for everything, Sir.

As every utopia contains, if only as a nightmare to haunt the sleep of its happy citizens, the shadow of dystopia, so does every dystopia harbor, if only as a yearning in the waking minds of those trapped within the workings of its world-machine, the promise of a better place in a future brighter than the present. The early months of 1997, the year I discovered Iain Menzies Banks Culture series, were also the time in which I realized that utopia and dystopia belong to the heart of the individual as much as they do to the collective soul of a society. My mother was gone, taken by cancer, and my internal horizon had shrunk to the range of the day; when the sun pulled the curtain on the afternoon, I quietly reset my internal clock to zero, waiting for the next iteration. I didnt think beyond tomorrowmy future felt uncertain right thennor did I go back in my memory to a time before the day just gonemy past was full of a life spent with her, and that did not quite bear dwelling on.

In the normal course of events, I came to understand that I was going through the same process of grieving everyone else goes through when such things happen to them, but at that time, mired in the immediacy of the moment, all I knew was that I needed to find evidence that a future existed at some point along the line in which I could reboot and restart. So I started seeking this evidence, and because Im a bookworm, both by temperament and by training, I sought it in the voices others had committed to print. I read a lot, anything from Macbeth to Calvin and Hobbes (this pairing feels, to me, strangely appropriate), and because I was at least taking some form of action against my prevailing internal weather, things started improving.

Then came the summer of 1997. I went to Cambridge, England, for three weeks, and among the many books I brought back home to Trieste, Italy, was Excession (1996), whose paperback edition had just come out. To this day, my memories of reading that novel come back to me as an undifferentiated timespan, a succession of mornings and evenings disconnected from any sense that a calendar had anything to do with anything I was thinking or feeling. There it was, a future, drawn out in trajectories across hyperspace, told through the serene clear agency of godlike AI, and spelled out in a voice modulated so that the pain of ones existence became a small section of a far larger context. And there was a past, also contextualized so that I could now see it as part of a four-dimensional flow of which I, with all my angst, was only a microscopic subset. Excession contributed to ease the burden on my shoulders; it helped return my yesterdays and my tomorrows to me, all of them, so that The Commonwealth Of Simone Caroti could now begin to seek a life in, as Alasdair Gray once put it, the early days of a better nation. Excession also opened up the path to the other Culture novels: I backtracked to read the State of the Art, Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, and Use of Weapons (in that order), and when I was done I waited patiently, along with everybody else, for the next installments. Absurdly, part of me still waits today.

By the end of 1997, budding and wildly under-read literary critic that I was, Id decided I would write a book about the Culture when the appropriate time came, and now, seventeen years and a bit more reading later, the moment has come. I made the original proposal to my publisher in December of 2012, when Banks was still with us, and I was fully determined to interview him. I was also going to go to WorldCon 2014 in London, where he was going to be Guest of Honor, and tell him everything I wrote above. I wanted him to know hed made a difference.

Instead, I found myself looking at the history of the Culture not as an ongoing project, but as a closed body of work, and I didnt go to London. I stayed home and wrote, which given the circumstances was for the bestmy love of Banks writing had started out as a personal affair, and it felt appropriate that I should write the book in the same spirit. That I really didnt have any other choice helped the decision along in no small measure.

This book is meant as an introduction to the Culture series, not as any sort of presumptive final word on it. Researching Banks and his work, even confining myself to the ten books comprising the Culture universe, I found so much to discuss that a book twice the length of this one still wouldnt have exhausted the topic. This gives me as much joy now as it frustrated me when the time came to decide what to put in and what to leave out. I bear full responsibility for the choices I made, although I do hope to have at least partly succeeded in illuminating my subject.

Many people helped make this book what it is and worked to let me know what I needed to do to improve it. As usual, if you find merit in the arguments that follow, thank them as well; if you dont, blame me for being fully forewarned and still botching the job.

Thanks to John Clute, who took time to speak with me in the very early stages of the books composition and make me understand exactly what Id set out to write and for whom I was writing. Johns voice also pervades this book through his reviews of the Culture novels and his writings on fantastika, all of which happily accompanied me on my way. I am deeply grateful for his help.

Thanks to the many participants to ICFA 35 in Orlando (March 2014) who graciously dedicated part of their time to discussing with me Banks impact on SF and his legacy. Ian McDonald, Russell Letson, Mary A. Turzillo, Geoffrey A. Landis, Suzy McKee Charnas, and James Morrow in particular were of significant help.

Thanks to Douglas Texter for proofreading everything I wrote and pointing out what I was doing well, but especially what I was doing wrong. He made this book far better than it would otherwise have been.

Thanks to my colleagues and my students in the Creative Writing for Entertainment BFA at Full Sail University, Winter Park, Florida. Throughout the many months of this works gestation, they enfolded me inside a community of discourse wherein my thoughts returned to me clarified, cleaned, and sharpened. Their voices echo through this work, again making it better than it would otherwise have been.

Thanks to Noelani Cornell and Christopher Ramsey, my program coordinators, who helped me get through the more intense months of this books composition.