Conference noted::sf

    I'm afraid that all I've read of him was "Consider Phlebas", which 
    wasn't encouraging.  On picking it up I thought "Space opera that 
    quotes T.S. Eliot?  Could be interesting", and it was, for a while.
    After the first hundred or so pages, though, the hero's ordeals 
    got pretty numbing.   He is supposed to have all these bodily 
    control skills, but how much torture can he reasonably stand?  
    And how much should we have to read about?  
    
    My copy of CP was an English edition.  I haven't seen anything else by 
    him, so perhaps his better work is just waiting to jump the Pond.

    /jlr

One other novel not mentioned in .0 is 'The Player of Games'. This is set in the
same universe as 'Consider Phlebas', only a couple of centuries later, and
concerns the adventures of one Jernau Morat Gurgeh (why DO SF writers feel they
have to invent such silly names for their characters?) who spends his life
playing games (what a surprise!). The first 1/3 is _really_ slow moving, the
middle 1/3 is more interesting and the last bit is pretty good; overall I
enjoyed it (but then I liked 'Consider Phlebas' too, so what does that count:-)

I would say his best books are 'Walking on Glass' and 'The Bridge' (both of
which are pretty wierd), with 'The Wasp factory' coming in a close third. My
main reason for liking his writing is that it is so different from anything else
I've read; the man has a warped imagination!

Simon

    I prefer Consider Phlebas and Player of Games to any of the others.
    I consider them much better in structure and plot.
    
    Has anyone read Canal Dreams ???
    
    
    
    				Jamie.

    I think "The Wasp Factory" , "walking on Galss" and (to a lesser
    extent) "The Bridge" are more interesting. He creates truly bizarre
    situations that I find more challenging than the usual hackneyed
    Space Opera scenario which has been pretty much done to death over
    the last 50 years or so.
    
    I haven't read his more recent work like "Espedair Street" which
    is a (fairly) straightforward fictional biography of a rock star
    mostly set in the 70s.
    
    There is a more recent novel out in hardback which looks to be more
    in the vein of his early work.
    
    Cheers,
    
    Paul
    ----

    I just read "Walking on Glass" this month and enjoyed it more than I
    expected to.  I didn't think of it as SF, by the way, even with Chapter
    3.  (: >,)  Probably because of the kind of stuff I usually read, I
    didn't find his ideas bizarre - I'd seen them all before in various
    forms (nightmarish "romantic comedy" in Pinter, psychopath's world
    view in a zillion or so novels, claustrophobic fantasy in Kafka and
    "Titus Groan") - but on a detailed, sentence by sentence level he
    handled them well.
    
    I found the end thoroughly bogus, though.  
    
    Maybe I'll check out "The Bridge",
    Ray

    RE .4
    
    The hardback, as I mentioned earlier, is "Canal Dreams".

    	I have only read three of Bank's books so far: The Wasp Factory,
    Walking on Glass and Consider Phlebas.

    	The "Wasp Factory" is one of the only books that I have seen/read so
    far that have derogatory or bad comments from the critics. Some of the
    critics were to the effect that Banks had to be some kind of `sicko'
    to write that stuff. Personally I found it a really interesting book, even
    with some very funny parts, particularly the description of the main
    character walking home from the pub!

    	Banks seems to specialise in anticlimatic finishes. The finish of
    Walking on Glass was a real let down, although I thoroughly enjoyed the
    book. Consider Phlebas also ended unconclusively although again I
    really enjoyed the book. He (Banks) seems to have a style all his own
    in which he ties different strands going through his book together in
    very subtle ways.

    	I am really looking forward to reading some of his other material.
    Although, here in Munich, its hard to come by.

    Cathal.

    		

    
    	I came across more of Iain M. Banks' material last weekend. "Use
    	of Weapons" is another book based on and around 'The Culture' which
    	was introduced by Banks in "Consider Phlebas" and "The Player of 
     	Games". If those two books are anything to go by then it should
    	be pretty good!
    
    	I also saw a collection of short stories by Banks called "The State
    	of the Art". I think the stories are Banks' early works in the
    	Science Fiction area. Unfortunatly the book was only available in
    	hardback, so I'll have to wait for the paperback edition!
    
    Cathal.
    	   

Yup, I too spend most of last winter/spring reading Banks.

I think there too distinct lines of works:

Iain Banks (IB):	Wasp Factory (WF), Walking On Glass (WOG), 
			The Bridge (TB), Canal Dreams (CD), Espedair Street (ES).

Iain M Banks (IMB):	Consider Phlebas (CP), The Player Of Games (POG), 
			Use Of Weapons (UOW), The State of The Art (STA).

The first line, in black'n'white covers, I would call science fiction, it's 
"ordinary" fiction and quite weird. IB Seems to have a weakness for surprice 
endings - like WF.

[After some-one pointed me to the mental disaster ongoing in HUMAN::DIGITAL 
# 1616.*; I am considering re-reading WF, having somewhat got a new angle on 
the meaning/significance of the term "WASP"! Is it "white and straight person"?]

The second line, in black covers with "colorfull" front illustrations, is scifi
allright. Banks is taking a quite close look at "The Culture", which I feel is
somehow us (i.e. Digital, since we so close to the machines). The maskarade of
"space opera" is well employed providing distraction from the real heavy stuff
being passed on. Endings here seems to be exhausting: it took me days to get 
over CP. [A bit like the end of "All Quiet On The Western Front"]

I think the "Culture" is the real contribution to society and would like to 
enter a discussion/exchange of views of that subject.

Nis,
Europe

re: .9

I just found _Consider Phlebas_ at Lauriats at the Pheasant Lane Mall in
Nashua, NH.  That's the first one of Banks's books that i've seen in
paperback around here.  Does seem like space opera so far--sort of like
Charles Harness's _The Paradox Men_.
								paul

Article: 642
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
From: [email protected] (Stephen MG Hodge)
Subject: Feersum Endjinn
Sender: [email protected] (Michael C. Berch)
Organization: The Internet
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 1994 23:31:01 GMT
 
Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks
Orbit, June 1994, 279 pages, GBP15.99
 
A Review by Stephen M.G.Hodge
 
Iain M. Banks' latest SF offering again moves away from the milieu of
Culture in which his early SF novels Consider Phlebas, The Player of
Games and Use of Weapons are set. Feersum Endjinn however displays
the same arresting imaginative flights of fancy as his earlier
books, but in a rather more controlled and discplined manner than in
Against a Dark Background which I felt was perhaps over full with
novelties. However Feersum Endjinn still has the authentic Banks'
look and feel of a complex civilisation in full maturity, if not
decay, with millenia of history tradition and culture determining
events as much as the efforts of the characters; and he is still
fascinated by size. In Feersum Endjinn, instead of intelligent
starships hundreds of kilometres long as in the Culture, we have a
20-plus kilometre high structure set somewhere on the North American
land mass, in the form of a medieval castle, with a tower and rooms
and halls and windows kilometres high and wide; as so often with
Banks' inventions one says to oneself 'Why not?', especially later
in the story when the original purpose of this gigantic structure
becomes clear.
 
Banks has applied his fertile imagination to the cyberpunk/virtual
reality world, and comes up with the Data Corpus or the crypt. The
crypt is the result of thousands of generations of humnan and
cybernetic evolution for into the crypt go the personalities of
every inhabitant of the planet, as downloaded by their 'implants' at
the moment of their final death (in this world you get eight real
lives and eight virtual lives) A good part of the action takes place
in crypt, where times runs several thousand times faster than in
'base reality', (a useful plot device), and you can get killed or
damaged severely in an impressive variety of ways. Indeed some of
the characters exist only in the crypt, while the most engaging of
them, Bascule, makes his living by diving into the crypt to
interrogate its inhabitants. Banks I think likes to challenge his
readers, sometimes - as in his main stream novels such as the Wasp
Factory - by shocking them, and in this case making us suffer from
Bascule's insistence on spelling phonetically (he can't do otherwise
he tells us because 'unlike evrybody els I got this weerd wirin in
mi brane so I cant spel rite juss have 2 do evrythin foneticly') You
suffer with it however (Bascule writing in the first person takes up
perhaps 20% of the book) because Bascule is an engaging character,
and the action moves along when he takes up the story. As always
with Banks there are plenty of other interesting characters, both
bad guys and good guys, cyberbetic, animal and human, including
Egates, a mechanical ant who is Bascule's friend but has a mission,
Count Sessine who someone is trying to assassinate, which is a long
job when you still have one real and eight virtual lives to go
through, a King who gets his kicks by spying on his subjects through
their implants and Gadfium the Chief Scientist and the alter ego she
creates in the crypt. 
 
The story line concerns the response of this decaying civilisation
on Earth -- left behind after most of mankind migrated to the stars -- 
to the encroachment on the Solar syatem of an interstellar dust
cloud, which is first going to freeze the Earth, then turn the Sun
nova. The political classes and their henchmen are of course working
on saving themselves and no-one else, and actively opposing the
effort of the good guys, and whoever or whatever it is at the bottom
of the crypt and the top of tower. The action moves along rather
smartly on several levels with a satisfying outcome at the end. All
in all a worthwhile read.
 
%A Banks, Iain M.
%T Feersum Endjinn
%I Orbit/Little Brown & Company (UK) Ltd.
%C London, UK
%D 1994
%G ISBN 1-85723-235-6
%P 279pp
%O hardback, GBP15.99