Permanence

2 comments on Hacker News

1. NeutralatombenderApr 6, 2025

   Thanks, I'll check out Permanence, never heard of this author.

   Oh, Banks is definitely maximalism. I always enjoyed him as a kind of more serious version of Douglas Adams; his books are infused with a kind of wry, mildly nihilistic comedy, full of colourful, somewhat random exposition and sarcastic asides. His "Outside Context Problem" [1] is like something straight out of the Hitchhiker's Guide.

   Phlebas is pretty atypical among the Culture series, in that's not particularly funny, but actually pretty grim. It's not even told from the point of view of the Culture. There is lots of classic Banks shenanigans — the set pieces (Clean Air Turbulences, the Game of Damage), the drones, the long expositions of backstory, they're all there in later novels.

   He's rarely all lasers and explosions, though! Keep in mind that Phlebas is his "Hollywood world war 2 movie" book. It's his version of the "suicide mission behind enemy lines" Hollywood plot (think The Dirty Dozen or maybe Cross of Iron). But it's also a really grim version of it. It ends up on a poignant note, then undermines its entire premise by pointing out, in the appendix — which explains what happened to the characters afterwards — that none of it actually mattered in the end. This poignancy is carried over to Look to Windward, a sequel set about 800 years later that examines the long-term consequences of the war depicted in Phlebas. So much of the Culture books are about the consequences of war and the desire to avoid it at all costs.

   Just because I'm a roll, I'd like to add that I think Banks' non-Culture sci-fi is underrated. A standout is Feersum Endjinn, which always struck me as a novel Terry Pratchett could have written if he'd been into hard sci-fi. It's set on a future earth where most of humankind has long ago left for the stars, and the remaining, rag-tag population has descended into a medieval class inhabiting the gothic megastructures left by the previous generations. Much of the book is told by one of Banks' most memorable and endearing characters, a young monk-like simpleton who writes phonetically á la Riddley Walker (hence the book's scrambled title) and who inadvertently bumbles his way into a conspiracy between the warring classes. Shades of China Miéville and William Gibson here, too, with the baroque city landscape and cyberpunky "cryptosphere" holding the uploaded images of the dead.

   I also really enjoyed his early novel (but later-published) Against a Dark Background, a road movie of a crime heist thriller set in a sort of anti-Culture universe, a planet so distant from any galaxy that its civilization has given up ever trying to reach the stars. Like Phlebas it's very grim, and not for everyone.

   [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Problem

2. PositiveglobnomulousApr 6, 2025

   Sorry, my mistake: the title is Permanence. Author is Karl Schroeder. If I remember correctly (and clearly my memory isn't to be trusted), Watts says in the afterword of Blindsight that he violently disagrees with Schroeder, or the perspective Schroeder offers, in that book, but I believe he recommends it as a rich exploration of many of the issue Blindsight explores.

   Thanks for the write up. I'm completely sold on Sunflower series, and will probably read it next. It sounds very promising -- and probably short enough that I can slip it in between books 1 and 2 of the Culture series.

   Thanks also for the encouragement to stick with Banks, too. I'll try. I'm not sure I'll be able to last for six full books though. The storytelling in Consider Phlebas -- which I'd call action-adventure sci-fi maximalism -- isn't working all that well for me. There's so much technobabble. There are so many lasers. So much ink is spilled filling out the world just for the sake of it. It's a massive overload and baroque overdose of sci-fi tropes. So far the most interesting episode has been, I think, the main character's interaction with the shuttle on the island.