By a large margin my favourite author. The Wasp Factory was the first novel of his I read and it was great, but Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games utterly blew my mind.
Agreed. I became a fan of his after reading just a few chapters of The Player of Games, and have since read almost everything he has ever published. He is an author of extraordinary skill.
Which Banks book should I start with? I was going to start with the Player of Games after your comment, but it turns out it's part of a series, and Consider Phlebas is the first one. Does it matter?
I'd suggest Player of Games first; I found it better as an introduction to the Culture. They're not really a series as such; his Culture novels share a setting but don't share any characters (well, almost none) or any particular plot continuity, so you certainly don't have to read them in order.
I'd suggest PoG as a starting point to explain what the Culture's about, which I think it does better than CP because the main character in that is not of the Culture. YMMV though.
No, it doesn't really matter. Each of the Culture novels is basically standalone. They occasionally reference events amongst each other, but more in an "this is an interesting story too" manner.
I'd suggest not starting with the Culture novels. The Algebraist is more accessible because it's not constantly referring to a mysterious super-organization that's driving the plot.
The Culture books are not really a series so much as a collection of stories all taking place in a single imaginary universe. Plots and characters from one book occasionally turn up as background details in another, but there is no reason to read them in order.
I've read in a Amazon review that it is recommended to start with Consider Phlebas, then The Player of Games and finally Use of Weapons (as a first start into the Culture, that is).
I've bought them three myself and will read them in this order.
Use of Weapons is great, but the writing is poorer than the other two.
Heh. Interesting. I'd say exactly the opposite myself. Not that I dislike the other two - PoG is one of my faves of his SF work - but to me UoW is a vastly better work of literature, both in structure and character development. Less full of SFnal goodies than some of his later work, but all the better for that in some ways.
To everyone who enjoyed Player of Games, I ask.. why?
I'm not suggesting your opinions are wrong, of course, but I had a much different impression. Obviously Player of Games is well regarded by many people, so I'm curious to know what I missed.
--- SPOILERS BELOW ---
My general impression was that the Empire of Azad was that its conception lacked imagination. The peculiarities of the species (the three sexes, the society built around a board game, etc) could have made for a very interesting culture, but those instead the peculiarities were mostly left untouched and the culture was recognizable as human in every way. The greatest offense, in my opinion, is that the most interesting part of the book (the game Azad) was left almost entirely undescribed. An alien species should be different. Vastly different. These were humans painted green on Star Trek.
> An alien species should be different. Vastly different.
That is one thing you could do with an alien species. Banks has done that elsewhere quite a bit. It could be that his imagination failed him here. Or he could have made a conscious choice, seeking a specific effect.
I think it was the latter. For me, part of the point of literature is to explore what it means to be human. One of the things that comes up over and over in Banks's work is encounters between developed and primitive cultures. He uses the contrasts to examine where we've come from, who we are, and where we might go.
Player of Games in particular to me spends a lot of time looking at the desire to win, and also the desire to play for high stakes. The Culture's post-scarcity society makes bets meaningless. How does somebody with a gambler's nature fare in that context? And how does somebody raised in that context change when they become immersed in a society built around gamesmanship and gambling? The Azadians are an exaggeration of particular aspects of humanity because he's trying to explore those aspects. If they were more alien, you would identify with them less, which I think would weaken the impact.
If you're reading Banks for things like detailed descriptions of fictional games, you should probably look elsewhere. He's definitely the kind of guy who likes building elaborate sets and then showing them to you. But they are there to support the drama that is performed in front of them.
Banks explains, in one the books, how the universe somehow produces humanoids all over the place, for unknown reasons; probably it's simply an optimal shape in a certain type of gravity and atmosphere; and that this is why many of the species in the books are humanoid. It's a writer's way out, really, and a perfectly adequate one.
Banks has other weird and interesting species appearing in the periphery. But the books are ultimately not about weird aliens.
He also goes further in this explanation in another work (whose name eludes me), in so far as some races deliberately seed the galaxy with humans so that when a race such as ours breaks free of their solar system, they don't get all hegemonic because there are already humans everywhere.
I read Consider Phlebas in one go during a day off between finishing my final year project at Uni and starting revising for my finals - would have been May '88.
