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A review by outcolder
The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks
2.0
The first half of the book is a collection of short stories that were excellent but most of the last hundred pages is a novella that I hated, followed by a short piece that was even worse.
My problems with the novella were: (1) too much dialog, not enough story. (2) too much exposition about the Culture for a short piece. I guess he wanted that people who hadn't read other Culture stuff could read it and get it because he has what I considered long speeches from Contact agents explaining to each other stuff about the Culture that they would not only already know but find trite because as Contact agents they would have thought a lot about what the character was saying. So for a reader who has a few Culture novel bricks under the belt, it is not only boring to read so much exposition, it also doesn't seem right in the story. (3) I hate when god-like artificial intelligences study the Earth's cultures and end up obsessing over "Western" literature. Supposedly, these things can read everything ever written in the blink of an eye and then, not just in this book but in other SF, they get all into a stuffy literary canon. It would cost almost nothing for an SF author to name drop Popul Vuh or "Things Fall Apart" alongside the usual Europeans.
So given all that, I would have preferred if he'd taken the things he wanted to say about Earth and made it one of his big old Culture brick books but about another planet. Leave Earth out of it. If it had been some other planet that was on the brink of self destruction but still had hope of getting it together, and fractions within a Contact vessel were arguing about whether to "save" them or leave them alone, I think most readers would get it that it was about Earth and it would have the advantage of not suddenly placing the Culture stories in our present and galactic neighborhood.
Then there's the last bit in here, called "Scratch" which gets an F. This kind of thing has been done to death in the 1960s.
My problems with the novella were: (1) too much dialog, not enough story. (2) too much exposition about the Culture for a short piece. I guess he wanted that people who hadn't read other Culture stuff could read it and get it because he has what I considered long speeches from Contact agents explaining to each other stuff about the Culture that they would not only already know but find trite because as Contact agents they would have thought a lot about what the character was saying. So for a reader who has a few Culture novel bricks under the belt, it is not only boring to read so much exposition, it also doesn't seem right in the story. (3) I hate when god-like artificial intelligences study the Earth's cultures and end up obsessing over "Western" literature. Supposedly, these things can read everything ever written in the blink of an eye and then, not just in this book but in other SF, they get all into a stuffy literary canon. It would cost almost nothing for an SF author to name drop Popul Vuh or "Things Fall Apart" alongside the usual Europeans.
So given all that, I would have preferred if he'd taken the things he wanted to say about Earth and made it one of his big old Culture brick books but about another planet. Leave Earth out of it. If it had been some other planet that was on the brink of self destruction but still had hope of getting it together, and fractions within a Contact vessel were arguing about whether to "save" them or leave them alone, I think most readers would get it that it was about Earth and it would have the advantage of not suddenly placing the Culture stories in our present and galactic neighborhood.
Then there's the last bit in here, called "Scratch" which gets an F. This kind of thing has been done to death in the 1960s.