t might be a good idea for Americans to start here. In Britain,
where Iain Banks has been extremely popular since the beginning of his
career 16 years ago, Look to Windward will read as a kind of recessional
to the world of the Culture, a recessional laced with joy. But--as T.S.
Eliot said more than once--in our end is our beginning. Start here.
Start with T.S. Eliot himself, who also wrote the following famous
lines in The Waste Land, which Banks uses as an epigraph:
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
The burden of meaning of The Waste Land is famously complex, and it may
be that Banks means to test our knowledge of the last century of human
life on the planet through his intricate use of the quote, from which he
has extracted two book titles. After all, as far as Eliot was concerned,
the Waste Land is not only World War I, when civilization as we'd known it for centuries began to end; the Waste Land is also Us. But maybe
Banks's intention is simpler than that (though it is dangerous to quote
Eliot; it is like quoting the century).
Maybe it's more to the point to notice that Banks' first SF
novel--it is also his first novel about the galaxy-spanning civilization
known as the Culture--was called Consider Phlebas (1987), and that
what happens in Look to Windward, centuries later, does much to redeem
the tragedy and chaos that mark the earlier story, as though it had taken
the helm of the earlier tale and set its course aright.
Which is a way of defining redemption: to take the mistold tale of
the past, and tell it better this time. If we can define redemption as a
way of freeing ourselves from history, then the bottom line of Look to
Windward is redemption. Though it mirrors and repeats Consider Phlebas
in a number of ways, Look to Windward is in fact all about history not
repeating itself.
Look to Windward is about taking the helm. It is, therefore, the
best possible introduction to the Culture for readers not yet familiar
with Banks' great space-opera notion about how to manage the future.
A different kind of Culture
Very briefly, the Culture is a vast, galaxy-spanning compact
between the Minds (hugely evolved Artificial Intelligences who govern the
vast ships and vaster Orbitals that comprise the Culture's home
territories) and the Involved (species sufficiently evolved to interact
with one another; Homo sapiens, by the skin of its teeth, is one of
these). The population of the Culture, at the time of Look to Windward,
is 31 trillion beings. Most live on Orbitals--ring-shaped space habitats
typically 10 million kilometers in circumference, and 6,000 kilometres
wide at the base of the encircling ring, which orbit selected suns. But
this is all icing; the essence of the Culture does not lie in
measurements.
The secret of the Culture is the absence of scarcity. This is what
distinguishes Banks' left-leaning, European conception from most American
space-opera visions--most of them entrepreneurial--of the nature of
galactic civilization. It is not that the Culture is rich, though it is
inconceivably rich in the goods and ingredients necessary for the physical
continuation of biological life; it is that the fundamental contract
between all 31 trillion citizens of the Culture, and the Minds Who
maintain them, states unalterably that everything is free: "in the
Culture, anybody anytime could experience anything anywhere for nothing."
Back here on Earth, in the late ravenous plague-years of a world
system which would starve to death without scarcity to profit from, this
is a revolutionary notion; up in the astonishingly complex environment of
a typical Orbital like Masaq', where Look to Windward is mostly set,
scarcity would only be an issue if it occurred, when it would be treated
as an accident, or a sin. Sentient beings--humans among them--are too busy
living to worry about whether or not they deserve to.
When readers first encountered Consider Phlebas, none of this
was known. The protagonist of that novel seemed normal enough. As a
mercenary bound to the Idurans, a valiant war-faring race, he seemed to be
a typical hero of our SF times. And the soft, slippery, Machiavellian
Culture his employers were combatting seemed conventionally lacking in
moral fiber. Only gradually did we discover that our protagonist (and we)
were wrong, and that the beings who represented the Culture were the good
guys. But this was too late for the hero, who dies uselessly. He is
Phlebas, but nobody seems to have been considering him.
Healing the great scar of the past
Culture novels--the other titles in the series are The Player of
Games (1988), The State of the Art (1989), the savage Use of
Weapons (1990), Excession (1996) and the sly sleight-of-hand
Inversions (1998)--tend to be very loosely connected, but Look to Windward does hearken back clearly to the first book. Six hundred years
after the Iduran War, a grave moment is approaching: the moment when the
Culture-caused nova that ended the war finally becomes visible to the
inhabitants of Masaq' Orbital, 600 light years distant from the scene of
the tragedy. The Masaq' Mind, which had been intimately involved in the
War, and the billions of Involved who live on the Orbital, wish to
commemorate the becoming-visible of the great scar of the past.
The plot then thickens, but brightly. The underlying engine of
story may be inherently bleak--as always in Banks' work, whether SF or
not--but the texture of Look to Windward is shot through with gaiety. An
emissary--from a system whose uplifting to Involved status had been,
unusually, bungled by the Culture--has been primed to cause enormous damage to Masaq' in retribution; a great composer--in exile from the same
rigidly hierarchical system--threatens not to compose the music necessary
to honour the Iduran dead; a Culture citizen, trapped inside a sentient
floating leviathan, learns of the plot against Masaq' and warns the
nearest Mind with his last gasp.
But none of any of this really matters, though we do note that the
emissary's attempt to destroy Masaq' subtly mirrors the mercenary's
doomed attempts to win an unjust conflict in Consider Phlebas. The plot
as a whole unpacks neatly, though nothing actually happens, and this
time round the emissary--the creature caught in an unenlightened world--is
redeemed. What we mainly remember, however, is the slow unveiling, through
discussions and guided tours and astonishments, of the whole magnificence
of the Culture in its pomp.
The previous novels in the series--there may not be a new Culture
novel for some time--may now be read in the knowledge that in the dream
world of Iain M. Banks there will always be a Mind above us, "forever
keeping an eye to windward for approaching storms," and that, in this
dream world, humans like us can be imagined enjoying the freedom, licence,
space, time, energy, love, zest we aspire to even now.
So start here. Then explore backward to Phlebas.
