We Haven’t Met But You’re a Great Fan of Mine: Iain M Banks’s Culture Series

 (spoilers and trigger warnings apply)

The eight, nine, or ten books of Iain M Banks Culture series (depending on how you count them – see below) are some of the most important science fiction novels published in the last forty years. Variously called space opera, utopian futurism or anarcho-techno-syndicalism, the Culture goes beyond the standard sci-fi typified by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke and their contemporaries. Here there are big ideas, even if some of those ideas are not explored in any great depth, but they are the backdrop to each stand-alone novel. Character, rather than science, takes centre stage in the Culture.

The Culture refers to an utopian, post-human society in which biological life and general AI (‘Minds’) exist and work together. Not that this is a human society. Although the Culture is located in the Milky Way, the novels take place as much as fifteen hundred years apart. The titular story of The State of the Art collection does take place on Earth, but humanity is otherwise not featured. That said, the majority of the main characters in the Culture books are humanoid in appearance. Banks, after all, is writing for other humans.

Post-human in this sense refers to the various genetic and technological advancements that augment the people of the Culture. They live for hundreds of years, with many using a ‘neural lace’ grown around the brain to protect them against unexpected death, uploading the consciousness to a lab-grown replacement body. Many in the Culture switch between genders and raise children as both men and women. They also employ various glands in the body to secrete drugs for sleep, alertness, time dilation or enhanced memory, to name but a few examples.

The majority of Culture inhabitants no longer live on planets. Instead, the Culture has constructed great rings (‘Orbitals’), millions of miles in diameter, on which cities are built on plates on the inner ring. Each of the billions of inhabitants are in communication with the central Mind that controls every aspect of their environment. Humanoid Avatars act as the Minds’ representatives on the surface.

The other main population density are found on the various spacecraft of the Culture that whip around the galaxy at speeds many times faster than light. The larger General Systems Vehicles (GSVs) can be home to billions of people, although the average GSV is about the size (or volume) of a large city and house millions rather than billions. These ships are also managed and operated by a central Mind and its Avatars.

The ships of the Culture are perhaps the most well known element of the series, due to the comical names the Minds choose for themselves. Just Read the Instructions, No More Mr Nice Guy, The Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival, Poke it With a Stick, Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life's Rich Tapestry, the list is extensive¹.

There are also ships named in honour to other sci-fi and cultural items. The Someone Else’s Problem seems to be named after the SEP field from Douglas Adams’s Life, the Universe and Everything²: Minority Report after the Philip K Dick short story (and the schmaltzy Hollywood adaptation): Clear Air Turbulence after the Ian Gillan Band album, which bears a resemblance to the yellow striped ship on the LP cover.

Many people know the names of Culture ships thanks to Elon Musk. In an act of typical small-mindedness, Musk named a number of Space X rocket platforms after GSV ships, including Of Course I Still Love You and A Shortfall of Gravitas. Which is a bit like naming a paddle boat after the Titanic. It’s further evidence that Musk might have read a lot of science fiction, but he doesn’t seem to have understood much of it.

The other main occupants of the Culture are Drones. Anything from the size of a fingernail to as large as a dustbin, drones are robotic life. Like R2D2 hovering in the air. The electrical field around them, which presumably allows them to hover, glows in different colours depending on mood. Although entities in their own right, Drones usually accompany a main character on their journey or mission (just like R2D2 in fact). A subset of Drones are Knife Missiles, which are a more overtly weapons-grade Drone. For the most part, Knife Missiles are to Drones what Avatars are to Minds.

The controversy over how many Culture novels there are and what constitutes a Culture novel is complicated by two entries in the series. The aforementioned The State of the Art is a collection of short stories that features two, possibly three, stories set in the Culture universe, including the title story. However, the book also includes a number of non-sci-fi, Earth based stories. Banks published science fiction as Iain M Banks and regular fiction as just Iain Banks. While The State of the Art is a hundred pages long, more than half the book’s length, five of the eight stories included are normal fiction.

Moreover, the novel Inversions is set entirely on a world equivalent to Earth’s medieval era. While there are two moments of Deus Ex Machina that seem to be caused by Culture-esque technology, possibly a Knife Missile, the narrator, Oelph, is a native of the planet, where electricity has yet to be invented, The incidents in question are not witnessed by him directly and he speaks about them as miraculous events (any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic). Alternating chapters focus on The Doctor and The Bodyguard³, who both seem to be Culture citizens in disguise, but the book is routed in medievalism. It’s more The Name of the Rose than The State of the Art.

As such, I will focus mainly on the remaining eight books that make up the Culture series. Luckily there is more than enough material to consider.

Preference is subjective and comes down to personal choice, but I think most people will agree that The Player of Games is the first great Culture novel. The first book in the series, Consider Phlebas, is good, but its follow up is on another level and is arguably the best of the first four Culture books (five, if you include The State of the Art).

All of the Culture novels feature Special Circumstances, the Culture’s equivalent to the CIA or MI6. Many main characters are officers of Special Circumstances, but in The Player of Games, Jernau Morat Gurgeh is a master board game player recruited by Special Circumstances to travel to a civilisation in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The journey takes years, during which time Gurgeh learns to play a game so complex that no one, not even Special Circumstances, expect him to last beyond the opening rounds of the tournament he is about to enter.

The Azad, to whose homeworld Gurgeh is travelling, are a species that base their entire society on this one game. The most skilled players become generals and professors. Even emperor. The Azad spend their entire lives learning the game in order to rise through the ranks of their society. Gurgeh has only a few years to learn the game during his journey out of the galaxy, but hides and underplays his understanding of the game, even from Flere-Imsaho, the Special Circumstances Drone sent to accompany him.

The Player of Games has some similarities with Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. In both books, the central game is complex and neither is described in any great detail. The Glass Bead Game requires expert knowledge of music, mathematics and philosophy. The Azad game involves mini games played using cards or dice, but the main game is played on a board large enough for players to walk around it and interact with the pieces.

Both the Azad and the fictional European country of Castalia are authoritarian in nature. The Glass Bead Game takes place at some unspecified time in the future. The Player of Games takes place a century after The State of the Art, which is set on Earth in the 1970s. Mastery of the game in both The Player of Games and The Glass Bead Game allows for social advancement in their respective societies. How much, if any, knowledge Banks had of Hesse’s novel is unclear, but the books are at least connected in spirit to one another.

Indeed, The Player of Games is the most unique of the Culture novels. There are more accomplished books later in the series, but The Player of Games is a true stand-alone novel in the sense that it has a tone and a style that Banks’s didn’t really use again. Consider Phlebas is similar in the way it follows one POV character for the majority of the narrative, but Bora Horza Gobuchul is a more self-possessed character than Gurgeh. Gobuchul is a mercenary and a survivor. Gurgeh is a civilian and a pawn in the Culture’s plan to destabilise Azad society.

Consider Phlebas is in its way also unique, in that it is the only book that focuses solely on a character from outside the Culture. In this first entry in the series, most of what we know about the Culture is gleaned from what their enemies in the Idrian War think of them. Though, to be fair, they are not exactly wrong. The Culture might be a utopian society, but its dealings with rival empires are Machiavellian in the extreme. Their treatment of the Azad, who live in a dwarf galaxy and lack the capability to cross into the Milky May, demonstrates this. It’s safe to say the Culture do not abide by any equivalent of Star Trek’s Prime Directive.

Consider Phlebas takes place about seven hundred years before the events of The Player of Games and five hundred years before any other book in the series (although there are flashbacks in Excession that take place more than a thousand years earlier). Rather like Asimov’s Foundation and its connecting series, events in The Idrian War become the subject of rumour and folklore in later Culture novels.

After The Player of Games, Banks never again concentrated entirely on one character. Each subsequent book is either a duet of dueling narratives, like Inversions and Use of Weapons, or we find a true space opera of competing stories, all focused on one event or plotline. Excession, Matter, Surface Detail, in fact most of the later novels, are all examples of this second kind of storytelling.

Again, preference is subjective, but for me the best of the Culture novels is Look to Windward. More of a dueling kind of narrative with some elements of space opera, Look to Windward swirls around its main protagonist. Major Quilan is another character from a species external to the Culture, the Chelgrian. Quilan’s wife, also a soldier, is killed during a civil war the Culture instigated (part Machiavelli, part CIA). He is offered the chance to take revenge on the Culture, although the true nature of his mission is kept from him until the end of the book.

Look to Windward is a kind of sequel to Consider Phlebas, in that they both take their titles from lines in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (although there is little else to connect them). I think what elevates Looks to Windward is its treatment of grief and PTST and survivor’s guilt. Quilan’s motivation, ultimately, isn’t about revenge but death-wish and an inability to carry on without his wife. He is vulnerable and, like Gurgeh, used as a pawn by more powerful forces manipulating his grief.

The resolution is bleak but it is honest and not muddied with high-minded rhetoric about the human condition. The best novels offer no resolution because life itself is unresolved. Every life ends in tragedy of one sort or another, if only for the people left behind. Science fiction, it is worth repeating, is about taking contemporary human concerns and placing them at some sufficient remove in time or space in order to examine them with greater objectively. In that sense, Look to Windward is the most human of all the Culture novels. It is melancholic and dark, but it is also the book to which most people should be able to relate.

Banks wrote the Culture novels as a riposte to the dystopian science fiction of the day⁴. Yet for supposedly utopian science fiction, the Culture series is shot through with all of the most extreme forms of violence, including rape, cannibalism and dismembered bodies fashioned into household furniture. True, most of this violence is committed by non Culture species, but the eponymous society has just as much blood on its hands. The Culture is a model of the western world, where opulence and comfort have been achieved at the expense of colonialism, slavery and bloodshed.

Nowhere is the violence more evident than in the penultimate Culture novel, Surface Detail. Here the two main female characters, Lededje Y'breq and Chay, are both victims of sexual violence. Lededje is killed by her abuser as she tries to stab him to death and is resurrected tens of light years away by a neural lace grown in her skull without her knowledge or consent. Chay is an operative in a digital hell, created to control the native population, who becomes trapped and is repeatedly tortured, raped and tricked with visions of escape, before being made into an angel of death, able to kill one person a day and release their souls from hell.

In the meantime, the Culture are going about their usual machinations. They seem to be trying to protect Veppers, the operator of the various digitals hells, who also happens to be Lededje’s abuser. The Culture, though,  are plotting against him. A rouge Culture Mind, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, helps Lededje return to her homeworld, but prevents her from exacting revenge on Veppers when confronted with him. It is another act of duplicity by the Culture and with the servers destroyed that maintain digital hell, Veppers is ripped to pieces by tech implanted in Lededje’s regrown body.

A fitting end perhaps, but it once again shows the darker side of utopia. In a future where we could upload and resurrect ourselves at the flick of a switch, what value would we place on life itself? Like being able to download a book or an album in an instant and then leaving it unheard or unread because it has no physical presence or intrinsic value. To a species obsessed with ownership, would life become equally worthless when it is so easy to download and retain? Another throwaway commodity, like single use plastic. And what protection would we afford peoples lacking similar means to save and download themselves? The history of colonialism and globalisation give hints of a worrying conclusion.

What most utopian science fiction writers quickly learn is that perfection is boring⁵. The original Star Trek series (TOS) from the 1960s was an optimistic, utopian vision of the future, produced against the backdrop of the Summer of Love and the civil rights movement. By the time The Next Generation aired in 1987 (coincidentally the year Consider Phlebas was published), the cynicism of the 70s and 80s Reganomics had made that vision seem as naïve as it ultimately was. The imperfect world of Deep Space 9 (1993-1999) was both a more honest view of the world and an accurate prediction for many of the issues still facing us to this day. The narrative limitations of utopia had given way to boundless imperfection and dystopia, creating one of the best science fiction shows in TV history, as well as leading to the Battlestar Gallactica reboot, which plumbed the depths of dystopian science fiction in the years following 9/11.

There was an attempt to return to utopia in later Star Trek series, but Voyager needed the introduction of Seven of Nine to create conflict and as good as Enterprise became, it’s main human characters often come off as arrogant and self-serving evangelists for the American way of life above all other ideologies. People denounce modern Trek for being a betrayal of Gene Rodenberry’s vision but that vision turned out to be kind of bunk. It was of its time and has not aged well. The idea that no-one in the future would use slang or idiom or more than the most mild of swearwords is a white, educated, middle class view of the world. Every indication is that these things will increase as society becomes more tolerant of colourful language and embraces language outside of the ‘norm’. English in particular has always appropriated words from other languages. The English of the 23rd and 24th centuries will probably sound nothing like 21st century English. If English survives at all.

Science Fiction reflects the time in which it was written. TOS is a reflection of the 60s and second generation Trek a reflection of the concerns of the 80s and 90s. Modern Trek is a reflection of today. People swear in new Trek because characters are allowed to swear on mainstream TV today in a way they couldn’t in 1966 or 1987. In the same way that same sex couples exist in modern Trek in a way TV executives were intolerant (and openly homophobic) towards in the past.

Much of this is also true for the Culture series. It might be a utopian society, but watching normal people going about their ordinary, comfortable lives isn’t very interesting. Hence the main characters of the Culture novels are soldiers and mercenaries and sex slaves and exiled war criminals. Banks argued that the Culture has lived in relative peace for thousands of years and the few episodes depicted in his novels are the exception rather than the rule. The Culture, he said, only interfere in the development of other societies when they absolutely have to, or when a threat to the Culture is identified.

This seems like a conceit. All the evidence from the Culture books indicates they interfere more frequently than either they or their creator would like to admit. Special Circumstances has a lot in common with Star Trek’s Section 31, the covert organisation introduced in Deep Space 9. As we see with their treatment of the Azad and the Chelgrian, Special Circumstances often interfere in the affairs of other planets and societies not because they must but because they can. Section 31 are prepared to commit genocide against the Changelings in order to win the Dominion War. Like all science fiction tropes, these are reflections of our own covert organisations overthrowing democratic governments (or bombing civilians in revenge for crimes of which they are not guilty and had no power to prevent) in order to maintain western global hegemony. We do it not because we have to, but because we want to. After five hundred years of colonialism and empire building, it has become a destructive habit. We just can’t help ourselves.

The Culture novels show that all the technological advancements we can imagine won’t save us from ourselves. People still suffer from boredom and depression and post traumatic trauma. People still cheat and lie, especially to themselves. People still die, despite their best efforts at preservation, and people still grieve for those they have lost. Despite the most advanced general AI working in concert with one another, the Culture is still deceived and bested by individuals and other societies alike. We can’t solve all of life’s little problems and the more we do, the more new problems will blink into existence in unpredicted ways. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t try.

Maybe this is why Banks became more and more interested in medieval societies in the later Culture novels. As well as Inversions, Matter and Surface Detail feature worlds with societal levels roughly equal to the Middle Ages. Amusingly, Banks at one time became so obsessed with the game, Civilisation, he hadn’t done any writing in three months and had to delete the game from his computer and smash the CD to avoid missing another deadline. Although Inversions predates this incident by several years, Matter appears to be the book he was working on at the time.

The main focus of Matter is a feudal society on the eighth level of the Shellworld, Sursamen. The plot centres on palace intrigue. The king is murdered by his adjunct under the cloak of a battlefield injury. His son, Prince Ferbin, witnesses his father’s slaying and flees through the various levels that make up the Shellworld, each an environment in itself, as he attempts to reach the planet’s surface and recruit mercenaries to help him defeat his father’s killer. His younger brother is declared heir to the throne until such time as the regent can arrange the boy king’s death. Meanwhile their sister, Djan Seriy Anaplian, who left the planet fifteen years earlier to became a Special Circumstances agent, hears of her father’s death and makes the journey home. 

Despite the usual elements of space opera, Matter has as much in common with Game of Thrones as it does Foundation or The Expanse. How much of the plot developed from Banks’s addiction to Civilisation and how much he played the game as ‘research’ for the book is unclear⁶. Yet it clearly affected the structure of the book, albeit containing some good science fiction world building. The denouement is as violent and incident packed as any Culture novel, relying on every iota of Culture technology. Yet the final scene of the book returns to the simple life of feudal Sursamen.

War is a common feature of the Culture novels. The Idrian War. The civil war of the Chelgrian. The medieval conflict in Matter. The War of Heaven being waged in Surface Detail. The various internal wars in which Cheradenine Zakalwe is embroiled in Use of Weapons (another non-Culture citizen recruited by Special Circumstances who conceals the true nature of his origins).

Indeed, the lion’s share of the Culture series is about military engagement and covert operations. Other than the first act of The Player of Games, it is not until we get to Look to Windward that we spend any extended period of time in the Culture itself, where much of the main narrative takes place on the Orbital, Masaq’. More time is given over to travel on one GSV or another, but these seem to be the hedonistic, pleasure cruise, party bus division of the Culture and more atypical than life on the Orbitals.

Again, utopia is boring, narratively speaking, and little focus is placed on the sedate regions of the Culture, except as a force pulling at the hero as they the resist the Call to Adventure. In Joseph Campbell’s hero cycle, the Culture might be viewed as the immature state we are destined to reject in setting out to become adults. The majority of the Culture’s unseen citizens are in a state of arrested development as a result of extreme luxury and the guiding hand of the Minds and Special Circumstances. Eden, like all utopias, is stultifyingly boring, which is why Adam and Eve couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.  Yet the Culture has not one omnipotent being watching over it, but countless numbers of them, patrolling Eden’s gates and sending angels down to issue their proclamations (and avenging angels to defeat their enemies). This perhaps explains why the Culture is involved in so much war and conflict on and beyond its borders. Sheer, unmitigated boredom.

Curiously, for a gender fluid utopia, relationships depicted within the Culture are for the most part hetero-normative. There is the relationship between Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil in Excession, in which they both pass through a number of sex changes and impregnate each other, as well as living for a time as a same sex couple. But even this ends in infidelity and infanticide. Yet in a gender fluid society, wouldn’t this be the most interesting kind of romance? One that places no limit or importance on gender or sexuality, but only the love of one sentient being for another over the centuries as they navigate the interpersonal dynamics with each change in gender that seeks to keep things fresh. There is of course the conversation about sexuality as genetics rather than a choice, but one can imagine in a future where one’s gender can be so easily switched, one’s sexuality becomes equally fluid. Life as not only post-human but post-genetic and post-gender. Sexual evolution facilitated through technology.

This is perhaps the biggest criticism of the Culture novels. That Banks built a world of interesting possibilities and then didn’t follow through with its many potential thought experiments. It is true that the Culture books are space opera and each concentrates on some crisis point within the galaxy, but these are also character studies and the sex lives of the characters are for the most part hetero-normative. Whatever the mainstream distaste for such considerations, it seems a lost opportunity to create a world of gender fluidity and then only shine a light on the most frozen regions where men love women and women love men. Other than Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil, the only other kinds of same sex coupling are in the orgiastic parties of the hedonistic GSVs. Or the affair between Gilt President Geljemyn and her underling in The Hydrogen Sonata, which is still a hetero-normative cliché.

To Banks’s credit, the Culture novels are filled with strong, self-possessed, fully realised female characters. They are often the main protagonist in a cavalcade of characters, particularly in the final three books in the series (Matter, Surface Detail and The Hydrogen Sonata). Even in the duelling, two character novels (Use of Weapons and Inversions), female POV characters take up half of the narrative. I’m not sure the Culture ever crosses the threshold for passing the Bechtel Test. The nearest two named women come to having a conversation about something other than a man is in Surface Detail, where Culture agent Yime Nsokyi is sent to prevent Lededje from killing Veppers. The closest we come is with Nsokyi being in conversation about Lededje. The two women never meet and the Nsokyi subplot is perhaps the least important of the novel.

However, it is again a curious kind of redundancy to talk of male and female characters in a gender fluid society. There are no trans characters and the only kind of androgyny is found in the Avatars that represent the Minds. I don’t think we can judge Banks too unfairly, as this is a problem inherent in all science fiction. In shining a light on the rest of the universe, we really only reflect our own personal experience and preference (and prejudice), in the same way that alien races in Star Trek are indentified as ‘other’ by slightly different nose,  forehead and neck ridges. Aliens always conform to human expectations. Klingon women still have cleavage and even reptilian women are identified with prominent bosoms, despite not being mammalian. Even lizard women must conform to an adolescent male idea of sexuality on which much of entertainment is still based.

Indeed, many of these issues come down to the simple fact that science fiction was for the longest time the sole preserve of male writers and directors. Just as progress on Earth moves slowly because white, male, hetero-normative power structures are reluctant to relinquish power and increase diversity, so do we see a mainstream view of society reflected in our science fiction.

If you want a vision of something outside of the conventional, waspish view of the universe, you have to step outside the white-male-centric world and read science fiction written by women and people of colour. Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, with its species of non-binary peoples, was considered revolutionary when it was published in 1969 (though it seems fairly tame by today’s standards, which is a testament to progress made in the last fifty years). Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (aka Lilith’s Brood) presents visitors to Earth who are so truly alien that humans become nauseous at the mere sight of them⁷. Or Afro SF (published 2012), a collection of short science fiction stores written by African writers, which reflects the issues facing the continent, from post-colonialism to political corruption, in the same tradition of all science fiction. There are myriad other examples, all of which get buried beneath the foundations of classic science fiction, which is, for the most part, entirely white and  entirely male. This is starting to change. Albeit slowly.

These criticisms are perhaps a little unfair and overly harsh, because I am a massive fan of Iain M Banks (and Iain Banks) and of the Culture in particular. They are all better than average novels, well written and well executed. What’s more, there is incredible variety in their structure. No two books are exactly alike. Consider Phlebas is a series of adventures. The Player of Games is one contiguous narrative. Use of Weapons is the first dueling narrative, one story moving forwards, the other backwards in time. Excession is the first of the space opera books. The dueling narratives of Inversions are lock-stepped in time.  Look to Windward mashes everything together. Matter and Surface Detail are perhaps the most similar, but still significantly different.

I think what Banks’s science fiction represents is a bridge between the classic 20th century science fiction that runs from Asimov to Philip K Dick and the emergent 21st century worlds of Liu Chixin, Arkady Martine and the countless modern science fiction writers I have yet to read (I have a pile I am working my through). I don’t know if or how much James S. A. Corey’s Expanse series was inspired by the Culture books, but it seems a kind of natural successor. For all its utopian pretensions, the Culture introduced a grittier, darker kind of universe to science fiction and the Expanse definitely leans into that. Both series employ a similar level of casual violence (though the TV adaptation dials it up somewhat). I like the Expanse books, but the prose seems a little terse at times. Could do with a few more run on sentences. A minor criticism.

 

 

There are features to Banks’s final Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata, that make it seem like a book written by a man who knew he was dying. The Gzilt are preparing to Sublime, an activity which had been alluded to in other Culture books, but not enlarged upon. To Sublime is to enter a higher state of reality and leave the physical world (the Real) behind. The book is written as a sequential narrative, counting down to the day on which most, if not all, of Gzilt society will Sublime. Though the reality of Subliming might not be as concrete as many believe. The search for this truth drives the book’s narrative.

All good metaphors for death and the beyond. In fact, Banks wrote the book before his final diagnosis. His final non-fiction book, The Quarry, is the one he completed as he was dying and is structured around a son and his terminally ill father. However, if Banks was going to write a final Culture novel (it was the last book released before his death), the themes addressed in  The Hydrogen Sonata are a fitting and ironic way to conclude the series. It is one of the best of the series: The conclusion feels like Banks accepting death and the uncertainty of what lies beyond. No matter the circumstances under which he wrote it, The Hydrogen Sonata always reminds me of Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, the final two TV series written by Dennis Potter in the mid-90s as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. The desolation of the final scenes of The Hydrogen Sonata play out like a metaphor for a world without Iain Banks living in it. Which is a sadder and more impoverished place to be.

Banks died ten years ago as I write and as a committed socialist and humanitarian, I can only imagine what he would make of what has happened to the UK and the world in general in the decade since he left us. Brexit, Trump, Ukraine, the cost of living, Partygate, anti-Wokeness, transphobia, the refugee crisis: Utopia rarely seemed so beyond our reach. We could do with a few Minds about now to save us from the mindless. And the heartless. And ourselves.

The Culture showed that science fiction novels can embed themselves in a common world without the need for a continuous narrative featuring recurring characters. Which is still something of a radical idea. Even the great world building books of science fiction and fantasy are concentrated on a common theme, whether it be the forging and destruction of the one true ring in the Lord of the Rings, or the formation and concealment of the various incarnations of the Foundation in Asimov’s novels. The actors might change, but the goal remains the same. Either that or authors create new worlds with each new novel⁸. Few authors other than Iain M Banks use world building as a background to a series of single arching, single use narratives.

The moving finger writes. And having writ, moves on. And we must move on. To the science fiction inspired by the Culture. And to the books that follow in its wake. Iain M Banks smoothed the way. His pioneering work should not be forgotten.

Footnotes:

¹A complete list is available at: https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft
²Similarly, the five year long party held on a floating platform in The Hydrogen Sonata appears to be based on a similar one in Life, the Universe and Everything, which, in that book, has been going on for four generations.
³The Doctor’ chapters are narrated by Oelph and ‘The Bodyguard’ by a more general narrator.
⁴I always find it funny that when Blade Runner was released in 1982, it was considered a bleak vision of the future - today it looks almost naively optimistic.
⁵It’s why Dante’s Inferno is enthralling, Purgatory interesting and Paradise dull as dishwater.
⁶Ironically, given Banks’s issues meeting his deadlines, Matter is the book I read quicker than any other. I managed to read all six hundred pages in two days, while holding down a full time job.
⁷Butler’s Patternmaster series does explore elements of the gender fluid relationship of long lived entities, but that relationship is for the most part patriarchal and domineering.
⁸Three other Iain M Banks novels, The Algebraist, Feersum Endjinn and Against a Dark Background are non-Culture books, but nonetheless just as good.

 

The Concept of Albums

Today we hone in on the concept of a concept album. Now pay attention...

The Concept of Albums

I was listening to Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime today, wondering what makes a great concept album.

Apparently many people don’t know what a concept album is, judging from Wikipedia’s list of purported concept albums. I’m unfamiliar with many of the names, but a random sampling include Metallica’s ...And Justice For All and Load (wrong on both counts and if Load, why not Reload?), the first four Blur albums (I mean honestly) and Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage (this one I find the most baffling of all).

What’s just as surprising here is what’s missing, given these albums represent the criteria on which we are supposed to judge what makes a concept album. Metallica but no Megadeth, several of who’s album get nearer to approaching a unifying concept or theme. I’m not sure that a jazz album can be a concept album, but if Maiden Voyage is a concept album then I can think of several that have a better claim, including Hancock’s own 1973 album, Head Hunters and certainly Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. As for Blur, well to paraphrase a line from something the source of which escapes me for the moment, stop it, now you’re just naming albums.

Most egregious in the Wikipedia list is the inclusion of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most famous concept album that isn’t a concept album, the clue being in the fact that The Beatles themselves said it isn’t a concept album. Abbey Road might have a better claim, or at least the second side of Abbey Road, which is broadly conceptual, like the second half of Queen II, an album which also appears in the Wikipedia list.

For me, an album must have something of the musical about it to be considered conceptual. It must be almost operatic. Which is odd, given that I can’t stand musicals and I can only listen to opera. Watching opera is like having teeth pulled. I do enjoy a good concept album. However, a group or musician attempting a concept album is like a footballer attempting a bicycle kick. Get it right and it’s spectacular. Get it wrong and you look like an absolute dick.

Operation: Mindcrime is a fine example of getting the concept album right. It contains all of the elements for a good concept album. It has the structure of an hour long musical, including talky acting bits in between songs. There are leitmotifs borrowed from Wagnerian opera, which return to haunt the album at various points. It also has a clear plot of revolutionaries, terrorism, murder and corrupt priests, which is quite easy to follow. The narrative is circular, ending at the same point at which it begins. 

Operation: Mindcrime also contains echoes of maybe the most famous actual concept album yet recorded, Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Especially near the end of Mindcrime will you hear very deliberate musical strains referencing The Wall. It’s a nice touch. You hear the same thing in Mastodon’s Leviathan, a concept album built around Moby Dick, which tips its hat to Iron Maiden’s 1988 concept album, Seventh Son of the Seventh Son, which is about... well, guess.

It’s perhaps a little kitsch to admit this, but I love The Wall. A friend of mine used to say that rather than watching horror films, he preferred sitting down to listen to a Slayer album with the lyrics sheet in front of him. I used to do almost the same with Pink Floyd. I would have a smoke or four, get into bed with all but my face wrapped in sheets and listen to the whole of The Wall in the dark through a pair of headphones. It beats the hell out of a emersion tank. The Wall’s musical narrative tell the story of the rock star, Pink, and his slow decent into madness. I love The Wall because it’s an album of eighty minutes of unrelenting bleakness, punctuated by two minutes of light at the end of the tunnel. I also love it because by accident or by design songs like The Trial contain many of the same tropes as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

The Wall and Operation: Mindcrime can perhaps be better described as rock operas than concept albums, the same as The Who’s Tommy or The Kink’s Arthur. Yet this, in one sense, is exactly what makes a concept album. There are many that describe Floyd’s previous three albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals as also being conceptual. I would submit only the last album of the three for consideration. A concept album isn’t just one in which similar themes are explored, there has to be an overarching, unifying theme, if not an actual fictional narrative. If Dark Side of the Moon was a concept album, then so would most other albums ever recorded. I’m sure every One Direction and Justin Bieber album could be considered conceptual using this standard. Is that what you want? Is it?

  

Sloppy categorising is exactly the same thing that allows ...And Justice for All and Maiden Voyage to be accepted into what should be a highly exclusive club. For instance, what about the Alice in Chain album, Dirt? Is this a concept album? All but one of its tracks can be argued to be about heroin addiction. I would say that no, it isn’t, for exactly the reason that one track (Rooster) is about the experiences of guitarist Jerry Cantrell’s father’s experiences in Vietnam. Yet Dirt probably has a better claim than half of the albums in Wikipedia’s list.

As egregious as Sgt. Pepper’s inclusion in this list is the exclusion of PJ Harvey’s Mercury Music Prize winning album, Let England Shake, an album that is as conceptual as you can get without actually crossing over into rock opera. I honestly don’t think that a better album has been produced this side of the millennium, a record all about Britain and its involvement in wars now and centuries past. I have waxed lyrical about Let England Shake at length in my essay, The Sombrer Opacities of the Gloom.

Curiously, you also won’t find any Bob Dylan albums in the Wikipedia list. A convincing case can certainly be made for John Wesley Harding, given that it was recorded when The Beatles were recording Sgt. Pepper and The Rolling Stones were copying them with Their Satanic Majesties. Dylan meanwhile recorded an album that is about as far from psychedelia as it’s possible to go. An collection of songs that don’t contain any choruses is certainly a concept. A argument could also be made for Blood on the Tracks and Time Out of Mind, great divorce porn albums them both. Yet like Alice in Chains Dirt, the concept doesn’t  entirely track across either album. A better case can be made for Jack White’s Blunderbuss, which is both divorce porn and consistently conceptual.

Tom Waits has recorded a handful of concept albums, but many of these were recorded for actual plays (The Black Rider, Alice and Blood Money). Nighthawks at the Diner from 1975 though is that rarest of breeds, a concept album recorded live, in which Wait’s channels the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s beat poet performances. There is also the curious case of the Easy Star All-Stars. The Easy Star All-Stars rerecord classic albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Ok Computer, Sgt. Pepper, Thriller, etc. in reggae and dub styles. That’s conceptual art for you. Meta Conceptual even. Easy Star All-Stars’s version of Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig in the Sky is one of my favourite things ever.

 

Perhaps the most exciting artist to be producing conceptual albums in recent years is Janelle Monae. Her debut EP, Metropolis, and two albums, The ArchAndroid and The Electric Lady continue the same narrative, where Monae’s alter-ego, the android Cindi Mayweather, falls in love with a human being in the future and travels back in time to the present day to escape arrest. It’s high concept indeed, heavily influenced by Fritz Lang’s science fiction silent film, Metropolis, as well as the robotic stories of Isaac Asimov.

I’m not exactly a fan of modern R&B, but genius comes in many forms and Monae is there or thereabouts, taking her influence from artists as diverse as Michael Jackson and Prince, Outcast, the B52s, David Bowie, Scissor Sisters, Rachmaninoff and George Gershwin. Like Dylan, she had the foresight to write a polemic entitled Mr. President, without mentioning the incumbent at the time (Dubya). My one criticism is that she should spend more time singing the song during Obama’s administration and less time hanging out at the White House. After all, Dylan continues to perform It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) whether the President who ‘must sometime have to stand naked’ be Johnson, Nixon or one either of the Bushes.

So there you go. I hope we have managed to establish the concept of a concept album. Or at least tightened our definition. OK Computer, yes (just), Kid A and Amnesiac, no. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, yes, The Kink’s Muswell Hillbillies, no. Any Frank Zappa album, yes, any Captain Beefheart album, no. Got it? Good, ‘cause I don’t want have to run through this shit again (*winks*).

Get it done.

The Completist

“Hey, hey, hey, we’re moving in the right direction now.”

The Completist

As explored in a previous article (see Obsessions), I can get quite obsessed by certain things. As we saw, I love books, both collecting and reading them. As is expected of the obsessive reader, there are certain authors that I read time and again and others that published in such prolific profundity that the challenge is to hunt down and read their every last publication.

Isaac Asimov, for instance, published over four hundred books in his lifetime, fiction and non-fiction, covering everything from science and science fiction to commentaries on the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. I don’t quite have the time or the money to hunt down that many works from one author, but I do have a dozen or so Asimov books so who knows what may happen in the future. The Foundation Series and his short stories though are done. You’ll learn more about science reading his book, The Left Hand of the Electron, than from a dozen Horizon documentaries.

Back down the echelons of the more manageable, I’ve been obsessed with Emile Zola ever since I read Germinal fifteen years ago. Germinal is just one novel in Zola’s Rouqon-Macquart series, which runs to twenty books and one short story. The rule here is that they have to be found in second hand bookshops. So far I have found only half (less one short story), although two of those found are in the original French, waiting for when my French gets a little stronger (it’s getting there, though Zola apparently uses a style strange even to native speakers).

Even in English though, the Rouqon-Macquart series is an amazing group of novels, grander in scope even than Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, featuring over  three hundred main characters from the same family. Germinal alone is in my opinion amongst the greatest novels ever written, certainly in my top ten, even up against some pretty stiff competition. 

To the best of my knowledge I have read and own mostly everything by Ernest Hemingway except for a handful of his later short stories and his first book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon. Actually, I also own, The Dangerous Summer, his second book on bullfighting, which I still haven’t got around to reading, given that I don’t exactly approve of the sport. Then I’ve read plenty of his stories and articles on hunting despite not approving of that either. I’ll eventually read both of them. It’s the completist in me.

I agree with Michael Palin’s assessment of Hemingway: we wouldn’t have got along, but he always wrote passionately. His fiction is as much a travelogue, from Kilimanjaro to Cuba, Venice to Key West, and his journalism gives one as much a sense of the First World War as his novel, A Farwell to Arms. As with Zola though, I think I read his best book first. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a brilliant novel, although long, capturing much of the confusion of the Spanish Civil War. If you want to start with something lighter, there is always the much shorter The Old Man and the Sea, which only takes an hour or two.

My favourite American writer though is and probably always will be John Steinbeck. In the Maher Hierarchy of Great Writers, Steinbeck sits second only to James Joyce. Like Hemingway, I think I’ve read pretty much everything of Steinbeck’s, from the well-known masterpieces, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden (my personal favourite), to the lesses known greats like The Winter of Our Discontent and In Dubious Battle, to his non-fiction gems, Once There Was a War, Travels With Charlie and Journal of a Novel. There a couple of earlier novels that I’ve not found yet and I got a bit bored with The Log of The Sea of Cortez, written when sailing the Sea of Cortez with his scientist friend, Ed Ricketts (the model for Doc in the novels, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday). As with Hemingway’s bullfighting books, I circle back around to it eventually.

I can’t say enough in praise of John Steinbeck. He never wrote a bad novel (ok, The Wayward Bus wasn’t great), but he did write several masterpieces that no one can claim to be well-read without having read. Any writer who wants to know about narrative structure should study Steinbeck in detail. There isn’t a writer living or dead that tells a better story than John Steinbeck. Neither is there a writer who knows better how to end a novel. Steinbeck novels always end with a bang.

 

Then there’s Graham Greene. There’s two early Greene novels that have never been republished, at the author’s own request, which I will track down someday, but otherwise I’ve read pretty much everything. Greene was certainly more of a mainstream writer than Steinbeck, perhaps even Hemingway, but there are still perhaps half a dozen of his novels that remain master pieces. Certainly, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, Brighton Rock and Travels With My Aunt are some of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

As with Hemingway and Steinbeck, Green wrote a number of non-fiction works that are just as entertaining and enlightening as his fiction. His volumes of autobiography, Ways of Escape and A Sort of Life are revelatory on his highly complex character. He converted to Roman Catholicism, but led anything but a virtuous life, having an affair with a married actress, as fictionalised in The End of the Affair. He was a former MI6 operative, but also a habitual drug user, including cannabis and opium, the latter of which he smoked during his time as journalist in Vietnam, where his experiences led him to write The Quiet American, concerning the CIA’s terrorist activities in the country during the 1950s. The main character of the British journalist, Thomas Fowler, is as autobiographical a character as Greene ever created.

In reading Greene’s non-fiction work, Getting to Know the General, I first heard of how the country of Panama came to be and it’s worth repeating. Panama was for a time part of Columbia. Then the Panama Canal started to be built, but when the private American companies in charge of the project ran into financial difficulty, the American government took over the project, unilaterally decided that Panama wanted to be its own country and declared Panamanian independence. The country was then further split into the Panama Canal zone, run by the Americans, and the non-Canal zone run by the Panamanian government. Greene became good friends with General Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama until Torrijos was killed in a car crash in 1981, even accompanying him at one point to speak at the UN in New York. Getting to Know the General is another hidden gem that most people know nothing about. See also, Journey Without Maps, Greene’s account of exploring the country of Liberia.

There are many other authors that I hope to one day complete reading. One Kurt Vonnegut novel, Player Piano, remains on my list, plus a number of his short story and non-fiction collections. I also have a great love for Alice Walker. I’ve read all of Walker’s major novels and some lesser known fiction and non-fiction. Like Zola, everything I have read by Alice Walker I have so far found in second hand bookshops, but there is enough left from her bibliography that I think I will have to hunt down through Abe Books and the like. Her most famous novel is The Colour Purple, for obvious reasons, but The Temple of My Familiar is even better, the narrative switching between a number of different characters, including Celie and Shug Avery from The Colour Purple.

I guess the common theme to emerge from this article is that I love reading writers who are also fascinating characters in their own right and Alice Walker has always fascinated me. She was taught at Spellman College in Atlanta by the heroic historian, Howard Zinn, married a Jewish man and moved to Mississippi, where it is said they were the first ‘interracial couple’ (I’ve never really understood that term, as simplistic and idiotic as all ‘racial’ language) in Mississippi and had a relationship with the singer, Tracey Chapman. Aside from one small collection essays, I read nothing of Walker’s non-fiction. The joy of reading is in the anticipation of books yet unread.

On a final note, I’m currently halfway through The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell. A more inaccurate title for a book can rarely have been conceived, with section titles including The Epistemologist, The Metaphysician and The Philosopher and Expositor of Science. Russell was also a prolific writer of books, mostly non-fiction, and I have for years hunted down titles such as Political Ideals, Sceptical Ideals, On Praise of Idleness and The ABC of Relativity in second hand bookshops, although it’s been a while since I found new one.

Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is a masterpiece and an excellent introduction to the subject. Philosophy and physics have been at odds for years with each rarely even pretending to understand the other, despite both disciplines being subordinate to mathematics. Bertrand Russell was that rarest of breeds, a man who bridged the gap between mathematics, physics, philosophy, logic and linguistics and time spent in Russell’s company is time never wasted. A proper, full review of The Basic Writings will follow in a week or so.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should also say that there are still a few minor Shakespeare plays I’ve not yet read. I’m savouring them.

Get it done.