Matter
Iain M. Banks is one of my favourite authors. His Complicity was a very good book with one of the characters being Edinburgh itself, and The Bridge is an interesting admixture of dreams and reality all on the backdrop of the Forth Rail Bridge. He does good space opera, stories of the pan-human machine sentience society the Culture, meddling in the affairs of other with fantastic ship names. The Player of Games shows the culture pitted against a barbarian society in single combat, while Use of Weapons I think is my absolute favourite.
The craftsmanship of the two story lines in Use of Weapons, one drawing away from and one drawing toward a single point in the life of the protagonist is really impressive. And Banks does get you in the end, having spent all this time looking through the world with the eyes of the protagonist and...well, lets just say things are not what they seem. You can find an extract from the book here, just to whet your appetite.
So I've been awaiting his latest culture novel, Matter. I got it for Easter (lovely tradition). It's not his best. Frankly, I can't get through the bloody thing. It's long, it's heavy, and I just don't give a tinker's dam about any of the characters and I don't care what happens to them.
I really HATE that.
The craftsmanship of the two story lines in Use of Weapons, one drawing away from and one drawing toward a single point in the life of the protagonist is really impressive. And Banks does get you in the end, having spent all this time looking through the world with the eyes of the protagonist and...well, lets just say things are not what they seem. You can find an extract from the book here, just to whet your appetite.
So I've been awaiting his latest culture novel, Matter. I got it for Easter (lovely tradition). It's not his best. Frankly, I can't get through the bloody thing. It's long, it's heavy, and I just don't give a tinker's dam about any of the characters and I don't care what happens to them.
I really HATE that.
- Globalization, conduct norms and ‘culture conflict’: perceptions of violence and crime in an ethnic albanian context
- Drugs and popular culture: drugs, media and identity in contemporary society
- Warm Christmas
- Air gun wounding and current UK laws controlling air weapons
- Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. By Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward and Jock Young (London: Sage, 2008) * Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism. By Steve Hall, Simon Winlow and Craig Ancrum (Cullompton: Willan, 2008, 248pp. {pound}19.50 pb)
