389 pages
English language
Published Dec. 3, 1997 by Bantam Books.
Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared.
Now it is back.
Solid space opera, but construction (how Banks creates suspense and mystery) and message ("more humility, less competition") are a little in-the-face ("man merkt die Absicht und ist verstimmt"). Good: how Banks deals with identity, memory and guilt.
I know it's not fair to the book itself, but I struggled to finish this one because the narrator's voice did not agree with my ears. It's quite interesting overall, a bit complex but I think necessarily so given the topic.
Although it's interesting to see the Culture through the eyes of the Minds that effectively run it, I was ultimately disappointed by this book.
It starts off strong and brings in some interesting elements and characters, but at the end the whole thing just sort of fizzles out.
It also broke a lot of mystique the Minds held for me. These are impossibly advanced intelligences, with capabilities that we can't ever imagine. Intelligences that have to cripple themselves mentally just to communicate with us. Yet they are portrayed here as a pack of immature anarchists.
Maybe my mental image of the Minds was wrong, but I liked the idea that something you could spend an hour having a stupid conversation about bunnies with was simultaneously running a ship, talking to 100,000 other people, and doing all sorts of esoteric multidimensional mathematics. It's not pretending to have an obsession with bunny …
Although it's interesting to see the Culture through the eyes of the Minds that effectively run it, I was ultimately disappointed by this book.
It starts off strong and brings in some interesting elements and characters, but at the end the whole thing just sort of fizzles out.
It also broke a lot of mystique the Minds held for me. These are impossibly advanced intelligences, with capabilities that we can't ever imagine. Intelligences that have to cripple themselves mentally just to communicate with us. Yet they are portrayed here as a pack of immature anarchists.
Maybe my mental image of the Minds was wrong, but I liked the idea that something you could spend an hour having a stupid conversation about bunnies with was simultaneously running a ship, talking to 100,000 other people, and doing all sorts of esoteric multidimensional mathematics. It's not pretending to have an obsession with bunny ears, it's just a minutely small part of its totality.
As a human, getting a glimpse of the true nature of being like that, would be frightening.
