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Bezig met laden... Surface Detail (editie 2011)door Iain M. Banks (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkSurface Detail door Iain M. Banks
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I love the culture tech ! ( ) This is difficult. And it gets more and more difficult with each Culture novel I read. First of all - world and conceptions are beyond great, I have no words or english language skills to talk about it, really. Too much incoherent bubbly and musical thoughts. Almost every Culture novel at the end comes to me with two faces. There is always something to like and something to not like. And the best thing? Both of this faces grows and changes with time. That is one of the most fabulous thing about Culture. Never as simple as first impression, never as simple as understanding, never as simple as afterthought. On most of the novels I have read I can give several completely different reviews at different times. Never the same. Almost to the point of "and I don't really know what the heck I'm writing about right now". So, here is quick and simple - this novel didn't blown my brain out like "Use of weapons", or make curl with pain like "Consider Phlebias", or left empty like "Player of games" or whatever. It just showed some things about Culture, some of them so high up the power scale that it really doesn’t matter anymore. Until... next time. This is kind of a weird book because I feel the central concept is a big introduction to make and messes with the uniqueness of a species in a previous book Feel it's worth warning that the book contains some rape stuff and there are some descriptions of kind of grotesque over the top gore/body horror type stuff. No rape scenes, just mentions of it. Very ending thing Oh and the epilogue gets a dig in at right wing revisionist historians so hell yeah I think I’ve read six Culture novels now and only really liked the first two. This one has one sick idea at its core — with infinite processing power, hells can be actually instantiated as virtual worlds nonetheless all too real to those who end up in them — but there’s no way it had to be over six hundred pages. At least one of the core narratives seems to have been no more than a sandbox for Banks’s imagination and could have been cut entirely. I like Space Opera in theory but so often it falls down into tiresome battle scenes and action sequences and there’s a lot of that here. The pacing is whack, too. Banks spends 550 pages floating around the galaxy with his sentient (and always enjoyable) ships and grab bag of aliens and pan-humans, then wraps things up hastily and somewhat anti-climactically. Surface Detail, set in Banks's Culture universe, tells the story of a small-time spacefaring civilization, the Sichultian Enablement, and its wealthy magnate Veppers. Having completely dominated his own society through capitalistic machinations, Veppers aims higher and negotiates with much more advanced civilizations involved on both sides of a galaxy-wide war, manipulating and backstabbing his way to even more wealth. The Culture itself is not involved in this war but definitely has a preferred outcome, and after picking up Vepper's escaped slave, alternately emphasizes with her plight and tries to use her to influence the war. The book focuses on how much of a despicable and capricious person Veppers is, drawing obvious parallels to billionaires in our own society. Filled with realpolitik between many galactic civilizations, the overbearing personality of Veppers, and all of the Culture accoutrements we know from Banks's novels, Surface Detail was a fascinating read.
Those who love the Culture will know the best lines often go to the artificial intelligences. In Surface Detail the stand-out character is a sadistic Abominator class ship called the "Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints". The warship's barely concealed glee when, after centuries of waiting, it finally gets to blow some other ships up, is hilarious, and its motives remain intriguingly mysterious. Some other characters, particularly the Special Circumstance agent Yime Nsokyi, remain a little underdrawn. But this is a minor quibble – the novel's real power lies in the absorbing questions it poses about the value of the real, as opposed to the virtual, about who or what is expendable, and whether a society is better held together by threats or by promises. Onderdeel van de reeks(en)The Culture (9) PrijzenOnderscheidingen
When sex slave Lededje Y'breq is murdered by a politician on the planet Sichult, the artificial intelligence running one of the Culture's immense starships resurrects her so she can seek revenge. Meanwhile, the Culture is uneasily watching the conflict over whether to preserve virtual Hells for the souls of "sinners" or give them the release of death. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. Orbit Books2 edities van dit boek werden gepubliceerd door Orbit Books. Edities: 0316123404, 0316123412 Hachette Book GroupEen editie van dit boek werd gepubliceerd door Hachette Book Group. |