Against A Dark Background: Iain M. Banks

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A very entertaining read, but despite some meaningful reflections, they are lost in the background, so after finishing it you are left almost as you were before. You’ll visit a society where the inhabitants deliberately retard their technical development by giving their surplus to a ‘Useless King’ (his official title) who blows it all on pointless gadgets, keeping his nation at a near medieval level of existence. Imagine the novel equivalent of a film that begins like Star Wars and ends like Reservoir Dogs and you'll have some idea of the tonal shift I'm talking about. It experienced a degree of regret that she could reappear so unexpectedly - and so delightfully - after its resurrection, only to give it another cause to mourn the passing of the old world . They reckon there were a couple of reactors in there nobody knew about; from the radiation signature of the leaks they're very old and very dirty, and their containment's been breached; it's only the wreckage that's keeping it more or less sealed.

A great example of this first edition first printing title, by Iain M Banks, that looks smart on the shelf in the archival fitted cover. At first, Against a Dark Background seems like a jumble of big ideas and indeed, throughout the novel, Banks tosses in big ideas/tech with almost reckless abandon. Banks relates the present-day timeline interleaved with the protagonist's back story, often in chunks of about four paragraphs. But with Solipsists and Useless Kings and a host of others tumbling in and out of this story, crowding it with laughs, however dark it also gets, a slightness of Huhsz is neither here nor there, I guess. That may well happen in this book but I have no idea what has happened so far as the book is very disjointed.

The books featured on this site are aimed primarily at readers aged 13 or above and therefore you must be 13 years or over to sign up to our newsletter. she willed that distant, ember memory to prevail against the leaching cold that made her teeth ache and her body shiver, and against the laws that ran the universe and the system and the world and every thing and body within it; the laws of decay, consumption, exhaustion and death. So, on the one hand, Against a Dark Background is a quest novel, where Sharrow and company attempt to track down the last Lazy Gun in the rather sensational Thrial system, encountering all kinds of trials and tribulations.

Sharrow still suspected these theories were wrong and the explosion had been the Lazy Gun's work, but there was no easy method of proving the matter either for or against, and she wasn't sure that it really made much difference anyway.

I've been a science fiction fan as long as I can remember, and I later realized that I was also interested in philosophy all along! Clarke's Third Law: Most of the ancient technology is sufficiently advanced, particularly the Lazy Guns, which destroy anything by extra-dimensional, whimsical means. Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the civilisation based around the planet Golter. Living in a state of semi-retirement, she suddenly found herself the target of the Huhsz, a religious cult, and realised that she had to find and reform her old team if she had any hope of survival. I found Sharrow to be the kind of protagonist you sympathize with yet dislike at the same time, and Banks does an excellent job of bringing her contradictions out in high relief throughout the novel.

I have half a bookshelf laden with his Culture novels, and just panning my eyes across them gives me faint hint of pleasure, the residue of the SF ecstasies I enjoyed while pawing through each one. The Bond villain, when she meets him in his inner sanctum, manages not only to get the situation reversed on him and his trusted lieutenants killed, but also has an escape vehicle standing right there for the taking. This certainly isn't Banks' best work but it's a Hell of a lot of fun and I enjoyed it so much I went back and re-read it from the beginning as soon as I finished it! Against a Dark Background went from my To Be Read shelf to before my eyes with the news of Banks' illness.His Culture novels, and indeed, his other SF books, take the same dizzying scales and ideas but the writing is so much better. The main character Sharrow is part of a noble family often involved in private wars within the system. The Culture: The Drawings– an extraordinary collection of original illustrations faithfully reproduced from sketchbooks Banks kept in the 1970s and 80s, depicting the ships, habitats, geography, weapons and language of Banks’ Culture series of novels in incredible detail.

Right from the start of the 'final mission', Sharrow's enemies not only follow her, they seem to actively know where she is going. let off some nuclear steam in their end-of-the-millennium war, and everyone is much happier now, somehow. And now - thanks to this woman sitting here, poised, alert (and nervous, though trying not to show it), smiling lovingly at the little girl on the seat - now it knew that its previous self had behaved with bravery, resource and honour, and had - assuming that it had died, as it supposed one must - died well. Before the novel started, Lady Sharrow and her team of four other treasure hunters purloined one from a temple of the Huhsz religious cult.Golter orbits a star which sits out in deep space, between galaxies, and they expressly don't have the technology to detect any aliens, let alone reach them. It is a marvelously interesting read, with strangely dark humor and filled with wonders from Banks’ vivid imagination. Double-Meaning Title: It's a dark novel, which begins with the violent death of the protagonist's mother, taking place in a star system where any neighboring galaxies are far, far out of reach, on a planet which has spent ten thousand years tearing itself apart in meaningless, unfathomably destructive warfare. Banks fires off hundreds of great ideas, sometimes needing only sentences to convincingly illustrate concepts that lesser authors would need entire novellas to explore.