Look to Windward
From Free net encyclopedia
Template:Infobox Book Look to Windward is a science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, first published in 2000.
Contents |
Summary
The Culture had intervened unsuccessfully in Chelgrian politics, leading to civil war which killed 5 billion. Some years later, the Chelgrians seek revenge. Mahrai Ziller is a Chelgrian composer living in exile; Major Quilan is sent, officially to persuade him to return.
Description
It is Banks' sixth published novel to feature The Culture.
Major Quilan suffers grief and bereavement from the death in battle many years ago of his wife, when both were soldiers. The mind of a long-dead general is emplaced into his soulkeeper, a device normally used to protect and back up the Chelgrian mind in case of death. Quilan's memories have been edited so that he has no knowledge of his mission until the memories gradually return. Meanwhile, the conversations he has inside his own head with the general in his soulkeeper make up a good part of the book.
Ziller is deeply suspicious of Quilan's motives for wanting to contact him, it turns out rightly so. The GSV Lasting Damage is now the Mind controlling Masaq Orbital.
The end of the novel shows a harder, vengeful side to the Culture not seen in previous novels. A wry epilogue set tens of millions of years after the events in the novel hints at the (extreme) long-term fate of the Culture.
Analysis
In some respects it serves as a loose sequel to the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas: both titles come from the same sentence of T.S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land (which appears in this work as an epigraph).
This book deals with the themes of exile, bereavement, religious justification of mass violence against humanity/sentience in war, and (naturally) the mores associated with life within a technologically and energically unlimited anarcho-socialist utopia. The book also notably deals with the Sublimed and with their construction of a heaven.
Many contemporary literary journals reviewed Look to Windward favourably, and critics consider the author as one of the prime motivators for the return to the mainstream of contemporary UK fiction and science fiction.
Bibliography
Look to Windward, Iain M. Banks, London: Orbit, 2000, ISBN 1857239814 (paperback), ISBN 1857239814 (C-format), ISBN 1857239695 (hardback)
External link
Template:Iain M Banks Template:Iain Banksfi:Tähystä tuulenpuolta