Lazy Gun story.

On a planet that is out of the way, and so prone to historical cycles isolated to its own environs--the story of a soldier.

That is, the place can have collapses, rises and falls, etc.

The veteran in question is after a powerful weapons artifact. Because of the situation on the planet, this is now a unique item, the ability to utilise this technology level disappeared.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2009/10... ( )

Long live the Useless Kings: Definitely great vintage Banks SF, which is not set in the Culture universe.

Golter, the planet where the action takes place, is old and extremely isolated and has suffered many rises and collapses of civilizations, some so advanced that their technology now looks like magic. The overall impression is a cross between Vance's Dying Earth and the Mote in God's Eye, liberally sprinled with cyberpunkish dystopia and Banks' tongue-in-cheek anti-capitalism.

The heroine, Sharrow, chases after the Lazy Gun, a long-lost military artifact of tremendous power, while being chased by a religious cult dedicated to killing her. She rounds up her old war buddies for one last hurrah and they are off to the races, punctuated with flashbacks about the war and Geis and Breyguhn, her cousin and half-sister, respectively.

Through the flashbacks it gradually becomes clear that guilt largely motivates Sharrow. Guilt about the previous time she found a Lazy Gun, and caused thousands to die, seems to be what separated her from Miz, her former lover. Sharrow is said to be a star cyberhacker, yet never does any hacking. Turns out that she killed her android butler as a teenager, doing a hacking prank. Yet all that guilt is only implied, never in the forefront.

The rest of Sharrow's team is pretty sketchily characterized, but that's OK as Sharrow, her family, and Golter are the only characters who really matter.

The plot rambles around somewhat and takes us on a tour of Golter's bizarre social/political/technological landscape, thus allowing Banks to pull out some truly bizarre societies to serve as a background to the main storyline.

It isn't too hard to guess how it will end, especially if you have read Banks before: it will end _BADLY_. But it is definitely a fun ride getting there.

This was the second of Banks' novels that I read, with the first being "Consider Phleblas" which I thoroughly enjoyed. That said I came to this book with high hopes, and for the most part they were thoroughly fulfilled.

I was hooked from the first six pages by the rather horrifying and gripping prologue and from then on the book never lost my attention. It's the story of Sharrow, a rather whimsical woman who was the leader of an 8-man squad back in the much alluded to but never explained war. After the war ended she made her way with what was left of her squad, until several years later when they all went separate ways. Now she is hunted and tries to reuntie her squad to help her find the last "Lazy Gun", which she can exchange for her life. The Lazy Gun's being 8 intensely powerful weapons that for one reason or another had disappeared over the millenia until only one remained.

The story is told in the present, though there are flashbacks throughout the book which help to show the characters in another light, before the horrors that they faced at the end of the war. Overall I enjoyed this book, though I wasn't a huge fan of the ending, but that was only a slight niggle with what was a solid read. ( )

"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. Now she is hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes that she is the last obstacle before the faith's apotheosis, and her only hope of escape is to find the last of the apocalyptically powerful Lazy Guns before the Huhsz find her. Her journey through the exotic Golterian system is a destructive and savage odyssey into her past, and that of her family and of the system itself. "

This is the first of Iain Bank's sci fi's that I've read, and I've got to come straight out and say it was Bloody Brilliant :) Definitely makes me want to read more of his, and I'm excited to have found a sci fi writer I enjoy.

Having read one of his 'normal' fictions first, and not getting on well with it, I didn't have high hopes for this at all, but I found it completely unputdownable. I'm a huge fan of sci fi when it comes to TV and film, but up until now I've not found an actual author I've really liked in the genre. Thinking about it more carefully, there's one legendary exception to that statement, and that's "Ender's Game", which still rates up in my top 5 Best Books Ever.

As ever, I digress! back to AADB. It's set within a single solar system, completely isolated from the rest of the universe. It's a fascinating world, pretty dark as the title suggests, but there's also humour and love to be found amongst the harshness of the religious persecution faced by the heroine and her friends. The concept of the 'lazy gun' is both fascinating and terrifying, and for all the alienation felt from reading the antics of characters in a world so far removed from our own, there remain enough recognisable elements to keep the tale both relevant and indeed a little frightening to the earth-bound reader.

I'm not sure yet about working out a proper rating system for here, but for now I'll give this a "Damn Good Read". ( )

"Against a Dark Background" is the first of Iain M. Banks' novels I've read that is not set in the "Culture" universe. If nothing else, he easily demonstrates that he doesn't need to fall back on the established conventions from those novels to spin a good yarn. This is a book with invention and narrative detail to burn. Ideas that would have been the central premise of a science fiction novel written in the 1950s are tossed around like confetti.

As the title suggests, this is a darker work than "Player of Games" or "State of the Art" (I'd say it's on par with "Use of Weapons"). Sharrow, the central character is haunted and hunted by her past, and pursues her destiny as everything and everyone she loves is methodically stripped from her. In this sense, it is a punishing novel, establishing a raft of characters at length only to make their absence that much more painful.

The culture in which she and her team travel is space-faring and has progressed to peaks of scientific achievement and then descended into relative savagery. The star system in which the story is set has been shaped by conflict bred of isolation, similar to "The Mote in God's Eye". There is advanced science left over from earlier ages, which includes the "Lazy Gun", the MacGuffin for this particular journey. The "Lazy Gun" is a weapon that is almost cartoonish in its effects, I'm surprised the author stopped short of having it drop anvils on its victims. This makes a nice change from the usual doomsday device, all deus and machina, with very little humor.

I finally found a copy of "Trillion Year Spree", the sweeping history of Science Fiction by Brian Aldiss, and even in the first few pages, it's provided some relevant insights regarding gothic novels as the forerunners of Science Fiction novels:

"Other planets make ideal settings for brooding landscapes, isolated castles, dismal towns, and mysterious alien figures; often, indeed, the villians may be monks, exploiting a local population under the guise of religion."
-- "Trillion Year Spree" by Brian Aldiss (with David Wingrove)

This is indeed a gothic novel, full of moody environs, steeped in protracted mysteries and eventual revelations. On that level, it's straightforward enough, and in fact just a little disappointingly so. Where the novel really shines are in the details, the set pieces established along the way. Parts of the novel, such as the boat heist, the android city, and the train heist are compelling and enjoyable. The overarching plot is just the excuse the author gives himself to progress from set piece to set piece. I would urge anyone who enjoys compelling ideas and descriptive detail to just enjoy the individual squares in the quilt, and not to think too much about the overall design. ( )

http://yet.org/2008/06/la_plage_de_ve... ( )

http://sfreader.com/Home/BookReview/t... ( )

Against a Dark Background was my first Banks, and I came to it with high expectations (because of glowing praise for Banks on another book site which I follow). I would have to say that this book was a pretty big disappointment.

Sharrow is one of the least sympathetic protagonists I can remember; in fact of all the characters only the android is mildly interesting. The plot meanders with little rhyme or reason; people do stupid things with little reason but to move the plot from one dead-end to a new tableaux. The final confrontations of the last 100 pages or so are reasonably entertaining, but hardly sufficient payoff to compensate for the rest of the novel.

All in all, I'd say skip this one. Fortunately, I have gone on to other Banks' books, and found them generally quite a bit better. ( )

A standalone novel by Banks describing the tragic plight of Thrale, a lonely inhabited planet surrounded by tens of millions of light-years of "dark background," with no neighbors. I never think that I've fully understood this book -- there are a lot of unexplained subtleties -- but I think it is one of the most profound meditations I've ever read on the human condition. Here we are, on our own lonely planet, torn by war and suffering, against a dark background.

To elude the Huhsz cult hunting to assasinate Lady Sharrow, she and her friends must find the Lazy Gun.

Great writing, great ideas, harsh, relateable characters. Slow at times, plot not great. ( )

Vicious stuff; the kind of thing you expect from Banks. The man is just amazing, an imagination more fecund than anything else I've ever encountered.

Like Use of Weapons we have the destructive sibling rivalry, like Consider Phlebas we have a grand tour, meeting strange and marvellous things along the way.
But most important, in the background we have the *large* theme.
In the end, like the Culture novels, this is a book about the point of life.

The setting is a planetary system millions of light years from any other star and thus incapable of expanding beyond a very finite space. Given this limitation, civilizations have risen and fallen countless times. The current system is an extreme version of the 20th century west mixed with the medieval --- wealthy corporations as more powerful than states, excessive bureaucracy and legalism --- but the specific details are not that important.

The important issue is the question of should it be changed? And if so, too what? If it should be changed, how much suffering is justified in doing so? And what's the point of change, anyway; the new system will be just one more regime like countless regimes that have gone before.

What makes Banks so interesting (and so unpalatable to many readers) is that he has no answers to these questions, and that he doesn't have much faith in the stock answers society provides. IMHO, for the most part his SF books, including this one are arguments by example against the pat ways in which society answers these questions when they arise.

This book is especially upsetting in that he doesn't even offer up the hedonistic comfort of the Culture books, the idea that man is optimized for pleasure and might as well concentrate on that. All we get is a very Buddhist endless cycle of suffering with no escape. ( )

I'm starting to cotton onto Iain Banks' morbid sense of humor. It must entertain him to create characters that you like and then kill them off. And then to have the hero of the book as someone quite unlikeable.

I found this book thought provoking, heart breaking in places, hilarious, well observed and gripping. ( )

This is supposed to be a novel Banks wrote while still quite young, later published after the success of his other Science Fiction. Sad to say, it really shows. There are some clever ideas in here, but he hasn't really got the hang of it yet. ( )

A non-Culture based Science-Fiction novel from Iain Banks.

One of the best sci-fi books I have ever come across. This was the first Banksian sci-fi book that I read and it is the one that made the greatest impression on me. However I describe it I cannot do one tenth of the justice that it deserves.

The lead character is Sharrow, a woman who was born into a family rich in history but impoverished in wealth. Her family are either dead or imprisoned and she has known violence from an early age - her mother was assassinated for religious reasons and her life remains in danger for those same reasons. But, no matter what the cost, Sharrow remains herself.

In a way she could be comparable to Ripley in the Alien films, although Sharrow has previously chosen to be a soldier of a linked combat group out of principle rather than necessity. But the underlying strength for survival is what motivates Sharrow, even when things get incredibly bleak. 'Against A Dark Background' is rightly named, there are no stunning heroes or total victories in this book. But the characters make you care, make you want to follow to the end - like all good leaders do. ( )

http://www.engel-cox.org/text/against... ( )