The backward thread creates a narrative undertow that makes it hard to keep that part of the story "in order," so I can imagine that it always feels like a kind of rediscovery.
I should re-read Excession too. It was the first one to focus the story on the Minds, and it's also the one that put me off the Culture novels until Banks announced that he was dying. I'm curious whether I can still see what put me off.
Excession is my least favorite of the Culture novels.
I may have said this as we talked about the Culture novels, but I think the first three took Banks as far as he could go in the direction of meddling with lesser cultures, leaving Excession as kind of a dead end. Inversions reset the whole series and gave Banks more freedom. After Inversion, we see more aliens and wider views of the Culture.
Don't remember hearing that riff before, but it makes good sense. Although I felt the aliens were a bit of a weakness in the later books, since they just seemed like humans with different physiognomy.
Yeah, they were kind of like "latex aliens" like on a TV show. I think he says once or twice why the basic design of intelligent species is hominid biped, but I don't recall it clearly.
Even (or especially) when the aliens are non-biped non-hominid, as in Look to Windward, they just seem like humans with funny body parts. With body modification, even the humanoids often have funny body parts.
In one of the earlier books (can't remember which) Ian said that the Culture went in for body-shape fads. Currently in the era the books are set in they happen to be mostly mammalian hominid biped but they've chosen to be other forms in the past and will change again in the future. Maybe now that Ian's no longer with us that change might happen.
I think all of the Culture's aliens (and the Minds too) were "Uncle Harry with a wrinkly forehead" types never mind their bodyform but it's difficult to impossible to write ALIEN aliens, so to speak as the reader can't connect with them. The nearest we get to that in fiction is horror and that works because we dread and fear the Other since we can't connect with them emotionally or intellectually.
My gold standard for the depiction of aliens is Donald Kingsbury's "The Survivor," which has not one but three distinct alien races that don't seem human. I'm not sure any humans even appear in the story except at a distance. C.J. Cherryh is also good at portraying alien thought processes -- thought processes that appear inscrutable at first but have their own cultural logic.
I should also say that I think Banks' aliens only seem human when they are viewpoint characters and we get to see their thought processes. There are some very nicely weird aliens in Matter, for instance, who speak a bizarre nonsense that *almost* makes sense.
Peter Hamilton might write some clunking prose but he does do good alien.
There's several aliens species in his stuff that are very very alien indeed and at least one which is impossible to comprehend on any level which causes quite a few plot problems for him.
I felt that he was effectively writing over his core conceit of Excession which was what happens if the sublimed make a return incursion... only by the time of The Hydrogen Sonata, either they'd settled how that worked, or he'd decided something else.
One could argue if you consider it was a Sublimation Sphere for the minds who wanted to use it.
Well, I don't know that it does. But I somewhat assumed that the Excession was something coming back from a post sublimation perspective which would be a challenge.
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I should re-read Excession too. It was the first one to focus the story on the Minds, and it's also the one that put me off the Culture novels until Banks announced that he was dying. I'm curious whether I can still see what put me off.
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I may have said this as we talked about the Culture novels, but I think the first three took Banks as far as he could go in the direction of meddling with lesser cultures, leaving Excession as kind of a dead end. Inversions reset the whole series and gave Banks more freedom. After Inversion, we see more aliens and wider views of the Culture.
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I think all of the Culture's aliens (and the Minds too) were "Uncle Harry with a wrinkly forehead" types never mind their bodyform but it's difficult to impossible to write ALIEN aliens, so to speak as the reader can't connect with them. The nearest we get to that in fiction is horror and that works because we dread and fear the Other since we can't connect with them emotionally or intellectually.
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I should also say that I think Banks' aliens only seem human when they are viewpoint characters and we get to see their thought processes. There are some very nicely weird aliens in Matter, for instance, who speak a bizarre nonsense that *almost* makes sense.
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There's several aliens species in his stuff that are very very alien indeed and at least one which is impossible to comprehend on any level which causes quite a few plot problems for him.
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I liked Excession but now I've read Hydrogen Sonata I can't help but feel he somewhat over wrote it.
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I felt that he was effectively writing over his core conceit of Excession which was what happens if the sublimed make a return incursion... only by the time of The Hydrogen Sonata, either they'd settled how that worked, or he'd decided something else.
One could argue if you consider it was a Sublimation Sphere for the minds who wanted to use it.
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