Some thoughts on modern-day literature

[tacit]

There will come a time
This life you live
Will catch up with you
And no one will be left
When honesty is blind
In ignorance exist the fallen.
We’re begging for the truth

I just returned from a trip to Chicago to visit dayo. The flight's a little over two hours, plus ancillary waiting-about at the airport after passing through the absurd farce we

Comments

[tacit]

I haven't read Gateway, though from reading the plot summary, it seems that the stories are very different.

Use of Weapons is set in The Culture, a huge and extremely technologically sophisticated, post-human, post-scarcity society where strong AI, effortless nanoscale assembly, and faster-than-light travel exist. The society is loosely organized and largely anarchistic, largely overseen by AIs that are thousands of times smarter than humans, and introverted to a great extent. Most humans in the Culture live on artificial Orbitals (think "ringworlds" on a larger scale) or on General Systems Vehicles, spaceships with populations in the tens or hundreds of millions.

Most of the Culture is, in fact, pretty boring. No disease, very low rate of accident, no scarcity of anything, no aging, no death. The place where it gets interesting is when the Culture, which is arguably the most technologically advanced civilization in the galaxy, encounters other societies.

Within the Culture is a group called Contact, whose job is to act as the interface between Culture and non-Culture societies. Within Contact is a very small group called Special Circumstances, which is the espionage, subterfuge, and dirty-tricks department. They steer other societies, particularly societies with pre-FTL-travel and pre-AI capabilities, in directions that make them (in theory) better neighbors.

The main character in Use of Weapons is not a member of the Culture, but he works on behalf of Special Circumstances, primarily by involving himself in brushfire wars along the Culture's edge to influence the outcomes of those wars in directions the Culture finds desirable. The Culture as a whole hates war, but is exceedingly good at it.

The story in Use of Weapons is told nonlinearly, in a fashion that's somewhat reminiscent of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (in the sense that past events are revisited in the mind of the main character and revealed to the reader bit by bit). The main character has a special affinity for war and for battlefield tactics that makes him quite useful to Special Circumstances; he is aggressive, smart, brutal, occasionally sadistic, and yet his story is still told sympathetically, even when he is involved in acts of atrocity.

[peristaltor]

In Gateway, the character is also running from his past decisions, but not in a way that becomes apparent until the end. The setting does indeed seem very different, but it has a flashback Sound and Fury narrative feel to it, albeit with only one protagonist.

So far, I think it's the best thing I've read from Pohl. Heck, it's the only reason I read more than one Pohl.