THE STATE OF THE ART discussion (The Culture group read)

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THE STATE OF THE ART discussion (The Culture group read)

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1kgodey
Modifié : Jan 21, 2014, 11:32 am

   

The first ever collection of Iain Banks's short fiction, this volume includes the acclaimed novella, The State of the Art. This is a striking addition to the growing body of Culture lore, and adds definition and scale to the previous works by using the Earth of 1977 as contrast. The other stories in the collection range from science fiction to horror, dark-coated fantasy to morality tale.

This thread is for the discussion of The State of the Art, the fourth book set in the Culture universe. This book also contains stories that are not set in the Culture universe, but feel free to discuss them!

Posts with spoilers should be marked SPOILERS at the beginning, and the spoilers should be placed within <spoiler>spoilers here</spoiler> tags like this – spoilers here. Both are necessary because the spoiler tag feature is new and doesn't work for everyone yet.

The Culture group read: Wiki page | Organisational thread

2Petroglyph
Jan 25, 2014, 9:26 am

While I enjoyed most of the stories in The State of the Art, I can't say I liked the Culture novella, at all. (The Culture stories about the gun and the suit were fine.)

Ye gods, was it preachy! It didn't even pretend to be subtle or indirect about it: this was straight-up lecturing, creating characters just so they can deliver lines and speeches that the author wishes he could tell you directly. Author tract, indeed! And, sadly, that usually prevents me from enjoying a work of fiction. Better luck next novel, I suppose.

The previous books in this series featured non-Culture protagonists or people from the Culture who didn't really care, and I liked that as a literary device: an indirect view on the ongoing story arc in the background. If that is what is preventing Banks from preaching at me, then I hope the next Culture reads are more like the novels and much less like the novella.

3elenchus
Modifié : Jan 27, 2014, 11:54 am

The link to TV Tropes is great: heard about the site but never visited. Amusing.

I've not yet read the novella or any other selection from The State of the Art, but my sensibilities align with yours. Mostly I didn't find Banks preachy in the novels I've read, and liked the sideways-on social criticism. I've only read Look to Windward and Excession thus far, but those avoid the tractism, in my opinion.

4Petroglyph
Jan 29, 2014, 7:52 am

It's one of those time-sink sites. Friends don't let friends click on a tvtropes link.

I have not (yet) read those two books, since I'm reading the Culture books in publication order, but so far there's been very little soapboxing. Player of Games got a little heavy-handed at times (Ultranationalist state propaganda is bad, mkay? Violent conquest and war rape is barbaric, mkay?) but it never took over the story.

But lest this thread starts of with a focus on the negative, here's what I did like about the Culture stories and the novella in The State of the Art. Differences of gender, race and species seem to be as irrelevant to the protagonists as different eye colours. I like the idea of a post-scarcity society that is run by (weakly?) godlike AIs on a basis of sound respect for individuals and a reasoned maximization of benefits. I find myself agreeing with the argument that self-aware AIs should enjoy the same status (and in many cases a superior status) as humans on the grounds that that status derives from being a self-aware complex biological machine processing information and other stimuli. Humans are special, in that they are sort of the standard for what is considered "intelligent", and at the same time not special at all, since all other intelligences are automatically considered fellows, and since most intelligences are non-human (biologically speaking) and cleverer by far.

The story I liked best, Descendant, features a human and a machine collaborating and looking after each other. Technically, the machine could have done away with its human burden at any point, but it didn't: ethics and morality are, in part, a consequence of reasoning about shared benefits and alleviating pain as well as considerations of inherent respect for a fellow self-aware intelligence.

5PiyushC
Avr 15, 2014, 6:43 pm

The State of the Art - Iain M. Banks

Finally a review! Even if I am the only one getting excited over the fact! This was the fourth book in the Culture Series, the version I read consisted of a number of short stories culminating with the novella titled "The State of the Art".

Short stories, as a rule, don't agree much with me, and this one proved to be no exception. Some of the stories and a few scenes were quite shocking, in their grotesqueness - that however, is far from being a reason for me not liking this installment as much as the last two. It is just that more than a few stories failed to resonate any kind of chord with me, and while some of them were quite good, on an average, I found the book, average!

3/5

6imyril
Avr 16, 2014, 5:32 am

Ok, chiming in. Full disclosure: I skipped most of the non-Culture stories as they weren't doing anything for me. Like Petroglyph my favourite was easily Descendant, but State of the Art didn't annoy me as much and I didn't like the one about the gun.

First up, these are very different to the novels. I'd say Banks is conscious of the limited length and had specific points to make with Descendant and State of the Art. State of the Art felt like a challenge piece - 'what would the Culture make of Earth' and 'explain how your anarcholibertarian post scarcity future works anyway, especially Contact and SC as these seem counterCulture'.

Cue lots of political and ethical argument in which supposed characters deliver Banks' point of view and rip strips off both the West and communism. I found it hard to reconcile this Diziet Sma with the Sma of Use of Weapons; I put a lot of that down to her being a mouthpiece here.

Is it interesting? To a point - it's a valid perspective and criticisms, and it makes the ideology and idealism of Banks' society clearer. It's not very satisfying as a story though - the story here is Dervley Linter, and we never get inside his head because he's just illustrating a principle.

The machines are, as ever, the stars of the show and I think the suit's choices in Descendant make more sense in light of the Arbitrary's defense of its actions in State.

So how does this work in light of our sequence? It's the pause for breath, the exposition that we've been saved from to date. Does it work? The problem for me with using Earth as a vehicle for the Culture's disapproval is that it's nowhere near as bad as other societies illustrated (Azad!) so it feels a little hyperbolic. And it doesn't hit harder because it's us.

I can see why I'd forgotten this one, and I don't see me revisiting it. It's a really bad entry point to Banks and the Culture, although it gives regular readers another rare glimpse to life inside Contact - which I always appreciate.

7Sakerfalcon
Avr 16, 2014, 5:39 am

I read the first three stories in the book last night - Road of skulls, A gift from the culture and Odd attachment, and wasn't very impressed overall. A good short story should still be able to immerse you in its world, but these lacked that immediacy; I felt as though I was watching events through a screen rather than experiencing them myself through the characters. This was especially true with Skulls, where we are outright told, rather than shown, the twist in the tale. I did like the sentient plant in Odd attachment musing that mammals have it so easy because they are not capable of deep feelings like love and pain, but overall the story just seemed to be trying to make the reader squirm. These three stories are so inferior to Banks' SF novels that it's as though someone else wrote them. Maybe they were written very early in his career?

8imyril
Avr 16, 2014, 5:59 am

>7 Sakerfalcon: I wondered that - they're so graceless and flat after the novels - but the dates given for writing (or is that first publication? Might be, in which case they could be a lot older) are all in the 80s.

9Annalietta
Avr 22, 2014, 10:25 am

IMHO:
It takes a special kind of writer to write good short stories and Banks is not that kind of special. It's not that any of the stories are really bad, it's just that none of them are really good. Some of them are sketches more than short stories. "A gift from The Culture" for example could easily have been the starting point for a novel and I would have loved to see the world of "Road of skulls" fleshed out in a novel as well.

"The state of the art" itself is also not bad (I quite like the idea of it), but the lack of space makes Banks jam his points down our throats. For some reason it made me want to reread Century Rain, so something good came of it :-)

10elenchus
Avr 22, 2014, 11:48 am

>9 Annalietta: Have not read Alisdair Reynolds, but you prompted me to read some reviews and add a title to my wishlist.

I've not read anything of Banks's short work except "A Gift from The Culture" but I'd agree his talents aren't so much displayed as sketched out: jammed down our throats, as you put it. But if the alternative is we'd never have seen it, because there wasn't time to fully develop it, I'm glad he put it out there in that form, at least.

11Annalietta
Modifié : Avr 24, 2014, 7:12 am

>10 elenchus:: When I first read this short story collection some 10 years ago, I remember disagreeing with a friend about just that: he thought that the more Banks published the better. I would rather have waited for some of the stories (especially "Road of skulls") to be made into novels.
Today I have to agree with you though: I'd rather have the stories as is, than not have them at all.

12jorvaor
Juil 19, 2015, 5:36 pm

"The problem for me with using Earth as a vehicle for the Culture's disapproval is that it's nowhere near as bad as other societies illustrated...".

For what I understood, Earth was not contacted due to being on the edge between a good society and a bad society. It could develop into one or the other, and the Minds decided to watch and see what happened if the Culture didn't intervene. They wanted to use the Earth as a control (I even think that it is stated so in the novella).

13imyril
Août 21, 2015, 3:21 pm

>12 jorvaor: It's been a few months since I read it now, so I can only say that if it was stated explicitly in the text then I missed it :) Even if this is the case, I'm not convinced the story holds its own in the broader Culture canon - but that's just me. Mileage will, as ever, vary.