As the main action of the story opens, Zakalwe has "retired" from SC.
Use of Weapons is the story of Cheradenine Zakalwe, a non-citizen of the Culture, who has been employed by the Special Circumstances branch of the Culture's Contact section as a mercenary, trying to influence conflicts on a variety of planets to be resolved in the direction the Culture prefers. (The Culture is a utopia, so at least to a first approximation, everyone is happy, and there isn't much in the way of story-generating conflict.) Like all the Culture novels I've read, this one takes place mostly outside the Culture proper: because that is where the stories are. Use of Weapons is one of Banks' "Culture" novels: set within our Galaxy at approximately (to within plus or minus a millennium) the present time, and concerning the interactions of the Culture, an interstellar society composed mostly of humanoids and of a variety of AI machines, the latter often "drones" of (very roughly) human size and intelligence, or ship minds: of ambiguous size and enormous intelligence. However, in this case my expectations were met. (A new SF novel, Excession, was published last summer in the UK and is just now available in the States.)Īs implied above, I approached Use of Weapons with high expectations, not always a good attitude.
) Half by accident, half on purpose, I evolved a reading strategy which has led to me end up my reading of all the Banks SF novels available in the US as of last year with Use of Weapons, probably the consensus choice among Banks' readers as his best SF novel. (Reviews of two of those novels appear elsewhere on this site. He seems less well-known in the US, but at least his SF books eventually make it across the pond, and I have been reading the SF novels over the past year or so.
Banks has quite a reputation in the UK, stemming from the success of his first novel, The Wasp Factory (1984). Banks is a Scottish writer, of several "mainstream" novels (albeit often with "slipstream" elements), published as by Iain Banks, and several SF novels (published with the middle initial). In his memory, here's my review of my favorite among his SF novels, posted exactly as I wrote it in 1997: He was a wonderful writer of SF, and SF-adjacent "mainstream" fiction. Iain Menzies Banks would have turned 65 last Saturday (16 February 2019) - he was only some 5 years older than me, but alas he died far too young at about my current age.
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