The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction by Simone Caroti (review)

With Iain Banks’s novel-writing career finished, it is tempting to look back on his works and ponder whether they were also concluded. Did he say everything he wished to say? Simone Caroti’s book, focused on the Culture series of science fiction novels, offers a chance to take stock.

Just two years after Banks’s untimely demise, it is difficult to be dispassionate about the author or his works. Caroti remembers meeting Banks through the science fiction at a time of loss in his own life, and remains grateful to the fullness of experience offered by the Culture novels. Still, Caroti, a creative writer and a critic of science fiction, has an ear for authorship. He begins with an introduction premised on meeting Banks, something made impossible by the author’s sudden illness. Nonetheless, Caroti gives a real sense of Iain ‘El-Bonko’ Banks the person. Most importantly, this book picks up on the work started by John Clute and recently continued by Martin Colebrook and Catherine Cox to recognise the critical contribution accomplished by a writing too often dismissed for its genre.

Banks’s science fiction, so wide-ranging, philosophically motivated, laden with thought and experiment, poses a challenge to criticism. The challenge to critical thought and clarity comes, too, from Banks’s order of writing. Caroti helpfully situates the science fiction in context of Banks’s ‘mainstream’ work, such as The Wasp Factory and Complicity, and he explains the complex chronology by which Banks started his career with science fiction but published it belatedly and out of its own writing sequence. Forced to engage the late publication and considerable revision of earlier works, and the disorder of their publication dates, Caroti makes an argumentative choice at once contingent and critically astute. He works through the novels largely in order of their publication, but clusters them according to major ideas. The result is a book that makes clear Banks’s grasp of convention, his resistance to it, and his formal and conceptual innovation as a writer of a science fiction that deserves to be called literary.

Consider Phlebas is not the first science fiction novel Banks wrote, however it is his first published. For Caroti, then, it becomes the first evaluated. Equally, Consider Phlebas provides a primer on a crucial concept – the Culture – and on the ideas that underpin it. Banks, Caroti argues, enjoys, embraces and even celebrates the tropes of space opera, but in Consider Phlebas we can see him reproduce them consciously and also critically. Caroti shows how operatic space plots are invoked yet extended – until they begin to crumble under their own weight, to reveal possibilities even wider but consequently less triumphalist. Future time has passed us by, so with everywhere to go, there is no transcendent possibility. The Culture of human and machine is already the best of all possible universes, thus ‘nothing matters and everything does’, in Banks’s words. Space opera is rewritten as form and as philosophy.

Successive chapters consider expressions of and variations on Banks’s philosophy as enacted in this reconceived and reformed genre. The second published novel, The Player of Games, stands out for its emphasis on structures and rules – and its suggestion that since games compel by their form, what matters is how we play them. Advanced Minds (and perhaps advanced authors) resist obvious and easy moves because, though nothing matters, who we are matters to ourselves. How we play the game, and who we invite as partners or use as counters centres Banks’s next pair of published books: The State of the Art and Use of Weapons. Both are deferred texts, initially rejected as manuscripts, and Use of Weapons was massively rewritten to run along opposing timelines that converge according to the understanding of a Culture agent. Placed sequentially, these novels reveal to Caroti a further stage in Banksian philosophy. If nothing matters, but everything does...