Banks’s Culture series chronicles the interactions between a hyper-developed interstellar civilization and other civilizations around the galaxy. In this novel, the mysterious Cheradenine Zakalwe acts as an agent of the Culture’s “Special Circumstances” group, whose aim is to manipulate lesser civilizations in the name of the greater good. As with all Banks’s books, excellent writing carries the complex plots and keeps the listener engaged. Peter Kenny’s calm narration conveys the detachment that is characteristic of Banks’s protagonists. Kenny pronounces the fantastical alien names that Banks invents without hesitation. Most of Banks’s universe speaks with a cultured British accent—except for the less developed cultures, whose inhabitants speak with the accents of middle Europe. Banks makes all the accents credible. F.C. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
It’s a wonderful time to be a science fiction fan. The television adaptation of James S.A. Corey’s Expanse space opera series is poised to drag SyFy back from the brink. Ann Leckie’s excellent Ancillary Justice has been optioned, as has basically everything with John Scalzi’s name on the cover, from Lock In, to Redshirts , to The Ghost Brigades. But there’s one series […]
Few science-fictional settings are as intriguing as the one created across the nine novels (and one novella) that comprise Iain M. Banks’s Culture series. It’s a benign take on the concept of a galactic empire (at least on the surface), a post-scarcity future in which humanity’s every desire, from bizarre entertainments, to body modifications, to […]
What makes a science fiction story a space opera? Well, it needs to take place in space obviously, though not necessarily all of the time. Hanging out solely in an arcology on a climate-blasted Earth, or even in a domed city on Mars, doesn’t cut it. Actually, the more space the better; though there are certainly exceptions, […]