Against A Dark Background: Iain M. Banks

Product Information

p>Read about how we’ll protect and use your data in our Privacy Notice. If you’ve read Banks you’ll know to expect the weird and wonderful, sewn together in a convincing narrative that will have you turning pages late into the evening.

All his books are good; I believed that Feersum Endjinn was an intelligent book, but 'Against a Dark Background' now takes lead - much more in depth. Oh well,' it said, 'if they ever do excavate to the level of the Sea House ruins and discover my original self still somehow conscious or potentially so, it should pose an interesting moral and legal question. Also it's quite episodic in structure as Sharrow and her crew follow the trail of the last Lazy Gun (and Sharrow has her back story filled in by flashbacks) - so there are lots of natural breaks. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. A kind of glow spread through Feril's consciousness as it contemplated the value of the gift this woman had brought it, just by telling the story of that doomed journey to the fjord, the tower, the Keep and the House.Psychic Link: Sharrow and the rest of her combat squadron (originally eight) were linked together with a synchroneurobonding (SNB) virus.

Exposition, in the form of one of the various maybe-clones who keep trying to hire her, tells Sharrow her own backstory. She visits her half-sister Breyghun who is held prisoner in the Seahouse, a monastery run by the Sad Brothers. You’ll visit a society where the inhabitants deliberately retard their technical development by giving their surplus to a ‘Useless King’ (his official title) who blows it all on pointless gadgets, keeping his nation at a near medieval level of existence. Created by a lost civilization, no one understands how these guns work, only that when fired they frequently destroy their target in a random way whose ridiculousness is inversely related to the size of said target. I listened to about 2 hours of this and realised I had no idea what was going on so I started again.Clarke's Third Law: Most of the ancient technology is sufficiently advanced, particularly the Lazy Guns, which destroy anything by extra-dimensional, whimsical means. So, for example, if you are the sole conscious being, this review was actually written by you, or some part of your mind. What does Peter Kenny bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you had only read the book?