Book 18: "Against a Dark Background" by Iain M. Banks
Monday, May 30th, 2011 08:47![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeThey could see the nebulae, beautiful and distant and beckoning, and could tell that those faraway galaxies were composed of suns, other stars like Thrial, and could even guess that some of those suns too might have planets around them . . . but they looked in vain for stars anywhere near their own.
The sky was full of darkness. There were planets and moons and the tiny feathery whorls of the dim nebulae, and they had themselves filled it with junk and traffic and the emblems of a thousand different languages, but they could not create the skies of a planet within a galaxy, and they could not ever hope, within any frame of likelihood they could envisage existing, to travel to anywhere beyond their own system, or the everywhere-meaningless gulf of space surrounding their own isolated and freakish star.
For a distance that was never less than a million light years in any direction around it, Thrial -- for all its flamboyant dispersion of vivifying power and its richly fertile crop of children planets -- was an orphan.
This book is a stand-alone, and not part of the Culture series, although I suppose it's possible that it takes place in the same universe, and that the isolated position of this star means that the Culture has never come calling.
As the book starts, Lady Sharrow is preparing to go on the run, as the Huhsz, a religious cult who murdered her mother and are determined to destroy the female line of her family, are about to be granted a year-long passport to track her down and kill her. Rather than going into hiding, Sharrow decides to go on the offensive, and track down the Lazy Gun that her ancestor stole form the cult, as its return will end the hunt. It's a strange idea, that giving people carte blanche to kill someone legally for a limited period would prevent assassinations. I can't see it working in reality, especially with a religiously motivated group like the Huhsz. Would they really just give up once the year was up?
But there are some really interesting concepts; a prison without locks, a tree that covers half a planet, and the city that was abandoned due to radiation which is now a city of androids, And of course the Lazy Guns. Lazy Guns are cool. So although I am a huge Culture fan, "Against a Dark Bacjkground" as equally good, just different.
The sky was full of darkness. There were planets and moons and the tiny feathery whorls of the dim nebulae, and they had themselves filled it with junk and traffic and the emblems of a thousand different languages, but they could not create the skies of a planet within a galaxy, and they could not ever hope, within any frame of likelihood they could envisage existing, to travel to anywhere beyond their own system, or the everywhere-meaningless gulf of space surrounding their own isolated and freakish star.
For a distance that was never less than a million light years in any direction around it, Thrial -- for all its flamboyant dispersion of vivifying power and its richly fertile crop of children planets -- was an orphan.
This book is a stand-alone, and not part of the Culture series, although I suppose it's possible that it takes place in the same universe, and that the isolated position of this star means that the Culture has never come calling.
As the book starts, Lady Sharrow is preparing to go on the run, as the Huhsz, a religious cult who murdered her mother and are determined to destroy the female line of her family, are about to be granted a year-long passport to track her down and kill her. Rather than going into hiding, Sharrow decides to go on the offensive, and track down the Lazy Gun that her ancestor stole form the cult, as its return will end the hunt. It's a strange idea, that giving people carte blanche to kill someone legally for a limited period would prevent assassinations. I can't see it working in reality, especially with a religiously motivated group like the Huhsz. Would they really just give up once the year was up?
But there are some really interesting concepts; a prison without locks, a tree that covers half a planet, and the city that was abandoned due to radiation which is now a city of androids, And of course the Lazy Guns. Lazy Guns are cool. So although I am a huge Culture fan, "Against a Dark Bacjkground" as equally good, just different.
