Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #214 Read online

  Not all of the Culture's citizens are biological. The civilisation is run by Minds—artificial intelligences of staggering power who reside in (and control) the Culture's ships and habitats. The ships give themselves ridiculously bombastic or apropos names (Awkward Customer, Hand Me The Gun And Ask Me Again and Just Another Victim Of The Ambient Morality, to mention just a very few), while the habitat Hubs range in behaviour from avuncular mayors to benevolent despots as needs demand.

  On a par of status to the biological citizens are the drones; AIs of less power than Minds, but still able to run rings around most humanoids both intellectually and physically. Minds and drones are as likely to be major characters as the biologicals—Banks doesn't relegate them to the background.

  Banks's characters are much loved by his fans—and that love sometimes expresses itself in strange ways.

  "I once met a fan who'd had the little wood-cut illustrations from the paperback edition of The Wasp Factory tattooed on himself ... and once this guy wrote to me from BFPO somewhere-or-other, I think he was in Bosnia with the British Army, and he'd changed his name by deed poll to Cheradenine Zakalwe [the disturbed ultimate-soldier protagonist from Use Of Weapons]. I was kind of flattered..."

  Does Banks himself have any favourites that he's particularly proud of?

  "It's questions like this that make me realise I don't think about my own work at all cogently or in any properly organised way. Thinking about it now, I suppose I'd nominate Isis from Whit as my mainstream choice and, from the sf, Sharrow from Against a Dark Background—both partly because there's always a degree-of-difficulty multiplier attached to whatever merit a male author's female characters might possess. This is purely personal, of course; I'd be surprised if either character figured high in the ratings if you polled any representative sample of my readers. Shohobohaum Za from The Player of Games would be the one to go for a drink with, definitely."

  All may be pretty peachy for the average Culture citizen, but it's a big galaxy, and the Culture is far from the only ‘in-play’ civilisation, to use Banks's own term. Which means there are still plenty of opportunities for conflict and complexity to appear—opportunities limited only by Banks's wild and free-roaming imagination, which has populated the Culture books with mind-blowing mega-scale engineering projects, with alien races and civilisations that range from weird, funny or outlandishly grotesque (or all three at once), and with maverick characters, vast wars, crafty conspiracies, and dangerous ancient technologies.

  Mundane sf, this ain't. Nor is it just a case of playing to the front-row:

  "No, I'm just being completely self-indulgent, as usual. If the Culture works as a setting, almost as a character in its own right throughout the stories, it's because I love writing about it, and the bits that I love writing about the most are close enough to the bits that people enjoy reading about the most for a sufficiently strong fan-base to build up and make the whole enterprise worthwhile for all concerned. I'm not writing down to people when I throw in sarcastic drones, fabulous weaponry and weird aliens ... I mean, always assuming that's what people are looking for especially, because frankly I haven't done the market research to know for sure.

  "The point is that's the fun stuff for me too. But there has to be a context, a story that makes sense and isn't just about ‘Oh, wow, isn't the Culture cool.’ That'd very quickly become boring for me—and, eventually, for readers too. Anyway, most of Matter isn't set in the Culture. Though come to think of it, the vast majority of Consider Phlebas wasn't set in the Culture either, and I suppose it's kind of the ur-text of the Culture novels."

  Banks maintains that he doesn't analyse his own writing in any formal sense:

  "I'm not that sort of writer; I know a lot of us do think about these things very seriously and very closely, but I don't. I just get a story, and my technique is to add complexity—when in doubt, add more stuff! So any meaning to the novels comes out of what the reader takes to them ... much as I'd love to think that people could only take what I'd meant to put into the books, that isn't actually what happens. Everyone reads a different novel."

  That's not to say they're completely unplanned, however.

  "There's a fairly detailed plan to be followed, though these days it sort of flutes out a bit towards the end so I have a bit of wriggle room to allow for unanticipated inadvertencies in the story as it works out. One should always be prepared for unanticipated inadvertencies!

  "The themes I know about are there from the planning stage. I persist in cleaving to the doubtless vain hope that there are deeper themes in there I don't know anything about that somehow emerge as a natural result of the given novel's astoundingly fascinating complexity and my own extraordinary and inarguable genius. So that'll be right, then..."

  But the real word always leaks into the fictional:

  "Annoyingly but inevitably. Can't help it! Some real-world stuff creeps in and some is plonked in deliberately, though that requires some care. Ultimately though, this is really a question for somebody who can be objective about my work to answer, not me. However, science fiction will remain relevant to the real world until the full effects of the Industrial Revolution have worked themselves out. So, for the foreseeable future, then."

  Because of the relative stability of the Culture itself, the stories tend to take place at its fringes, featuring characters who are either involved in the parts of the Culture that interact with other civilisations, or members of those civilisations being interacted with—whether they are aware of it or not. Matter is no exception, and shows Banks yet again reaching gleefully into his seemingly bottomless bag of big ideas in the course of creating the story.

  Matter is largely set on the Shell-world Sursamen, a four-dimensional hypersphere built aeons ago for purposes unclear by a (mostly) departed alien civilisation. Now it contains a number of ‘client species'—cultures and civilisations transplanted to one of Sursamen's levels so that they can be guided and controlled in their development to some degree.

  But not by the Culture—at least not directly, in this instance. The caretaking of Sursamen is split uneasily between two alien species, the Oct and the Nariscene. The eighth level is home to the Sarl, a humanoid race who benefited in recent times from the sort of passive advice that Culture agents sometimes provide. As a result, their previously late-Medieval technology has outpaced that of their local adversaries, the Deldeyn—and as the book opens, a major attack by the Deldeyn has been repulsed.

  Not without mishap, however. The king of the Sarl is murdered by his principle advisor. His eldest surviving son, the foppish Ferbin, is missing, presumed dead—which is lucky for him, because he's next in line to the throne, and hence next in line to be removed from the succession. While the king's youngest son, a naïve academic type, becomes the heir-in-waiting in ignorance of the Regent's machinations, Ferbin and his laconically pragmatic man-servant flee Sursamen in search of Anaplian, the King's other surviving child—who was long ago married off to some meddling advanced civilisation or another.

  That civilisation is, of course, the Culture—and it has already caught wind of the dodgy doings on Sursamen. Anaplian temporarily leaves her work as part of Special Circumstances to tie up loose ends and pay her respects at around the same time Ferbin and Holse begin their quest to find her. Meanwhile, strange things are afoot in the land of the Deldeyn; local disputes on Sursamen turn out to have far wider connotations, and before we know it the story has panned out into a wide-screen space opera narrative of typical Banksian scale and complexity.

  Banks had a brief flirtation with short stories (one of which appeared in the pages of this very magazine two decades ago), but soon settled on the stand-alone novel as his favoured form precisely because of the wealth of ideas he produces.

  "The thing is, I started out writing novels; it was always in that direction that my ambition lay. So, like an idiot, I just jumped in at the deep end ... and promptly disappeared for fifteen years, but that's not the point. I looked into t
he details of this once and realised that at no point in my writing career have I ever written more short stories than novels; the bottom drawer always held more wildly-overwritten novel drafts than inadequately realised short stories.

  "I wrote short fiction partly because one or two ideas just seemed natural as short pieces, and partly because it seemed like a worthwhile idea to try shorter stuff—and anyway, proper writers wrote short stories, so therefore so should I. In the end it's an idea-driven thing, though; where will the idea fit best? In a short story, centre-stage throughout? Or in a novel, as part of a whole, concentrated on only for a brief period?

  "Almost all the ideas I have seem destined for novels from the start and even the ones that in theory could go either way tend to get subsumed in longer works as well, maybe because I've just got better at doing that over the years ... better at seeing what you can do with any given idea to make it work in a longer framework.

  "One of the things I absolutely adore about writing novels rather than trilogies or anything else is that you can just kill people off! With written sf in the single-novel context, when you open the book you have no idea who's going to survive to the end. Especially in my books! But if you're writing a trilogy, you're constrained, you're going to have to keep some people alive ... the beauty, the glory of writing individual novels in science fiction is that you can just do anything."

  So, will we ever see more short fiction from Banks?

  "Well, never say never—though obviously I just have, twice! I fell in love with sf largely through short fiction and I'd be horrified to see it disappear. On the other hand, I prefer to write novels, so I'm not exactly providing a good example."

  Well, we're not going to give up hope. But in the meantime, we have a greater Matter to attend to.

  Copyright © 2007 Paul Raven

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

  FAR HORIZON—Jason Stoddard

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  Illustrated by Paul Drummond

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  Jason's fiction has appeared in Interzone, Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, Futurismic and many other places. He is a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and his day job is in metaverse development. More information is available at xcentric.com.

  * * * *

  An angel danced on the cramped stage, surrounded by smartfog in the shape of luminous clouds.

  "My God,” Alex Farrel said.

  Adele Yucia frowned at the chimera. “There's probably no fragment of human genome in it."

  Alex shook his head. He'd expected a clumsy thing, crisscrossed with surgery scars. But the angel was exquisitely made. Brilliant white wings arced above her head, trailing almost to the floor. Her body was covered in fine feathers, rising to a short crest atop her head, and her eyes were sky-blue and huge. She wore a filmy gown, wrapped over small breasts and slim hips.

  "I didn't know that the 80s were back again,” Adele said.

  "What?"

  "The song. ‘Send Me An Angel'. Trite."

  "I hadn't noticed,” Alex said. Though he supposed he shouldn't be surprised. Paul's Bar was a throwback to the Oversight era, dug deep under the fashionable restaurants on Olympic in South Los Angeles. The walls were lined with lead foil, the floors were made of conductive tile scavenged from a defunct defense contractor, and flyeye-zappers still sputtered in the corners. Still, smartfog displays weren't cheap, so Paul must be making money with the angel.

  Alex leaned closer to the stage. The angel glided closer, its wings dipping gracefully. Alex could see muscles working at its sides.

  Adele hugged herself, as if cold. “We shouldn't be here."

  The angel flitted away down the stage, towards other customers. Alex sighed. “I'm not worried."

  "You should be."

  "Winfinity probably doesn't even think this is illegal. Especially if they think they can make money on it."

  "Winfinity doesn't run the country."

  Alex shook his head. “Not yet."

  "What about me? What happens if the nets light up with a reality bite of the CEO of Nanolife at a chimera den?"

  "Maybe nothing,” Alex said.

  "Maybe the end of my career."

  "Would it be so bad?” Alex said. “We could travel the world together, go to the Moon, buy a piece of Mars."

  Adele turned to look at him, her dark eyes wide and serious. Her lips, set in a thin line, twitched downwards, just once. And it was almost as if he could hear the desperate dry whispers of her thoughts. If he was serious, I would do it. I would follow him and see if there was any sane place in the universe.

  Alex remembered that they were supposed to be going to an opera that evening, at least before he got the message about Paul's bar with the little video clip of the angel.

  He touched the back of her hand. “I'll make it up to you,” he said. “I'll—"

  "Unbelievable, isn't she?” a man said, crouching beside their table. The soft light of the smartfog clouds made his eyes glitter like crystal. His nose, oversized and crooked, gleamed with the sheen of oil. He smelled of cigars and hair gel, of exotic polymer fabrics and testosterone. He wore the lens of an implanted lifelogger at his temple. The lens was spray-painted black.

  "Who are you?” Adele said.

  "I'm Paul Borrego,” the man said, looking at Alex. “The owner."

  "What about the eye?” Adele said, pointing at Paul's lifelogger-lens.

  Paul laughed, like a machine full of broken parts. “Remnant of life left far behind,” he said. “Interesting for the ladies, sometimes."

  Adele's lips pulled down into a deeper frown.

  "Nothing to worry from,” Paul said. “Much discretion given to visitors of stature, especially a Number and a Chief."

  "A number?” Alex said.

  "You're what, number six in the world? For wealth?"

  Alex said nothing. But Paul was right. He imagined everyone in the bar looking at them, bitterness burning behind their eyes. There was nothing more than synthetic politeness, given only in hope of reward.

  Paul gave him a greasy smile. “And with your mouth hanging open, over our angel."

  "What's her story?"

  Paul shrugged. “Ain't one."

  "There's always a story,” Alex said. Chimera-makers always wanted you to know how human DNA hid the secrets that we were once gryphons, or Neandertals, or that we were the actual and true descendants of angels, and all it took was a session with a 3d atom probe, some genetic editing software, and a bank of atom lasers to create a blastula that could prove it.

  Paul shook his head. “No story."

  "Who made her?"

  "Don't know."

  "Where'd you buy her?"

  "Don't remember."

  And I bet all it takes to jog your memory is money, Alex thought.

  The angel came and danced nearby. Alex wanted to reach out and touch her, to see if the feathers were as soft as they looked.

  "Does it speak?” Adele said.

  Paul glanced at her, his eyes flickering like a snake-strike.

  "Answer her,” Alex said.

  "Not much,” Paul said. “A few words."

  "It probably isn't any smarter than a dog,” Adele said.

  Alex watched her glide across the stage. Does something this beautiful need to be brilliant? he wondered.

  Paul shot another razor look at Adele and leaned close to Alex. “She's available after the show,” he whispered.

  "Available?"

  "Available for a private show, or something more intimate."

  A sudden vision of dirty hands, stroking soft feathers on a bed of rags in a back storeroom, came to mind. Paul's craggy, streetworn face, bent over those huge sky-blue eyes. Alex's hands clenched into fists. He grabbed the back of his chair to give his hands something to do, to ensure they wouldn't fly up to Paul's throat.

  No wonder he had money
to buy a smartfog display, Alex thought.

  "What's wrong?” Adele said. “What is he saying?"

  "Nothing,” Alex said. He stood, and beckoned Paul to follow. A lopsided grin stretched the other man's shiny face. Adele made to stand, but Alex pushed her down in the seat.

  "Alex,” she said.

  "Wait."

  He took Paul over to the bar.

  "Interested, yes you are,” Paul said, his smile growing even wider.

  "I'd like to meet her after the show."

  "Yes, discreet, very discreet. One thousand five hundred Winfinity points, please."

  Alex made a small notation on his handcom, and Paul smiled. He went back to watch the rest of the show with Adele.

  "She's probably not even really female,” Adele said.

  "Probably not."

  "I don't understand what you see in those things."

  Alex sighed. I don't know either, he wanted to say. Maybe because they don't want anything from you.

  "I said I'd make it up to you."

  "You don't have to.” Stiff. Not looking at him.

  Alex took Adele's hand. It trembled, just a little. “We'll go out to the opera next week."

  "They're out of town next week."

  "We'll go up to Santa Barbara."

  Adele took her hand back, but said nothing.

  When the show ended, Alex took her backstage. She followed in silence. Paul raised an eyebrow when they both squeezed into the tiny room. It was much like he'd envisioned it, except the bed was tidy, with black satin sheets that shimmered under the soft lights.

  The angel sat on the edge of the bed.

  "What are you doing?” Adele said.

  "Trust me,” Alex said.