Against A Dark Background: Iain M. Banks

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It's a book that begins like a light-hearted sci-fi actioner (albeit salted with darkness from the memorable prologue onward) and ends in a nihilistic explosion of death, loss, and recrimination. Each character is complicated, yet completely believable - these are full people, with inconsistencies and foibles, but not all riven by some all-consuming internal strife like so many postmodern protagonists. Banks is a phenomenon' William Gibson Lady Sharrow was once the fearless leader of a combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the vicinity of the planet Golter.

For me Golter made a lovely counterpoint to the Culture, and could be an example of how Culture manipulation of this kind of 'primitive' system might have gone horribly wrong. Against a Dark Background went from my To Be Read shelf to before my eyes with the news of Banks' illness. He related his concerns about the invasion of Iraq in his book Raw Spirit, and the principal protagonist (Alban McGill) in the novel The Steep Approach to Garbadale confronts another character with arguments in a similar vein. A very entertaining read, but despite some meaningful reflections, they are lost in the background, so after finishing it you are left almost as you were before.

On an island with a glass shore - relic of some even more ancient conflict - she discovers she is to be hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes she is the last obstacle before their faith's apotheosis. Every possible religious, political and philosophical system has been tried and tried again (and Banks has great fun with many of them as the scene shifts chapter after chapter - the Solipsists might be my personal favourite). Any sort of link or text post is welcome as long as it is about printed / text / static SF material. Set in the Thrail star system, (and one without FTL and hence self-contained) our main protagonist is Lady Sharrow, an aristocrat of long lineage, but from a 'fallen' house as her father lost the family fortune via gambling; she has made her way finding lost relics Indiana Jones style. Sharrow recruits the surviving members of her combat unit and sets out to make contact with the son of Gorko's butler.

Before the novel started, Lady Sharrow and her team of four other treasure hunters purloined one from a temple of the Huhsz religious cult. I found Sharrow to be the kind of protagonist you sympathize with yet dislike at the same time, and Banks does an excellent job of bringing her contradictions out in high relief throughout the novel. It was often the case that I would read the first paragraph of such a section and still not know which timeline I was inhabiting. Which is not to say it is "bad", but in saying "good" we sometimes imply that something is not "great".

Thus, target a city and it will probably just blow up, but shoot a person and it will probably kill them in a manner more commonly seen in Bugs Bunny. However it all makes sense in the final, fast past action-orientated chapters (which remind of Consider Pheblas due to the, umm, high body count.