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Article Excerpt
Iain M. Banks's Culture novels have earned critical plaudits as well as commercial success, and he is viewed by many as one of the most creative figures in contemporary science fiction. The Culture books form the large majority although not all of Banks's science fiction output, running to seven of the ten books published under his Iain M. imprimatur, setting aside the genre-bending status of works such as The Bridge (1986) and Walking on Glass (1985) written by his authorial alter-ego Iain Banks. This article takes as its central focus the complex relationship between two of Banks's Culture novels, Consider Phlebas (1987) and Look to Windward (2000), and explores the political and cultural contexts from which they emerged. While a number of critics including William Hardesty and Simon Guerrier have considered whether the Culture is a utopia, my exploration is centred on how the works may relate to the contemporary political scene rather than attempting to measure the Culture against an abstract ideal. In particular, I will be examining the extent to which Look to Windward reflects the cultural aftermath of the first Gulf War, forming a critical re-appraisal of key themes in Consider Phlebas as well as looking ahead to terrorism in the post-9/11 world.
Consider Phlebas was Banks's first published Culture novel, presenting a secular, freedom-loving, technologically hyper-sophisticated civilisation spanning thousands of worlds where humans live long and fulfilling lives in spaces maintained by colossally powerful artificial intelligence (AI) entities known as Minds. In a society with almost limitless resources in terms of energy, one that is able to manufacture its own territories, citizens of the Culture have no use for money and can indulge in bio-engineering, including self-metabolised drugs and repeated sex changes. While William Hardesty doubts whether members of the Culture can be termed citizens "given the absence of political structure in their society" (Hardesty, "Mercenaries" 40), I think that to drop the term would obscure the political freedoms and privileged status afforded to them, not least protection from invading forces. Indeed, it is not that the Culture's political structure is absent, as Hardesty has it, rather that its organisation and machinations remain obscure and its relation to the citizenry hyper-attenuated, as discussed below. Consider Phlebas's space opera plot involves the Culture's war with the Idirans, a species of ultra-religious three-footed reptiles who have set out to conquer vast swathes of inhabited space and to defeat the godless and overly AI-influenced Culture. In the hunt to recover a hidden Mind that has been jettisoned from a destroyed Culture ship, a race emerges between "Contact," the Culture bureau that oversees relations with other civilisations, and a secret agent named Horza who is working on behalf of the Idirans. After many adventures in this widescreen baroque science fiction novel, it is the Idirans who fail in this mission and the Culture that prevails, their success presaging their ultimate victory in the war. The liberals of the Culture turn out to be more determined and resolute than their religious fundamentalist foes the Idirans had anticipated, and soon the Culture has turned the war around and decisively defeated the imperial ambitions of the unappealing and scaly tripeds.
Antipathy to religious belief, although nominally not to the believers, is manifested in Consider Phlebas in two broad directions, the first being toward the Idirans and the second being the slightly comic treatment of the ritual antics of a "wild" group encountered by Horza whose obese leader eats people while his tribe starve. The Idirans are the principal embodiments of religious belief in the narrative however, and their values are clearly placed in stark opposition to those of the Culture. The blurb on the latest paperback edition of Consider Phlebas sets out the narrative in strikingly Manichean fashion: "The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. There were principles at stake. There could be no surrender." This then is a "Clash of Civilisations" that bears similarities to Samuel P. Huntington's model in which Islam plays an important role, first expressed in 1993 and later in The Clash of Civilisations and Remaking of World Order (1996): a conflict between civilisations based on the incompatibility of their core values. Banks's clash of civilisations is initiated by a group of fearsome and uncompromising religious zealots that has set out to destroy the nice liberal people of the Culture who despite their easygoing appearance have real military power. Significantly it is the Idirans' religion that is presented as fuelling their desire for war, and that therefore forms the real source of the conflict. The nature of Idiran religious belief is not explored in great detail in the novel. Rather it is their strict adherence to it and the pretext it provides for attacking non-believers that is emphasised. In the blurb's equation, Faith is pitted against the moral right to exist and readers are left with little doubt that Faith is at fault.
Look to Windward, which like Consider Phlebas takes its title from Part IV of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," was published in 2000 and is set 800 years after the end of the Idiran-Culture war. The war is remembered not with jubilation at the Culture's victory over its foes, but with regret at the mistakes that the Culture made in how it conducted the war. The Culture's rejection of Idiran peace deals and its unwavering demand for the total and unconditional surrender of the Idirans prolonged the war, leading to the Idirans destroying two solar systems in the Twin Novae Battle and killing billions of people. Chapter 1 entitled "The light of ancient mistakes" describes a ceremony of commemoration on Culture orbital Masaq' for the victims of the Twin Novae battle. The AI Mind that operates the Orbital, called Hub by the inhabitants, was a warship during the Idiran war and so has special reasons for remembering the conflict and Kabe, a Homomdan visitor, is surprised at how upset some of the citizens are. Memories of the Idiran war in Look to Windward are intertwined with mistakes the Culture has made in the more recent past, particularly in relation to the Chelgrian war when covert political interference led to a devastating civil war on the planet Chel. By trying to influence the Chelgrians to abolish their unjust caste system, the Culture helped cause the destruction of a large part of that society. The novel's plot involves a former Chelgrian soldier called Quilan arriving on Masaq', ostensibly to encourage an exiled Chelgrian composer named Ziller to return to Chel, but actually to destroy Masaq' Hub and thereby kill billions of Masaq"s inhabitants in a suicide mission involving smuggled warheads. Quilan has volunteered for this mission not principally out of ideological commitment but because of a death-wish caused by the death of his lover in the Chelgrian civil war. It turns out that the Hub has also been scarred by its war experiences, including the loss of the AI equivalent of a mate or lover. Quilan believes he has been successful in secretly planting the warheads whereas in fact his plot has been foiled. However despite this escape from bombing, the Hub decides to self-destruct and takes Quilan with it, in what must count as something of a surprise ending to the novel.
The epigraph to Consider Phlebas is made up of 2 quotations:
Idolatry is worse than carnage. The Koran, 2: 190 Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward. Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land IV
The explicit use of a quote from the Qur'an in the context of this science fiction Clash of Civilisations should give us pause for thought. The quote's clear comparison of non-belief to killing and its relative preference for the latter situate Islam as a real-world religion analogous to the Faith of the Idirans. The idea of an intolerant religion that poses a threat to secular social formations, this epigraph quote seems to suggest, is not without real-world inspiration. Consider Phlebas's use of the word "jihad" (455) in relation to the Idirans further strengthens and develops the identification of the Idirans' religion with...
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