4 ms·
Apropos of nothing, my "The Culture Novels, Ranked": 1. Excession 2. Player of Games 3. The Hydrogen Sonata 4. Matter 5. Surface Detail 6. Look to Windwar
by disillusioned 6y ago
Apropos of nothing, my "The Culture Novels, Ranked":
1. Excession
2. Player of Games
3. The Hydrogen Sonata
4. Matter
5. Surface Detail
6. Look to Windward
7. Consider Phlebas
8. Inversions
9. Hitting myself with a hammer
10. Use of Weapons
- scotty79 6y agoI would move Matter and Surface Detail to the first two spots and bumped up Use of Weapons few positions up, but the rest can stay in that order. ;-)
- tern 6y agoI once went on a bit of a journey to find "realistic" novels about AI and outside of Superintelligence (which I enjoyed reading as if it were a novel) and The Age of Em, Excession is one of the best I found. Still, nowhere close—I eventually concluded that truly imagining artificial intelligence in a way that would make for a compelling narrative is mostly impossible. Others include: - Accelerando - A Fire Upon the Deep - Permutation City - Daemon So far, the only sci-fi novel that meets the level of rigor I was looking for—albeit about aliens rather than AI—is The Three Body Problem.
- fossuser 6y agoYou need to read True Names: http://www.scotswolf.com/TRUENAMES.pdf http://www.scotswolf.com/TRUENAMES.pdf
- speed_spread 6y agoYou might like Peter Watt's Blindsight.
- marvin 6y agoBlindsight and Echopraxia are absolutely brilliant accounts of "what happens when you meet someone who is dramatically smarter than yourself". I'm glad someone on HN recommended them to me.
- anigbrowl 6y agoLegitimate
- fossuser 6y agoIf I thought Consider Phlebas was bad should I bother with Excession?
- detritus 6y agoYes.
- speed_spread 6y agoThey're close to opposites in quality! But Excession is not the best entry point in the Culture universe, I would rather start with Look to Windward or Player of Games.
- disillusioned 6y agoThis answer is spot-on. Excession is definitely NOT an entry point to the series, if there is such a thing. And Consider Phlebas is routinely considered not a great entry point, but people do it anyway because it's chronological. But it's a bit of a snore and it only barely grazes on Culture and doesn't get into any of the meat of the conceit at all, so it sort of turns people off to the series as a whole, I think.
- marvin 6y agoYou must have a special relationship with pain if you'd actually have gone through hitting yourself with a hammer before reading Use of Weapons in its entirety, and finding the former more pleasant. I'd just have stopped reading if I reached that point ;) Absolutely love the Culture series, by the way. It's a tragedy that Banks died far too young.
- habosa 6y agoI can't stand to see Look to Windward so close to Consider Phlebas! Agree with Excession at #1 though, what an incredible book.
- WorkLobster 6y agoI've seen an increasing amount of Use of Weapons bashing over the last few years; personal counterpoint is that it's not just my favourite of the Culture, but favourite novel full stop.
- atombender 6y agoAs much as I enjoyed Excession, I thought Look to Windward was his strongest book. It tells a story that is set closer to the Culture and is less about its violent interventions into other civilizations; rather, it's portrays the consequences (moral, personal, etc.) of such interventions, and about the resulting trauma among those involved. Personally, I would rank Surface Detail, Consider Phlebas, and Use of Weapons higher than the others. I thought The Hydrogen Sonata had some fun parts, but was otherwise quite slight. Matter was good but also severely bloated, a bit like The Algebraist, with a long middle journey portion that felt unnecessary.