Matter (Ian M Banks)
Sci-fi, 7/10 – Jul/08-Mar/09 This story is set in a Shakespearean-like era with kings and princes and swords and battles – minus the romance. Actually, it’s more like medieval Merlin and the knights of the round table because the civilization is shrouded with myths and has the equivalence of dragons because it is semi-integrated with [...]
Look to Windward (Ian M Banks)
Sci-fi, 6/10 – June 2006 The Culture usually sounds like such a wonderful utopian place, but this book makes some good arguments that make the Culture out to be far more tarnished and corrupt than I have previously seen, one of them from a Hub mind itself. I found myself not being sure who I [...]
The Wasp Factory (Ian Banks)
Horror, 5/10 – Summer 2004 It is obsessive, gory, cruel, repellent and gut churningly unsettling. This book will no doubt encompass some of your worst nightmares and lay them out clearly for you on the page. It will destroy your innocence. The story has a twist at the end, but I was expecting more and [...]
Inversions (Ian M Banks)
Sci-Fi, 2/10 – Spring 2004 Besides extra moons in the sky and stories of devastating meteor showers that toppled a former Empire, this novel’s squalid, pre-industrial world seems to have no sci-fi elements. I was constantly anticipating something cool to happen but it never did, or it did but was really really disappointing. I would [...]
Use Of Weapons (Ian M Banks)
Sci-Fi, 4/10 – September 2003 A culture novel with a few good bits but otherwise a weird story cut into incoherent ribbons that kept skipping here and there just as the boring part of the latest skip was coming to an end. The main character is a depressing guy called Cheradenine Zakalwe, with many dark [...]
The Player of Games (Ian M Banks)
Sci-Fi, 9/10 – July 2003 This book is the second in the series of Banks’ Culture novels, set in a futuristic human/machine symbiotic society. Player of Games submerges itself in the society of the Game Players, those whose soul occupation is to play games to the best of their abilities, formulating new strategies, quite akin [...]
