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 secrets and unhealed scars. He’s a non-citizen of the Culture, who has been employed by the Special Circumstances branch of the Culture’s Contact section as a mercenary, trying to influence conflicts on a variety of planets to be resolved in the direction the Culture prefers. |
As the main action of the story opens, Zakalwe has “retired” from SC. Diziet Sma, a Culture citizen who has been Zakalwe’s “control” in the past, is rudely summoned from her latest (quite pleasurable) assignment in order to find Zakalwe and recruit him for one more emergency mission (involving a situation with which Zakalwe was previously involved). The main problem for me was the many flashbacks of low-tech worlds outside the Culture proper: because that is where the stories are. (The Culture is a utopia, so at least to a first approximation, everyone is happy, and there isn’t much in the way of story-generating conflicts.)