{"id":25,"date":"2003-10-01T09:52:56","date_gmt":"2003-10-01T08:52:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/?p=25"},"modified":"2010-03-29T07:54:52","modified_gmt":"2010-03-29T06:54:52","slug":"use-of-weapons-ian-m-banks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/2003\/10\/use-of-weapons-ian-m-banks\/","title":{"rendered":"Use Of Weapons (Ian M Banks)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Sci-Fi, 4\/10 &#8211; September 2003<\/em><\/p>\n<table cellpadding=\"2\">\n<tr>\n<td>\n<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.tomfotherby.com\/Images\/BookReviewImages\/useOfWeapons.jpg?w=620&#038;ssl=1\" \/>\n<\/td>\n<td>\nA 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&#8217;s a non-citizen of the Culture, who has been employed by the Special Circumstances branch of the Culture&#8217;s Contact section as a mercenary, trying to influence conflicts on a variety of planets to be resolved in the direction the Culture prefers.\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p>As the main action of the story opens, Zakalwe has &#8220;retired&#8221; from SC. Diziet Sma, a Culture citizen who has been Zakalwe&#8217;s &#8220;control&#8221; 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&#8217;t much in the way of story-generating conflicts.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sci-Fi, 4\/10 &#8211; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[54,53],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-ian-m-banks","tag-sci-fi"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1572,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions\/1572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}