AH. I finally understand. People who are passionate about Banks' culture novels truly love these books with great enthusiasm. Although this is the fourth of his novels that I've read (the third in this series of mostly stand-alone works), it is only in this one that I grasp that kind of excitement. The common praise for his writing finally makes sense to me: in this book, the ship names are indeed utterly hilarious, and the AIs are deliciously snarky. Moreover, the culture's ulterior motives of being seemingly sinister for your own good are all too obvious.

Cheradinine Zakalwe hails from a backwater (non-culture) planet and has a robust military career. As a result, he is of use to the culture as an operative when the need arises - apparently, "utopia spawns few warriors." He is deployed to planets not quite ready for absorption into the culture to nudge wars in the direction determined to be best (though he often has no idea who is supposed to win or why). He is a battle-hardened warrior, gifted in the "use of weapons" - including diplomacy, generalship, assassin-craft, as well as guns and ammo - and he himself is a weapon used by the culture.

Zakalwe is (so far in my reading) Banks' most identifiable and "standard" protagonist - the blurb above makes him sound like a Michaël Bay movie action hero, and in many ways, that's true. However, Banks turns much of this trope on its head, and the story is ultimately more about personal cost than about huge explosions. Additionally, because he is an outsider to the culture, this book can serve as an excellent introduction to the series.

As a random aside, Banks is the author who now has the distinction of appearing most frequently on my personal "wow WTF" shelf - three out of the four books of his that I've read. So, take that as you will. It's a rare tale indeed that will have me literally gasping aloud with surprise (or shouting shocked expletives, good or bad) at a genuinely, thoroughly unexpected moment in the story. I haven't been a fresh-eyed teenage reader for many years now, so I really appreciate it when an author can actually shock or surprise me. But of course, your mileage may vary. Banks can be rather gory in those moments.

So this book introduced me to one of my new favorite drones: Skaffen - Amtiskaw.

Still not quite as brilliant as Marvin the depressed robot from The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but close.

First things first, let me take you on the rollercoaster that this book was for me.

In Part 1, it was all so cool. The fabulous drone, his funny nature, and the amazing ship. A crew member with a cold in a sci-fi story, how refreshing!

Then came Part 2, and I was left scratching my head. Huh? How? What's the link? I just didn't get it.

Part 3 was even more wacky. No way, how could this be? Seriously, WTF??? It was a wild ride of emotions.

Maybe I should just stop here and let that be my complete review.

On a more serious note, there are parts of the book I really like. The writing style is very visual, making it easy to imagine everything and build an entire world in your head. The characters are interesting, especially the drones. And the humans are well done too, complex and a bit messed-up.

However, there were some things I didn't enjoy as much. The general structure of the book got me lost and confused, and even at the end, I felt like I needed a re-read.

Now, onto my favorite part of the book: Skaffen - Amtiskaw. He's just so fabulous. He has a great sense of humor, can turn into a Ninja - drone in a fight, and disguises himself as a suitcase on the underground train.

When Sma and Skaffen - Amtiskaw go to a party, he dresses up like the ship Xenophobe. And when Sma discovers a secret, his antics are hilarious.

To end, I'll share with you one of my favorite chuckle - quote of this book: \\"The ship was over eighty kilometres long and it was called the 'Size Isn't Everthing'\\"

But seriously, stay away from the chair.

Sigh. ‘Bloody writers.’ Why can’t they write books how God intended? Why can’t they just start at the beginning and stop at the end, with a gradual progression from the one to the other? What’s with starting at some random page in the middle and heading out in a shambolic way, ‘tying all the loose ends’ together at some point where finally, you think to yourself, ‘Ah. Things will be okay now. It will all start making sense’ and you turn the page and – nothing. La musica, it is finished. Shit.

But I took a look around Goodreads and people seem, by and large, to consider this was a deliberate technique on the part of the writer. Sigh. ‘Bloody printing presses.’ That was my first thought when I noticed that there were two stories in this book and one of them was going backwards. It happens all the time, that sort of thing, they cock up the order in some way in the production process and you end up with something you have to stand on your head to read.

Tim, in his review http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... of this says: Despite being the third of Banks' "Culture" science fiction novels to be published, he wrote a much more complex version of this story in 1974, before any of his books saw print. He later said it was so complex it "was impossible to comprehend without thinking in six dimensions". He credits fellow Scottish author Ken McLeod with getting him to sort this baroque novel into a publishable form. So why isn’t that the book I got then? The publishable one? Can I get my money back?

Not that I got that far…I would not want to be seen to be writing this under false pretences. I’m just assuming that if I’d keep struggling on, it would finally have made sense. But it explains something. To me the book had nothing to do with the Culture book I had read and liked: Player of Games. And lo, it turns out this is no great surprise. It wasn’t a Culture book. It was shoved into the Culture series long after it was written. I wonder if simplifying it, if that is what the process of making it publishable meant, included the turning of characters into movie-style caricatures….Sorry, that’s how Sma, the overly cutesy drone with the name too long to write down and the hero (he’s got too many names, they change, to write down) seem to me. I’m guessing it would make a great movie, but I keep thinking that about his sci fi stories.

So, in the end – not ‘the end’ but about 150 pages in, since that is my designated end, and why not in a book that starts where it does? – what is it about this writing ‘technique’? I still think it is true that having more than one story gadding about in different directions is a way of getting away with not having a story that is sufficient to fill up a novel. But at the same time, I’m starting to wonder if it is a way of letting pseudo-intellectuals who profess horror – or at least boredom – with the whodunit, have the same experience whilst telling themselves it is something superior. For this is what one does in this sort of book. You spend the whole time wondering what the fuck is going on…at some point you start picking up the clues and towards the end you feel like you have probably solved it in the way the author intended – but we’ll just read on to the end to check.

viii 8 ENOUGH

Holy shit.

Banks was truly a genius. His untimely death is a great loss.

This is an expansive science fiction work that still centers around characters. In this world, a Star Trek-style Federation exists, and people live in absolute post-scarcity bliss. However, there are still real and true stakes.

Use of Weapons has a non-traditional style. Every second chapter is a flashback, and these flashbacks proceed in the opposite order. In other words, as the text moves forward, we delve deeper into Zakalwe's past, exploring the events that led him to the odd-numbered chapters. In these chapters, he has been re-recruited by "Special Circumstances" (a subset of the Culture's "Contact" arm that deals with recruiting other civilizations) to use his mercenary skills to hopefully prevent a Cluster-wide war.

There is an obvious sense of foreboding as we "catch up" on Zakalwe's past. But there is really no way to prepare oneself for the second half of this book. It is simply a masterpiece of science fiction.

Overall, Banks' work in Use of Weapons is a remarkable achievement that combines complex characters, a unique narrative style, and a thought-provoking exploration of a future society.

Sigh.

Clearly, tastes in books differ significantly. It truly takes a book like this particular one to make that fact dramatically and blatantly obvious to me. I found this book to be absolutely horrible.

Sure, it had some pretty sentences that might catch the eye at first glance. And there were also interesting character vignettes that provided snippets of the characters' lives. However, that's where the positives end.

This book had no obvious plot to speak of. There was no clear narrative arc or driving force that kept me engaged or made me want to keep reading. Additionally, there seemed to be no real rationale for the book to exist in the first place.

In the end, we don't actually end up knowing the characters at all. The glimpses we get of them through the vignettes are not enough to form a complete or meaningful understanding. And what little we do know of them, I, at least, don't like any of them.

Sure, there is mention of technology and a galactic society, but this is more hinted at rather than actually shown in a detailed and engaging way. It feels like these elements are just thrown in for the sake of it, without any real depth or purpose. Yuck.

My favorite Culture novel so far is truly an engaging read.

At times, the pace of the story moved a bit slowly, which made me feel a bit impatient. Additionally, for the first 30% of the book, I found the two timelines really confusing. Fortunately, I had read other people's reviews that clarified that the roman numeral chapters were each going back farther in time, while the numbered chapters were the current story.

I really enjoyed the interactions between Sma and the drone. Their exchanges added an interesting layer to the narrative. Throughout the entire book, I was on the edge of my seat, dying to know what Zakalwe's big awful secret was. What had he done that left him so broken? What was the terrible thing he didn't want to remember?

And then that ending.... holy shit. It completely blew my mind. I was left in a state of shock and awe. This is definitely a book that will have me thinking for a long time to come.

Use of Weapons is a captivating stand-alone space opera novel set within Iain M. Banks’ remarkable Culture Universe. It holds the #3 position out of 10 in the publication order, yet the novels are not arranged chronologically. I had previously delved only into Consider Phlebas (#1, 1987) and thus far, I've discovered no dependencies that would impede reading these novels in any sequence.

The Culture represents a future galactic civilization functioning as a utopian anarchy with a post-scarcity economy. Boasting seemingly limitless resources and extremely long lifespans, its citizens often lean towards hedonism and nihilism, a milieu that reminds me of some of Gene Wolfe's works. Certain chapters in Use of Weapons explore and expose life within one of the fantastically large habitats where most Culture citizens, both organic and AI, reside. Meanwhile, throughout the remainder of the galaxy, other civilizations exist, in which the Culture intervenes in pursuit of its ineffable goals.

Cherandenine Zakalwe, an agent of the Culture’s Special Circumstances organization, was born and raised on a non-Culture planet and is now managed by Diziet Sma and her partner, the AI drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw. The story commences with a sequence of seemingly unconnected episodes描绘 his interventions in various brush wars across the galaxy, where he commits personal and planetary violence, often oblivious to the Culture’s ultimate objectives. His role is to undertake the dirty work that the Culture requires but that no citizen could endure. Both Zakalwe and Sma pursue extreme sexual pleasures during their work, sometimes with a wry sense of humor.

The narrative is complexly structured and rather challenging to follow in its first half. From the outset, one set of the alternating chapters (increasing numbers) progresses forward in time as Zakalwe takes on the objective of extracting an older colleague, Tsoldrin Beychae, from a planet where he has hidden and delivering him to another site where the Culture has plans for him. In exchange, Sma claims to have located a woman named Livuela whom Zakalwe seeks and promises to bring him to her as his reward. The other set of chapters (decreasing roman numerals) moves backward in time towards Zakalwe’s childhood, young adulthood, and indoctrination into Special Circumstances. The two narrative lines cross-fertilize in terms of revealing Zakalwe's character and the history of events. We learn about the horrific origins of his obsession with chairs. Besides the myriad of weapons he employs, I believe he himself is the weapon referenced in the title.

I intend to read other novels of the Culture, but as I've mentioned, there doesn't seem to be any necessary sequencing among them.

This is rapidly evolving into one of my most cherished series. "Player of Games" initially captivated me, and "Use of Weapons" left me utterly astounded.

This particular installment, however, presented a bit more of a challenge in terms of immersion compared to the previous book. The continuously changing time periods made it a bit difficult to initially get into the groove.

Nonetheless, once I managed to adapt to the rhythm and learned to patiently await the emergence of context clues, it became nearly impossible to put down or get out of my mind.

I found myself completely engrossed by the second half. I'm reluctant to disclose any spoilers, but I can honestly say that no other book has ever had such a profound impact on me at a particular juncture as this one does. Banks'卓越的 writing truly sets this series apart from the plethora of other science fiction works I've perused in the past.

It's a testament to his literary prowess and ability to craft a story that keeps readers on the edge of their seats and craving more.

Ok, this is a really hard book to review. On one hand, it is truly brilliant. The ideas and concepts presented within its pages are innovative and thought-provoking. However, as you are reading it, you might find yourself thinking, "Meh, this is a little boggy." There are some sections that seem to drag on or are a bit difficult to get through. But then, you reach the end, and well, just read it. It's like a lightbulb moment. Your mind is completely blown away by the unexpected twists and turns, and the overall message that the author is trying to convey. It's one of those books that you will be thinking about long after you have finished reading it.

Review for The Player of Games

The Culture series by Iain M. Banks is truly captivating. Banks' approach to imagining a post-singularity utopian civilization is both unique and thought-provoking. In the Culture, advanced self-aware artificial intelligences manage most aspects of society. Instead of the dystopian outcomes seen in some other works like The Matrix or Terminator, Banks presents a society where humans can achieve full self-actualization. There is no lack, no conflict, and no unrest. People can pursue any path they desire, whether it's science or a more humble occupation like waiting tables. However, this post-scarcity paradise can make for a rather dull setting for a story.

That's why Banks focuses on stories at the periphery or beyond the borders of the Culture. The Culture is not the only power in the universe, and they strive to spread their brand of benign utopianism to other space-faring worlds. But they do so not through conquest but through subtle influence on the cultures of those worlds. Sometimes this means supporting a particular political faction, while other times it might involve removing a despotic leader. And then there are the special circumstance agents who are willing to get their hands dirty.

Use of Weapons delves into the life of one such agent, Cheradenine Zakalwe. We see glimpses of his missions for the Culture, some successful and some not, as well as his life before joining the Culture on his home planet. There are hints of a terrible trauma and disasters that led to his exile and eventual work with the Culture. Despite his composed exterior, Zakalwe has deep and lasting wounds that shape his decisions throughout the book. These are gradually revealed, culminating in a full and devastating account of his past at the end.

Like the other books in the series, Use of Weapons is self-contained, so you don't need to have read the others to understand it. I appreciate this aspect of the series because in the vastness of space, there's no need to be tied to one character or group of characters. The book succeeds in both telling Zakalwe's story and further exploring how the Culture operates and interacts with other civilizations. The story, with its engaging contemporary and flashback sequences, features colorful characters and well-developed worlds and cultures. It meets all my expectations and makes for a highly enjoyable and engaging read.

Overall, Use of Weapons is a great addition to the Culture series. While it may not be considered high literature, it effectively tells the story of a complex character in an emotionally moving way, with plenty of action to keep the plot flowing. Like the previous two Culture books, it's well worth your time.

As is the case with most of Iain M Banks' books, this particular one is distressingly slow and lacks a clear direction for a significant portion of its length. His writing style indeed has its merits, but his blatant disdain for his own characters makes it difficult for the reader to form any emotional connection.

However, then suddenly, the last 10% of this book takes a completely unexpected and abhorrent turn. It becomes an emotional obscenity, a brutal assault on the reader's sensibilities, a celebration of hatred, and a blatant abuse of the reader's trust. I find it impossible to forgive Zakalwe for his deranged and horrific brutality, a sin that seems beyond any hope of redemption.

I deeply resent Banks' violation of my mind in this book, the poisonous images that have been seared into my consciousness.

I will carry a lasting hatred for him because of this book, you sick fck.

This was an absolutely terrible book.

I had the pleasure of reading "Consider Phlebas" and "The Player of Games", and both of them were extremely enjoyable. However, this third installment of the Culture series has completely put me off from reading anything else by Iain Banks.

The interwoven second story told in flashback seemed to be there solely for the sake of a lame plot twist at the end. It was not only annoying but also pointless until it devolved into a dumb "gotcha" moment.

Beyond the introduction to The Culture that was provided by "Consider Phlebas", there is nothing new or exciting in either this book or "The Player of Games" from a science fiction perspective. It seems that the author should have stopped writing after the first book until he had something truly interesting or novel to say.

Overall, this book was a major disappointment and has left me with a sour taste in my mouth when it comes to Iain Banks' work.